* * *
TrainsAmericans have always had a great fascination with trains. Though they might travel by automobile, bus, boat, or plane, it is our railroads about which we sing: the Chattanooga Choo Choo, the Wabash Cannonball, the Atcheson,Topeka & Santa Fe, and many more.
My favorite train song includes the following chorus:
‘Good morning, America! How are you!
Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son!
I‘m the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.’
 |
| Illinois Central locomotive powering the 'train they call the City of New Orleans' |
For the full lyrics, as sung by Arlo Guthrie in 1972, and the song’s interesting background, click here or copy and paste
https://genius.com/Arlo-guthrie-the-city-of-new-orleans-lyrics on your browser line.
JL
* * *
Leadership
 |
| Lao Tzu |
Here’s a Fifth century B.C. quote from legendary Chinese sage Lao Tzu for you to consider. A philosopher and poet, he is generally considered to be the spiritual founder of philosophical and religious Taoism. His ‘Way of Life,’ a source of inspiration for many religions, might be summed up as ‘creative quietude.’ There are many translations of the ‘Way of Life;’ this quote from one of them, written by Witter Bynner some years ago, deals with leadership and makes sense today.
'A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.'
‘Fail to honor people,
They fail to honor you;’
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will all say, ‘We did this ourselves.’
You know whom this DOESN’T bring to mind
* *
State of the Union Address - Tuesday evening, the President declared that the state of the Union was ‘strong.’ That was pure baloney! He boasted that most problems, of course the fault of ‘crooked’ Democrats, had already been, or have practically been, solved by him with the aid of his Republican allies.
I could list the ‘problems’ that he ignored. You can too. Virginia’s Democratic governor Spanberger did exactly that in her response to the President’s lie-filled address. That’s why all polls show his approval ratings to be plummeting to record lows.
He still basks in the ignorance of how his beloved tariffs get paid, claiming they are paid to us by the nations from whom we import things, and can possibly eventually replace taxes!. That is not so, they are paid by the importers who pass the costs on to the purchasers, the American public. So they really become a tax, hidden withing an imported item's price. Some importers are already talking about refunds of the tariffs the SCOTUS has ruled unconstitutional. Good luck!
Trump also thinks it acceptable to bring us to the brink of war with Iran. He thinks that is diplomacy. The longest State of the Union address ever, he padded it with introductions of patriots or their survivors, stressing how he had rescued some of them from murderous immigrant killers or insane terrorists. This was safe ground for him, which even drew occasional Democratic applause, except of course when he included Charlie Kirk’s widow and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan dictator as the basis for his remarks.
He was far, far, from the leader described by Lao Tzu above.
For a more detailed description of Trump’s campaign rally-style State of the Union address, see what Professor Heather Cox Richardson had to say about it in her posting dated February 25 by clicking here or copying and pasting https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ on your browser line.
Our ‘leader,’ President Trump, has decided to establish his own historic institutions to replace or at least compete with existing ones that he doesn’t like, such as the United Nations. That’s the deal with his phony baloney ‘Board of Peace’ and the ‘Commission of Fine Arts.’ (Those of you fluent in German might check out that language’s word for ‘leader.’)
The other day when the Supreme Court ruled six to three against Trump’s obviously illegal and unconstitutional tariffs, Justices Gorsuch, Barrett, and Chief Justice Roberts joined with the three Democratic appointees to do so. This angered the President who said some nasty things about the Justices. Trump quickly found a new way to impose tariffs. A never-used old law permitted him to do so for 150 days if there were a ‘national emergency.’ Of course, there is one right now. It is the presence of Donald Trump in the presidency! And that, dear majority of Republican voters, is your doing!
Plans for construction of a massive ballroom to replace the demolished East Wing of the White House continue. It will take years to reverse the changes, physical and otherwise, that our wannabe dictator, President Trump, has wrought. The voters of this country have to be more careful whom they elect to public offices. It’s not like choosing channels on a TV set!
Must we continue to learn that the hard way? Not really! Defeating Republicans by voting will do the job.
It is less than nine months until the midterm elections, at which time sane voters will probably give the Democrats a majority in the House, and reduce or possibly eliminate the Republican majority in the Senate. That will, unfortunately, increase the chances of a lame-duck President Trump taking dangerous domestic and foreign risks during the last two years of his term in office. Only Congress and the Supreme Court will remain to support the Constitution in the face of his continued defiance of our laws while he, and those he appoints, are still in office.
Recognizing that voters are poised to turn them out of office, Republicans are trying to make it more difficult to vote, hoping their efforts will reduce turnout by Democratic voters. Be prepared to document citizenship, including name changes due to marital status, and prepare for reduced early voting opportunities. Voting by mail is also being attacked. Constitutionally, elections are governed by the individual States, but the President ignores this, believing he can insist upon such tightening of the rules by those States with Republican dominated legislatures. This is where the battle for the 2026 mid-term elections is taking place, right now. Keep the pressure on your State legislators about this.
And speaking of defying laws, law enforcement personnel shot and killed an armed man early Sunday morning trying to enter the grounds at Mar-a-Lago. Early reports from his North Carolina home State describe him as coming from a strong pro-Trump family and community. Strange … unless it is true that familiarity breeds contempt.
It appears to me that this fellow, like two earlier would-be assassins, was not part of a domestic terrorist group, but merely a very unbalanced (spell that 'crazy') individual motivated by a dislike for the President’s domestic or international policies which cannot, by any stretch of one’s imagination, be described as derivative from Lao Tzu’s ‘creative quietude.’
JL
* * *
Worthwhile reading is UCSD Professor Barabara Walter’s ‘Here be Dragons’ dated February 25. Copy and paste https://barbarafwalter.substack.com/ on your browser line or click here. She explains that while both of our major parties have serious defects, one is clearly better than the other, based on demographic changes.
JL
* * *
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 in Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘paper’ newspaper (now becoming the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email; that includes the views of many contributors, including the New York Times and other respected journals.
Be aware that when I open that email, I first quickly glance at and screen out those sent to my very old former email address and those considered ‘promotional’ by Gmail’s system as no more than advertisements or requests for donations. Besides these sources, I also utilize 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 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.
JL
* * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment