In the 2024 presidential race, it is becoming clear that the choice will be between voting for electors supporting President Joe Biden or those supporting his predecessor in office.
Because the incumbent president will be 82 years old by the inauguration date, and his challenger will be 78 at that time, the choice of a vice-presidential candidate to accompany the presidential nominee becomes important.
While both candidates seem to be in good health, their advanced ages cannot be ignored, the four year difference between them being inconsequential. Clearly, neither are spring chickens. Furthermore, the former president, defeated in 2020, faces numerous legal challenges that are unlikely to be fully resolved by the inauguration of our forty-seventh president. These cannot be ignored either. These are the two reasons why the vice-presidential nomination becomes very important.
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| Harris |
Quite likely, the incumbent vice-president, Kamala Harris, will be on the Democratic ticket in 2024. She is a known quantity, a former California Attorney General and Senator with liberal leanings that she is comfortable leaving in the back seat when necessary.
The Republican vice-presidential slot is open for grabs. He or she might be chosen from that party’s
extreme right or from those Republicans who are more to the center, but who to
some extent tolerate the extremists, the votes of whose supporters are crucial
to that party’s survival. If I had to
place a bet today, I would put my dollar on former South Carolina governor and
United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley.
It is interesting to note that both Harris and Haley are first-generation Americans whose parents immigrated to this country. Both of Haley’s parents came from India, while Harris’ mother came from India and her father came from Jamaica, meeting here as university students. Therefore, I cannot see either one of them being personally hostile to a liberal approach to immigration.
This might pose a problem for Haley because of her party’s traditional anti-immigrant stance. And Kamala Harris is of course aware that the labor union support of Democrats has always been leery of legislation that might result in immigrants entering the work force, replacing native-born workers.
One overriding reason the Republicans might turn to Haley is their belated concern with the votes of women, many of whom already are hostile to the G.O.P. because of its posture regarding abortion restrictions. They would lose even more support if they nominated a man for the number two slot, opposed by Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket.
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| Haley |
Your job? Scroll back up to the first item on this blog's posting for a clue!
JL
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Two Birds of a Feather (plus two more)
Birds of a feather do indeed flock together, and their birdhouse in today’s political aviary seems to be the Republican Party. Its floor is covered with bird excrement. Smell it? That's the smell of the G.O.P.
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who should
have stuck to coaching football, is still holding up what would normally be routine
Defense Department personnel changes in the Armed Forces in order to pressure
them into restricting travel allowances in connection with military personnel getting an abortion. Dumb
Alabama residents confuse government with SEC football and voted him back in office
last year. (By the way, Tuberville doesn’t even live in Alabama, his real
residence being across the State line in Florida.) Most of his Republican colleagues recognize his unfitness for a Senate seat but support him to maintain party unity.
And speaking of Florida, its governor, Ron DeSantis (currently falling on his face in his efforts to get the Republican presidential nomination), picked a fight, one that he is losing, to pressure the Disney people by playing with their favorable taxing district, to get them to stop defying his negative position regarding LGBTQ individuals.
Disney’s Magic Kingdom is perhaps Florida’s single largest private employer and greatest tourist destination. DeSantis seems to forget this because he spends his time restricting voting opportunities, messing with the State’s public school curricula and its State colleges and universities, attacking drag queens, banning books, and severely limiting a woman's right to choose to have an abortion.
I suppose this is why Tuberville chooses to live across the border in Florida, probably because he is envious of DeSantis' agenda, and hopes to learn from him.
Florida's two Republican senators also reside in that smelly birdhouse with Tommy and Ron. Neither of them similarly make no effort whatsoever to serve the interests of residents of the State they allegedly represent. Both continue to put 'party before country.' Maybe it's not the bird excrement you smell. Could it be the stink emanating from Marco and Rick? (Rick is up for re-election in 2024.)
Your job? Scroll back up to the first item on this blog's posting for a clue!
JL
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Thoughts on the Absence of ‘Time’ from ‘Space’ … the Webb Space Telescope
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| Webb Space Telescope Image of Activity from which Stars are Formed |
When the Webb Space telescope sees something during its traveling through space, in its orbit around the sun a million miles away from its origin on our planet, it is not seeing it exactly as it is at the time that image reaches back to Earth. It takes ‘time’ from when the telescope sees something for it to reach the viewer, and that time is measured by the speed of light, roughly 186,000 miles per second. Therefore, what the telescope reports seeing happened a very long, long, time ago, conceivably before the creation of our planet and possibly of our solar system! We measure that time in what is called ‘light years,’ each one consisting of the amount of ‘our time’ for the image to travel in one year or about 5.88 trillion miles. Wow. That sort of blows one’s mind. But that’s the easy part.
To find out more about the Webb Space telescope (a project of our government along with Canadian and European scientific partners), check out https://webb.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/assets/documents/WebbFactSheet.pdf or just CLICK HERE.
I suggest that you do that right now.
Down here on planet Earth, time is measured in meters, miles, seconds, hours, and years all of which we neatly define based on the earth completing one rotation on its axis (every 24 hours … we call that a day) and one rotation around the sun (about every 365.25 days … we call that a year). This makes sense to us but is meaningless from any other perspective in the universe other than Earth. Data from the Webb Space telescope out there in space is ultimately reflected to us in terms of these parameters, and this includes what defines a ‘light year.’ But beyond the planet Earth, this definition of what a ‘light year’ is might not exist.
What the Webb Space telescope sees in the simplest of terms just ‘IS,’ while ‘WHEN’ it occurred, occurs, or will occur is dependent upon from where the event in space is viewed, be it from Earth, another planet, another galaxy, or any indeterminate point in the cosmos. (Read that sentence twice.)
That’s what is crucial about the Webb Space telescope. It provides us with a controlled vantage point other than one on the Earth. Though it originated from our planet and speaks to us in our language, the Webb Space telescope’s perspective is not from some observatory on Earth, but from where it is in its travels in its orbit around the star we refer to as the sun. To find out more about this controlled orbit around the sun, enabling it to see further into space than earlier efforts, like the Hubble telescope that ‘merely’ orbited the Earth, check out https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html or just CLICK HERE.
I suggest that you do that right now.
Let's pause for a while to say again that when the Webb Space telescope transmits an image of something happening in space, it is not necessarily aware of when that something took place. Until the development of the Webb Space telescope, that ‘WHEN’ was always something variable and indefinite because what was seen depended upon the viewer’s vantage point here on terra firma. We had been unable to measure time from the infinite number of vantage points other than Earth’s.
But now, we can do that from the vantage point provided by the Webb Space telescope, something we can control. Having the Webb Space telescope in its controlled orbit in the nearest reaches of the universe, around the star we refer to as the sun, enables us to better see beyond our sun and its solar system, and is the gateway to getting into the dimensions of time from these other more distant vantage points.
I think it is safe to say that out in space, there is no such thing as time in the terms that we usually understand it to be. There may be an ‘absolute’ timing of what occurs in the universe, but we are not there yet. There is just ‘space.’ (Sometimes this is referred to as a ‘space time continuum,’ introducing another approach to defining ‘WHEN,’ getting us into Einsteinian astrophysics, where obviously this blog is incapable of going. Recall those cartoons with a scientist filling an enormous blackboard with calculations dealing with this.)
From what we can see of space from our vantage point using the Webb Space telescope out there in space and similar devices yet to be developed, some scientists have come to believe that the universe is periodically expanding and contracting, but ‘WHEN’ such changes occur, occurred, or will occur, cannot be defined within our limited definition of ‘time.’ What’s out there in space just ‘IS’ and may be ‘timeless.’ Or maybe not. In any event, the vantage point provided by the Webb Space telescope is enabling us to learn more about the nature of space and time and of the universe.
If anyone wishes to comment on these thoughts,
please do! But first, check out both
links provided in this article. I am at
the limit of my familiarity with this subject.
JL
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Trivia Quiz #8
Our neighbor to the north, Canada, consists of ten Provinces (something like our States) and three sparsely populated territories. (Clue: One of the Provinces represents two areas and has a double name.) See if you can name at least seven of Canada's Provinces.
And here are the answers to Trivia Quiz #7.
The six named guests at that masquerade party came dressed as follows:
Billy Batson - Captain Marvel
Lamont Cranston - The Shadow (He's the one that's hard to see.)
Peter Benjamin Parker - Spiderman
Clark Kent - Superman
Britt Reid - The Green Hornet
Bruce Wayne - Batman
JL
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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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