Obama vs. Lyndon Johnson - No Contest

During the course of any day many different people normally offer the conciliatory "Hello, how are you?" greeting and then turn away without waiting for any reply, no intended insults taken either--everyone is polite, but busy. Occasionally conversations take up after the perfunctory salutations, then it can be an opportunity to share ideas about the weather or more substantive topics. 

Lately, however, I have realized that I have been in amongst an ever-growing population of the living dead; Vampires, a pejorative description for liberals who may appear to be regular people. Contrary to popular misconceptions about the mythical Vampires, they can stand the light of day but not direct sunlight because they will sparkle showing what they really are--it sounds just like Vampire Liberals who cannot withstand any media spotlight highlighting their true colors, otherwise people should fear them as well.

The unfortunate tragedy here is that many of these Vampire Liberals are unaware they are transformed into the walking dead. They have been unknowingly programmed due to repeated exposure from a barrage of left-wing mainstream media assaults at home while inundated with propaganda under the auspices of the federally funded liberal school curriculums. The left-wing agenda has literally permeated the whole societal fiber of the citizenry today in order to control the politics. 

So how does this trend reverse itself?  Sadly the quick answer is a very slow one as it has taken from 1960 to 2013, fifty years plus, to indoctrinate two generations into joining federal entitlement programs. A generation is defined as thirty years it takes for a person to be born and to have children of his own. Lyndon Johnson started "The Great Society" program to mimic the FDR "New Deal" program which then encompassed "The Civil Rights Act" and "Medicare Act". Lyndon Johnson, who was ambivalent to the Civil Rights Bill changed his tune when he realized he could put a lock on a whole voting block real cheap, for the next fifty years, it was then a political deal that he really relished.

Factoid: The 1964 election brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938 due to public sympathy after the JFK assassination and completing JFK's program to lower the upper tax bracket by 20% and middle income ones too which increased the GDP 10%. Even though the House and Senate both had 2/3 Democrat members, during the heated debates on the Civil Rights Act, the Southern Dixiecrat Democrat segregationists voted against it to block it. The party of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party, voted in the legislation to enable it to pass. The Social Security Act of 1965 authorized Medicare. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act ended a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education, but it opened up ever since a pandora's box of intrusive Washington political agendas in all school levels through college.

Economist Thomas Sowell argues that Lyndon Johnson's "The Great Society" programs only contributed to the destruction of African American families, saying "the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, then began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.

The Johnson Administration submitted eighty-seven bills to Congress, and Johnson signed eighty-four, or 96%, arguably the most successful legislative agenda in U.S. Congressional history. 

Obama can't get anything passed - Does that say anything?

Titanic 1912 - A True Love Story

Everyone remembers Jack & Rose "flying" on the bow of the ship during this "seminal moment" in the epic movie, "The Titanic".... But what about Joe & Juliette?

Joseph Laroche and Juliette Lafargue were passengers on the Titanic.

Now these ship passengers should have been included in the epic movie, Titanic. Talking about a great love story subplot, Joseph Laroche's story could have replaced that sappy film shot wasted on Jack, Leo Dicaprio and Rose, Kate Winslet "flying" over the bow.

Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche was born in Cap Haitien, Haiti, in 1886. At the age of 15, he left Haiti and travelled to Beauvais, France, to study engineering in high school. While visiting nearby Villejuif, Joseph met his future wife, Juliette. After Joseph received his degree, they were married. Joseph Laroche and Juliette Lafargue were an interracial couple.

Their daughter Simonne was born in 1909, and a second daughter, Louise was born prematurely in 1910, and suffered medical problems. Because of racial discrimination it prevented Joseph from obtaining a high-paying job in France. The family needed more money to pay for their youngest daughters medical bills so Joseph planned to return to Haiti in 1913, to find a better-paying engineering job. However, in March of 1912 Juliette discovered that she was pregnant, so the family decided to leave for Haiti before her pregnancy became too far advanced.

For a welcoming present Joseph’s mother in Haiti bought them steamship tickets on the La France, but the line’s strict policy regarding children caused them to transfer their booking to the Titanic’s second class. Racism towards the couple because of their interracial marriage was rampant aboard the ship, especially among the crew members.

After the Titanic struck an iceberg on April 15, 1912 historians agree that Laroche was calm and heroic. As the ship sank, Joseph stuffed his coat packets with money and jewelry and took his pregnant wife and children up to the boat deck and managed to get them into the lifeboat. He wrapped the coat around his wife, and his last words were: “Here, take this, you are going to need it. I’ll get another boat. God be with you. I’ll see you in New York.” Joseph Laroche died in the sinking and was the only passenger of black descent (besides his daughters) on the Titanic. His body was never found.

