July 14, 2025 - Fourteenth Amendment, Accountability in Texas, April Postings, and Platonic Empathy

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The Fourteenth Amendment

Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ dated July 9 explains the historic background of the Fourteenth Amendment and decries the ‘originalist’ Justices who would take away many of the rights it guarantees for Americans; they include present Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas. 

I believe that there should be either a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court Justices or a fixed number of years in their terms. (Justice Alito is 75. and Justice Thomas is 77.)

JL 

                                                                                                                         

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There Must Be Accountability Somewhere

Paul Krugman’s July 10 column explains why the Texas flood tragedy should not avoid being ‘politicized.’ The government should not be allowed to avoid responsibility, if not for the specific acts of non-feasance which many claim occurred, but at least for nourishing a mindset that reduces the role of the federal government, and sets the similar tone for State and local government in directly serving the people, especially in times of tragedy.

I believe that a federal government prepared to serve the needs of the people in emergencies is not socialism. Others might.

JL 

                                                                                                                         

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Let's Go Back to April

Jackspotpourri’s April, 2025, postings concerning President Trump were very important and should be reviewed. Access them from the archives over to the right. 

On April 2, for example, I posted the following: ‘A President who disagrees with a law will find ways to avoid his Constitutional duty of executing the laws, even in the face of court decisions supporting the law. And hence, the ‘rule of law’ takes a back seat, and once that happens, what had been inconceivable is no longer impossible, and that is dangerous.’ 

Over three months later, that remains true, the ‘inconceivable’ remaining an alternative. Please re-read the April postings in regard to the President. 

JL                                                            

                                                           

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Empathy Wins Out over Opinion 

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world." - Plato 

This leads us to be careful in accepting what appears as any source’s ‘opinion’ as suggested by Plato and to give greater credence to ‘empathy-based’ ‘stories’ of what one personally experiences or witnesses directly, a point made recently by film maker Ken Burns to columnist Maureen Dowd. 

JL                                                            

                                                           

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Some source materials used by Jackspotpourri:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ 

https://msnbc.com/ 

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/ 

https://snyder.substack.com/ 

https://www.nytimes.com/ 

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/ 

https://www.thefp.com (the Free Press) 

Some of these sources call for a subscription, but generally, much information is still available from them without subscribing in order to cross their ‘paywalls,’ where they exist. If I were to select one source to access without paying to subscribe to it, Professor Richardson’s is the clear choice.

In a recent meeting with several followers of Jackspotpourri, it was suggested that one of its shortcomings was its lack of brevity. We will try to address that where possible. You might  notice that in today's posting.

JL                                                            

                                                           

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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri

Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.   

Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered daily ‘paper’ newspaper (currently the Palm Beach Post, a Gannett publication) and what appears in my daily email.

Be aware that when I open that email, I take these steps:

1.  I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or two emails I still get each day at my old email address to see from where they are being sent.  Most are from vendors which I may have used years ago. Without reading 99% of them, I usually immediately delete them.

2.   I then go to the email arriving at jacklippman18@gmail.com. Gmail enables ‘Promotion’ emails to be so designated and separated out. I believe their criteria are whether or not they end up asking for donations or if they are no more than advertisements. I ignore most of these ‘Promotion’ emails without reading them, deleting them. A very few, perhaps one or two a day, get moved over to the two or three dozen other emails which I will actually open. 

3.  Then I read my email.

Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want. 

Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence).  On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so.  Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.

Following such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the results of my initially having accessed Google (or any other search engine) for information. Contrary to the AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated.

I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information, yourself or something else (AI), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable.  Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.

(In doing searches on Google, I have found that these AI summaries can sometimes … but not always … be avoided by saying so in your search. For example, instead of searching for ‘FDR’s New Deal,’ I might search for ‘FDR’s New Deal – No AI.’ This is a work in progress.)

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. 

 JL

 

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