250 – Emperor Decius orders everyone in the Roman Empire (except Jews) to make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The courts do that now to everybody except Muslims.

1521 – Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem. Yeah, put THAT toothpaste back in the tube…

1823 – Stephen F. Austin receives a grant of land in Texas from the government of Mexico. Clearly, Mexico would have benefited from tighter immigration controls.

1834 – The government of Mexico imprisons Stephen F. Austin in Mexico City. This disturbs many Texans.

1848 – Joseph Jenkins Roberts is sworn in as the first president of Liberia as the American ‘Africans’ subjugate and colonize the ‘African’ Africans who occupied the land.

1919 – At the Paris Peace Conference, Emir Faisal of Iraq signs an agreement with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in a large part of the Middle East. Modern Arabs and their apologists and sympathizers in the UN tend to ignore this fact as well as the whole grand sweep of Biblical history.

1921 – Turkey makes peace with Armenia after killing more than a million Armenians in something that has yet to be called a genocide. Turkey is Muslim. the Armenians were Christian. Got any clues?

1924 – English explorer Howard Carter discovers the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, Egypt, providing fodder for a great Steve Martin bit.



1925 – Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy. Twenty years later they’ll be hanging his naked carcass from a lamp-post. This is a suitable finish for many politicians, although that twenty-year wait cost Italy much blood and substance.

1932 – Martial law is declared in Honduras to stop a revolt by banana workers fired by the United Fruit Company. That’s why they’re called “Banana Republics”.

1957 – The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch. The extension cords turned out to be problematic.

1959 – Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. State.

1961 – The SL-1, a government-run reactor near Idaho Falls, Idaho, leaks radiation, killing three workers. These are the ONLY nuclear reactor fatalities in the history of the US.

1962 – Pope John XXIII excommunicates Fidel Castro. The last pope beatifies him.

1977 – Apple Computer is incorporated. Two guys working out of a garage, neither of whom was a college graduate, and NO government funding and very shaky diversity figures.

1994 – More than seven million people from the former apartheid Homelands receive South African citizenship as South Africa enters an new era of prosperity, enlightenment, and harmony.

1996 – The Motorola StarTAC, the first flip phone and one of the first mobile phones to gain widespread consumer adoption, goes on sale. I had one from my employer. Compared to the iPhone 15 Pro Max I have now, that flip-phone is positively quaint.

2002 – Israeli forces seize the Palestinian freighter Karine A in the Red Sea, finding 50 tons of weapons. Clearly the Palestinians need a separate state.

2015 – Boko Haram militants raze the entire town of Baga in north-east Nigeria, starting the 2015 Baga massacre and killing as many as 2,000 people. Just Muslims being Muslims? Or politics as usual in Africa? Or “D – All of the above”?

2019 – Chang’e 4 makes the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, deploying the Yutu-2 lunar rover, a mere fifty years after the USA put MEN on the moon.

2020 – Iranian General Qasem Soleimani is killed by an American airstrike near Baghdad International Airport, igniting global concerns of a potential armed conflict.

2024 – At least 91 people are killed in bombings in Kerman, Iran, during a ceremony commemorating the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani four years earlier. Just a doctrinal dispute between two sects of the Religion of Peace™.

1492 – Reconquista: the emirate of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, surrenders. Once they run the Muslims out, they can go discover the New World.

1818 – The British Institution of Civil Engineers is founded. There’s no such thing as a ‘civil’ engineer. They’re all assholes.

1890 – Record 19 foot 2 inch alligator shot in Louisiana by E. A. McIlhenny. He’s the son of the McIlhenny that brought Tabasco pepper sauce to the world.

1905 – Russo-Japanese War: The Russian garrison surrenders at Port Arthur, China. The Japanese mis-read the reasons for this event and get cocky. In forty years their perspective will be energetically corrected.

1920 – The second Palmer Raid takes place with another 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists arrested and held without trial. These raids take place in several U.S. cities. If we did that today, we’d practically gut the dimmocrat party and academia.

1921 – World premiere of the science fiction play R.U.R. by the Czech writer Karel Capek in a theater in Hradec Králové. This is where we get the word “robot”.

1974 – President Richard Nixon signs a bill lowering the maximum U.S. speed limit to 55 MPH in order to conserve gasoline during an OPEC embargo. Enforcement of the new limits is used as a form of revenue enhancement nationwide and develops a nation full of scoff-laws. “Collect and Serve” is the motto of many police departments now.

1999 – A brutal snowstorm smashes into the Midwestern United States, causing 14 inches (359 mm) of snow in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 19 inches (487 mm) in Chicago, where temperatures plunge to -13°F (-25°C); 68 deaths are reported. Da*n global warming!

42 BC – The Roman Senate posthumously deifies Julius Caesar. The Left uses this practice today: JFK, MLK, Nelson Mandela, and of course the Living God Among Us, Barack Obama. When you add to that whichever thug-du-jour comes out of the black criminal underclass – Brianna Taylor, Michael Brown, Saint George Floyd of Fentanyl…

45 BC – The Julian calendar takes effect as the civil calendar of the Roman Empire, establishing January 1 as the new date of the new year.

1772 – The first traveler’s cheques, which could be used in 90 European cities, are issued by the London Credit Exchange Company. I used to use them to move my money when I was changing posts in the army. Banking was a lot less portable fifty years ago.

1773 – The hymn that became known as “Amazing Grace“, then titled “1 Chronicles 17:16–17? is first used to accompany a sermon led by John Newton in the town of Olney, England.

1804 – French rule ends in Haiti. Haiti becomes the first black republic and second independent country in North America after the United States. Right now they’re so ‘independent’ that if outside aid stopped, they’d descend into disease, death and anarchy in a matter of months. Oh, wait! They’re getting outside aid and they STILL have disease, death and anarchy… Sort of like New Orleans…

1880 – Ferdinand de Lesseps begins French construction of the Panama Canal. And like so many things in the next hundred years, something the French start, the Americans come behind and finish.

1908 – For the first time, a ball is dropped in New York, New York’s Times Square to signify the start of the New Year at midnight. Of course with Joe Biden in the White House, ball-dropping is elevated to an art form.

1914 – The SPT Airboat Line becomes the world’s first scheduled airline to use a winged aircraft. It takes people between Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida, a 23-minute flight replacing a two-hour boat ride, twenty hour drive, or a four to twelve-hour train ride. A one-way ticket was five bucks.

1934 – Nazi Germany passes the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring“. This paragraph didn’t make it into ObamaCare because it would deprive the Left of a major source of dimmocrat votes.

1942 – The Declaration by United Nations is signed by twenty-six nations. At the time, it was twenty-six nations against the tyranny of Germany and Japan, the tyranny of the USSR being of the kinder, gentler sort that only killed millions of politically inconvenient people. It’s time to end this travesty.

1949 – United Nations cease-fire takes effect in Kashmir from one minute before midnight. War between India and Pakistan stops accordingly. Now, both of those countries are nuclear powers. A real war could be rather energetic.

1959 – Fulgencio Batista, dictator of Cuba, is overthrown by Fidel Castro’s forces during the Cuban Revolution. Cuba, freed of the oppression of Batista, goes on to become a beacon of fairness and opportunity in the Western Hemisphere. Now they’re having a shortage of sugar. It’s $25/lb in a nation that used to export the stuff.

1982 – Peruvian Javier Pérez de Cuéllar becomes the first Latin American to hold the title of Secretary-General of the United Nations. Latin America is often regarded as a fount of good governance.

1983 – The ARPANET officially changes to using the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet, Al Gore curiously absent.

1994 – The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect. What’s that big sucking sound?

1997 – Ghanaian diplomat Kofi Annan is appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations. Because, Ghana, as everybody knows, is a beacon of freedom and enlightenment and the UN is just exactly the way to share it.

1999 – The Euro € currency is introduced in 11 countries – members of the European Union (with the exception of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Greece and Sweden). Now they’re up to twenty. I wonder how much longer it will be before it’s replaced by the dinar.

2010 – A suicide car bomber detonates at a volleyball tournament in Lakki Marwat, Pakistan, killing 105 and injuring 100 more. Just a political debate between pro- and anti-Taliban groups. The pro bunch pulled the trigger.

2011 – A bomb explodes as Coptic Christians in Alexandria, Egypt, leave a new year service, killing 23 people. Obama doesn’t acknowledge this bombing since only Christians died.

2017 – Portuguese politician and diplomat António Guterres was officially elected Secretary-General of the United Nations, because if any place says ‘world leaders come from here’, it’s Portugal.

1687 – The first Huguenots set sail from France to the Cape of Good Hope. Does the name “du Toit” ring a bell?

1695 – A window tax is imposed in England, causing many householders to brick up windows to avoid the tax. Don’t give the ‘takers’ any ideas! California’s already considering a tax on text messaging, and the only people who HAVE windows are ‘rich’ people, right?

1759 – Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum and starts brewing Guinness.

1805 – End of the French Republican calendar; France returns to Gregorian calendar like the rest of the civilized world. If you EVER want to see what happens when the Left takes control of government and implements all its “enlightened” ideals, study the French Revolution. Or Detroit.

