Be Careful Whom You Trust

Some people are trusting. Perhaps too trusting. 

Take, for example, this recent message on a residential association bulletin board: “We live on XYZ (I redacted the actual street name) and will be travelling during the last two weeks in July and need someone from July 17th through July 29th to come by once a day to feed our cat, take in the mail and water our vegetable garden.”

Hello burglars, or at least those who monitor the Internet for leads on which locations are most vulnerable to easy pickin’. I’ve often wondered why people post pictures of their extended time away from home during their trips. Couldn’t they wait until they returned to make their friends and family envious of their time in the sun or on the slopes? Those postings are open invitations to those with less than socially acceptable behavior to drop by for some extra curricular “play while the cat’s away.” 

In the above cited message, of course, the cat will be home, but it probably is not trained to protect home and hearth. Given today’s Internet-capable ability to hone in on addresses, providing the dates one will be away and the street of one’s home is pretty, oh, let’s just say, it, STUPID!

Oh, one more thing. The person in need of a daily house monitor included their name! Again, STUPID! Why not just leave a key in the front door or, better yet, leave it unlocked?

Am I being paranoid? I don’t think so. What do you think? Are people too trusting for their own good?

Speaking of trusting, Donald Trump’s just completed trip to Japan and Korea, both South and North, if you consider 20 steps inside a corrupt, repressive country a bona fide visit to Kim Jong-Un’s dictatorship, exemplified his foreign policy approach. It is all based on personal appeal. 

George W. Bush thought the same way at first, as when he initially met Vladimir Putin and said he “looked the man in the eye and found him to be straightforward and trustworthy.” Bush said he looked into Putin’s “soul” and believed he could do business with the man, so much so that he trusted him enough to invite him to his ranch. 

Yeah, Putin gave him, America and its allies the “business,” all right. 

Trump believes Putin didn’t interfere in the 2016 election and accepts his word that he will not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump’s security and intelligence chiefs tell him otherwise. He rejects their analyses. 

Trump believes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had nothing to do with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Why, because MBS, as he is known, told him so. But U.S. and United Nations intelligence findings say he is responsible. 

Trump trusts autocrats over his own advisors. 

Trump seeks personal relationships with despots, believing, somehow, they are eager, or at least willing, to enhance the position of the United States over their own country’s interests. 

By contrast, when he has to deal with substance, such as the issue of climate change during the just concluded G-20 meeting in Japan, he is incapable of displaying mutual cooperation with our traditional allies (https://beta.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/as-g-20-reaffirms-fight-against-climate-change-trump-again-stands-apart/2019/06/29/d3d96f22-9a68-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html?outputType=amp).

Trump is a world class spinmeister. Without achieving any concrete breakthroughs, he has positioned his photo-op meetings with Kim and with China’s president Xi Jinping as building blocks to foreign affairs victories. 

Even his detractors hope he is on the road to success. But wariness abounds that he is being played and that America will wind up no closer to achieving Trump’s objectives of denuclearization of North Korea and a more even-handed trade agreement with China.

Can You Trust The NY Times? The Times is still the gold standard of reporting. But its copyediting/proofreading increasingly leaves something to be desired. As a former editor I read most things with an eye toward what might be wrong (I’m not perfect myself, but at this juncture in my journalism career I am not being paid to get everything right). 

Twice in the last few weeks I spotted the same mistake in two different articles—the printing of “though” instead of “through.” I blame whatever spell check program The Times uses and the laziness of copyeditors/proofreaders to actually read content for clarity. 

A June Op-Ed by Thomas Edsall on meritocracy contained the following sentence: “Much resentment focuses on the way in which the meritocracy is selected, though the education process, and on the winnowing effect of extensive standardized assessments that seek to measure and validate cognitive skills” (https://nyti.ms/2IC9RbK).

Did you catch the mistake? He meant “through the education process.” Hours after I read the piece The Times corrected it before I could send off a note to Edsall.

