The Oxford English Dictionary, considered by many to be the most authoritative arbiter of the words English-speaking (and writing) people use today, has named its ‘Word of the Year.’ It’s ‘brain rot’ and here’s a short item defining and explaining it from the New York Times. Just copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/arts/brain-rot-oxford-word.html on your browser line or JUST CLICK HERE.
Although we try to avoid ‘slop,’ as mentioned in the article, avoiding the sometimes-unwanted assistance of Artificial Intelligence in publishing Jackspotpourri is nearly impossible because of the way it has invaded the internet.
JL
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Making Up Your Mind
Heather Cox Richardson’s Dec. 1 posting on ‘Letters from an American’ touches more bases than there are on a baseball diamond.
Check out her posting at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ or by CLICKING HERE. It is well worth reading.
But many Americans think differently from Professor Richardson. To see what they might believe, check out Bari Weiss’ ‘Free Press’ at bariweiss@substack.com (CLICK HERE) where on December 2, author and commenter Joe Nocera heaped praise upon many whom others fear and condemn.
And another favorite of mine, Yale professor Timothy Snyder turns it all into a mind-bending historical exercise which can include many outcomes, in his ‘Thinking About’ piece dated November 30, entitled ‘Trumpomuskovia.’ Check it out at https://snyder.substack.com/ along with his ‘Decapitation Strike’ posted on December 1.
(CLICK HERE)
Much of what all three post about is accurate. But some may not be or even be contradictory. There’s a lot out there for Americans to chew on, spitting out some, but digesting most of it each day to come up with an answer that will perhaps, just maybe, keep our representative democracy alive and healthy. If it doesn’t, our great experiment might just be slipping away. (Spitting something out is preferable to vomiting it up later.)
JL
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Thomas Friedman’s Optimism Dismissed
A recent column by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman recalled that despite his anticipated appointment of ‘one-stater’ religious zealot Mike Huckabee to be ambassador to Israel, president-elect Trump’s history includes his efforts during his earlier administration to bring about a ‘two-state’ solution recognizing Palestinian rights!
Friedman suggests that he might somehow pivot back to that position.
If this occurs, it would be another example of Trump’s playing one side against the other, using them to serve his own objectives, which might include having something positive for history to record about him along with all the documented garbage and slime amidst which he dwells.
Friedman’s idea is no more than wishful thinking.
JL
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A while back I had promised future postings ‘About Democracy.’ The initial posting chronicled the events leading to the formation of the United States with its Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Here is ‘number two’ in that series, stressing the Constitution and its great shortcoming, the United States Senate.
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About Democracy (#2) – Making it Work
After the War of Independence, it became evident that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate to manage the new nation. To remedy the situation, twelve States selected delegates to a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to draft a document to replace them.
After they finally surmounted an initial hurdle by agreeing that there would be two legislative bodies, a House of Representatives (a ‘people’s house) whose numbers were based on the population of the States (slave holding States got to count non-voting slaves as 3/5 of a person), and a Senate where each State would have two Senators, making each State equal to each other State, the tradeoff began as to what would be the powers of each house of those dual legislatures, of an executive branch, and of a judicial branch.
The intention was that these three branches would serve as brakes on one another.
Much of this horse trading was resolved by agreeing that there would be a Bill of Rights comprising the first ten Amendments to the new Constitution, guaranteeing certain basic rights to individuals, and in effect to States as well, mollifying the initial reluctance of some States to ratify the proposed Constitution.
Those ten Amendments were finally passed by December of 1791 by the State Legislatures to which the new Congress, as required by the new Constitution, had forwarded them.
They were not officially passed until over three years after the Constitution’s ratification!
They were:
Amendment I - Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment II - A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Amendment III - No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Amendment IV - The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V - No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI - In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Amendment VII - In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Amendment VIII - Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Amendment IX - The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X - The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Someone must have then stood up (Maybe James Madison) and shouted ‘Now, is everybody happy?
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(One important delegate to that Convention who was not happy at all was Massachusetts’ Elbridge Gerry. He would have preferred that the Bill of Rights be in the Constitution itself. We remember him as the proponent of the practice of States altering Congressional District borders to best serve the interests of one party. We call it ‘Gerrymandering.’)
Undoubtedly a great patriot and one of the Founding Fathers, he was one of the three attendees at the Constitutional Convention who refused to sign the Constitution because originally it did not include a Bill of Rights. Even after having a Bill of Rights was agreed to, he withheld his signature from the Constitution’s ratification, because those first ten Amendments had not yet been passed. He had wanted them in the Constitution before ratification. A man of great principles, Gerry was elected to the first House of Representatives and became President Madison’s vice-president.)
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Nevertheless, the ratification by nine of the thirteen new States’ delegations to the Constitutional Convention, required to make the Constitution legal, was eventually secured in this order.
• Delaware: December 7, 1787
• Pennsylvania: December 12, 1787
• New Jersey: December 18, 1787
• Georgia: January 2, 1788
• Connecticut: January 9, 1788
• Massachusetts: February 6, 1788
• Maryland: April 28, 1788
• South Carolina: May 23, 1788
• New Hampshire: June 21, 1788 (With this state’s ratification, the Constitution became legal.)
• Virginia: June 25, 1788
• New York: July 26, 1788
• North Carolina: November 21, 1789
• Rhode Island: May 29, 1790 (Rhode Island did not hold a State constitutional convention to choose delegates as did the other twelve.)
After the relatively rapid approval of those first ten Amendments by 1791, looking to the Constitution’s Amendment process to make future changes to make our democracy work more effectively turned out to be a difficult route. It requires a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress, and ratification by three quarters of the nation’s 50 State legislatures.
The Constitution was a great improvement over the Articles of Confederation, but it has left us with several problems, most of which stem from the undemocratic structure of the Senate, where each State names two Senators, regardless of its population. Originally, this was the responsibility of the State legislatures, but the 17th Amendment (1913) provided that they be elected by a State’s voters. (There also was a ‘thumb on the scale’ in the House of Representatives as well where non-voting slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person in calculating the size of a State’s House delegation.)
The thirteen original States were reluctant to totally give up their independence. That is why States were given great influence in the Senate, regardless of their population. This was understandable at that time since ‘the elephant in the room’ was slavery, and its preservation required an undemocratically formed Senate. In effect, the Bill of Rights ‘bought’ the ratification of the Constitution by slave-holding States.
That affected the presidency as well, because each State has a presidential electoral vote for each of their Representatives in the House of Representative and one for each of its Senators. This extended the Senate’s undemocratic basis to the Electoral College, which chooses for our president. That same undemocratic Senate also confirms Supreme Court appointees, approves treaties, and serves as a jury if the House of Representatives impeaches a president.
The undemocratic rules determining the composition of the Senate lie at the heart of the problems with which our 1788 Constitution has left us.
Besides the decades-long Amendment process, it also includes the Tenth Amendment, one of the goodies which convinced those reluctant to ratify the Constitution to sign it, reading ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ (‘People’ were not defined.)
All of this word-juggling was because of that ‘elephant in the room,’ slavery, which slaveholding States feared might be the subject of pressure from the Federal government. That was also the real reason for the Second Amendment, if Federal military force became involved, or if there were a ‘slave rebellion.'
This is the setting that we find ourselves in today, still trying to make our democracy work effectively. Change does not come easily, but today is neither 1788 nor the 1860s. Standing still as time moves on may be the same as moving backwards. Stay tuned to Jackspotpourri for suggested remedies.
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Something more to think about: Would it have been better if the Constitution had not been ratified, leaving the new nation stuck with the unmanageable Articles of Confederation, or if the Brits succeeded in taking us back, as they tried to do in 1812, when they got as far as burning the Capitol?
In London, Parliament ended slavery in the entire British Empire effective in 1834, and that would have included their North American colonies, which except for Canada and some islands, are now the United States of America!
If history had flowed in that direction, we would not have had a Civil War when we tried to end slavery in the 1860s. That was what the Civil War was all about although some still maintain it was about the Rights of States, a more respectable basis for argument than the slavery such rights permitted.
Or would we have had our Civil War thirty years earlier in 1834 as a reaction to any British effort to enforce Parliament’s Slavery Abolition Act here?
