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'Sissy Football' in the NFL
President Trump has no great love for the NFL. Lately he has criticized the new kick-off rules initiated last year, intended to lessen injuries, as making it ‘sissy football.’
Back in 2017, when he objected strongly to some players not standing for the National Anthem as a political protest against supposed racism in this country, he added his dislike of penalties to those remarks according to reporting by ABC and ESPN at the time: ‘Trump also said referees are "ruining the game by calling 15-yard penalties for ‘beautiful’ tackles’ ... and went on to say that “stiffer penalties are ruining the game … Today if you hit too hard, right, they hit too hard. Fifteen yards, throw him out of the game." I suspect he was referring for penalties for intentional ‘targeting’ by tacklers.
The President prefers professional wrestling, a theatrical artificial sport where rules don’t mattter, to professional football where breaking the rules results in penalties, and sometimes even throwing a player out of a game. That’s very understandable because his administration breaks rules established by our Constitution all the time and manages to evade penalties for doing so.
I wonder who the real ‘sissy’ is, getting a vicarious thrill from others’ violence. Somehow, I preferred the touch football played on the lawn in Hyannisport by the Kennedys.
JL
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Who is Tilly Norwood?
Tilly exists only in Artificial Intelligence. She was never born and is only the product of the coding that AI required.
Let’s start with Maureen Dowd‘s New York Times column of October 4 which points out the danger of our abandoning a world based on reality with an artificial one created by Artificial Intelligence. Ms. Dowd starts in the world of entertainment, but it just a tiny leap from there to other media and evntually to everything else in our lives. To read her column, Click Here or copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/opinion/ai-hollywood-tilly-norwood-actress.html on your device’s browser line.
It leads me to wonder, for example, about our how our human bodies can survive when they don’t get the same real physical nourishment from a mouth-watering AI-created dinner as they might do from a real one.
Both (and perhaps Tilly) can make your mouth water, but that’s where the ‘artificial’ part of AI comes in and its illusion ends.
We live in a real world. Those who choose to live in a world created by AI instead should seek professional help in the real world, perhaps to which AI can lead them.
JL
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Housing the Homeless
In many editorials, letters to publications, and opinion pieces, I frequently read that the solution to homelessness is providing more affordable housing. Plans for residential structures often specify a certain number of units intended for such ‘affordable’ housing.
Usually, however, such housing is intended for lower-paid public employees and other workers at the bottom of the economic ladder. As well-intended as such planning is, it fails to address the problem of homelessness.
An unanswered question is how many of those sleeping in parks and in other public areas, and on the streets or in cars, have any source of income enabling them to ‘afford’ such ‘affordable housing’ at any price, however minimal it might be.
Solutions to homelessness should be directed to solving that problem rather than providing affordable housing for those who lack the income to even take advantage of such solutions.
JL
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A Question
In photographs of Palestinians in Gaza seeking to flee to safer areas, mixed in with images of the vast majority fleeing on foot, some photographs occasionally include those in automobiles or trucks, even as recently as earlier this year.
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| Fleeing Gaza - From New York Times - March 2025 |
One thing that puzzles me is where the gasoline stations are where these vehicles get their fuel. And how do they obtain it. I never see them in the photographs.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
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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.
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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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