Summer pleasure: staying cool -- July 4, 2019 column

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By MARSHA MERCER

When the afternoon summer sun beats on the thermometer outside my kitchen window, the red liquid in the gauge shoots all the way to the top -- 120 degrees.

The radio and TV report it’s only in the mid-90s, but I feel the thermometer’s pain.

“It’s HOT out here,” it seems to scream. “HOT, HOT, HOT.” I take it seriously -- not literally.

At least we’re not in France, where the recorded temperature reached 114.6 degrees – the highest ever -- the other day. At least we have air conditioning.

Europeans have always felt superior to Americans for our wimpy reliance on artificially cooled air.

“People here don’t like air conditioning. They think it’s a waste of energy, it’s bad for the environment, and people say it makes them sick,” a Californian who has lived abroad for a decade, the last four years in Berlin, told The Wall Street Journal.

When it rarely got too hot for comfort, Europeans closed up shop – and schools and offices, too. Don’t laugh. Remember what happens when an inch of snow falls on Washington. 

But early summer heat waves have swept Germany, France and Spain -- countries that have traditionally coped with summer heat with electric fans.

Only about 5 percent of European households have air conditioning, compared with 90 percent of Americans, according to a report last year by the International Energy Agency.

That worked when the temperature rose above the mid-80s only a few days a year, but as 100-degree days become more frequent, Europeans are questioning whether they can continue their holier-than-thou attitude toward mechanically cooled air.

You never think you need the Klimaanlage – the German word that literally means climate apparatus – until the temperature hits triple digits.

The worldwide demand for air conditioning will soar in coming years, the energy agency says. It predicts 10 new air conditioners will be sold every second for the next 30 years. The number of AC systems installed in buildings is expected to rise from 1.6 billion in 2016 to 5.6 billion in 2050.

And that raises “an urgent need for policy action to improve cooling efficiency,” the agency said. Unfortunately, the Trump administration doesn’t see the need.

It stopped enforcing the 2015 rule that prohibited use of HFCs or  hydrofluorocarbons, powerful greenhouse gases that are linked to climate change, in air conditioners and refrigerators, and is rolling back scores of other environmental rules.

Meanwhile, it’s hot out there.

Naturally, sweltering Europe has made dandy fodder for reporters writing for the American audience.

The Washington Post’s man in Berlin reported: “Residents are sharing maps on social media of air-conditioned buildings and cafes in their area, fans and portable cooling systems are sold out, employers are worried the lack of cooling is killing productivity, and at least one Berlin air-conditioning installer suspended its phone service because of a flood of calls, according to a recorded voice message.”

German authorities, worried the surface of the famous Autobahn will melt in the heat, has set speed limits in some areas. France barred cars over 10 years old from some city centers to curb pollution.

A fellow in Germany caught riding naked on a motorcycle said it was too hot for clothes, and women in Munich were told to put their bikini tops back on.

In the United Kingdom, SkyNews advised Brits to stash their pyjamas and pillow cases in the freezer before bedtime and, of course, to carry an umbrella -- the British answer for any weather emergency.

Sizzling Europeans might learn from orator, Secretary of State and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who, in America’s pre-AC era, had a secret, low-tech technique to keep cool on the summer lecture circuit:

“I take a small piece of ice . . . I put it in the palm of my right hand and hold it tightly. Then I shift it to my left hand, holding it in either hand for about five minutes. Then I pass my cold hands over my forehead. I have always found this very effective,” Bryan said, according to an article on the White House Historical Association site.

As for me, I’d rather keep cool with the ice in a drink and the AC cranked up.

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All right reserved.

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Social media wants your bank info. What could go wrong? -- Aug. 9, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Someday you may click on Facebook and see your checking account balance.

The social media giant has talked with several large U.S. banks about getting their data on where their customers shop with debit and credit cards, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Why? So you’ll spend even more time on social media.

“Facebook increasingly wants to be a platform where people buy and sell goods and services, besides connecting with friends,” the Journal said. Naturally Google and 

Amazon also want in on your bank action.

