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Frightening Things
There’s a lot of frightening stuff still going on these days! I hope you are paying more attention to them than our leader was at the December 2 Cabinet meeting.
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| Photo from AOL.com |
Consider the criminals masquerading as businessmen whom the President pardons or whose sentences are commuted. His release from prison here of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted of major drug trafficking, is something even the Mafia couldn’t pull off. I wonder whether Trump will ultimately will end up living outside of the United States, primarily to avoid prosecution for the illegal things he has done, and continues to do.
Even Republicans are wising up to his almost infinite shortcomings. They include appointments based on loyalty to him rather than upon competence and law, and often dodging required Congressional approval through arcane technicalities.
It is good to see that numerous judges are now ruling against the President’s appointments as well as blocking his attempts to criminalize normal behavior of those who oppose him. The days of the Executive branch’s ignoring the rule of law upon which the nation is based are numbered.
And Congress is finally becoming aroused by the administration’s misuse of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and our Armed Forces on our cities’ streets as well as in the Caribbean Sea where we may have committed ‘war crimes,’ supposedly to curtail drug smuggling.
Indeed, these are frightening things. But at last, some rays of light are appearing.
And behind them looms Epstein’s ghost.
JL
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A Headline in the Morning Papers
Some months ago, I included this story in a Jackspotpourri posting, but here it is again.
During the Great Depression during the 1930s, a businessman stopped each morning at the newsstand in the lobby of the office building where his office was. After paying for a newspaper that he looked at for no more than a second, he tossed it into a nearby trash can. Puzzled, the newstand operator eventually asked him why he did this day after day. ‘I’m looking for an obituary,’ he answered. “Oh,’ the newstand operator responded, ‘You’re looking in the wrong place. The obituaries are at the back of the paper.’ The businessman quickly replied, ‘Don’t worry, when this son of a bitch croaks, it’ll be all over page one!’
I am repeating this story because first thing each morning, when I check my emails, whether I am doing so purposefully or not, I am looking tor that same kind of obituary that the businessman was hoping for. I just can’t help my duplicating that 1930s’ businessman’s mindset.
JL
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Check Out ‘Letters from an American’
If you're not doing it already, take a look at Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s daily ‘Letters from an American,' particularly the most recent ones. (She usually posts these late the prior evening). Just CLICK HERE or copy and paste https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on you device’s browser line. Unless you want to subscribe enabling you to comment, it is free, and includes links to many of the sources she quotes.
JL
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How To Watch a Football Game on TV
Check the time online or in the newspapers and tune in (what an old expression that is) only in time for the final quarter or so. That’s all that matters. The first three quarters are meaningless.
If you find that one team is more than two touchdowns ahead, switch to a game on another channel. If not, watch for the remaining parts of the game that really count in its waning moments (possessions and/or field goals) that can precipitate lead changes.
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 my email each morning, I take these steps:
1. I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or so 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 and newspapers, 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, then 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 any 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 and material derived from it.
JL
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