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Venezuela Defeats the U.S.A.The World Baseball Classic, featuring professional players representing the countries of which they are citizens, was won on Tuesday evening by Venezuela. In the final round, they upset the United States, despite a ‘USA’ lineup that included the bats of Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, and Kyle Schwarber.
Tied at two runs each going into the ninth inning, Venezuelan pinch runner Javier Sanoja (a Miami Marlin reserve), who had stolen second base, scored when Eugenio Suarez doubled.
Venezuela had defeated Italy and Japan to reach the final game. Those games, played in the Miami Marlins’ home ballpark, hosted full houses, something the Marlins never achieve in their regular seasons there. The World Baseball Classic is becoming more and more important each year because of its international nature.
I wonder if imprisoned former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, or President Trump who had physically removed him from office, watched the game … which although pointedly non-political, painted the Venezuelan people in that country or expatriates living here, in a favorable light.
Maduro, in a melancholy way from his jail cell, probably enjoyed seeing the Venezuelans win. Trump, of course, would have loved a victory for the USA, especially just after the Academy Awards on Sunday night honored a Ghanaian (Michael E. Jordan) as the best actor and an Irish woman (Jessie Buckley) as the best actress. (In all fairness, the best picture Oscar went to an American film, ‘One Battle After Another.’)
JL
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Looking at the Numbers, Hope, and ‘Hopium’
I trust the statistics that the Google platform provides showing from where access to Jackspotpourri is taking place. Until now, there has not been any recent clicking on it from Iran.
But on Tuesday morning, more than triple the number of hits on this site came from Iran than came from the United States! It appears that this was an anomaly because it was not repeated on succeeding days.
While Jackspotpourri’s statistical breakdown cannot determine if Tuesday’s outburst of contacts originated with civilians or the government there, it is hoped that some Iranian civilians are still able to take advantage of news and opinion internet sites based outside of that country.
Meanwhile, Americans can get some idea of what is going on from Simon Rosenberg’s ‘Hopium Chronicles.’ Our government’s releases are next to worthless. His March 17 posting can be found by clicking here or copying and pasting https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/trump-and-trumpism-were-already-failing on your browser line.
Rosenberg is not a supporter of the President and considers him to be ‘mad,’ and he doesn’t mean it in the sense of being angry. Many in this country agree.
JL
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Funny Remark Were It Not the Truth
According to Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) observed that Trump “has more plans for the ballroom he’s trying to build at the East Wing than anything he’s gonna do next in the Middle East.”
(This was excerpted from Professor Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ dated March 17, always a good source of information from other sites as well as her own commentary, available without a subscription at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ .)
And while you’re there, check out her March 18 posting which seems to open, or re-open, doors that the Republicans had thought were locked regarding the Epstein scandal.
JL
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Wartime Berlin & More on Antisemitism
Besides its cover appearing in the previous Jackspotpourri posting, the March 16 New Yorker magazine included an article about Berlin during the height of World War Two. Based on ‘Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945’ by Ian Buruma, it reported how Berliners, including Jews, did some terrible things in order to stay alive there during the war.
American journalist Martha Gellhorn (she was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife) who travelled to the Rhineland shortly before V-E Day, wrote a famous dispatch that read, in jokingly quoting a fictitious German:
“No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about twenty kilometres away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially, there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren’t really many Jews in this neighborhood. Two, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, *all God’s chillun hid Jews.)” This was apparently her ‘wordplay’ on the title of a popular 1925 play by Eugene O’Neill – ‘All God’s Chillun Got Wings.’
This reminds me of Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, who on seeing her son’s play mimicking her acts, remarked. ‘The lady (in the play) doth protest too much, methinks.’ The Queen feared that her own guilt, on close examination, would be revealed, so she made a point of criticizing the ‘lady’ in Hamlet’s play.
So it might be with those who go overboard denying being antisemitic.
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 in Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered local daily ‘paper’ newspaper (now 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. Always!
JL
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