Facebook denied it’s actively asking banks for customer data, saying in a statement, “Like many online companies with commerce businesses, we partner with banks and credit card companies to offer services like customer chat or account management.”

Facebook also insists it won’t use bank information to target advertising or marketing. 

People would use the Facebook Messenger app to communicate with their banks and make other transactions. More than 1.2 billion people use Messenger.

“The idea is that messaging with a bank can be better than waiting on hold over the phone – and it’s completely opt-in,” the statement said. “A critical part of these partnerships is keeping people’s information safe and secure.”

So is seeing your checking account balance on social media convenient or creepy?  

Your answer may depend on your generation. If you’re a baby boomer like I am, born between 1946 and 1964, you may find it creepy. We still believe there’s something called privacy and we ought to be in control of our personal information – although holding onto this idea in 2018 is like grasping Jello.

Facebook’s track record for safeguarding information is hardly inspiring. It’s still recovering from the fallout of 87 million users having their information improperly used by Cambridge Analytica in 2016. But banks and credit card companies have been breached as well.

I’d rather stash my cash under a mattress than trust social media to safeguard details of my personal finances.

Did I say cash? Cash is quaint. So last century.

One in four adults say they rarely or never carry cash, and the number jumps to one in three for millennials – those born between roughly 1981 and 1996, a survey by Capital One found in March. Many millennials consider paying with cash “inconvenient,” the company reported.  

And if you’re a post-millennial or member of Generation Z, born in 1997 and after, you use your devices all the time and have grown up paying by phone and plastic.

Teens use cash for only about 6 percent of their transactions, according to Current, a company that offers a debit card for teens. Parents load up the debit card to give their kids their allowance. 

There’s no doubt shifting attitudes toward money are affecting us all. Major banks have closed thousands of branches in recent years as more people choose to bank online, although some smaller banks have opened branches. Cashless restaurants and shops have proliferated.

Which brings us back to your checking account in the digital age.

For millennials and Gen Zers, seeing your bank balance on social media may seem a convenient no-brainer.

Millennials like the idea of using Facebook to access and manage their money – or they did in 2015 when Capital One conducted a survey. About 45 percent of millennials said then they’d use Facebook, more than other social media platforms.

Gen Z may be especially receptive to keeping tabs on their bottom line on social media. They may not remember pay phones, but many remember the Great Recession. They saw family members lose jobs and struggle financially, and it made an impact.

Studies show Gen Zers are more likely than millennials to save money, so they may want to check their balances often because they know how easy it is to overspend when paying with plastic and their phones.

But would young people think it cool to do their banking on Facebook or on another platform? They’ve been quitting Facebook for Instagram and Snapchat, leaving Facebook with a demographic no marketer prizes.

As The Guardian, a British newspaper, put it: “Is Facebook for old people? Over 55s flock in as the young leave.”

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Best defense against Russia's lies: `Consider the source' -- Feb. 22, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The Russians are coming – for real. And they’ll meddle in our November elections.

After all, it worked for them in 2016.

“There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee Feb. 13.

“We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” Coats said.

Even President Donald Trump now concedes Russians interfered in the last presidential election, though he still cannot bring himself to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin. Authorities agree there’s no evidence vote tallies were altered, but it’s impossible to know how many minds were changed.

Russia’s goal is to sow fear, distrust, discord and divisiveness in America and elsewhere and restore Russia’s role as a world power, experts say. Russians have been successfully pushing our emotional buttons for years, using social media.

Most recently, after the massacre in Parkland, Florida, they used #guncontrolnow and #gunreformnow to stir the pot. They used similar tactics following the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas.

Russians began posing as Americans in social media, creating false stories and spewing tweets, in 2014. These were trial runs to see how much they could get Americans to believe, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday after an extensive investigation.

We take the bait -- as the tale of the tainted turkey demonstrates.

Around Thanksgiving 2015, someone claiming to be Alice Norton, a 31-year-old mother of two in New York City, wrote on a cooking website forum that her whole family had gotten food poisoning from a Walmart turkey. Twitter repeated the claim thousands of time, and a news story reported 200 people were in critical condition at hospitals.

