* * *
A name that cannot be ignored in that period of history is that of Thomas More. He opposed King Henry VIII’s divorce from childless Catherine of Aragon which brought about the establishment of the Church of England, separate from the Papacy. For taking that stand in support of the Roman Catholic Church, More was beheaded in 1535, ultimately being sainted by the Church.
But aside from that, More had held high positions in England’s government, often putting him at odds with the Monarchy. Among other posts, he had served as Lord Chancellor, a position somewhat akin to our Attorney General, heading up the country’s legal system, and considered first among all of the ministers, above even those managing the Crown’s foreign affairs, armed forces, and Treasury.
Earlier in his career, Sir Thomas (More had been knighted along the way) wrote a book called ‘Utopia’ which included many progressive ideas with which we are still struggling today. Rather than attacking the monarchy, which might have cost him his life much sooner than it eventually did, he wrote about an imaginary place, where some of the problems he saw as present in Sixteenth Century England had been successfully resolved. Rather than discuss the entire book, a monumental task, I will occasionally mention some of More’s ideas found in ‘Utopia.’
One was that while capital punishment was appropriate for murder, hanging
thieves was excessive punishment, and an encouragement for murders. Rather, they should be
punished in less lethal manners, which he carefully enumerated and described,
and which might potentially be beneficial to society. He even approached the reasons why a person
might resort to thievery as a last resort necessary to survive. (Shades of Jean
Valjean in Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’!)
Thomas More recognized that thieves might decide that they might just as
well murder their victims because the penalties for thievery and murder were
the same, death, encouraging thieves to become killers as well, eliminating a victim
whom if left alive might testify against him.
Another concerned the
Monarchy borrowing to pay its bills. More pointed out that paying off such loans, usually taken out to
finance wars, as well as paying the periodic interest due on them, in a devalued currency was cheating those who had lent the
government money that was more soundly based. (Yes, there were deficits in those days too,
but no debt ceiling.) After our Civil
War, Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution dealt with that
precise problem, a tactic that Southern senators were advocating to more easily
pay off the debt accrued to fund the Civil War.
Additional comments on ‘Utopia’ will appear in future blog postings. I am still working my way through it. Watch for them.
JL
A Letter Gets Published – Wetlands and Weapons
Here’s a letter from me that was published on the Opinion page of the Palm Beach Post on June 3. It was prompted by a column pointing out how Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s wrong-headed opinion substituted the narrower adjective, ‘adjoining,’ for the more inclusive ‘adjacent,’ limiting the wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act. Example: If there is a berm between a creek and a marsh, Alito pointed out that they are not ‘adjoining.’ This ignored the fact that they were still ‘adjacent,’ so one of them (the marsh?) loses inclusion in the waters protected by the Act, according to Alito’s opinion.
The two words are not synonymous, despite the Court’s majority pretending they are. But that’s fitting, because they also are ‘pretending’ to be Justices, instead of the political appointees they actually are. The kinds of ‘checks and balances’ that keep the Executive and Legislative branches ‘honest’ disappear from the Judicial branch once Judges or Justices are appointed and confirmed. That flaw must be, in some way, shape or form, remedied.
But here is my letter:
”As bad as Justice Alito's misuse of the Supreme Court to misinterpret the Clean Water Act is, it doesn't come close to the late Justice Antonin Scalia's 2008 misinterpretation of the Constitution's Second Amendment that ignored its first thirteen words. While Alito's opinion merely weakens an act intended to protect the environment, Scalia's opinion made possible the uncontrolled proliferation of weapons and the thousands of resulting deaths. There may be wetlands mud on Alito's hands but that doesn't compare with the victims' blood on Scalia's.”
I am not worried about those gun-carrying Floridians who might disagree with me because none of them read newspapers anyway. But I am worried about our run-away Supreme Court charging off in the wrong direction, despite some late signs of a more intelligent approach from Justice Kavanaugh.
JL
* *
Libertarianism Lives on in the Republican Party
There’s a lengthy article in the June 5 New Yorker magazine about libertarianism. It deals with the social and economic philosophers and their ideas behind libertarianism, the theory that less government, or even the absence of government, is more desirable than what we have now.
In the minds of its believers, libertarianism might be simply defined as liberty from government! That makes sense if one believes that the role of government ought not to include collecting taxes in order to provide benefits to, and serve, the people. I doubt if today’s Republicans, heirs to many libertarian ideas, really understand them or have even heard of those mentioned in the article who propounded them. The motives of those who vote for Republicans for supposedly libertarian reasons are probably no more than ordinary selfishness and the hope of paying lower taxes. Anyhow, to read the article CLICK HERE or copy and paste this on your browser line.
It will leave you far more knowledgeable
about libertarianism than most who claim to be libertarians.
