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SMH

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Now that we’re entering the height of the election-year silly season here in the old USofA I find myself shaking my head quite a bit, but not at the candidates. They are politicians, after all, so I expect them to amaze and disappoint me with their character flaws, slips of tongue, dissembling, hyperbolic ranting and all the rest of the unpleasant things that politicians do. No, my head shaking is prompted mostly by other citizens and their reasoning, or lack thereof, when it comes to evaluating the candidates.

The easiest case to point to is what’s going on with the presidential election. Almost everyone is unhappy that they have to pick between Trump and Clinton, and if you ask them many will explain why they’re picking their candidate by detailing why the other candidate is a bigger POS than the one they’re voting for. That’s their right, but I have to tell you that the one argument I have a hard time swallowing is the one I hear from many of my more conservative friends. It goes something like this:

“I really don’t like Trump or Clinton, but I’m gonna vote for Trump because at least he tells it like it is. Clinton’s a criminal – she should be in jail after all that crap with her classified emails – and she’s a liar. And Trump’s a successful deal maker and we need someone like that in the White House at a time like this.”

Believe me, I get not liking Clinton. She’s a truly unlikable candidate for any variety of reasons, not the least of which is her propensity to make everyone think that she thinks she’s better and smarter than everyone else. But what I can’t understand is how these folks think that Trump isn’t a liar or how his business dealings haven’t been as shady as Clinton’s past ventures. The answer is probably that the vast majority of people just haven’t done much research and are accepting talking points being tossed out there by the GOP spin masters or Trump himself.

That’s why I’m hoping this article about the guy who was the ghost writer for Trump’s Art of the Deal gets some serious attention. It’s truly frightening in many ways, and should cause anyone who thinks Trump is somehow a more moral/ethical choice than Clinton to question their own judgment. Here’s just a few samples:

When Schwartz began writing “The Art of the Deal,” he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Schwartz now disavows the passage. “Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He added, “ ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ” Trump, he said, loved the phrase…

But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment…

In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump portrays himself as a warm family man with endless admirers. He praises Ivana’s taste and business skill—“I said you can’t bet against Ivana, and she proved me right.” But Schwartz noticed little warmth or communication between Trump and Ivana, and he later learned that while “The Art of the Deal” was being written Trump began an affair with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. (He divorced Ivana in 1992.) As far as Schwartz could tell, Trump spent very little time with his family and had no close friends. In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump describes Roy Cohn, his personal lawyer, in the warmest terms, calling him “the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed . . . literally standing by you to the death.” Cohn, who in the fifties assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy in his vicious crusade against Communism, was closeted. He felt abandoned by Trump when he became fatally ill from aids, and said, “Donald pisses ice water.” Schwartz says of Trump, “He’d like people when they were helpful, and turn on them when they weren’t. It wasn’t personal. He’s a transactional man—it was all about what you could do for him.”

You should read the full article – it’s truly stunning.

And I’ll leave you with this thought: If we have to vote for an asshole, shouldn’t we at least vote for the most competent asshole? If that’s the case then I truly don’t understand how you can vote for Trump. And if you just can’t stomach Clinton then maybe it’s time to check out Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, or start a write-in campaign. Either of those propositions are better than going with His Hairness.

Father’s Day Gift Ideas

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Kristen Daukas compiled a list of Father’s Day gift ideas for this year – some of it on her own and some from recommendations she solicited from dads she knows, including yours truly. Here’s my favorites from her list:

Here’s one from my own experience. My better half got me the SkyRoll on Wheels for Father’s Day a couple of years ago and it has completely transformed my business travel life. Easily the best piece of luggage I’ve ever had.

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Proactivism

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Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last couple of months you’ve heard about a small issue we’ve had here in North Carolina. It’s a piece of state legislation called HB2, aka “The Bathroom Bill”, and it has actually grown into a national issue thanks to the combination of national media attention, acts of protest by well known companies and entertainers and the recognition by many politicians that it is a perfect “wedge issue” for this monumental election year. From amidst the increasingly nasty din that surrounds the issue has emerged a fleetingly rare voice of sanity, and it came to my attention from, of all places, an issue of a trade newsletter I receive called Associations Now, that has a piece about a group that is encouraging musicians to use their shows to protest HB2 instead of cancelling their shows outright in protest:

As an alternative, a pair of activists launched North Carolina Needs You, which encourages musicians to hold shows in the state and use them as platforms to speak out against the measure, known as HB2.

The initiative was born when Grayson Haver Currin, a prominent North Carolina music journalist and onetime codirector of the state’s Hopscotch Music Festival, came up with the strategy after Springsteen canceled. Currin and his wife, Tina, created the campaign out of concern that, in the long run, artist boycotts would do more harm than good.

Almost immediately, the band Duran Duran, which had struggled with whether to cancel its show, collaborated on Currin’s initiative and decided to perform, using the show to draw attention to the cause by bringing critics of the law onstage and by donating money to political nonprofits working to fight the law.

The website also found quick support from those nonprofits, including Equality NC, Progress NC Action, and the state chapters of the NAACP and the ACLU…

The artists choosing to stay have received positive notices from music-industry peers who are directly affected by the law.

The band Against Me!—whose lead singer, Laura Jane Grace, publicly came out as transgender in 2012—announced that it would keep its May 15 show in Durham on the schedule specifically to protest the law. The band is encouraging attendees to use gender-neutral bathrooms at the concert venue.

While it’s easy to understand where acts like Bruce Springsteen are coming from when they cancel shows, this approach seems much more productive. Hopefully more voices like the Currins’ will emerge here in North Carolina and we can get back to some level of sanity.