JL
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Cancer Centers and Other Hospitals
(Of particular interest to those living in Florida)
Just because a hospital calls itself a ‘comprehensive cancer center’ doesn’t mean it is one of the 57 institutions nationwide given that specific designation by the government’s National Cancer Institute.
In the State of Florida, there are only two hospitals meeting the criteria required to be given that designation: the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, and the Mayo Clinic’s branch in Jacksonville. (The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, has several such branches, one in Jacksonville and two others in Arizona.)
In addition to these two institutions, there are two additional hospitals in Florida included in its listing of ‘NCI Designated Cancer Centers.’ which the National Cancer Institute lists as meeting the criteria to be included as ‘clinical cancer centers,' specifically the Sylvester *Comprehensive Cancer Center in Miami and the cancer center at the University of Florida’s Shands Hospital in Gainesville. (*The use of the word ‘comprehensive’ in this case seems to be Sylvester’s choice and not the designation assigned to it by the NCI).
It appears to me that the difference between these two ‘NCI Designated Cancer Center’ categories has to do with the type and level of research carried on there. As for excellent treatment of and care for cancer patients, there does not appear to be any difference between them.
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Despite the great number of physicians in the Palm Beach County area, some major northern hospitals (some of which are NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers themselves) are opening satellite offices here, sometimes staffed with local physicians and sometimes staffed by physicians from their northern facilities. Most of these northern institutions, however, have not yet built hospitals here or become directly affiliated with local hospitals.
You might notice an increasing number of advertisements for Tampa General Hospital, about a three-hour drive and 200 miles away, on TV and in local newspapers. The efforts of this highly rated hospital, whose Palm Beach County efforts are partnered with Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, are in addition to New York’s Langone Medical Center. Hospital for Special Surgery, and Mt. Sinai Hospital all of which seem to recognize a vacuum in Palm Beach County that they hope to fill, despite the many competent physicians, including oncologists and surgeons, already practicing here.
Some of these physicians practice independently and many are affiliated with established institutions such as the Baptist Health group (locally, Boca Raton Regional, and Bethesda East and West Hospitals), Jupiter Medical Center and those affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic’s nearby Florida branches. The Cleveland Clinic has a full hospital in nearby Weston in Broward County, and is rumored to be planning on building one in Palm Beach County where it also has a satellite office.
Many of these institutions carry the NCI designation of being a comprehensive cancer center. But while it is clear that the leading cancer centers in the United States are the M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, the Dana Farber Cancer Instituter in Boston, and Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, as well as several in California, that does not mean that excellent cancer care is not available elsewhere, including in Florida and specifically in the Palm Beach County area.
Perhaps the presence of the winter White House at Mar-a-Lago and Vanderbilt University’s planned graduate business school in West Palm Beach will result in the residents they bring here wanting to see an upgrading of local medical facilities at least to the level found in Washington and Nashville (home of Vanderbilt).
Right now, the Palm Beach County residents are very fortunate in being relatively close to the NCI-designated ‘clinical cancer center’ at the Sylvester Cancer Center in Miami at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine. Excellent care and treatment are available there and it is an institution deserving of our support. And it is about 140 miles closer to Palm Beach County than Tampa, site of the Moffitt Comprehensive Cancer Center (at the University of South Florida’s Morisani School of Medicine) or even Tampa General Hospital.
(All of the institutions mentioned above fall into the category of ‘being not-for-profit’ while others may be parts of hospital chains which are publicly traded such as Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) or Tenet Healthcare. Local examples of such publicly traded hospitals are Delray Medical Center and JFK Hospital. While excellent care may be available in such hospitals, they usually are not connected with medical schools or involved in research.
Given the choice, I feel that one should always prefer a not-for-profit hospital over one that keeps an eye on the interests of its owners or shareholders.
Remember that decision-making regarding all medical issues should always include discussion with one’s primary caregiver.
(Note: Above mention of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the government’s National Institutes of Health (NHI), may become obsolete in view of the president-elect’s choice of a believer in hoaxes and conspiracies as the cabinet member or official in charge of those agencies, appointments that will lead to the premature deaths of many Americans, among other serious inconveniences.)
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
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.
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.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
JL
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