Interesting fact: When Juliette returned to Paris with her daughters she gave birth to a son, Joseph Lemercier Laroche. The White Star Line, the company that owned the Titanic, was later forced to issue a public apology for the derogatory statements made by the crew. When Louise Laroche died on January 28, 1998, at the age of 87 it left only seven remaining survivors of the Titanic.

The Obama Faulty FDR Foreign Foreplay Failures

Yalta, Ukraine - Feb. 4, 1945 - Churchill. FDR. Stalin (L-R)A summit meeting was held at the Livadia Palace in Yalta, where Joseph Stalin hosted Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in February 1945 to negotiate the political map of postwar Europe. It was time to divide up the war spoils of Germany.

"In our hearts we really believed a new day had dawned," Harry Hopkins, FDR's closest aide, recalled about Yalta. "We were all convinced we had won the first great victory for peace. . . . The Russians had proved they could be reasonable and farsighted and neither the president nor any of us had the slightest doubt that we could live with them and get on peaceably with them far into the future."

It was certainly true of FDR. The man who got what he wanted from the American public like no other president could be forgiven for thinking of himself as someone who understood people and their motivations - Does it sound like another President we all know now?

Returning from his first meeting with Stalin in Tehran in 1943, Roosevelt told reporters: "I got along fine with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe we are going to get along very well with him."

FDR didn't end up feeling positive like in Tehran after the Yalta meeting. Contrary to popular feelings that Yalta was an example of deliberate American cynicism or cowardice...

It typified a style of American diplomacy that combined boundless idealism with fatal naiveté, an exaggerated confidence in the power of persuasion to bridge differences—and a fatal indifference to the importance of ideology in creating them - Sounds like an American president you now know?

Historians of the Yalta conference have often noted that the Russians had every room in the palace bugged, and that Stalin was provided every morning with transcripts of Roosevelt's and Churchill's private discussions with their staffs. But Stalin's advantage at Yalta wasn't that he was better briefed. It was that he was a better psychologist. He knew how to turn Roosevelt's illusions to his own purposes.

Above all, FDR cherished the illusion that, through universal participation in the U.N., World War II could be what the first one had not: the war to end all wars. Stalin was more than willing to nurture FDR's idealism—provided FDR returned the favor by granting Stalin the run of his ambitions.

So it is with so many negotiations between Democrats and Tyrants: When there is a deal, it usually winds up being a trade between:

the theoretical and the tangible

the immediate concession and the long-term promise

the paper agreement and the territorial prize

President Obama is incapable of resisting "the deal" with Iranian President Hasan Rouhani. So, Obama has instructed Secretary of State, John Kerry to engage with Iran in talks to discuss a nuclear weapons deal. Obama, like FDR, envisions he will be hailed as a master diplomat and a triumphant peacemaker working within the constraints of the United Nations organization. As with Yalta, it won't take long to learn who is betrayed, and what is lost, in the service of an illusion to stop Iran from nuclear proliferation and fostering global terrorism. 

It's been said, "Fools rush in where Wise men fear to tread" which seem to be an apropos description of our inexperienced President and his advisors not having any cultural-ethnic understanding in negotiating with those Russians, Iranians, Syrians, Libyans, Afghanis, Iraqis and other militant, terrorist groups which have all proven to be utter diplomatic failures.  

NEWS FLASH FOR OBAMA:  As for Islamic followers, the Muslims around the world believe in the total submission of non-believers, the infidels converting and living under Sharia Laws--there is no compromise, it is to the scripture in the Quran.  They do not negotiate their faith, beliefs or practices.  So gays, lesbians, cross-genders, Jews, Christians, women as chattel do not have any rights under Sharia Law, can either suffer under Dhimmitude or if doing anti-Islamic sexual practices be stoned to death. HELLO, they run a Theocracy, not a Democracy, get it? 

Wilson's Legacy to Obama Presidency

As one biographer described Woodrow Wilson: "A pince-nez, which emphasized his erudition, became his trademark," For those unfamiliar with such antiquated rhetoric, a "pincz-nez" is "pinched nose' eye glasses that literally pinch the bridge of the nose with no hinged arms to bend over the ears to hold them in place. Those glasses made Wilson image appear erudite, that quality of having or showing great knowledge or learning; scholarship--erudition.  

