April 25, 2024 - Staying Minimally Informed, Polling vs Voting, and Life Insurance for the Unhealthy

 

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Stay Informed

Too many people do not read a daily newspaper, and too many don’t bother with the extensive reporting major papers post on the internet.  This results in their not being familiar with the news that affects their daily lives, and of course, the nation as well.

They sometimes seek out a shortcut to being informed and often select the wrong one.  Here is one I feel might be ‘right one’ for many.  It’s short and very informative, and provides links for those who might want to explore something in greater detail.  It’s provided by local NPR stations.  I check it out each day and you can too, by visiting

https://www.npr.org/newsletter/news?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_campaign=20062866420&utm_content=149885269346&utm_term=npr%20newsletters&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_qexBhCoARIsAFgBlesD1QWli6oYEh5AqXFCHZaDbf6Cejc6kkTnDYTWqOlpWg1WMfYfuHgaAsP2EALw_wcB  

but that's a pretty long URL so why not just CLICK RIGHT HERE

JL 

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Polling Elects No One - Voters Do!

I just do not believe the recent poll (FAU Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab - PolCom Lab - Mainstreet Research polling) that shows Rick Scott far ahead of Debbie Muscarel-Powell in the Florida senatorial race.  Other polls have the race as much, much, closer.  

As the Biden campaign gets into full gear, and as the legal system removes the curtain of lies blinding most Republicans, each day sees more and more voters beginning to realize that voting Republican means voting for Donald Trump, with all of his baggage and lies, and for those who remain in his shrinking camp, and that includes Rick Scott.  

Six years ago, Scott was elected by only 10,000 votes statewide, despite coming off of his two terms as Florida’s governor.  Since then, he has done nothing in the Senate whatsoever than be among the chief obstructionists to constructive legislation there, besides voting for Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, the crew that reversed Roe vs Wade.  I don’t know precisely who was polled in the polls that have him far ahead, but let’s look at two voting groups.  

Seniors:  Debbie should be an easy choice for seniors (even the ones who are registered as without party affiliation, independents and Republicans), considering Scott’s historic opposition to Medicare and Social Security both of which he wanted to put up to a fresh vote in Congress every five years. He has shut up about that right now, but if re-elected, believe me, it remains high on his agenda.  There are many seniors in Florida. Scott’s positions directly attack their pocketbooks where it hurts, the cost of their health care and their retirement income!  Democrats must publicize this! 

Women:  Scott’s opposition to women’s abortion rights should bring many women into Ms. Muscarsel-Powell’s camp.  The presence on the ballot of an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution should augment this too!   Democrats must publicize this, too. 

However, Democratic strategists must be careful because that amendment is included along with a bucket full of other ones, and too many voters are in the lazy habit of voting ‘no’ on all questions on their ballot, assuming ‘yes’ votes will cost them money.  Clearly, voters for the amendment guaranteeing abortion rights will not vote for Scott, so publicizing its importance deserves the very highest priority. 

In addition, Scott’s efforts to make voting more difficult, aimed at minorities and immigrants (Debbie is one), should bring the votes of Latinos and those of color to the Democratic column as well.   Remember, polling elects no one.  Voters do! 

I know Floridians are far from being the brightest folks in the nation, their repeated choices of awful governors proving that, but I don’t think this applies to a majority of seniors there and most women too!  And they might be just enough to turn the State blue, and that could include the legislature in Tallahassee and several congressional districts as well!  

For more information about Debbie Muscarel-Powell, visit  https://www.debbieforflorida.com/ or just CLICK RIGHT HERE.  You might want to join me in setting up a monthly donation to her campaign. 

Let me repeat: ‘Polling elects no one.  Voters do!’ 

You must do your part to make that happen.

And while on the subject of polls, I have little faith in the New York Times/Siena University polling that still puts Trump slightly ahead of President Biden.  Americans are just not that sick.  That poll might be.

JL                                        

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Life Insurance

Seeing those ads on TV (or in the AARP magazine) about life insurance for seniors with no health questions asked leads me to share some information with you about life insurance.  I’ve included this before on Jackspotpourri but its repetition never hurts. (My experience in the life insurance industry spanned over four decades, most of which was in non-sales activities.)

1.    All life insurance policies, regardless of company, are based on the same or very similar mortality tables that tell insurance companies how many individuals at a given age will die within one year.  There are no exceptions to this.

2.    These mortality tables assume that the insureds are healthy, having at least answered health questions before being issued a policy.  If this not the case, the number expected to die is arbitrarily increased, as explained below.

3.    The insurance company must collect enough ‘premiums’ to cover the anticipated number of deaths that these mortality tables indicate will occur within that one year.

