Monday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“It is really depressing when you realize that the number of your friends attending your funeral will be determined by the weather.”

                                           Lily Tomlin

I feel the need to express my opinion on discipline during my formative years. Being a historian I cannot find a greater American generation that those born about 1918. They endured near starvation during the dust storms on the Great Plains and the Great Depression. Then they went to Europe and the Pacific and fought in the greatest bloodbath in recorded history during WWII. They were not done yet...there was Korea. Do you know what most of them had in common? They were raised in families that fostered physical retribution if the transgressions deserved it. My father was from that era and brought that method with him. Our family was a patriarchy and all of us had enormous respect and love for him and knew he was fair and understanding. We also knew where our boundaries were and there would be an answering if those boundaries were crossed. This lifestyle did not turn us into serial killers or unbalanced career criminals. We ended up knowing that we were responsible for our own actions...that is greatest lesson anyone can learn. I remember one time when my one of us spoke disrespectful to our mother and my father stood him up and drew back his fist...he covered up and my father said “Drop your hands, you are going to stand there and take it”. He did...and he did. He is a very successful today. My father would also find us jobs in the summer when we were out of school, that and respect for others among many other things were lessons well learned from our mother and father and shaped our futures. My father and my mother were my best friends and always will be.

I saw an interview with Donald Trump. I am no fan of Trump but the interviewer was not interested in what Trump had to say on any issue without trying to dispute him in a very condescending tone. It was CNN as you might suspect. It just further convinced me that the news media has an agenda to try to denigrate anyone THEY do not approve of. Trump suggested that financial experts like Carl Icahn should be hired to oversee trade agreements to ensure that the United States is not ripped off. The major trade negotiator between the United States and any country is our ambassador. Japan enjoys an uneven trade balance over the United States by a factor of 3. Guess who went to Tokyo as the United States ambassador? It was Caroline Kennedy. Explain that to me.

                This Date in History August 24

79AD On this date the Roman elite in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples were just sitting down to lunch or a late breakfast. Most of the houses in these cities were vacation homes to the Roman rich. Then a stupendous explosion shook the very ground on which they were sitting/standing. It was the eruption of the centuries old extinct volcano Mount Vesuvius. A cloud of white hot ash and rock shot 20,000 feet into the atmosphere and lava and mud slid down the side of the volcano in torrents. The people in the cities did not have a chance. The dust and rocks in the atmosphere began raining down burning people to death or mixed with the poison gasses that accompanied the mud and lava and asphyxiated them. The ash and rock mixed with the lava and mud forming a sort of concrete and buried thousands of them under 10 to 15 feet which cooled into a solidified mass. A Roman General name Pliny the Elder was in command of a Roman fleet that was on patrol in the Bay of Naples when this great event occurred. Pliny saw with disbelief swarms of people swimming out into the bay to escape the enormous heat but the raining ash was still hot enough to burn and people were screaming for death in their agony. Pliny ordered some of his ships to go and try to rescue them but they returned after a short while saying the ash was so hot that it was setting their ships on fire. Pliny just could not stand aside and watch so he ordered his boat into the maelstrom and went to the sides of the ash flow and tried to comfort those that had escaped. Pliny got a whiff of the toxic gasses and collapsed and died. His nephew Pliny the Younger, aged 17, was on the opposite side of the bay and chronicled what he saw and gave it to the Roman historian Tactius. The two cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were eventually forgotten until a farmer digging a grape vineyard and the ground collapsed into the courtyard of a buried mansion. From then on archaeologists and paleontologists descended on the area and nearly the entire towns have been excavated giving us a snapshot of what life was like in those ill-fated cities.

1572 The king of France was King Charles IX but the real control was in the hands of his mother Catherine de Medici. Catherine went down in history as one of the most manipulative and ruthless person who ever lived. She and he son Charles were supposed to be Catholic but she would persuade Charles to dance with whoever held sway at a given time be it the Pope or the French Huguenots which were protestant. In this particular point in time the leader of the Huguenots Admiral Garpard de Coligny held sway with King Charles and good old Catherine saw the Admiral as a threat and ordered his murder. On this day, Saint Bartholomew’s Day, the assassins found the Admiral and killed him. For some reason the Catholics got their bloodlust aroused and they began killing the Huguenots wholesale all across France in spite of King Charles ordering them to stop. They stopped alright, after killing over 70,000 of them. This event was known since and The Saint Bartholomew Day Massacre. Catherine may have felt more secure after this but France suffered because all the surviving Huguenots moved away taking their money with them.

1814 Earlier during the War of 1812 the British army under the command of General Robert Ross flanked and defeated the Patriot Militia at the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland. This victory for the British left the road to Washington undefended. On this date the British army marched into Washington unopposed and begin burning everything in sight. The British were pissed off because the Patriot army had burned the British consulate in Canada for no apparent reason. During the Battle of Bladensburg President James Madison went to the battle site and took command of one of the artillery batteries. This is the only time that a sitting American president engaged in combat. Before he left he told his wife Dolly that she would have to evacuate soon and to take only those things that were important. She took the portrait of George Washington with which we are all familiar. I guess it was that important because later that night the British burned the White House to the ground. But the redcoats ran up against US General Andrew Jackson and company near Chalmette, Louisiana who sent them running away with their asses in hand. But the war was over before this fight but the communications were so slow that Jackson knew nothing about the British surrender.

       Thanks for listening  I can hardly wait until tomorrow