Woodrow Wilson wasn't bashful about showing himself to be feverishly erudite either, he was terminally egocentric that way. As the former Princeton President and a Professor, Woodrow Wilson once wrote about biographies: "We have our individual preferences in history, as in every other sort of literature. And there are histories to every taste."

To date, President Wilson (1913-1921) is still stuck in the 'good-not-great' category according to many historians.  In my own opinion he does not deserve that rating either, Wilson should only deserve a 'so-so' rating. Barack Obama in his speeches has admirably eulogized him as a "Progressive" political leader with visions he wants to emulate. Obama, himself, will probably go down in the history books as our worst President ever elected to office.  

Wilson's quick rise in politics eerily parallels Barack Obama with his brief experience as an Illinois senator and then catapulting onto the national stage a short time later.

It's one of history's great surprises that Wilson even made it to the White House. Wilson's academic career shows how that career bled into his politics. At Princeton, Wilson was known to murmur, "God save us from compromise." By his early 50s, he had settled in as the president of Princeton, happy, in his own words, to "inspire young men to go into politics."

Elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, Wilson proved an aggressive reformer and quickly caught the eye of national Democrats. In 1912, only two years after his official entry into politics, Wilson won the presidency—thanks largely to his skill as an orator - describes Obama's history too.

At the start of his administration, Wilson pursued an ambitious progressive agenda, including the modern income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Then World War I enlisted him as a foreign-policy president. By the end of the war, he had found a new ideal to save from compromise—the League of Nations. My comment here is that the IRS, the Federal Reserve and the League of Nations, now the United Nations, were and are all bad ideas as they intrusively interlope into running personal, public and civic activities with too much Federal interdiction to control everyone.

One hundred years later the Woodrow Wilson Legacy still cripples our nation under its "Progressive" (code: "Socialist") government programs and his understudy, Barack Obama, is repeating the same failed policies and programs.

After the sudden death in office of Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) who proceeded Wilson's death, it took a great President like Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) to turn the Federal government around to curtail spending and waste to get things back on budget. The next President was Herbert Hoover, who was in office only seven months before the October, 1929 stock market crash. Then, FDR, Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945) came into office wielding his oppressive liberal spending programs and literally was bailed out of the financial mess he created by entering into the WWII wartime economic boom. 

Chemical Warfare Cures Common Cold

The public perception about chemical weapons had an auspicious moment, promising in an odd way that it was designed to humanly disable or kill enemies in combat while offering a positive biological medicinal value - to cure the common cold.

In the midst of WWI started in 1914, before our 1917 entry, the United States in 1916 lost its major dye supplier, Germany.  The "dye famine" sparked a wave of nationalistic fervor that helped the development of the fledgling U.S. dye industry. Newspaper editorials promoted the strategic value of the industry, since the nitration capacity for dye intermediates could be switched to production of high explosives for artillery shells and chemical gases in wartime.

"The Chemical Warfare Service was established on June 28, 1918. Combining activities which until then had been dispersed among five separate agencies of Government, it was made a permanent branch of the Regular Army by the National Defense Act of 1920. In the act of 1945, it was redesignated the Chemical Corps.

The specialty of the officers of the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) had beenResearchers in a chemical lab at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, ca. World War I. invaluable during the First World War. The nations that fought each other in the trenches of France made widespread use of poisonous gasses. Fighting in a place where chemical weapons attacks were a commonplace occurrence, soldiers relied on the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) to help them protect themselves from enemy gas and to manufacture and deploy America’s own weapons against the enemy. It is ironic, then, that once the war ended the service itself would come under attack; not from foreign enemies but from Americans.

The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) tried to change public opinion about chemical weapons in the 1920s, how well did they succeed? Along with their literary efforts, the officers of the CWS also worked hard to popularize themselves by experimenting with new uses for old gasses throughout the early 1920s. They believed that one reason for public apprehension about chemical weapons was that war gasses had no real peacetime uses. They labored to find such uses so that the American public and the military would look more favorably on the work of the CWS.

In his 2001 book 'War and Nature', Edmund Russell described the relationship between the military, the commercial chemical industry, and the American public in the development of insecticides and other pest poisons in the 1920s. The CWS was a key participant in this story, since they were the military branch that dealt most with chemical weapons and had the closest relationship with the commercial chemical industry. Helping to develop insecticides was an important way that the CWS promoted new uses for old war gasses. Some were initially skeptical of the potential of poison gas as a fumigant. In 1921 the Department of Agriculture publicly announced that they did not support the CWS’s pesticide experiments. 