The story was a hoax. There was no such outbreak of food poisoning, the Journal reported. The claims were linked to a Kremlin propaganda agency charged with meddling in U.S. elections by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The tainted turkey was just one of several fictitious events Russian propagandists manufactured before they moved on to support Trump and Bernie Sanders while disparaging Hillary Clinton, the Journal said.

The United States continues to be “under attack” by those who want to create cyber disruption, Coats and other intelligence officials warned. Our response?

“We’ve had more than a year to get our act together and address the threat posed by Russia and implement a strategy to deter future attacks,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said at the hearing. “We still do not have a plan.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a Cyber-Digital Task Force Tuesday to study what the Justice Department is doing to combat global security threats. Interference in our elections is one priority.  

That’s good, as far as it goes.

Social media companies are shutting down Russian bots, the automated accounts that flood tweets and posts, but as soon as one account is gone, others pop up.  

If we can’t rely on the government or corporations to stop the flow of misinformation by November, if ever, what can we do?  

Three words: Consider the source.

That’s what my mother said when I was a child and a bully said or did something ugly. Consider the source means don’t pay attention to someone whose opinion doesn’t matter.

Now more than ever we need to know if the source of information is credible. Don’t rely on Wikipedia or your friends to have their facts straight.

To recognize bots, experts suggest checking an account’s bio and profile picture. If the language is odd, if you Google the image and find it all over the Internet, if the “person” tweets more than seems humanly possible – move on. Don’t share it.  

We need to cultivate more good old American skepticism. Propaganda works because it plays to our existing distrust and divisions. Recognize when you love or hate something online it may be because it confirms your bias. We all have them.

This election year, look before you retweet. Don’t be played for a sucker.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Obama not debating but in the debate -- Sept. 22, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

He won’t be onstage Monday night, but President Barack Obama likely will dominate the first presidential debate.

Republicans have hung “third Obama term” around Hillary Clinton’s neck as if it were an albatross, but Democrats believe the prospect of a third Obama term could be just the thing to motivate unenthusiastic, undecided voters to go to the polls for Clinton.

Obama’s overall job approval rating, in the low 40s a couple of years ago, is a healthy 50 percent. Among Democrats, a whopping 89 percent approve of the way he’s handling his job, according to Gallup.

“More Americans are working. More have health insurance. Incomes are rising. Poverty is falling,” Obama said last week at a rally for Clinton in Philadelphia. Someone in the crowd shouted that gas is $2.

“And gas is $2 a gallon,” he said. “Thank you for reminding me.”

So when Donald Trump promises to wipe out everything Obama has done, starting with the Affordable Care Act, he not only threatens Obama’s legacy but he gives Clinton an opening with uncommitted voters who like the improved economy and social progress of the last eight years.

Only 2 or 3 percentage points now separate Clinton and Trump, so both campaigns want to woo the 13 percent of voters who are undecided.

Some are “better-educated people who lean Republican, who don’t like Trump and have zero use for Hillary Clinton, and they’re sort of paralyzed and frozen right now,” Republican pollster Bill McInturff told The Wall Street Journal.

Others are millennials who lean Democratic, supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries and haven’t fallen in love with Clinton. Democrats also worry that black voters, who provided the margin of victory for Obama in several swing states in 2012, could stay home.

Obama has made Clinton’s election his mission, telling the Congressional Black Caucus gala Saturday that he would take it as a “personal insult” to his legacy if blacks don’t turn out for Clinton.

First lady Michelle Obama, one of the most popular people in America, also is campaigning for Clinton – and Obama’s place in history.

 

“Elections aren’t just about who votes, but who doesn’t vote, and that’s especially true for young people like all of you,” Michelle Obama said last week at a campaign rally at George Mason University.

On the stump, the president charges that Trump is “unfit to serve” and “woefully unprepared to do this job.” Trump in turn calls Obama a “disaster” and “the worst president.”

If you can’t remember a president and first lady being so involved in a potential successor’s contest, it’s because it hasn’t happened in our lifetimes. Most presidents end their time on the stage on a sour note with the public or with little love for the person itching to replace them.   

