Up To Date With Ethan Callender

  Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 27: Going Rogan Does anybody remember that old stunt show called Fear Factor ? You know, where the contestants had to perform risky and risque stunts on national network television? It was the show where one group of contestants had to guzzle a particular bodily fluid from a donkey . I’m not even going to say which fluid in particular, by the way. It’s that gross. Well, the host of that show is now relevant in broader culture once again, and his name is Joe Rogan.  Now the host of a popular podcast on Spotify, this cockroach of a man just finds all sorts of ways to keep his career alive. However, his venture for the past decade, which is that podcast ( The Joe Rogan Experience) , is now coming under massive fire. From repeated racial slurs to incessant COVID misinformation , the show has it all. If you couldn’t already guess, I don’t mean that in a good way.  Let’s begin with the COVID misinformation. There have been many example...

  Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 26: Mein Kopfkissen (German For MyPillow) Mercifully, former President Trump has been losing a good chunk of his remaining support over the past year. However, those who have held out hope for his return haven’t gone anywhere. Well, except going off the deep end of the Grand Canyon. Exhibit A in this shameful display is MyPillow CEO and newly prominent far-right influencer Mike Lindell. Sure, this boneheaded moron is an easy target, but there are many reasons why I’m finally giving him an entry. The first reason is the sheer amount of material he has blessed political memers with. From botched “cyber symposiums” about alleged (and practically nonexistent) voter fraud to pitching various dates for the “reinstatement” of the defeated President Trump, Lindell has endured an amount of mockery that would traumatize any reasonable person for life. However, Lindell is not a very reasonable person, and I’m being extremely generous to him with ...

  Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 25: Double Manchin Senator Joe Manchin is a Congressman tasked with representing the people of West Virginia. This is no easy task by itself, especially as a Democrat in such a Republican-leaning state. However, Manchin has completely failed at this task in the most spectacular way possible. By rejecting Biden’s Build Back Better plan recently, he is obviously trying to appease the Republicans in the Senate, and yet he has failed to please anybody in either party in this past year. He has become the Senator that both politicians and the masses alike love to hate, and he has even blatantly annoyed and angered President Biden and his administration. How did America get to the point where one maverick Congressman could hold up an entire agenda? What is the deal with Joe Manchin? For one thing, it’s worth noting that Manchin is a career politician with a longstanding reputation for being a rather conservative Democrat. Before joining the Sen...

 Up To Date Presents Food For Thought Entry 4:  Chemical Elements America is well known as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It is also known as a land with many maladies for such a developed nation and is home to stores whose products contain many chemicals. Many of those are potentially toxic yet are protected from testing under the law. From lead to BPA and from mercury to atrazine, the market is saturated with potentially toxic substances. This is a normalization of toxicity in our products, and it is unacceptable. To start, the number of chemicals on the American market is over 84,000 (Loki 2020). To make matters worse, many of these synthetic substances are untested, and automatically presumed to be safe. In fact, AlterNet’s Reynard Loki puts the number of tested substances around only 1% of all chemicals on the market as of 2020. The reason for this is that the laws protecting American consumers from toxic chemicals are simply toothless. They vary by s...

Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 24: (Arguments) Shot Down DISCLAIMER: This entry discusses the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which may be extremely sensitive for some people. Reader discretion is advised. The news recently has been incredibly interesting, but due to various reasons, I was unable to write a new entry until now. Therefore, I want to quickly mention the verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. To begin, I want to state that in my non-expert opinion, no one side is correct about his case. For example, more liberal Americans are missing that the weapon Rittenhouse used was likely always in Wisconsin . More conservative Americans, on the other hand, are claiming he acted solely in self-defense. That would be a fair argument, but he drove himself to the scene as a civilian, thus proving he planned to be there. I don’t know about you, but if someone planned to be in a violent situation, that person shouldn’t be able to claim self-defense. What I’m saying is that he made ...

Up To Date Presents Food for Thought Entry 3:  GM Uh-Oh Genetically modified organisms are something people either love or love to hate. They are created by splicing the genes of a plant or animal with genes from entirely different organisms, often viruses or bacteria. This, in turn, creates a seemingly beneficial effect for the organism. These can include corn that makes its own insecticide, soy that resists popular weed killers such as Roundup, and salmon that grow faster. However, there are numerous problems with both the GMOs themselves and the claims made to defend them. The first claim worth mentioning is that the impact of GMOs on the environment is insignificant. In fact, a genetically modified salmon is now available to be sold. This is despite a small risk of the salmon being able to escape and negatively affect the wild population. In the words of the New York Times, AquaBounty, the company who produces the fish, said that the fish would only be grown inland and that...