Tag Archives: Donald Trump

The Species of Origins

 

I can barely microwave a Pop Tart. Yet Anthony Bourdain’s suicide this weekend really threw me for a loop.

Not for my love of food, obviously. But I discovered him during a hospital stay a couple years ago in which the TV remote control broke. One afternoon, I was force-fed  his Parts Unknown series on CNN. Then I watched another. And another. By the end of the stay, I had watched him criss-cross the world in a sort of international potluck dinner prep.

Like I said, boiling water and I are not on speaking terms. But his show, I later discovered, was never really about food. If anything, it was about journalism: meeting strangers, collecting anecdotal histories, asking open questions. Like the comedians of late-night TV, who have used parody to become the nation’s most influential political reporters, Bourdain connected with us by using food as verbs, spices as nouns, sauces as adjectives.

My fandom was confirmed with a tiny bit of research on him, when I discovered he was the son of a New York Times copy editor and routinely wandered newsroom halls. It cemented when I saw an interview in which he waxed philosophical that most of our introductions to new cultures are through the taste bud. More importantly, he said, we seal our relationships over meals, where anecdotes flow like wine. That’s Journalism 101.

Now he’s gone. Like Kate Spade, Robin Williams, Chris Cornell and endlessly on. And these were people at the top of humanity’s evolutionary chain: rich, creative, free to travel and purchase much of the world. It’s enough to draw you to an unnerving realization: We have over-evolved.

While Charles Darwin has no chapter on overevolution in his seminal book on natural selection, he has plenty on underevoltion, instances when a species could not adapt quickly enough to changes in their environment and perished. Roughly 99.5% of every species that ever existed on this planet have joined the cloud circuit, scientists estimate.

But if there are so many examples on that extreme of the continuum, what about the other? The Humane Society estimates an overpopulation of dozens of creatures, from Australia’s kangaroo baby boom to England’s badger surplus to Central America’s coyote explosion to Africa’s python epidemic. America is overrun by white-tailed deer.

And, of course, there’s us, 7.62 billion strong and growing, making us the world leader in overevolution.

Consider our other symptoms of evolving a bridge too far:

  • Suicide There are about 16,000 homicides a year in the U.S. But there are 40,000 annual suicides, a number that has increased 30% since 1999. When a species is three times more likely to kill itself than other members of the species, it’s overevolved.
  • Brain size We’ve gotten too smart for our own good. Our brains have evolved into such large organs that, without medical advancements, more than 20% of the world’s births would end in maternal or infant mortality. When a noggin is a deadly threat during childbirth, it’s overevolved.
  • Host threat When a species is capable of ending all life on its host planet, it’s overevolved.
  • Oxygen bars

I know Darwin died in 1882, but maybe the president could ask him to revise the book. After all, Trump keeps in contact with Frederick Douglass.

And now, less combustible factslaps:

  • About 20% of the world’s tech founders are immigrants, even though immigrants only make up about 4 percent of the world’s population.
  • Richard Nixon was an accomplished musician who could play the piano, accordion, violin, saxophone and clarinet.
  • The Moon gets hit by over 6,000 pounds of meteor material per day.
  • A study found that orcas can learn to speak dolphin.
  • Canada’s national parks are free for children.
  • Researchers have found that muscle soreness after a workout doesn’t necessarily mean you’re growing more muscle.
  • Vicodin’s name is based on it being approximately six (VI in roman numerals) times stronger than codeine.
  • In 1494, Michelangelo, at the age of 19, was commissioned by the ruler of Florence to sculpt a snowman in his mansion’s courtyard.

    Piero de Medici ordered Michelangelo to build a snowman.

    And finally, a neighborly word from Mr. Rogers, who gave the U.S. Senate its most elegant description of what should be mankind’s evolutionary plateau, and would have been such a beautiful message for Tony Bordain to have taken within:

 

 

 

U.S. to Mother Nature: Drop Dead

     That Donald Trump pulled the U.S. from the Paris global warming accord was as inevitable as the rising sea.
     What is surprising is the rationale that punctuated the withdrawal — and that we in the press let it pass for logic.
     We would expect the right to applaud it. Republicans increasingly find themselves on the wrong side of science, from evolution to stem cell research, that will eventually leave it the party of ancient texts. Now the GOP can claim a new acronym: Get Our Planet.
     But what was stunning was the pass afforded the administration. We in the media (and that’s all of us, social media strollers) permitted Trumpeteers to applaud the decision as Trump keeping an election promise.  CNN and MSNBC both featured Trump supporters like talking pimple whitehead Jeffrey Lord, hailing the move as canny American scrimping, which it may indeed be.
     Not once, however, could I find an analyst to ask this question: Did the promise itself have merit? We have reached a political strata where simply keeping your word suffices for integrity. But what if the pledge itself is a crackpot one?
     Say, for instance, that Trump promised to make America great again by returning us to slavery. And, thanks to the bible-thumping populace of the American South, he won — largely on that campaign plank. Would we have “the other side” of a political debate? The one that argues that, sure, Trump may have repealed the 13th Amendment, but at least he kept his word?
     Of course not. We would apply a larger question to the issue. Not ‘Is it legal?’ But ‘Is it right?’
     Yet I continue to look for a reporter who will ask this simple question of a single supporter: America makes up 4% of the world’s population. Yet we account for 32% of the world’s carbon emissions. Whatever your thoughts on the economic unfairness of the accord, doesn’t that mean we owe 8 times the amount on the dinner bill? Judge Judy likes to say “You ate the steak, now you have to pay for it.”
     Didn’t we eat eight steaks?
Now, on to other non-alternative facts, bitches:
  • An elephant’s skin can be up to 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) thick but is so sensitive it can feel a fly landing on it.
  • In Nepal, Mount Everest is known as Chomolungma, meaning “Goddess Mother of Mountains.”
  • In 2005, a psychologist and an economist taught a group of monkeys the concept of money. Soon, the monkeys engaged in prostitution.
  • Today’s average American woman weighs as much as the average 1960s man.
  • The U.S. joined Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations that aren’t part of the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions.
  • If you deprive a fruit fly or a fish of sleep, it will try to catch up the next day.
  • Butterflies have 4 eyes, bees have 5 eyes, most spiders have 8 eyes and Caterpillars have 12 eyes.