In 1960, when a reporter asked President Dwight Eisenhower to name a major contribution his vice president, Richard Nixon, then running for president, had made, Ike replied: “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

John F. Kennedy used Ike’s words in a TV ad -- and won that November.

In 2000, Vice President Al Gore – remember him? – kept his distance from disgraced President Bill Clinton, and it cost him.

But when the time came for President George W. Bush to endorse Sen. John McCain for president in 2008, Bush’s job approval rating had dropped to the basement -- about 30 percent. Even though Bush was still popular among conservatives, McCain chose not to ask Bush to campaign.

At this point in 2012, polls showed the race between Obama and Mitt Romney very tight with about 6 percent of voters undecided. On Election Day, though, the contest wasn’t as close. Obama won with 51 percent of the popular vote to Romney’s 47 percent.

Democrats hope a similar scenario plays out this year for Clinton.

As much as she might like to win purely on her own merits, Clinton knows “It Takes a Village.” Her uninspiring campaign style and the reluctance of key demographic groups to back her means she will need the whole Democratic village at her side to win.

Fortunately for her, Democrats still believe in Obama, and he said last week, “I really, really, really want to elect Hillary Clinton.”

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Read now, live longer -- and more good news about books -- Aug. 18, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A young woman walking in my neighborhood the other morning had her eyes not on her phone, playing Pokémon Go, but on the page of a book.

“Must be a good book,” I said as we passed, catching a glimpse of the cover. “Oh, it is!” she assured me.

It was a romance novel – but no judging. It cheered me immensely to see a millennial so engrossed in a physical book that she couldn’t bear to put it down.

Evidently, she’s not alone. There’s good news, finally, about books. We can stop writing the obituary for the physical book.

Retail sales at bookstores were up 6.1 percent in the first six months of the year compared with the first six months of last year, according to the Census Bureau.  

And 2015 was healthy too, with bookstore sales up 2.5 percent over 2014, the first annual increase since 2007, Publishers Weekly reports.

Spurring sales in 2015 was the No. 1 bestseller “Go Set a Watchman,” Harper Lee’s first book since “To Kill a Mockingbird.” People had been waiting 55 years.

This year’s presidential election has juiced bookstores with political tomes. The top four non-fiction books on this week’s New York Times best seller list are anti-Clinton or anti-progressive. 

Physical books outsold ebooks last year for the second consecutive year, with revenue from hardbacks up 8 percent, the Association of American Publishers reported last month in its annual survey.

People are also listening to more books. Revenues from downloaded audio books have nearly doubled since 2012, the publishers’ survey found.

Even more surprising in the era of modernistic temples to Apple: Dusty, used bookshops are a hot new retail venue. Among the cities where used bookshops are making a comeback are New York, Washington and Richmond, Va., according to news reports.

“There’s a used bookstore renaissance going on in New York City right now,” Benjamin Friedman, co-owner of a bookstore café in Queens, told The Wall Street Journal, whose reporter Anne Kadet last month counted more than 30 used bookshops in the city, and more than 50 when she included rare-book dealers.

For me, few pastimes are more enjoyable than browsing books, new or used, in bookstores. I recently was in a used bookstore in Staunton, Va., where an old – make that classic -- jazz record was playing on a turntable. Perfect!

If “vinyl” can be cool, why not books with paper pages? The White House said President Barack Obama took five books with him on vacation.

For the first time, The New York Times devoted a special section of the full-sized paper to an excerpt from the acclaimed new novel, “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead, and said it was the first of an occasional series of long excerpts from new books.

“Though we are excited by innovations like virtual reality and digital storytelling, we also recognize the lasting power of the broadsheet,” the editor wrote. The section was “a special ink-on-paper product, one not available in digital form. It is finite and tactile; to read it you must have gotten your hands on the Sunday paper.”

Think about that. The Times made something available only in the newspaper, making paper more valuable than digital. Brilliant.

Here’s another bit of good news about books: People who read books live longer than those who don’t, a Yale study reports.

