The Pope tweeted what now?

Make Me Smart January 2, 2023 transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Save the good stuff. Save the good stuff. Oh, god. Oh my god. Alright, Bridget’s in the control room. And there’s pendemonium. Good God. Hi, everybody. I’m Kai Ryssdal. I think I don’t know. Welcome back to Make Me Smart where we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

Amid the pandemonium. I’m Kimberly Adams, thank you for joining us on this Thursday. Today we just have some news fixes and make me smile that’s already making the both of us chuckle.

Kai Ryssdal 

It is a make me smile for the ages. And we’re all going straight to H-E double toothpicks. But that’s a whole different thing.

Kimberly Adams 

Toothpicks not hockey sticks?

Kai Ryssdal 

I always on… I always heard toothpicks but anywho

Kimberly Adams 

Toothpicks are straight, hockey sticks have… wow really?

Kai Ryssdal 

Well, we’re not doing capital H-E double hockey sticks. I’m going to lowercase H E

Kimberly Adams 

Oh, that’s a good point. I never thought of it that way

Kai Ryssdal 

I mean it’s a bad enough place to begin with. I don’t need to have it capitalized

Kimberly Adams 

I have only ever heard H-E double hockey sticks, not H-E-double tooth stick, toothpicks.

Kai Ryssdal 

As I recall, you had a more faith based upbringing than I did so.

Kimberly Adams 

Probably very true. So would be an all caps

Kai Ryssdal 

In all caps kinda thing yes. Anyway, let’s get to it. You do the news first. Go ahead. You got more than I do.

Kimberly Adams 

So I have to it’s just one of those might have double links on it. Okay. Today, there was news out that the United States is being given greater access to some military bases in the Philippines. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was over there and made this big announcement that the United States is going to be able to basically rotate troops through these military bases in the South China Sea. Why does this matter? Because it’s basically a response to the growing frustration, brinksmanship, fear of war, and other things that are going on with the United States relationship with China and China’s growing footprint literally and figuratively, given they’re building islands out there in the South China Sea. The reason this jumped out to me was because we were on here talking not but a couple of weeks ago, about the Biden administration trying to sort of tamp things down with China and like smooth things over in terms of trade and business relationships. But now when it comes to at least the military side of things, they are still moving forward as if China is a you know, global, not necessarily threat, but definitely like some chest popping happening.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’ve think threat is not too strong a word. Right? That’s definitely true. I think that’s definitely true.

Kimberly Adams 

I’ll take the advice of the Navy guy. Um, so my other one, you know, I don’t have to tell people that it’s Black History Month, which often results in some rather trite coverage in various media outlets, which is, I have to admit, gotten significantly better in the last couple of years. But one of the things that’s been happening is sort of a re-examination of a lot of the things that way… the way that many things have been covered in the past. So you have like the New York Times, I think, going back and kind of redoing obituaries for people who should have had them at the time. So all of that to set up the story in the Washington Post that came out yesterday. The headline being a black woman invented the home security system, then fell into obscurity.

Kai Ryssdal 

I saw that. I saw that. Yes!

Kimberly Adams 

In 1969. There was a woman in Queens who basically came up with the idea of the video based home security system, Marie Van Brittan Brown and her husband, Albert Brown, and they filed that patent on August the first 1966. I think they got the patent. Yeah, it was approved on December the second 1969. And there’s a picture of one of these patent illustrations in the Washington Post which is pretty funky looking but you know, it basically has the components of the home security systems that we use today, and apparently within the home security industry, she is credited with having the foundations that yielded what we have today and that those patents have been used, and cited up in as recently according to the Post, as 1993. Sorry, sorry, as 2013. Yeah, Brown’s invention has been cited 36 times by other patent applicants, including as recently as 2013. Neither Brown nor her husband ever filed another patent. So why isn’t she more famous? Because at the time that she came up with this, the technology to actually deploy it was way too expensive for most people, because we’re talking about the 1960s not, you know, the equipment and the tech needed for this was just so far out of the realm of possibility for people. And apparently, she never really profited off of the invention and died in 1999. As the Post says, “just before her innovation became omnipresent.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, man, that’s wild.

Kimberly Adams 

So kind of a bummer. But also cool to know that now, you know. I still don’t necessarily think any differently about the constant surveillance, surveillance of our, you know, digital security cameras, but yeah.

Kai Ryssdal 

Credit where credit is due, right? Yeah. No, it’s it’s really good. I like it actually. And it makes me think of, you know, among other unheralded, black women of technology and things we take for granted today, the black woman who did all the calculations for NASA to get us to the moon. You know, it’s it’s, it’s the same deal.

Kimberly Adams 

Many of us didn’t know about until there was a movie.

Kai Ryssdal 

Until there was a an awesome movie, by the way. The name, I cannot remember now.

Kimberly Adams 

Hidden Figures.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good film.

Kimberly Adams 

I got my niece, the Lego version of Hidden Figures. And she was

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, that’s awesome.

Kimberly Adams 

Less than, I don’t think she cared…

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, no. She didn’t think it was awesome. Oh, so now you’re the lame auntie? oh, well.

