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Heat Advisories
JL
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Introducing Rex
Rex Huppke, whose USA TODAY columns occasionally appear in the Palm Beach Post (both are Gannett publications) wrote an interesting piece the other day headlined ‘Trump Doesn’t Care Americans Hate What He’s Doing.’
Treat yourself to his thrice weekly humor and wisdom by CLICKING HERE or by copying and pasting https://www.usatoday.com/staff/6878775001/rex-huppke/ on your browser line. (But he isn’t as witty as Frank Cerebino.)
JL
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Who ‘THEM’ Are
In the July 29 posting of Jackspotpourri, I wrote that “It is
still our country unless we allow ‘them’ to take it away from us!
Defining ‘them’ is something to be addressed in a future Jackspotpourri.”
Well, Professor Heather Cox Richardson has identified ‘THEM’ for
us, defining who they are, and specifically naming many of THEM in her “Letters
from an American’ dated July 30, 2025. Stop
whatever you are doing right now and copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-30-2025 on your
devices browser line or CLICK RIGHT HERE.
And while you’re in that territory, check out Professor
Richardson’s postings dated July 31, August 1, and August 2. It appears to me that neither the insanity of
President Trump nor the machinations of politicians have any limits. Neither are any good for the rest of us.
But getting back to what’s on the table, It is now up to
those of us who must not allow ‘THEM’ to take our country away from us to fight
‘THEM’ on every level, national, State, and local, and not just sit on our
hands leaving it to others. Tomorrow might be too late.
Single demonstrations won’t do the job; the energy generated
by a single massive demonstration is not enough; demonstrations must be long-continuing,
ongoing, events if they are to succeed. A sorry example is the reversal of Roe vs.
Wade, despite enormous, but not continuous, demonstrations against its
repeal.
For more on this strategy, copy and paste https://barbarafwalter.substack.com/ on your browser line or just CLICK here to
read about ‘warning signs from the edges of democracy’ from Professor Barbara
F. Walter at the University of California-San Diego.
JL
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The Over-Opinionated Internet ...
Subscribe to a Printed
Newspaper as Well!
The internet is cluttered with the opiniona of pundits, professors, and provocateurs, many of whom to which Jackspotpourri has directed you or quoted directly or indirectly. It is over-opinionated and over-populated. Anyone can establish a presence (and perhaps make a profit) by setting up a blog, podcast. or whatever, using sites such as Substack to accomplish this, regardless of the merit of what they post.
I recommend, as a supplement to whatever one gets from the
internet, good, bad, or otherwise, a daily printed newspaper, left at your
doorstep each morning. Their
‘electronic’ versions are no substitute, being just as easily ignored as are the other
parts of the deluge of material with which the internet is flooded. Whether it is a good local paper with
national and international coverage, or the massive New York Times (‘all the
news that’s fit to print’), subscribe to one today! (Tip: A local paper will cover material the
Times does not.)
And just maybe, after reading the paper over your breakfast
(as I do) you’ll be able to minimize your time on the internet and resume
living a fuller life.
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A Short Course on Reading Newspapers:
1. Commit
yourself to looking at every single page of the newspaper (note that I
don’t say ‘reading’ every single page) of your delivered newspaper,
excluding classified advertisements and mandatory legal announcements.
2. Journalists
are taught that the articles they write may be shortened significantly by
editors. This is usually done starting
from the end of the article progressing forward toward its beginning.
Therefore, good journalists write what they want to commmunicate in the very
first paragraph of what they write, and flesh it out further on. That first paragraph might be all that escapes
the editor’s red pencil. This makes the article still look complete regardless
of how much has been sliced from its backside.
(A journalist who doesn’t do this still has a lot to learn.)
3. Take advantage of this by ‘looking’ at every page of your delivered newspaper, but actually just reading the headlines or the opening few words of articles on that page. You may end up reading a very, very, few articles in their entirety, just a bit of some others, and most, skipping completely. Use this tactic to speed from page to page on your newspaper, stopping only to read as much as you want of the important articles, nationally, internationally, or locally. Don’t worry; you will recognize them when you get to them. Usually, an editor has incuded a picture with the really important ones.
4. As you race
through the newspaper, less attention should be paid to sports or comics pages,
although there may be a very few favorites that you always check out like your
favorite teams or comic strips. Restaurant
reviews and recipes are only for the hungry. Puzzles you can save for later,
much later.
But the important thing is to get that printed newspaper
delivered to your doorstep every day.
Most offer bargain subscriptions to attract you.
I assure you that the president, members of Congress, and the
Supreme Court Justices all get an assortment of printed newspapers delivered to
them each day. They don’t have the time to navigate the internet, or even the
far less informative but omnipresent TV screens in their offices. (An exception
to this might be those with limited literacy who manage to end up in office.)
After such ‘quick reads’ of your newspaper, you will find
that you can ignore much of what has been posted on the internet, other than
the writings of any pundits, professors, and provocateurs of whom you might be
a dedicated fan (as I am of Professor Richardson), but that is your personal choice.
Of course, internet reporting of very recent important occurrences
like floods, wildfires, or earthquakes, happening after your newspaper went to
press, should be read because they might involve emergencies affecting you
personally..
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email
address is 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, 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
More on the 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 anonymous 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.)
JL
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