A zoo at the zoo
How much do you love animals? If you really love animals, a Center for Biological Diversity project suggests, eliminating the possibility of more people will help.
Toward that end, at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago last week, the group distributed condoms during an Adults Night Out event.
"Wrap with care save the polar bear," "Before it gets any hotter remember the sea otter," "Fumbling in the dark? Think of the monarch," "Can't refrain? Remember the whooping crane" and "For the sake of the horned lizard slow down, love wizard" were among the slogans of threatened animal populations that graced the outside of the condom boxes.
"More conscious family planning can be an effort to help wildlife," Sarah Baillie, a population and sustainability intern at the Arizona-based organization, said. More people, she added, means a greater strain on natural resources and the potential destruction of animals' habitats.
"As our population grows, and urban sprawl and agricultural development destroy wild spaces, species we know and love pay the price," she said.
If you're interested in preventing Abigail and Emily to save room for Rover and Mr. Cuddles, the program, called Pillow Talk, will next head to Austin, Texas, Portland Ore., and Anchorage, Alaska.
When you care to send the very best
Social media had a blast with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)'s choice of four slogans to choose from for the next bumper sticker it prints.
The four, sent in a letter to supporters last week, are: "Resist/Persist," "She persisted/We resisted," "Democrats 2018/I mean, have you see the other guys?" and "Make Congress blue again."
The one most lampooned seemed to be "Democrats 2018/I mean, have you seen the other guys?" Twitter users offered: "Not exactly the most inspiring political slogan," "Democrats 2018/Platforms are hard, you guys" and " it probably cost 'em about 10 mil & 6 months of focus groups to come up with that stinker."
Another respondent said, "I'm just impressed they didn't go with 'crying Harry Potter standing over a dying bald eagle in a hospital bed' image."
But the response that may have been thought by many was tweeted by one Nick Harper: "Is this a real ad from them? Or somebody's satire."
And that elicited this response: " when people have to ask if your election strategy is real or a joke. Man the dccc is the best."
A rudderless ship
A number of prominent Democrats apparently believe their party is having an identity crisis. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe recently became the latest party member who refused to answer who the party's leader is at the moment.
"You are a savvy guy," MSNBC's Katy Tur said to him during an interview last week. "You are plugged in. You've been around Democratic politics a long time. You no doubt are having conversations behind the scenes. No doubt those conversations are being had probably every day. Who is the leader of the Democratic Party, right now?"
"I think there are many leaders of the Democratic Party " McAuliffe began before the interviewer pressed him
"I'm not gonna give you ," he began. "I'll say the governors who are leading their states, creating jobs, building infrastructure, building an education system that works. We have to balance our budgets, unlike Washington we've not seen anything out of Washington."
Tur told the Virginia governor she has asked the same question of Democrats for the past eight months and can't get an answer. "What does that say?" she asked
McAuliffe again demurred, turning the answer back to a slam on President Donald Trump.
In addition to the non-answers, reporters quizzing former Vice President Joe Biden got the answer that there wasn't a "single" leader, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D- Calif., opined that former President Barack Obama can't "be dismissed as the leader of the Democratic Party."
Spatial education
If you have a car, you're a part of creating spatial injustice. You can learn all about it in a summer class at the University of California-Los Angeles, "LA Tech City: Digital Technologies and Spatial Injustice."
The class syllabus says, "Students will investigate spatial justice and injustice in the multi-ethnic city through the lens of three thematic technologies," cars and highways, the internet, and film and media.
If you're not quite up to date on spatial injustice, a UCLA professor referred Campus Reform to a description by Edward Soja, who said it is the "production of unjust geographies and spatial structures of privilege" within cities that can be "aggravated further by racism, patriarchy, heterosexual bias."
While the inner-city working poor "depend on a more flexible bus network given their multiple and multi-locational job households" as compared to "the relatively wealthy suburban population in Los Angeles," he goes on to say, "the accumulation of locational decisions in a capitalist economy tends to lead to the redistribution of real income in favor of the rich over the poor."
We'll save you the time by giving you the Cliffs Notes version: The rich get richer because they can drive to the LA suburbs for better work. Now, don't you feel better for having taken the class?