Running for Your Life: 24-Hour News: A Demagogue’s Dream

Demagogue (n): a person who stirs up public feelings especially of discontent, ie that politician is just a demagogue who preys upon people’s fears and prejudices.

Question: What counts as news in America more than ratings. Anyone?

Answer: You’re right. Nothing.

Question: What would you guess is delivering on high ratings (higher profits) in the history of 24-hour cable news?

Answer: Candidate debates, 2016. In this the craziest presidential election year in every talking heads’ memory what to do but slate as many candidate debates on 24-hour news channels as you can. Oh, and don’t even think to tinker with the format, especially when ratings (profits), as we’ve found in the latest business quarter, soar when a demagogue “stirs up public feelings especially of discontent, ie that politician is just a demagogue who preys upon people’s fears and prejudices.”

As to the public right to know? A mandate to perform a public service by presenting and analyzing the news in a way that doesn’t merit comparisons to March Madness or the Super Bowl or the World Series, in which each of us gather round the set or table or neighborhoods bar (Go Donald! You tell ’em, Bern!) and cheer blindly for our favorite team (brand, politician), must be a foreign idea.

I’m thinking Canada, for one.

Which might speak to why the domicile-change requests to the Canadian consulate are spiking these days. Or am I not making the right assumptions here?

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday  

Running for Your Life: Running and the C-Word

This latest news comes from The Economist – Feb. 27 http://econ.st/1QdaTJQ. Aerobic exercise like running has long been seen as a cancer preventive, as well as way to forestall cancer’s return after treatment.

Now, this new study says it all comes down to adrenalin, or what the test tube folks call epinephrine.

So take a medicinal form of epinephrine and get the benefits of running for your life. Good idea, right? Well, yes. And the scientists in a study in the journal Cell Metabolism came up with a second chemical factor that gets stirred up when you kick up a sweat on a run: interleukin-6.

So let’s get these drugs into production: Epinephrine and interleukin-6 to attack cancer tumors. Don’t diminish the role of running in a life, though. Put it this way: If you run for your life, you can do so without spending an arm and a leg on new drugs (in the US, anyway; drugs like these wouldn’t come to market at anything less than $100 a pill – that is, unless Bernie Sanders were to win the presidency!)

Next: Running for Your Life: 24-Hour News: A Demagogue’s Dream   

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Okay, a pretty large majority of us agrees that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. And, yes, Donald Trump could be assumed to be the presumptive nominee of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Quelle horreur!

Well, yes, and no. Lincoln, the famous man of “peculiar ambition,” is definitely a founding father of the nation we know. But if this great were us (and not primarily memorialized upon monuments, on sacred native land, on our $5 bill) here’s what we may be talking about in the fuller context of Honest Abe.

“[Lincoln] advanced the country toward unlimited government … He was willing to use foreigners and minority groups against his own people. He was willing to have a selective ‘democratic’ conscience when it came to subjects like deportations.”

                                                  – Sam Dixon, Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1986

Then there is this from historian Richard J. Carwardine in “Lincoln: Profiles in Power”

“Lincoln himself composed a few articles specifically for the newspapers and gave careful thought to where his public letters should first appear before they were copied Union-wide. He controlled the press’s access to his private meetings, allocated lucrative government printing contracts to selected Republican papers, and rewarded loyal editors and correspondents with well-paid jobs at home and abroad. Unsurprisingly, loyal correspondents made up the presidential trainload to Gettysburg in November 1863, their place on the platform assured; hundreds of local papers subsequently printed and celebrated Lincoln’s speech, in repudiation of Democratic ridicule of a ”silly, flat and dish-watery utterance’. Probably most important of all, Lincoln, though not dependably accessible to reporters, made sure his door was open when it needed to be.”

None of this is to excuse the hard reporting that should go into the suitability of Donald Trump’s bid for higher office. My two cents? There just might be something to learn in just what are some of the common traits (granted, hopefully a narrow sliver of a Venn diagram) of the current Republican presidential front-runner and Lincoln himself, a man who reasonable people have convinced us to use as a cudgel against Trump – rather than doing the harder work of knocking him down on matters of policy, most damagingly, his penchant for inciting hatred and violence, ie, a proposed ban on all Muslims from visiting America and the advocated killing of terrorists’ families.

Next: Running for Your Life: Running and the C-Word

   

Running for Your Life: Trouble With Slow

In a post about a month ago I let it be known that as a running pair Thurber and I were back. After one successful outing with my redbone coonhound running partner, I was bound and determined to get out there in the park at least once a week. Back to, yes, Running for Your Life !

That was then. Just over a week later, on a five-minute lope around the park with a considerably more rambunctious hound (ie, jerking on the leash, suddenly dead-stopping on the road in front of me and generally messing with my head), I felt a twinge in my left hip. Two days later the pain really set in. Yep, after months of physical therapy to correct a gimpy knee, I was on the shelf again. Unable to run.

Until today (March 2)! While I didn’t see a doctor, I’ve enough running experience to know what is what. I suffered a mild hamstring pull, and while my mobility now is hardly one hundred percent, I can run. That is, I can jog. Slow but sure. And today I went out for 45 minutes and felt no pain at all.

The trouble with slow is I want to go fast. I’m fit enough to go fast. But, when it comes to running for my life, I have to get it in my head that I can’t keep up with a spry coonhound on a five-mile run (maybe, a controlled run, say about 10-15 minutes. Frankly, though, even that’s probably not a good idea ...)

Do I want to run well into my sixties, my seventies? Then I’d better get a grip on the trouble with slow. To jog instead of run all out. To pay much better attention to any nagging pain, to not push it when the muscles are crying: “Slow down. Stop already!”

May Thurber enjoy his morning runs in the park with his pals – other dogs, that is. We might get back out soon. If he could read this blog, I know he would understand.

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats With Us Thursday

Running for Your Life: Super Tuesday and the Super Bowl

There have been – since the summer – a gazillion polls and a million debates in the run-up to the American presidential election.

In what stands in for democracy in this great country, tomorrow (March 1), is Super Tuesday. After this ill-advised monster day of primaries and caucuses, reasonable people paid big money to have serious opinions have suggested that front-runners Donald Trump, on the Republican side (sort of), and Hillary Clinton, on the Democratic side, will be in the catbird seats. They will, according to odds makers, represent their respective parties in the November general election.

I’ve a thought. Come Wednesday morning, let’s conduct a poll. In my mind, having watched most of the debates on both sides, Republican supporters value blood sports – brute strength and heavy hitting – while the Dems are big on finesse and clever maneuvers.

Or, said another way, the GOP go for sports in which players are more at risk of career-ending concussions, while those who are far less likely to suffer such a dark turn in their lives favor the Democrats.

With that reasoning, I would posit that a preponderance of respondents of our poll whose favorite sport is either football or hockey would back Trump in an election, while a similar majority whose favorite sport is baseball, soccer or basketball would back Hillary Clinton.

Woof. Does that sound like a dead heat? Time will tell …

Next: Running for Your Life: Trouble With Slow