But a June 2 profile of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi and who The Times called “the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates” still contains the “though/through” mistake: “His military is the Arab world’s most potent, equipped though (should be “through”) its work with the United States to conduct high-tech surveillance and combat operations far beyond its borders” (https://nyti.ms/2EMnuE4).

I know spell check has been a godsend to many a writer. But copyeditors/proofreaders need to be more careful. They are supposed to be the last line of defense against errors. 

News and Views of Friends and Family

David Pecker controls the National Enquirer and a handful of other sensational tabloid newspapers that assault or entice, depending on your perspective, your senses as you wait to check out at the supermarket. Pecker is chairman and CEO of American Media Inc., publisher of National Enquirer, Star, Sun, Weekly World News, Globe, Men’s Fitness, Muscle and Fitness, Flex, Fit Pregnancy and Shape plus the recently acquired Us Weekly.

To his stable of publications Pecker is said to want to add Time magazine as well as People and Fortune.

Pecker, who at one time helped John F. Kennedy Jr. launch George, is a friend and advocate of Donald Trump, which beggars the question, do we want a publisher who printed truly fake and misleading headlines and stories about Hillary Clinton and whose Enquirer was recently at the center of the Trump-Morning Joe dustup to assume editorial control of some of the most respected mass journals of our country?

Your political leaning will inform your response to that question. My answer, not surprisingly, is no, a thousand times no. But in this age of financial feebleness for far too many media companies, including Time Inc., the shareholders of Henry Luce’s trailblazing weekly might not be able to refrain from accepting a solid offer, even if they disdain its originator.

What America doesn’t need at this time of national division is a further erosion of integrity in the media. Time, People and Fortune have been stalwarts of independent, objective journalism. Under Pecker that impeccable position could be compromised.

By the way, it might interest you to know that “pecker” is Yiddish slang for penis. How fitting. (For a longer look at David Pecker, here’s a profile from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/03/the-national-enquirers-fervor-for-trump/amp)

If the Shoe Fits: I have a long held bias against women wearing open-toed shoes. I trace it back to my antipathy toward my mother’s choice of footwear. I know I should get over it, but it is there, I admit it and have never sought to impose my prejudice on Gilda, Ellie or Allison, not that they would have let me had I tried.

Anyway, long lead in to another example of too much government regulation, in this case, Republican desire to control attire, mostly that worn by women. 

It seems that at the direction of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan there is vigorous renewed enforcement of a dress code for appearing in the Speaker’s Lobby of the House of Representatives. It pertains to all elected congressmen, their staff and reporters. Sans proper attire one can be evicted from the area. 

Men have to wear coat and tie; women must be dressed appropriately, which has been interpreted to mean no sleeveless dresses/blouses and no open-toed shoes, preferred items by many women during Washington’s hot and muggy summer.

I found it particularly amusing that Elaine Quijano of CBS News reported on this brouhaha while sitting behind the anchor desk wearing a red sleeveless outfit. She did not reveal what type of shoes she had on.

Clothes Make the Woman: As long as we’re on the subject of women’s clothing, there’s no denying Melania Trump brings her A game to every public event (and probably to every private occasion as well).

Her popularity is soaring but indicative of how shallow Americans and other nationalities can be. They project her eye-candy appeal to positive status (much the same way Michelle Obama’s scores reflected her fashion sense even as she championed better nutrition and physical activity for children) but the public fails to consider Melania’s to date empty portfolio of first lady endeavors, particularly her expressed desire to reduce the incidence of cyber bullying, her husband’s favorite response-to-criticism tool. 

Ivanka on the Hot Seat: Despite criticism from many anti-Trump quarters, I have no problem with Ivanka sitting in for her father at the G-20 meeting while he met with the leader of Indonesia. She is as credible as any of Trump’s aides. 

But as I noted the other day when she, not he, visited a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, there are some symbolic functions that demand no substitute for presidential attendance.