This Day in History

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History.com tells me that on this day in 1564 William Shakespeare was born. What it does not tell me, and this is an unforgivable oversight, is that 402 years later on April 23, 1966 a remarkable person named Celeste Marie Rogers was born. The oldest child of Patty and Phil Rogers, she would go on to graduate from George Mason University and then make the questionable decision of marrying yours truly (Jon Lowder). The result is a 24 year (and counting) marriage that produced three incredible children -Michael, Erin and Justin – and lots of laughs.

In case you haven’t done the math yet let me make plain why today is important – it marks exactlyCelesteGlamourCropped 50 years that Celeste has spent on this Earth and that is an occasion worth celebrating. So here it is: Happy Birthday to a wonderful, wonderful woman!

 

Perception IS Reality

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In the ongoing North Carolina saga that is the aftermath of the state legislature’s passage of HB2, it has become clear people are still people. Essentially, people who support the bill focus on the parts they agree with – namely the “bathroom bill” portion – and seem perfectly willing to ignore or minimize the parts that they may or may not agree with if they bothered to look past the headlines related to the bathroom-related stuff. On the other hand opponents of the bill focus on the discriminatory aspects of the bill and the egregious rollback of employees’ rights to sue for wrongful termination -rightly so in my opinion – yet they also minimize the feelings of people confronted with the confusing spectrum of human sexuality and gender and belittle as “ignorant” those who don’t know the difference. In other words, our state legislature has drawn a big red line on either side of which the citizens of the state are lining up.

One real rub here is that there are many people who hate the bill, but don’t want to admit that sharing a restroom with a transgender person gives them pause. Given enough time to think about it they probably realize that they already have and just didn’t know it, but the fear of the unknown and different is something that must be addressed and it does no good to belittle those who have those fears.

Another issue is that a certain percentage of the backlash against the bill is coming from people and institutions from outside the state, so people who support it are able to fall back on the old “we’re not going to let those California liberals (or Yankee, or whatever other pejorative) tell us how to live our lives, so they can take their business elsewhere” argument or, even better, the “those people are hypocrites because they still do business in <fill in the blank place with some hot-button issue>” tack. When these people hear that yet another performer is cancelling a North Carolina gig, or another conference is cancelling and moving to another state, or another company is halting expansion plans for the state, they shrug it off as inconsequential or hypocritical. Yet, you can be dead certain that if Charlotte’s bathroom ordinance that was supposedly the justification for HB2 was in place and a Christian rock band cancelled a show there, then they would instantly invoke the right of the band not to violate its principles and decry the lost economic impact due to the ordinance. Hypocrisy, meet thyself.

So here’s the deal – both sides have their perceptions of the issue and so each has its own version of reality. What the supporters of the bill will have to reconcile themselves with is the reality that their perception, and thus their version of reality, is out of step with much of the rest of the country. You know what? That’s their right, but when some of them wake up one day and are unemployed because the state has lost so much business because it is out of step with the rest of the country then they will have a whole new reality to face and that might change their perception of what IS important to worry about and what’s maybe a red herring of an issue that’s been used to screw them over.

Making the Media His Biotches

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This article about how Donald Trump is controlling the media came to my attention via a friend on Facebook as you can see below:

TrumpMedia

I particularly like David Boyd’s comment that it  “Helps that they’re such willing bitches.” It’s understandable that the media want to cover Trump – after all he is the phenomenon of this political season – and I understand that they are competing for ‘share of mind’ of an increasingly diminished audience of news watchers, but when do they finally say, “You know what, this a-hole’s been able to run an incredibly inexpensive campaign because we give him so much free air time” and then cut HIM off. He truly needs them far more than they need him, so why keep feeding the troll?

Could it be that they’re desperate to prove they’re still needed, still the Fourth Estate, still an essential part of the democratic process? Maybe they’re finally realizing that what they thought was simply a nightmare they would wake up is reality – that most people don’t read, watch or listen to them anymore. They’ve got Facebook and so does Trump, so no one thinks they need the media anymore. Sadly, they’re probably right and wrong at the same time.

Is BMI Worse Than Worthless?

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The statistical gurus at FiveThirtyEight have looked at the ubiquitous body mass index (BMI) and come to a conclusion that many of us suspected: it stinks as a measure of health. In fact I’d argue that it might be worse than useless, in fact might even be harmful, because it misleads people into thinking they are not at risk of negative health effects because they have a BMI in the “normal” range.

Taken alone as an indicator of health, the BMI is misleading. A study by researchers at UCLA published this month in the International Journal of Obesity looked at 40,420 adults in the most recent U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and assessed their health as measured by six accepted metrics, including blood pressure, cholesterol and C-reactive protein (a gauge of inflammation). It found that 47 percent of people classified as overweight by BMI and 29 percent of those who qualified as obese were healthy as measured by at least five of those other metrics. Meanwhile, 31 percent of normal-weight people were unhealthy by two or more of the same measures.2 Using BMI alone as a measure of health would misclassify almost 75 million adults in the U.S., the authors concluded…

The researchers analyzed the health data for 15,184 adults who were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Their results,published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, were pretty surprising: They showed that midsection obesity was a killer, even among people with normal BMIs. For example, a man with a BMI of 22 (putting him firmly in the normal range) but too much belly fat according to his waist-to-hip ratio had an 87 percent higher mortality risk than a guy with the same BMI and a healthy waist-to-hip ratio.

What’s more, a man with a normal BMI and disproportionately big belly had more than twice the mortality risk of a man who was overweight or obese by BMI but not by waistline. Among women, those who were normal weight by BMI but had a high waist-to-hip ratio had a 48 percent higher mortality risk than those with a similar BMI but a healthy waist-to-hip ratio, and a 32 percent higher risk compared with those who were obese according to BMI only.

This is the kind of thing that leads me to think BMI has more in common with phrenology than mainstream health care practices.