* *
 |
| Kevin McCarthy telling Republicans not to believe every word he says. |
And while on this
subject, I note that the House of Representatives' extreme right-wing Republicans are willing to oppose all legislation if Speaker
McCarthy doesn't live up to the agreement he made with them that got him into
the Speaker's chair after fifteen ballots. Poor things, they feel betrayed.
They should recognize that just as it is normal for Republicans
to lie to the public, it's also okay for McCarthy to have lied to them.
The biggest lie of
all, of course, is that these extreme right-wing members of Congress are Republicans. THEY ARE NOT !! In their hearts and souls they are libertarians who agree with Grover
Norquist's words of twenty-one years ago: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce
it to the size where I could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the
bathtub.” Blocking all House legislation and having
opposed the increase in the debt limit are the things that such libertarians
turn to in their quest for the anarchy their financial supporters would relish.
And you might have thought that only
fascists and communists were foes of democracy.
*
* *
Sports I Like and Dislike – or Why Lord Stanley is Turning Over in his Grave
I find watching sports
on TV a pleasant pastime. Professional baseball, football, and basketball are
fine. Competitive tennis and golf are good too, as are most college sports. I
must admit that I usually avoid ‘cornbag’ tossing as a game for children’s
birthday parties and as for automobile racing, I suspect its fans are primarily
drawn by the anticipation of seeing accidents. Local streets and highways
provide enough of the latter for me.
Which leaves us with
professional hockey, which bores me stiff.
Here’s why.
(1) It is close to
impossible to follow the game on TV, because it is very difficult for a viewer
to follow the puck, which is where the action is. Years ago, they tried some video trickery to
color and emphasize the location of the puck, but I haven’t seen that in years,
(2) Most goals are
scored accidentally, the action leading up to the goal rarely being anticipated
and caught on TV, and can only be seen afterwards, not the way a home run, a
three-pointer, or a touchdown come across on TV, as they happen.
(3) The players fight
too much, constantly engaging in activities supposedly part of the game but
which would result in lifetime suspensions in any other sport, including
‘cornbag,’ but most of all,
(4) NHL games on TV are
increasingly presented more like professional wrestling, which is an
entertainment production but not a sport. Hockey games are not ‘scripted’ as
professional wrestling is and hockey players are really trying to win, but the
manner in which their game is presented caters to fans who came to cheer and
have fun but had no idea what is happening on the ice.
The first two games of
the Stanley Cup finals between the Florida Panthers and the Las Vegas Stars are
good examples, with spotlights flashing
over the audience throughout the entire game, and the introduction to the game
more suited to a show at a Las Vegas casino featuring ice-skating and ‘flying’ showgirls
and special effects. Olympic and college hockey, and the regular season games of
the NHL, are not that bad, but it is the Stanley Cup matches that set the tone.
If this is the direction the NHL is taking, they can keep it. I hope that if
and when professional baseball moves the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas, it
doesn’t follow this path. (I think
that’s a bad idea and suspect that the A’s will end up in a place with fewer
existing diversions than Las Vegas, perhaps Portland or Nashville.)
For all sports, I feel
that anything beyond cheerleaders (or ‘dance teams’ as Major League Baseball
calls their occasional brief appearances sometimes atop dugouts between
innings) and spot-lit entries of the teams’ starting lineups is
unnecessary. Baseball, supposedly our
national pastime, has survived for over a century and a half without most of even
that. The two teams’ players lined up on
the first and third baselines, caps off, as the National Anthem is sung, is
really enough. The NHL has a lot to
learn.
JL
* * *
A Word
About the Marlins
And speaking of baseball, no one (including local newspapers) seems to notice that the Miami Marlins, traditional doormats of the National League’s East Division, are just a few games behind the Division leading Atlanta Braves. On close examination, that is the result of their coincidentally being in the part of their 162 game schedule (neither the NFL, the NBA, nor the NHL play that many games) that enables them to play really weak teams like the Kansas City Royals or the Oakland A’s. If they are to matter as a team, they must learn to win without having to catch up in the late innings, something that the Braves and the Mets just won’t allow them to do.
JL
* * *
A
Birdie or a Bogey?
The merger of PGA and LIV Golf, amounting to the purchase of the PGA by Saudi-financed LIV Golf, is a great example of a pastime becoming a sport, and that sport becoming a profession, and that profession becoming a business, and that business becoming dependent upon its bottom line and return on investment to survive. Failure of such favorable outcomes to occur can turn the business back to being a profession and can turn that profession back to being a sport and turn that sport into becoming merely a pastime once again. Fore! Next month, croquette?
JL
*
* *
Housekeeping on the Blog
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.
If you want to send someone the blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by
visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I think this is the best method of
forwarding Jackspotpourri.
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 the blog will be
forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now are reading,
but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the
‘sidebar’ features such as access to the blog’s archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link
to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this
posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
Have a nice day!
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment