Trump-Biden: 1-0

Last week, while Trump was visiting Japan, he couldn’t resist calling Joe Biden, former vice-president and candidate to the 2020 presidential election, “a fool of low IQ” and listed off a series of embarrassing moments in Biden’s life, like the time he fell asleep during a speech by Barack Obama in 2011, or when he admitted to plagiarizing in school, back in 1987.

On Sunday, the same Trump tweeted that he had “confidence” that Kim Jong Un had “smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, and worse.” The next day, during a press conference, alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump re-served his diatribe, saying: “Kim Jong Un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low-IQ individual. He probably is, based on his record. I think I agree with him on that.”

It take a lot of guts, nastiness and a total lack of courtesy to endorse the North Korean murderer and dictator’s hateful insults of America’s former vice president, while standing next to the leader of a top American ally. Some people have said, “let Trump be Trump” or something of the sort, but we all should be outraged at this kind of behavior. I know, Americans are numbed by Trump misbehavior, but they have no excuse for it.

As for Biden, I don’t think he handle these nasty remark well by ignoring them. Had I been in his spot, I would have immediately called a press conference and ranted about the maniac that usurps his president’s role, and should have demanded that Trump immediately withdraw what he said and apologize to him.

Biden didn’t do it and this shows that he has no spine and won’t be able to joust against the Donald if he ever was to win the Democratic endorsement for president. He showed his total incompetence right there. There are many other reasons why I don’t support Biden, but this reason just happened to suddenly top my list.

Time to get rid of the landline?

These days, as everyone has a cell phone, and sooner in the future when everyone will NEED one for doing about any thing in their life from unlocking their car, their home or paying for most things, "should we get rid of the good, old landline?" will become an unavoidable question.

I’m now wondering, not if but when I’ll be able to say goodbye to our own traditional phone and that same number that we’ve used for almost 35 years. Things are changing pretty fast. Today, in the USA, about 40 percent of household make do with a wireless phone. With this in mind, here are a list of pros and cons I plan to consider before, literally “cutting the cord”.

Elements against: 

• Cost of maintaining a landline. According to what I was able to gather, the average monthly cost for a landline is $15 to $30, which may not sound like much, but add up over a year and more. Sure, there are ways to keep them and use them with Google voice or even Skype, but it’s more complicated and you may have to let go of your old number. 
• Landlines are source of spam. Back in 2003, the Federal Trade Commission launched a "Do Not Call List", allowing consumers to enroll so they wouldn’t receive phone calls from telemarketers. For a while it worked, but today, with robot-calls and the like, it’s become an abject failure. 
• It could also cost more if your cable and internet are “bundled” with your landline, and dropping it might add to the cost of the remaining services. 

Elements in favor:

• Sound quality is better. Even though some might disagree, there’s a likely consensus that landlines sound a little better and there are far fewer dropped calls with them. 
• They could come in handy in emergencies. There are situations when cell phones can’t be located, are out of batteries or might not work for a variety of reasons. 

In view of all this, we’re still torn between getting rid of our landline or transfering it to say, Google voice, but we’re not quite there yet!

When competence and confidence clash

Some people say that confidence breeds competence and that is probably where the expression “fake it till you make it” finds its origin.

I’ve always been skeptical of people overly confident and through the course of my life, I’ve seen them, time and time again, over-promising a lot, but under-delivering by an even larger margin.

That was until I heard, I few days ago, on NPR, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, shine a different light on these two important traits. The discussion began on how confidence was defined; namely, was confidence the same as being charismatic or extroverted?

Chamorro-Premusic said that confidence had an external and internal face, in that the external face looked a lot like extroversion, a trait linked to charisma in our Western societies. This said, there are many good people who can be internally confident without projecting it to others.

Overly confident folks are often coming across as arrogant and even obnoxious. All the narcissists are excellent examples of this.

Since confident individuals tend to be more extroverted, and socially-skilled our society tends to put them on pedestal, not only that, but we tend to equate confidence with competence, and automatically assume that because of it, they’re are also more skilled or talented.

The expert went on to say that competent people are generally confident, but confident people are not necessarily competent. They’re just skilled at hiding their incompetence and their insecurities– mostly because they’re self-deceiving themselves, so they can think that they are much better than they are in reality.

This is also an excellent reason why, during quick interviews or evaluations, it’s very difficult to measure how competent people are, especially when they use confidence to fake competence, especially when we’re not experts in that field and can’t perceive the difference.

So, these people who interview really, really well look really good if you have no evidence or information on their actual talent or competence, and this might lead you to assume that they’re great.

