* * *
Bruce Springsteen Speaks Out
Never one to ignore a pressing issue, Bruce Springsteen continued his current tour, inspired by Trump’s excesses, with a call to action, reported in Heather Cox Richardson’s April 10 ‘Letters from an American’ thusly’:
“The pushback against Trump is spreading across the United States. Jess Craven of 'Chop Wood, Carry Water' today called out rock and roll legend Bruce Springsteen’s opening last night at his concert in Los Angeles:
“Good evening, Los Angeles,” he said. “Welcome to the Land of Hope and Dreams tour. We begin tonight with a prayer for our men and women in service overseas. We pray for their safe return.
“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times. We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals, democracy, our Constitution, and our sacred American promise.
“The America I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration,” he said.
“Tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unrivaled corruption, resistance over complacency, truth over lies, unity over division, and peace over war.”
Amen!
JL
* * *
Getting Rid of Despots
Professor Barbara Walter out at the University of California – San Diego points out that a despot can be driven out of power by three methods, foreign invasion, a popular uprising, or the resistance of a nation’s military forces.
The first is unlikely to succeed in the United States because of its size. The second might be possible, but only along with the success of the third.
That is why President Trump has been firing or retiring early so many high-ranking military officers. Check out ‘Here Be Dragons’ (the April 8 posting) by clicking here or copying and pasting barbarafwalter@substack.com on your device’s browser line to learn more about this.
JL
* * *
Attacking Iran was a Dumb Move
President Trump has not accomplished his goals in regard to Iran, about which he has been difficult to pin down to start with. Despite a very tenuous ceasefire, Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz, still has their hidden stash of refined uranium, and still supports their allies in the region. And Israel doesn’t recognize that the supposed ceasefire fully includes its actions in Lebanon, where Hezbollah remains loyal to Iran. Israel seems willing to talk with Lebanon about that but meanwhile will continue to attack Hezbollah targets there.
That doesn’t sound like a victory to me, despite our demolishing Iran’s army and navy and wrecking a lot of buildings in Tehran.
Bottom line is that attacking Iran was a very dumb move, accomplishing little or nothing.
The story goes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sold Trump on the idea that a joint attack on Iran would successfully accomplish these goals, and the President was ultimately able to twist enough arms to get most of his initially dubious advisors to go along with the attack, a move which had been deemed unnecessarily dangerous by all of Trump’s presidential predecessors.
It turns out that they were correct and the President and Bibi were wrong and aside from physical damage and a diminution of its armed forces, Iran is actually better off than they were before the attack, finally gaining full control of the Strait of Hormuz (which they didn’t have before), and also being able to paint the United States as an aggressor nation, willing to attack civilian targets such as water and power sources, illegal acts. And Iran’s theocratic dictatorship, however battered but still able to execute any number of dissenters, seems to have survived.
Unfortunately, the influence of Netanyahu upon Trump will end up as an argument by antisemites, many of whom do not distinguish being Jewish from supporting the State of Israel.
President Trump has suggested that he might turn to an easier challenge to keep the spotlight away from shining on his possible relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.
We wonder why presidential spouse Melania Trump recently went far out of her way to specifically deny any connection with Epstein. What thus-far-unrevealed act motivated her to do that? We await her other spike heeled shoe to drop, recalling
Shakespeare’s widowed and guilt-ridden Queen Gertrude making excuses to her dramatist son Hamlet, on seeing a suggestive and damning play he had written in which ‘The lady doth protest too much.’
Right now, ‘Liberating’ Cuba, an ‘excursion’ more like his Venezuelan success, would fill the bill for Donald Trump. He very well might succeed in doing that, claiming to be divinely destined to be the second coming of Che Guevara, who by sheer coincidence conveniently shared a common birthday with Donald Trump, June 14! Are Cubans gullible enough to believe that?
With Trump having taken Venezuela out of the Cuban equation, Cuba has become more directly dependent upon Russia, and even upon China. The United States certainly should not have wanted that to happen. Or is that too much to expect of the President’s thought process.
Cuba has always presented a lot of economic and political challenges, most of which have not been solved, regardless of who were in charge there.
JL
* * *
Artemis ll a Success So Let’s Cut Space Programs
 |
| Euphoria is not permanent |
The national euphoria resulting from the accomplishments of the Artemis ll mission will not deter the administration from trying to cut its spending on such space programs that support ‘science,’ something Trump & Co. do not appreciate nor understand. The administration’s stupidity is not limited to its foreign policy in the Middle East.
Click here or copy and paste https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/apr/11/artemis-ii-nasa-budget-cuts#:~:text=Even%20as%20Integrity%2C%20the%20mission,cut%20for%20space%20science%20initiatives
on your device’s browser line to learn more about this.
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 ‘printed’ 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 emails, 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.
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
* * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment