50 Years Ago

Closing Thought–27Aug18

50 years ago this August history was being made the Dem Convention and the riots that followed…..the drama had everything needed to be a blockbuster…..love-hate, war-peace, old-new, etc…..

We’re taking another look back at the year 1968 this morning, remembering the political earthquake that was the Democratic National Convention. Chicago-born Scott Simon, of NPR, is our guide:

Worlds collided at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago: young and old, war and peace, law and order.

“The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching…”

“You can’t take that week in isolation,” said Bill Daley. “’68, one of the most dramatic and traumatic years in the nation’s history. And it kind of all rolled to Chicago, and you could feel it coming.”

Daley, who would become President Obama’s chief of staff, was a college student in 1968, and spent the convention at the side of his father, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.


In 1968 I missed these protests for I was a bit preoccupied in Vietnam…..if I had been stateside I would have been there…

This for you younguns……

If you would like a more detailed account of those bloody days in American political history……

Our young needs to know these history of how a people took to the street to make a difference…yes it turned violent and it is a matter of opinion on who started the trouble…..


Tribute To John McCain

Over the weekend we got the sad news that Sen.John McCain had passed away…..as a radical I seldom agreed with the man on policy…..as a Vietnam vet I respected the man……and I am sure that my reader will be seeing many tributes to McCain’s memory and his legacy…..

I share one that I read to his memory….

I did not join in the rather ghoulish anticipation of John McCain’s death indulged in by some war opponents. On Twitter, one aspiring attention-seeking pundit was suspended for her tasteless display of disdain for a dying man, and while there was an outcry (she was reinstated) I was not among the out-criers. For once I agreed with @jack, although I’m sure this meeting of the minds was purely coincidental and not likely to happen again: a little old-fashioned respect for the dying never hurt anyone. Far be it from me to cheer on the effects of cancer on a human being: I won’t do it, no matter who is involved.  This disrespectful rudeness was also indulged in by our President, another class act, who has more in common with his left-wing enemies than either is ready to acknowledge. (Trump eventually did his duty, however, albeit laconically.)

In his person, and his public pronouncements, McCain was the perfect representative of the nascent imperial class: born in the Panama Canal zone, the son of an Admiral, he was almost fated to become what he did indeed become – the archetypal Praetorian, the veritable embodiment of America’s post-World War II empire. A paladin of the cold war while it lasted, and a tireless advocate of post-cold war hegemonism, his favorite phrase was “boots on the ground,” and he championed this as a policy option for virtually every foreign policy problem confronted by US policymakers.


In these days to stupid a man of logic and truth will be sorely missed.

Good bye John and thanx for everything.  chuq

NATO Was Always Gonna Be

These days NATO makes the news almost weekly…thanx mainly to Our Dear Leader and his feud with the organization over money…..

NATO came into being after WW2 in an attempt to help prevent another World War….but it was always going to be a thing for the world and it all began in 1941……

Ever heard of the Atlantic Charter?

Take about 7 minutes to learn……

That is right……NATO had its birth with the signing of the Atlantic Charter…..so how about a little more history of the attempt…..

The Atlantic Charter is hailed by some as Churchill and Roosevelt’s vision of a more peaceful and egalitarian post-war world: a world where countries would not seek territorial expansion, aggressors would be disarmed, all nations would have the right to govern themselves and there would be social and economic welfare for all.

The Atlantic Charter is considered by some to be a logical successor document to Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. In a way it was. Just as Wilson’s 14 Points were turned into a bitter fraud by the Versailles Treaty, so too would the following promises of England and America be turned into a grim charade. Almost every one of the promises made in the charter were broken by the Allies both during and after the war.

Therefore we must ask, was the Charter actually created for the goal of establishing a more peaceful world? Or was there a different goal in mind? There are some troubling questions about this Charter that need to be addressed.


Now you know so others will know…..as I wrote before….a NATO was always the plan.

So I Have Written!

Class Dismissed!