Kimberly Adams 

Basically,  it happens.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yes, it does. Alright, so mine is a little bit off the beaten path for you know, business and economics. But we have talked about it on this program. So I think it’s germane. Disinformation, and how we study it and how we recognize that it’s happening. This was originally reported in the Harvard Crimson the newspaper up at that university in Cambridge, repeated and amplified by Semafor, which is the new site from Ben Smith, formerly of the New York Times and Buzzfeed and Justin Smith, formerly of Bloomberg. Anyway, here’s the deal. I’ll just read the read the lead. “Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government is shutting down one of the hubs of the American debate over truth and falsehood on the internet. Nancy Gibbs, the director of the Kennedy Kennedy School Shorenstein center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said in an email obtained by Semafor Thursday, that the Technology and Social Change Project was being shut down” for quote, “bureaucratic reasons.” Apparently, all those centers at the Kennedy School have to be run by full faculty members, and the woman who was running it was not a full faculty member. That seems to me to be a little bit of a fig leaf, sort of an unfortunate turn of events. Because as we know, and as we’ve talked about, on this podcast, we need more study of disinformation and misinformation in this economy and in the society and in our politics. And if we get less of it from a leading place, like the Kennedy School, which you know, love it or hate it, they do good work. It’s really a challenge. It’s really a challenge. So I don’t know about that.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah no I got no notes on that.

Kai Ryssdal 

It’s not great. It’s a downer. And it’s a it’s a very bad look for Harvard. Very bad look…

Kimberly Adams 

Which is why we need a happy place.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s true. So let’s do that. Jay, hit it and oh my… Go ahead, you go ahead. This one is all you

Kimberly Adams 

So usually, I’m so late to like things that happen on the internet that usually by the time I come across it, it’s been like taken down or there’s so many comments on the original thread, and so many, cotweets and other threads and side articles that I have to like, go down all of these nesting conversations to try to figure out what the original thing that happened was. So I was rather entertained this morning to see in the wild, the following tweet from an account labeled Pontifex as in the account of the pope in the Vatican. And when I read this, you will understand what I thought at first that it was misinformation or disinformation. So from Pope Francis @Pontifex. “The middle finger which is higher than the others, reminds us of something essential: honesty. To be honest means not getting entangled in the snares of corruption.” Yes, friends. That’s right. It seems that the Pope was endorsing, giving people the middle finger and I was like, “Surely not, surely not.” I looked and it was like blue verified checkmark and well, what does that even mean these days? okay. But it was labeled Pontifex, it had the link, it had like the 10s of millions of followers. I was like, “I think this is actually the Pope.” And as our newsletter writer, Ellen Rolfes pointed out, it was actually part of a series of tweets from the pope about the various digits of the hand, and I guess what they represent in a religious context. And so it was supposed to be this nice, like, religious moral mindful thing. But Americans ruined it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Well alright. But look, do you suppose and obviously, it’s not His Holiness, actually doing the tweeting or one hopes, because he’s got a whole, you know, empire to run. But you have to believe that whoever’s running the social media account for the Vatican knows what the middle finger means?

Kimberly Adams 

Well, it came down pretty quickly, after many comments, but… Because I think when I saw it, it had like 500 retweets, which is another reason I thought it might be fake because it felt like it should have more. But it lives in posterity, in this New York Magazine article, where they describe it as “part of a series in which Francis extolled the virtues of all the various fingers in aphoristic fashion. But something appeared to be lost in translation between the Italian and the English.”

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s what it is. It’s a translation error.

Kimberly Adams 

“As amused responses rolled in, Francis deleted the tweet and replaced it with one that tweaked the original wording, but seemed to carry the same meaning. Possibly, it’s still kind of hard to tell what he’s trying to say.” So here’s what the newer one said. “The third finger which is higher than the other others, reminds us of something essential honesty, to be honest means to not getting entangled in the snares of corruption.” But it’s still the same thing

Kai Ryssdal 

Somebody needs to tell the pope that the internet is forever. That’s all I’m saying.

Kimberly Adams 

The internet is forever but I was very entertained. Because, you know, as you saw, because I posted it in the Make Me Smart channel, I was like, “I can’t tell if this is a weird cultural miss or if Twitter is just that broken because this looks very real.” And it was real.

Kai Ryssdal 

And it was, and that’s where we leave you today ladies and gentlemen. Tomorrow back with Economics On Tap. 6:30 in the afternoon, evening on the East Coast. 3:30 in the afternoon, proper, here on the left coast. Drinks news, and we’ll play some half full half empty. also, by the way, just for the record dry January will be over so I will be having a beer.

Kimberly Adams 

Dry January is over. But since I didn’t do any Economics On Tap during dry January, I’m still going to have a mocktail on general principle. And as always, we love hearing you mocktail or cocktail suggestions or whatever we end up landing on calling them?

Kai Ryssdal 

Well I like spirit free cocktails. You liked cleverage

Kimberly Adams 

It’s it’s fun, but I don’t know that I would deploy it.

Kai Ryssdal 

It doesn’t like roll off the tongue though, cleverage because you gotta think you know?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. So if you have suggestions for what we should call them, or anything else that you want to share with us, we love hearing from you so you can send us your thoughts, questions, suggestions, recipes, whatevs we’re at 508-U-B-SMART and at makemesmart@marketplace.org

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, nice sneak on the theme music there Jay Siebold. Jay Siebold is in the house. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s episode was engineered by Jay Siebold. Our intern is Antonio Barreras.

Kimberly Adams 

Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter and keeps me up to date on quote “pope content”. Marissa Cabrera is our acting senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.

Kai Ryssdal 

We should say Bridgette was in charge today, as you heard at the beginning. That’s right. That’s why the beginning was so messed up just for the record. It was Bridget’s fault.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, it’s not our fault

Kai Ryssdal 

That has to stay in. Do not cut that part.