Maureen Dowd: ‘All American business schools should have a class on mug shots.’
I am getting bad vibes about the make-up of the
juries in the forthcoming trials of the indicted former president and his sometime
loyal acolytes. It will be difficult to
avoid seating that one jurist who will bring about an acquittal or a hung jury,
particularly in the cases being heard in Florida and Georgia. If that occurs in even one case, it will
become a weapon for the anti-democratic forces that are at the core of the
defendants’ cases in the other trials, and in their inevitable appeals. This will feed into the very dangerous ‘action-reaction’
spiral mentioned in the previous posting of Jackspotpourri, leading to civil
violence.
That’s why, to save the nation from such violent disintegration, the Republicans must be willing to renounce and denounce the idiocy, bigotry, and venality that has captured their party and sit down and make a political deal with the Democrats before it is too late, before any trials. As I pointed out, verdicts in either direction will have the same result, the causing of possibly violent reactions. (The previous posting described my ideas for such a deal. It might appear directly below this posting, or you can get there via the Archives off to the right.) But as I then wrote, if the Republicans do not do so, there will be no deal. That would leave the nation with the awesome task of calming troubled waters. In doing so, democracy might have to suffer.
Complicating this task will be the environment of
permissiveness that has allowed white supremacy and
anti-semitism to periodically manifest itself in the nation over
the past century and a half. Very few politicians
openly endorse such racist ideas, but some political parties (generally Democrats
in the 1800s, Republicans in the 1900s and later) remained, and continue to
remain, silent in regard to them in order to gain the votes of the numerous bigots
who think that way.
Over the past decade, acts of gun violence have
usually brought about public condemnation of their perpetrators, ‘thoughts and
prayers’ for their victims, but little to
change the environment that allowed these acts to occur in the first place. Legislation to
curb gun violence staggers.
An example of such ‘permissiveness’ is the defeated and now indicted former president’s comment
in referring to the violence of the ‘Unite the Right’ antisemitic, white
supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where he said that there were ‘very
fine people on both sides.’
 |
| Creating an environment of permissiveness in Charlottesville |
(Addendum: I still have a tee shirt from a demonstration
in which I participated five years ago after the shootings at the high school
in nearby Parkland. It reads ‘Grandparents Against Assault Weapons.’ I still haul it out and wear it whenever
there is a similar shooting, prompted by lax gun control laws and that
environment of permissiveness. I wore it
yesterday out of respect for those murdered on Sunday in Jacksonville. And I
still have a sign in my car’s rear window reading ‘Want an Assault Rifle? Join
the Army!’ I believe it is the only such
sign in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, where the vast majority of people
don’t read newspapers anymore. But I belong to another generation, one that has
been passed and left in the dust by too many who don’t give a damn about too
many things.)
JL
* * *
About Elon Musk
Musk’s ideas seem to be all over the place in ventures such as Tesla automobiles, space exploration, social media, and Artificial Intelligence, energized by his ego and his wealth, and seemingly all vaguely tied together. To some he is a progressive and to many he is a conservative, or even a fascist. He is so in love with world peace that he objects to the scientific discoveries he has enabled being used to aid Ukraine wage war in its military struggle against Russia. But how different is that from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s turning against the hydrogen bomb as a step too far against mankind after developing the atom bomb? Hmm.
Anyone with the power that Musk has over the economy, society, and to some extent, government as well, should be elected to that position of power and influence by the people and not arrive there through their own efforts. No one elected Musk to any office that I know of. Others with such non-elective power have historically been adequately regulated by the government, as were the ‘robber barons’ of the late nineteenth century, and as our largest financial institutions and businesses are today.
Government has difficulty doing that with Musk, however, because his wealth and resources sometimes exceed that of government in certain areas such as those where government involvement has retreated, leaving them to the private sector, which can mean cooperating with or even succumbing to Musk. Space exploration is one of those areas.
Elon Musk enables scientific and engineering Ideas and ventures that are the kinds of things traditionally found in academic or government environments where experimentation is not as risky as it can be when our society and economy serve as the testing laboratories. Every once in a while, don’t you read of an explosion or some other tragedy when an experiment goes wrong somewhere as happened, for example, with the recent loss of a submersible attempting to visit the wreck of the Titanic? When they happen to him, Musk just blows those occurrences off, something the American people should not be doing.
There
has to be a ‘resetting’ of the relationship of this unusual person to our
government, society, and economy. There
is something about him now that doesn’t ring quite true. Could it be that he exists only because he
finds himself in an environment of permissiveness, and runs with it as far as
it takes him?
JL
* * *
Trivia Quiz #3 - Finish the Pair (Each of the following was usually accompanied by someone else. Name them.
Note: Answers to Numbers 6 and 7 are not
their horses’ names, (but take an extra credit if you can also name them.)
1.
Edgar Bergen and ___________.
2.
Spencer Tracy and __________.
3.
Bud Abbot and _____________.
4.
Rodgers and _______________. (two acceptable answers)
5.
Bausch and ________________.
6.
Roy Rogers and ____________ .
7.
The Lone Ranger and _______ .
8.
Penn and __________________.
9.
Horn and __________________.
10.Lerner and _________________.
Answers
to Trivia Quiz #2:
The NHL is older than the NBA.
Bing
Crosby preceded Frank Sinatra.
Mussolini
preceded Hitler.
Colgate
preceded Proctor & Gamble.
The
National League is older than the American League.
Hot Dogs preceded hamburgers.
(And
if you disagree, check them out on ‘Google.’)
* * *
Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
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, 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 that blog
posting 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.
JL
*
* *
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