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National Emergencies
When President Trump wants to do something that is illegal or unconstitutional, he is in the habit of declaring the situation to warrant being a national emergency. Tariffs (the job of Congress) or street crime (the job of local government) are examples. He has done this at least ten times already this year, citing various laws to justify his doing so.
It doesn’t make much difference when a court tells him that his perceiving something to be an emergency is not warranted. He will just ignore the ruling. Sooner or later he is likely to declare that judges who rule against his national emergencies constitute one themselves.
In a non-violent manner of course, ‘sic semper tyrannis.’
JL
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Constructive Resistance
I know that some of you skipped checking out Professor Timothy Snyder’s ‘Thinking About’ posting of September 1. You can still find it at https://snyder.substack.com/.
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| 'Look at my works, oh ye mighty and despair' were the words Shelly put into his mouth! |
I recommend you check it out right now. Professor Snyder quotes from Shelley’s poem, ‘Ozymandias,’ in discussing our present-day pharaoh in Washington.
In any event, you should be aware of its closing paragraph, after he described the harm Trump and Vance are doing to America:
“The other lesson is that resistance is constructive. It can seem difficult to resist merchants of calamity such as Trump and Vance. No one action seems to stop them. But every act of resistance creates the possibility that the country itself can survive, and every moment of hope creates the foundation for a better republic. The actions we take have to be actions against, against what is being done to us now. But by their nature every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist, and in which the learning from resistance becomes the politics of freedom.”
Remember those closing words!
(Professor Snyder’s expertise is well documented in two collections of his,’On Tyranny’ and ‘On Freedom.’)
JL
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Jackspotpourri Values Your Opinion
And speaking of that September 1 Jackspotpourri posting (please go back and read it including the links included in it), one of our regular followers took issue with what it included. Here, with their permission, is their unedited, except for paragraph spacing, verbatim response:
"Hi, Jack--Your people: Heather, Tim, Maureen--not offering a plan of action, yet again??? They are not a moral army. The IDF is a moral army.
Heather slanders the entire Trump Admin. -- offers not one shred of guidance or plan of action to deal with her list of "evils". Tim slanders Trump & Vance by saying they believe in nothing; advises that we be patriotically constructive--with no specific plan of action. Maureen has taken the liberty of certifying RFK jr as a quack as if he rejected medicine. Meanwhile no one is rejecting medicine. I hope we all demand real science, informed consent, and medical freedom.
Childhood illness has exploded.
Has the CDC done anything to protect our kids?
1. The CDC mandates more than 72 vax doses for every child.
2. The CDC has not studied the safety of the full vaccine schedule. 20 years--our government’s own scientific advisors have urged the CDC to conduct these studies. The CDC ignored them.
3. Doctors who dared to publish data or ask questions had their licenses suspended or revoked.
4. Vaccines should not be mandatory-- they should be under “shared decision-making,” so parents and doctors can make individualized choices.
5. The CDC needs to conduct long-overdue safety studies comparing fully vaccinated and unvaccinated children. This Congress mandated.
Hooray to that!"
JL
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College Football
More and more, I prefer NFL professional football to the collegiate game in which paid professional athletes pretend they are students and wear a school’s colors on the field. NFL players are honest about what they do for a living. College players are not, except perhaps at those schools that you never heard of, never are on TV, and where athletes actually flunk out occasionally.
When you recognize that your quarterback was at another school a year ago, and might be at still another one next season, you realize that the college game is bathed in hypocrisy. These players can transfer from school to school, never pay tuition; the money flows the other way in the form of scholarships and NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) compensation to them.
The talented ones go where they can get the best deal. The less talented ones who stick around just get paid less and hope to be among those few selected in the NFL draft. Meanwhile, the schools enjoy the ticket revenues and a share of the network TV money the presence of these athletes brings in. That is the business model for college football.
(Carson Beck, current University of Miami quarterback, previously attended the University of Georgia for five years, including periods when he was injured or as a backup. He is now in his sixth year as a quarterback. I remember back when college was a four year experience. Next year, he probably will be a high NFL draft pick. His predecessor at Miami, Cam Ward, quarterbacked for two years at the University of the Incarnate Word, the largest Catholic university in Texas, followed by two years at Washington State University, and transferred for a fifth and final year to the University of Miami. He is now in the NFL with the Tennessee Titans. Players like these are not exceptions; they seem to be the rule in college football.)
Anyone who signs onto a regular schedule of real classes at a legitimate college knows that no student can succeed, let alone survive, in such educational environments, and at the same time participate in the practice, travel, and game schedule being on a football team demands. Both are full time jobs.
This applies to the ‘Power Four’ schools, all of which are indeed legitimate colleges, and they know it. That’s where the ‘disconnect’ comes in, whereby the 'student athlete' knows he cannot do both of his full time jobs successully. I’ll repeat my solution again, which rests with the nation’s college presidents, in a future posting.
JL
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South Park
The kind of criticism of the President and his administration that Jackspotpourri includes, as well as many of the sites it recommends, are usually polite and rational. But for those for whom that is not quite enough, letting these lawbreakers off too easily, an occasional visit to the cartoon series ‘South Park’ on Comedy Central offers a humorous and often raunchier approach to serious matters others take too seriously. (But it's not for kids.)
JL
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Brevity and Verbosity
It is said that ‘Brevity is the soul of wit.’ But consider the opposite whereby excessive verbosity drives recipients of some postings to immediately consign them to the ‘Trash’ file without their even being read. The ‘Hopium Chronicles’ from the very knowledgeable Simon Rosenberg are a good example. If you follow his postings, especially if you become a paying participant, you won’t have time for anything else, including eating, sleeping, etc.
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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