4.    The same procedure follows for each succeeding year, during which, simply because of aging, an increasingly larger number of insureds will not survive the year, and more premium dollars must be collected to pay that year’s death claims.

5.    This kind of insurance is known as one-year-term insurance.  Individuals at younger ages can purchase it, usually in one, five, ten, or twenty- year packages.  Insurance companies, however, use that one-year term cost at all ages internally in structuring the premiums for all of the policies they sell.  All of them!

6.    Because life insurance policies (excluding term policies), especially at older ages, are usually sold with premiums that remain the same, insurance company mathematicians known as actuaries, figure out a ‘level’ premium to be paid each year.  It is far in excess of the ‘one year term insurance’ premiums required to cover deaths in early years, but far less than the ‘one year term premium’ needed to pay death benefits in later years.  Taking interest rates into consideration, this amounts to overpaying in a policy’s early years and underpaying in its later years.  (Paying premiums using cash values, dividends, and loans does not change the fact that the cost of one year term insurance at a given age is at the heart of determining premiums.)

7.    The idea of ‘whole life insurance’ with a level premium lasting ‘forever’ is just a combination of the early years’ overpayments, saved up in what is called the policy’s cash value, internally supplemented by enough one-year-term insurance to add up to the policy’s death benefit each year. Ultimately, in a true ‘whole life’ policy, no one-year-term insurance at all will be needed at very advanced ages, its cost then being prohibitive, with the cash value alone then sufficing to be the entire death benefit.  All varieties of life insurance are variations of this approach, including endowment policies, universal life policies, and stripped-down term policies that usually run out before becoming death claims.

8.    Policies offered to seniors with no health questions being asked usually have two safeguards that insurance companies include so that they don’t issue policies to those on death’s doorstep.  These are: (a) the full death benefit is not available for the policy’s first two years, with that death benefit usually graded down to the actual premiums paid plus interest during that period, and (b) because the insurance company is insuring individuals about whose health they know nothing, the premium for the one-year-term insurance portion of the death benefit, as determined in 3, 4, 5, and 6 above, is significantly increased.  For example, at an age when 20 deaths during the year per 1000 among insureds who have answered health questions, is anticipated by the insurance industry’s established mortality tables, the actuaries might double that number of anticipated deaths to perhaps 40 per 1000 to account for those whose physical condition is unknown to them, anticipating that using that increased number deaths will provide enough to pay for the portion of the death benefit not available from the cash value, as explained above in number 7 above. This increase in the cost of this ‘term insurance’ portion of the death benefit will, of course, continue through succeeding years. That is the way these kinds of policies are internally structured, although the premium paid is a level one.  The smiling pitchman on TV doesn't go into that.

9.    Conclusion:  If one desires or needs life insurance at any age and can qualify for it by answering health questions, it will be far less costly than a ‘no health questions’ policy, in which the underlying one-year term premium as explained above is increased because the insurance company is unaware of the insured’s health, and the full death benefit is not usually available for the first two years.  But before purchasing any life insurance policy, at any age, a need for it must be first determined. 

 

JL                                        

 

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them. 

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. 

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog.

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  This is an election year.  Spread the word.

JL

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April 21, 2024 - Republicans and a Recommended Book

 

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The Truth About Republicans

For many years, the Republican Party was the party of respectability. It stood for what most Americans saw as traditional values.  It was graced by the memory of Abraham Lincoln, probably our greatest president.  It favored healthy small town and rural values, and avoided being associated with urban problems, which even immigrants who initially settled in cities tried to escape.  It championed individual accomplishment and tried to discourage foreign influences as well as foreign involvements. Any hints of radicalism were left to the Democrats.  When crooked politicians turned up, they were not found in the Grand Old Party. That was the stuff of Democrats, rumored to be in cahoots with organized crime.  Choosing to be a Republican was the safe, honorable, and respectable way of being an American!

Republican women were sometimes known as ‘cloth coat Republicans’ because they preferred a durable, stylish, cloth coat rather than furs, and that symbolized to many the party’s ties to the common working person.  I recall, when growing up, that my father, a unionized salesman, selected the New York Herald Tribune as his Sunday newspaper of choice. I doubt that he agreed with its editorial page but that was the respectable thing to do in those days. He liked being seen as the reader of the Trib. (During the week, he stuck with the Newark Evening News, another conservative paper.)

But here’s the big news!  It is no longer respectable to be a Republican. It has become the party of permanent opposition.  Even worse, it treats those on the other side of the aisle not as opponents but as enemies.  Its strategies are based on lying and cheating. 