Don’t fall into that trap and always look for a way of finding where their real competence stands and don’t just get blinded by their bravado!

Have humans “lost it”?

It’s a climber named NirmalPurja who posted this photo on Facebook on May 23. Like the rest of us, I saw it all over the places.

While I agree that weather is fickle in that particular part of the world and that climbing “windows” are few and far between, I see more than a thick line of climbers ready to ascend the Hillary Step and then the top of Mt. Everest. I see human stupidity in partaking into both a dangerous and miserable experience.

No question that this foolish exercise is the result of bucket lists that must be fulfilled no matter what, of fabulous postings on Facebook, Instagram and the like, and finally money. Obscene amounts of it. Yes, the ride is a costly one.

I’m told that climbing that particular mountain can cost between $35,000 and $75,000 per person, depending on how much comfort is expected, how many oxygen bottles are desired and how strong the logistical support - mostly made of sherpas – is needed.

I admit that I have no desire to join this crowded bottleneck, but I’m also saddened by hordes of tourists trampling that mountain as if they “had to” do it before they die. Makes me sad about humanity...

Why aren't more Mormons driving Teslas?

As we do every Sunday, we walked by the Park City Mormon Church yesterday, and for once, I looked at the cars parked there.

They were fewer than usual, since it was Memorial Day weekend and the weather had been so bad that many of the faithful had decided to drive south in search for sun.

In looking at the cars parked, I could only see one Tesla S, two Porsche Panamera, Several Cayennes and a few Range Rover.

Still Tesla is an all-America car, so why this lack of patriotism? The reasons for so few Mormon being fans of Tesla might be that, as a group, they don't believe that being “green” is good and that global warming isn't going to do us in.

Of course, Mormons have already too many weird things to believe in, that they're not more room left for subscribing to an even weirder thing like climate change. Let's cut them some slack and wait till the Quorum of Twelve Apostles begin to boil inside their Salt Lake building and have a revelation!

Park City's pelicans

Last week, as we were walking, I spotted some large, mostly white birds, by our neighborhood golf course and stopped to shot a video. I couldn't get too close, but could see that they had huge bills, like pelicans, which was quite unusual.

On Friday, we came across a smaller flock of the same birds, in flight, and they got closer to us, They confirmed what I saw previously, with their huge pelican yellow bill, with a bump on top, and a white plumage with a stripe of black.

As I returned home, I entered the description on Google and got the picture of an identical bird, the American white pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), a bird as large as the trumpeter swan. Its overall length can reach 70 inches (180 cm), including its huge beak that's around 11 to 15 inches long (280–390 mm) and a wingspan of about 95 to 120 inches (240–300 cm), making it the largest of any North American bird, after the California condor.

These giant birds nest in colonies in remote lakes of Canada's Alberta and its Northwest Territories. A small portion of their population uses Gunnison Island, in the Great Basin's Great Salt Lake as nesting ground while the southernmost colonies are found in southwestern Ontario and northeastern California.

They winter on the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts from central California, Florida south to Panama, and along the Mississippi River at least as far north as St. Louis, Missouri. In winter quarters, they're rarely found on the open seashore, as they prefer estuaries and lakes. They cross deserts and mountains to avoid the open ocean while migrating.

Now you know everything about these rare visitors to Park City. No, American white pelicans don't ski!

My French friends and the telephone...

Since I was born and raised in France, and spent more than a quarter of century in that country, I still have many friends over there.

Yet, staying in touch with some of them is a challenge as they never answer their fixed line or their mobile phone. I'm not even talking about email and the rest. Are some of them afraid of the phone (phonophobia) as some fear answering a phone or hearing it ring? Others may perceive the caller as threatening, intimidating or the bearer of bad or upsetting news?

I can't say, but on the other hand, fear of making calls might be caused by concerns of finding the right time to call or the fear of bothering others. In both circumstances, that same fear could originate from anxiety about poor sound quality, misunderstanding, need for repetition, or other awkward, poor communication.

These fears are often linked to the absence of seeing the body language, and individuals fearing to lose control. Then, there are others that are so cheap that they'll never return my calls or simply call me on occasions, to just visit with me? I don't know what their real reasons are, but I find the experience really frustrating.

With apps like Skype and WhatsApp, it's easy and inexpensive to contact people, that it makes me wonder. But again, I wasn't born yesterday and so were my old buddies. We're all vintage folks and have not been raised with cell phones, let alone normal land lines, around us.

I was close to 20 when my parents had their home phone installed, so I'm not even suggesting that calling someone is second-nature. We must do it, because we have to, not because we naturally feel the urge or the sheer pleasure to...