In the face of such doubts, however, Army researchers eventually figured out ways to kill pests with chemicals originally designed to kill humans. The CWS’s insecticide program stands out as one of their best known and successful postwar projects. They were able to use it to help convince Americans of the utility of war gasses and the soldiers who dealt with them. But their success with insects was the exception rather than the rule. Many of their other attempts to find uses for war gasses in the 1920s failed.

President Calvin CooliidgeThe CWS publicized this research into poison gas treatments for respiratory ailments as a breakthrough in the treatment of disease. They organized a series of publicity stunts to advertise the healing power of chlorine gas. In May 1924 the CWS sealed President Calvin Coolidge into a gas chamber and pumped in low levels of chlorine gas to cure his cold. After 45 minutes inside the chamber, Coolidge emerged and returned to work. A representative of his administration told reporters that the President felt much better, and that “all of the depression and lack of energy that accompanies a cold . . . had disappeared.” Apparently, spending almost an hour alone in a gas chamber breathing poison fumes could put the spring back in your step. Coolidge was so pleased with the results that he returned for a second treatment the next day, but this time brought his wife to sit with him in the chamber while the gas was being administered. She did not have a cold, but reportedly wanted to experience the process anyway.  After a third treatment on the third day, President Coolidge reported that his cold was gone.

In the months that followed the gassing of the President, General Amos Fries, Head of the CWS, and the rest of the CWS had to defend the chlorine gas cure against critics. In 1925, when the New York Department of Health called the Chemical Warfare Service’s record of success exaggerated, Amos Fries publicly defended the cure again as a breakthrough. As evidence, he offered the results of the largest publicity stunt they had yet attempted. In a committee room on Capitol Hill, the CWS gassed 23 Senators, 146 House Members, and 1,000 of their staff members, friends, and family. Fries said that “no accurate record was kept of these cases,” but concluded that the majority of them were cured of their ailments by poison gas. Later that year the University of Minnesota conducted a controlled experiment with both patients who had been administered chlorine gas and patients who had not. The University of Minnesota was able to demonstrate empirically that both sets of patients recovered at the same speed, proving war gasses were useless as a medical treatment - They failed to cure the common cold."

Factoid:

In my research an interesting dynamic was revealed that defines the "Military-Industrial-Complex", ominously "MIC", was made famous by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. The term is used anachronistically to refer to the 'merchants of death' debates in the 1930s over the alleged conspiracy of arms manufacturers and bankers for U.S. intervention in World War I. In these cases, there is no complex of military-industry at work. Instead, industry employs bribery and propaganda to increase profits and alter government policy.

In the 2001 'War and Nature', Edmund Russell described the relationship between the military, the commercial chemical industry, and the American public in the development of insecticides and other pest poisons in the 1920s after World War I. The manufacturing of poisonous gases relied on the manufacturer of dye which contained the necessary ingredients for chemical weapons, At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States imported much of it from Germany. Upon entry into WWI in April, 1917, the U.S. relinquished its "neutral nation status" to become an adversary of Germany and thereby ended trade and commerce until after the November, 1918 Armistice Agreement.

During the World War I dye famine, American companies struggled to produce synthetic dyes formerly imported from Germany. There were few American chemists with the requisite know-how of dye-making and this presented a major technology barrier. The demand for domestic dyes was insatiable during the war and selling prices rose spectacularly. In 1914 sulfur black, one of the largest volume dyes used in the textile industry, sold for $0.20 per pound.  During 1915 the price soared to $2.75-3.00 per pound.

The daring exploits of chemists, dye manufacturing companies,  and governments on both sides of World War I demonstrated the importance of chemical industry trade secrets to the outcome of the war.  But also at stake for the victor was the domination of the global economy by superior technology. The war ended the German monopoly of the dye industry, with the U.S. emerging as the world leader.

The trade secrets learned from unraveling the chemistry of synthetic dyes led to new developments in pharmaceuticals, fibers, rubber, plastics and many other products. The U.S. economy is still the world's largest based on continuing advances in research and technology.

So today, the "Military-Industrial-Complex" is subject to the risk and consequences of taking actions in war with the parallel collateral reaction of public scrutiny.  End results are the only measurement of war; therefore, the credibility of actions are not fancy rhetoric afterwards but the facts as they are set forth as they speak for themselves.