• It opposes a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion.  
• Its members oppose immigration policies that brought their own parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents here.  
• It opposes government support of health care for all Americans and even minimal retirement benefits. 
• It readily accepts those who are against efforts to achieve racial equality and regulations to protect the environment.  
• It favors reduced taxation of the wealthy and businesses believing in the fairy tale that their wealth will ‘trickle down’ to those their businesses and investments employ. 
• It thinks isolationism is a valid defensive strategy 
• It says ‘no’ to regulating the proliferation of weapons among civilians. 
• It claims a close relationship to the Bible and wraps itself in the American flag, when in reality, its actions daily deny what the the Bible and the flag represent. 

But even then, it manages to maintain a patina of respectability.  Really though, that is just an illusion.  Some Americans, because of greed, selfishness, and possibly even fear of their innate prejudices being exposed, despise a democracy chosen by all the people, and most importantly, one that works to serve the interests of all of the people.  They ignore the equality of all men promised in the Declaration of Independence. These people have found a home in the Republican Party and have taken it over.  They are today’s Republican Party. 

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?  At first tolerated because they produced votes, the bait that attracts all politicians, some unruly and dissatisfied Americans turned to the Grand Old Party and soon they became crucial to its electing its candidates to any office whatsoever and had no scruples about lying to accomplish that.  Without them, Republicans found they could not win elections.  

Violence is not excluded from their tactics. Think of the rioters at the Miami Board of Elections in 2000, trying to stop the count of Florida’s vote there in the election that took the Supreme Court to put George W. Bush into the White House.  Think of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in January of 2021 to stop the electoral vote count. Think of the demonstrators in Charlottesville a few years ago screaming antisemitic slogans whom then-president Trump included among the ‘good people on both sides.’ Think of those feared by the witnesses, jurors, and Court officials in the current litigation concerning the defeated former president, defenders of whom are not beyond stooping to violence.  These are today’s Republicans!  Watch them gloat and threaten nightly on Fox News!  

They are not just blowing hot air. The stage for their acceptance of violence was set late in the last century with the rejection of government authority by the armed Branch Davidians in Waco who died fighting the enforcement of Federal laws, inspiring the terrorists who later blew up the Federal Building In Oklahoma City with great loss of life, and even some of the subsequent shootings at schools and entertainment venues. It was reinforced by the gross misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court in D.C. vs Heller in 2008 allowing the proliferation of weapons in this country, bringing about thousands of deaths in this country over the years since then.  The pro-gun opinion of Justice Scalia (another flawed Republican idol) in that case will be remembered along with the Dred Scott pro-slavery decision in 1858 as one of the depths of American history.

These ruthless people have gotten control of local governments, school boards and many State legislatures and their influence has crept into the Federal government as well. 

You can find it, tragically, among some in law enforcement and in the military who confuse patriotism with Republican opposition to those they personally see as political enemies.  Some were even among those arrested for their participation in the January 6 rioting! 

They even elected a lying and cheating snake oil salesman to the presidency in 2016, who supposedly unknowingly, has been used by the nation’s enemies to further their causes.  Russian propaganda is voiced on the floor of Congress by those who couldn’t locate Russia on a map. The forty-fifth president still does not, along with many of his supporters, accept the fact that he was defeated in  2020! These are the people who pass as Republicans today. 

Republicans no longer condemn the world’s despots and dictators but seek to emulate their efficiency.  With the three politically motivated Justices that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shoehorned into the Supreme Court during Trump’s presidency, Republicans try to twist our laws and legislative bodies to serve their purposes, many of which seem aimed at weakening our Federal government’s role in best serving the people, replacing it with easily manipulated State laws.

It does not matter that some Republicans are not as bad as others, because when push comes to shove, most hold their noses, and nonetheless, stick with their corrupted party.  While those Republicans who choose not to run for re-election, retiring from corrupted Republican politics, are to be commended, their replacements usually come from the ranks of the very extremists whose presence brought about their retirement.

 ‘Respectable’ Republicans like New York’s Jacob Javits or Nelson Rockefeller of the last century no longer exist.  At the G.O.P.’s 1964 Convention, Rockefeller was humbled by the supporters of right winger Barry Goldwater, where physical violence almost erupted.  Goldwater preached the backward looking, ‘off the wall,’ conservatism of author William Buckley (who was the ghost writer for Goldwater’s book, ‘The Conscience of a Conservative’).   Really, very few Republicans today have what is considered a ‘conscience.’  Or a heart for that matter. That year, 1964, marked what really was the death of respectability for the Republicans, despite traces of sanity sometimes being detected occasionally, such as when the Republican-controlled House depends on Democratic votes to act on crucial legislation, or in the personages of those like the presently ostracized Liz Chaney.   

That is why Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and even the naïve Ronald Reagan, who didn’t know what he was buying into when he accepted the support of these vile interlopers into the G.O.P., would roll over in their graves if they knew that Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed to be Republicans.  It is very simple, folks …

 

Do Gaetz and Greene Call fhe shots for the GOP?

To be a Republican today is a disgrace.  

JL                                        

 

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A Book to Read

Portions of my piece about the Supreme Court in the previous posting of Jackspotpourri were inspired by scholar Louis Menand’s review in the April 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, ‘Reading the Constitution: Why I chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.’ The book, Menand points out, ‘is accessible, rather repetitive, and neither theoretical nor technical … and addressed to non-lawyers.’  I’ve added it to my reading list.

JL                                        

 

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.  

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com. 

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. 

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. 

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  This is an election year.  Spread the word.

JL

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April 18, 2024 - Supreme Court Reform, Dead Ends, a Published Letter, Shakespeare's Input, and Iranian Troublemaking

 

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Supreme Court Building

Fixing the Supreme Court – The Politics of the SCOTUS

The Justices of the Supreme Court have their personal political opinions and that is the key to the way they vote. They can find a reason to justify whatever they choose to do. They can stick to any statute's precise wording or expand upon it, go back to the intent of the framers of a Constitutional provision, pay attention to or choose to ignore 'stare decisis' (previous decisions), or even base their decisions on their foreseeable future consequences, not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution or in any statute. There is no rule book by which they always play. They do what they want to do, what their politics dictate, and find a way to justify their action. That's why Donald Trump might enjoy a pleasant retirement playing golf and hosting events at Mar-a-Lago, unless President Biden is re-elected along with a Senate majority, enabling him to add four Justices, changing the politics of the SCOTUS. 

Right now, if re-elected along with a Democratic Senate, I support Biden doing precisely that, because today, the present political orientation of the SCOTUS has been extremely damaging to the country.  A new majority must be created to undo the harm done by the three political appointments of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.  The SCOTUS was never intended to be a political football until the Republicans made it into one under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, in obedience to Donald Trump’s wishes.  That’s the game they played, so the Democrats must play it too, at least at this time. 

But such Court expansion should not be a permanent solution, something to be frequently turned to when the presidency and Senate make it possible.  That would not be good for the country either.  

The politics of the SCOTUS Justices reflect the mood of the country, and because Justices are given a lifetime position, what they reflect is rarely the current mood.  No SCOTUS Justice is apolitical. They reflect what the nation's mood was at the time of their lifetime appointments.  I believe that while SCOTUS’ politics should take that past mood into consideration, there should be significant limitations regarding the weight it should be given.  The problem is how to accomplish that.  Doing so via Constitutional amendments would take far too long, so periodic Judiciary Acts, passed by Congress would seem to be the best course of action. 

I suggest that once President Biden is able to expand the SCOTUS to undo the terrible harm the present majority has caused, especially in the areas of womens’ rights, gun violence, voting rights, environmental protection and business regulation, its number of Justices should be fixed to a permanent number, with no further expansion.  I also think we need to limit the terms of SCOTUS Justices to about a dozen years, so that appointees come closer to reflecting the nation’s political mood and not what it was generations ago.  Further, I would  limit the nominating abilities of a president in his second and final term in office to less than that, perhaps with Justices then appointed to serve for half that period, so that he or she cannot ‘load the Court’ during their last days in office with Justices who would be around for a dozen years.  

The past then would be honored and respected but not dominate the Court’s decisions, as it does today where it is far out of step with the political mood of the country, made possible by Justices appointed decades ago, reflecting the nation’s mood at that time.                                   

 JL                                        

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Trumpublican Dead-Ends

Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack posting on ‘Letters From an American,’ dated April 13 thoroughly describes the dead-ends into which their bankrupt policies have led both Donald John Trump and the Republican Party. 

Yet there are, as I have often pointed out, a significant number of voters who because of their bigotry, selfishness, greed, ignorance, gullibility, or just plain stupidity (or varying combinations of these qualities) seem comfortable in that ‘dead-end’ cul de sac where autocracy and dictatorship fester.  You cannot ignore their presence.  They are there, just as they were in other ‘democracies’ where noble endeavors were thwarted by those of evil intent whom democracy allowed to take charge. Examples?  The French Revolution, the Weimar Republic, and the Russian Revolution. We must be eternally vigilant.

You can find Professor Richardson’s daily (they are written the prior evening) postings at  https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ where I recommend you check them out each morning.  They are free unless you want to comment.  Give it a try by CLICKING HERE.

JL                                        

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Another Letter of Mine Published

The Palm Beach Post, which has an infinitely wider circulation than Jackspotpourri, published another letter from me, with just a few very minor changes, this one on April 17.  The editorial to which it refers described the many shortcomings of Florida’s Governor and Legislature.  The letter was brief but to the point, making it very simple:   

“Sunday’s Post editorial, ‘We’re heading in the wrong direction; fix it, DeSantis,’ was aimed at the wrong person.  The Post knows that he will not ‘fix it.’  The editorial should have been directed toward those who have the ability to ‘fix it,’ the voters of the state of Florida.  All they have to do is to avoid voting for Republicans, especially those running for seats in the Florida Legislature.”

I encourage followers of this blog to write letters to whatever newspapers, magazines, or social medial sources they follow.  You have a voice.  Use it. 

 JL                                        

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Israel vs Iran - an Open Secret

The strangest thing about the Iranian drone and rocket attack on Israel was that it was neither a secret nor a surprise.  Iran had said that it would do something when Israel bombed a meeting of its generals in Damascus involved in organizing Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, killing a few of them.  And Iran let Turkey know what it was about to do as revenge for that, who passed the word on to the United States, which told the Turks to tell Iran to keep their operation ‘within certain limits.’  Which they did. 

It is safe to conclude that Israel was made fully aware by Washington of what Iran was about to do, enabling them (with British, French, and Jordanian assistance) to disable 99% of the Iranian drones, missiles, and rockets.  Iran was able to say they had retaliated for the Damascus bombing and Israel was able to say they had successfully survived that Iranian retaliation, satisfying both governments’ need to declare their successes. Both sides were playing to their political audiences.   But more than that was at stake.  Muslim nations are quick to see that Iran is a far greater threat to them than is Israel.  That recognition is what this was a part of. 

Meanwhile, Israel was still trying to recover the hostages held by Hamas, simultaneously working to destroy that group’s military presence in Gaza, losing support of many in Israel and elsewhere along the way, and dealing with significant domestic disagreements, primarily centered on the right-wing support essential to Bibi Netanyahu’s survival in office.  Diversion of their energies and resources to Iran and its Hezbollah followers can wait for the time being.  But it will come at a time of Israel’s choosing.

JL                                        

 

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Shakespeare In the Criminal’s Mind – Listen to the Lawyers

There are two generally accepted interpretations of Shakespeare’s lines from Act IV, Scene II of his play, Henry VI, Part II.  The words ‘The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ are spoken by Dick the Butcher, and from one viewpoint, paints lawyers as part of, and supporters of, a corrupt legal system that prevents the people from receiving justice, and as a profession that favors the powerful and wealthy, justifying in his eyes their being ‘killed.’  This viewpoint omits the fact that Dick was an admitted criminal, if not a terrorist. 

On the other hand, however, another interpretation recognizes that omission and suggests that Shakespeare is saying that lawyers should be praised because they stand in the way of such criminals as Dick the Butcher who understandably, from a law-breaker’s standpoint, would want society to be rid of lawyers who supposedly work within the existing framework of laws.  This paints lawyers as a great benefit to society. 

I am pretty sure that both the lawyers defending Donald John Trump and those prosecuting him in his New York ‘hush money’ trial all agree with the second interpretation, believing they are doing the right thing in the pursuit of justice.  But in listening to their arguments, particularly those of the former president’s defense attorneys, the non-lawyer public might be more sympathetic to Dick the Butcher’s position, even though he is a scoundrel and criminal. 

I suppose the audience in those days saw both sides of the coin, depending on where they stood politically, because then, as is the case today, current political issues lurked in the background, with the well-meaning but dangerous dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell taking power a few decades after the play was written. 

Follow the lawyers, on both sides, carefully, and decide if their actions warrant anything near the level of punishment Dick suggests. In Seventeenth century England, they weren’t ‘killed,’ but certainly some were thought of as an obstruction by a less than democratic government. 

JL                                        

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Playing in the outfield for the San Francisco Giants is Mike Yastremski.  I had assumed he was the son of acclaimed Boston Red Sox ballplayer, Carl Yastremski, but I was wrong.  He is his grandson.  Oy!

JL                                        

 

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Strange “Hits’!  The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong!  I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.  

Email Alerts:  If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do.  And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.

Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.

If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them. 

There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though!   Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible.  If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you.  Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog.

Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting. 

Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter.  This is an election year.  Spread the word.

 JL

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