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Maureen Dowd at Her BestMaureen Dowd compares the present occupant of the White House to King Midas! Copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/opinion/trump-design-rococo-gold.html on your browser line or CLICK HERE to read all about it. The President is egotistical enough to consider that to be a compliment.
Millions of fooish Americans are impressed by what he is doing. In Greek mythology, Midas’ ‘golden touch’ was his undoing. (It is hard to eat and drink when everthing you touch turns to gold.) Bad for the digestion! Donald Trump might survive by getting a franchise selling golden replacement mufflers for cars after the nation eventually repudiates everything he has done in office.
JL
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When ICE's (Immigration Control & Enforcement) Lawbreaking Hits Home
Last week, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece about the necessity of doing more than just protesting the illegal actions of ICE, something the present immigrant communtiy is starting to organize to do, promoting direct acts of a more unified nature.
Please CLICK HERE to read her article (it is the version than Public Radio published) or by copying and posting https://www.wlrn.org/immigration/2025-08-01/they-saw-their-neighbors-taken-away-by-ice-then-they-made-a-plan. It is fairly lengthy but worth every minute spent reading it.
The vast majority of those of you reading this are NOT the immigrants immediately threatened by ICE today in this Trumpian era, but certainly, their parents, grandparents, or great grandparents, etc. were immigrants from somewhere sometime in the past.
We are a nation based on immigration. All of us are, unless you are a Native American, and even their forebearers are said to have crossed over from Siberia to Alaska when there was a land bridge there many ages ago.
That’s why after reading Ms. Goldberg’s article, the poem written after World War Two by German Pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned by the Nazis, becomes required reading.
"First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me "
You might not identify ethnically with those Michelle Goldberg is writing about today, but as Pastor Niemoller wrote, eventually, sooner or later, you will.
It is up to you to do something! Now! Find a group dedicated to preserving our representative democracy by doing something more than just protesting and waving signs. Become active in it.
Sitting on your hands is no longer an option. Belatedly, Pastor Niemoller became aware of that from his jail cell.
JL
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Delusion -> Belief -> False Facts -> Action = Dictatorship
Much of what President Trump does is based on delusion, often about American history. In his head, such delusions become his beliefs, and result in his actions, which are accepted as fact by his followers, establishing a model for accepting his future actions.
(Without identifying their source originating in presidential delusion, such actions even creep into Artificial Intelligence’s summaries of important issues. That’s why I am very leery of AI.)
This paradigm must be broken. The way to do it is to endlessly hammer home truth! That’s what this blog tries to do. Truth!
JL
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And Where Can You Find That Truth
Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ (copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your browser line or CLICK HERE) dated August 8 (Friday) is filled with the truth referred to above.
It will take a century to remedy the harm to the nation that President Trump is causing, supported by Americans who are taken in by the lies of this shady real estate peddler, and who in the eyes of history, will share the blame.
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 (now becoming the South Florida Sun Sentinel) 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 (or other search engines) 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.
After such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than the AI summary.
I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
JL
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