The study of 3,635 people 50 and older over 12 years found that book readers lived longer than non-book readers. Those who read books for three-and-a-half hours a week or more – half an hour a day -- lived on average almost two years longer than those who didn’t read books or just read newspapers and magazines.

Reading books promotes “deep reading,” engaging the brain more than newspapers or magazines do, and can foster empathy and other traits that lead to greater survival, Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade and Becca R. Levy wrote in their study, “A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity.”

“We also found that any book reading gives a survival advantage over no book reading,” Levy, a professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale, said in an email.

There’s never been a better time to crack open a book – and you may live longer to read more.  

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Hillary Clinton's new baggage for 2016 -- Feb. 19, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Hillary Clinton will bring baggage to the 2016 campaign that she didn’t have in 2008 and that Bill Clinton couldn’t have imagined in 1992.

It’s the price of success.  The Clinton Foundation is again raising big money from foreign governments for its global charitable programs.

The foundation has received large contributions from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the Canadian agency that is promoting the Keystone XL pipeline, and other foreign entities, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other news organizations reported.

In all, the foundation received nearly $2 billion in donations and pledges from foreign and domestic contributors between its launch in 2001 to the end of 2013, said the Post, which reported that of donors who gave more than $1 million, a third are based outside the United States, and of those who gave more than $5 million, more than half are foreigners.

At least $48 million came from overseas governments, according to the Journal’s tally.  

The donations support global projects tackling environmental, health and economic development problems, and they appear to be perfectly legal. While it is unlawful for foreign nationals to give to U.S. political campaigns, Clinton is not a candidate.

But the contributions raise questions about a possible president’s ties to foreign interests, and Clinton’s foes will make sure no one forgets.

When Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, the foundation suspended fundraising from foreign governments at the Obama administration’s request. It was thought inappropriate for Bill Clinton to be raising money from other countries while his wife was the president’s top adviser on foreign affairs.    

When she left the State Department in 2013 and joined the foundation -- now called the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation – it resumed overseas fundraising.

“Now that she is gearing up to run for president, the same potential exists for foreign governments to curry favor with her as a potential president of the United States,” ethicist Kirk Hanson of Santa Clara University in California, told the Journal, which discovered the donations during a search of the foundation’s online database. 

Hanson and others urged the foundation to reinstate the ban on foreign funds. It should do so immediately to avoid the appearance of conflicts-of-interest.

The Post reported Thursday: “Foreign donors and countries that are likely to have interests before a potential Clinton administration – and yet are ineligible to give to U.S. political campaigns – have affirmed their support for the family’s work through the charitable giving.”

As Republicans pounced, calling for the foundation to return foreign funds, the foundation defended its “strong donor integrity and transparency practices that go above and beyond what is required of U.S. charities and well beyond the practices of most peer organizations.”

The news invites a closer look at Clinton, who’s widely regarded as the Democratic frontrunner if and when she enters the 2016 race. On one hand, the historical appeal of a first woman president remains strong, and Clinton has burnished her credentials as senator and secretary of state. Fans can argue that the family foundation’s fundraising success shouldn’t be held against her.

Many Democrats and even some Republicans remember fondly her husband’s presidency with its booming economy and budget surpluses. (Never mind that messy impeachment business.)

But hold on, Rip Van Winkle.  Hillary is not Bill. Heck, Bill isn’t even Bill. Critics will say the Clintons are as inside as insiders get. Hillary enjoys strong support, personal and financial, but she is s cozy with Wall Street. Her six-figure speaking fees from financial firms raise eyebrows. She is the Democrats’ future?

Yes, for now, anyway. Half of those surveyed this month said Hillary Clinton represents the future, the highest of seven potential presidential candidates. Nearly three in four Democrats and independents who lean Democratic thought so. Both Republican Jeb Bush and Democrat Joe Biden were seen as representing the past by nearly two-thirds of people surveyed in the CNN/ORC poll.

This matters because as Bill Clinton, who cast himself as a “New Democrat” in the 1990s, says, Americans are always about the future.

We may be about to see if a Clinton with new baggage can be the future in the 21st Century.

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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