1862 – American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln signs an act that admits West Virginia to the Union, thus dividing Virginia in two. Virginia is trying to divide itself again over gun control today.

1878 – Karl Benz, working in Mannheim, Germany, filed for a patent on his first reliable two-stroke gas engine, and he was granted the patent in 1879. My last employer uses many two-stroke natural gas fueled engines to compress and move gas in our pipeline system.

1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time. 2012 – Incandescent bulbs are essentially outlawed by ignorant legislation. 2019 – President Trump rolls back rules restricting incandescent lamps. 2020 – We get Slo-Jo and the Ho and ‘Stone Age’ is within the realm of possibilities.

1951 – The Marshall Plan expires after distributing more than $12 billion USD in foreign aid to rebuild Europe. Then we stayed there for the next thirty years making sure the commie hordes didn’t come take the place, and they still treat US like crap!

1968 – The first flight of the Tupolev Tu-144, the first civilian supersonic transport in the world, with all the market impact of shit-flavored popcorn.

1981 – A coup d’état in Ghana removes President Hilla Limann’s PNP government and replaces it with the Provisional National Defence Council led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. Just Africa being Africa.

1983 – In Nigeria a coup d’état led by Major General Muhammadu Buhari ends the Second Nigerian Republic. Just Africa being Africa.

1991 – All official Soviet Union institutions have ceased operations by this date five days after the Soviet Union is officially dissolved. See 1951, above.

1998– The European Exchange Rate Mechanism freezes the values of the legacy currencies in the Eurozone, and establishes the value of the euro currency. And right now, Europe is seriously reconsidering the wisdom of that move…

1999 – The U.S. government hands control of the Panama Canal (as well all the adjacent land to the canal known as the Panama Canal Zone) to Panama. This act complied with the signing of the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties. The ‘Carter’ names says it all as President Jimmuh Carter naively expects a Third-World government to manage a First-World resource. They’re selling out to the Chinese and President Trump is talking about taking the Canal over again.

2007 – The Massive Big Dig construction project in Boston, Massachusetts ends as it starts filling itself in…

2019 – The World Health Organization is informed of cases of pneumonia with an unknown cause, detected in Wuhan. This later turned out to be COVID-19, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.

2020 – The World Health Organization’s issues its first emergency use validation for a COVID-19 vaccine.

1612 – Galileo Galilei becomes the first astronomer to observe the planet Neptune, although he mistakenly cataloged it as a fixed star. But hey! The science was settled…

1836 – Spain recognizes the independence of Mexico. Now, if only Mexico had recognized the independence of Texas, we could have saved us a whole war or two…

1895 – Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be commonly known as x-rays.

1908 – A magnitude 7.2 earthquake rocks Messina, Sicily killing over 75,000. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.

1939 – First flight of the Consolidated XB-24 Liberator bomber prototype. It and the Boeing B-17 were the backbone of US strategic bombing in Europe in WW II. The B-17 was prettier.

1943 – Soviet authorities launch operation Operation Ulussy, beginning the deportation of the Kalmyk nation to Siberia and Central Asia. “We take a brief break from fighting off Germany to further suppress a few of our own people.” Expected President Harris to clear out an area for the establishment of Wakanda here.

1948 – The DC-3 airliner NC16002 disappears 50 miles south of Miami, Florida. Cue up the “twilight Zone” theme music. It’s one of those “Bermuda Triangle” mysteries… Or a series of human errors. Depends on which way your mind works…

1973 – The Endangered Species Act is passed in the United States. Nine-banded snorflezorts breathe easier. Tree-hugging hippies now have a federal law to give meaning to their worthless lives.

1981 – The first American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, is born in Norfolk, Virginia. Yawwwnnnnn! Call me when a government welfare check is a contact birth control medication.

1999 – Saparmurat Niyazov is proclaimed President for Life in Turkmenistan. You throw off the yoke of Soviet oppression and you STILL end up with a “president for life”? Duuuude! You’re doing it waaaaay wrong! Obama read the Cliff Notes, still had time to make his move, but then he figured that after a term or two of HILLARY! as president, the country’d be clamoring for HIS coronation. It took Joe Biden to make obama look competent.

2009 – Forty-three people die in a suicide bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, where Shia Muslims are observing the Day of Ashura. The culprits? A group of radical Episcopalians OTHER Muslims who had differing opinions as to the correct attitude when slaughtering infidels. That’s part of the fun of the Religion of Peace™ – if there are no convenient infidels around, they’ll happily kill each other in large numbers.

2010 – Arab Spring: Popular protests begin in Algeria against the government. America’s Left, led by such luminaries of international diplomacy such as Hillary (Haauuugghh! Spit!) Clinton and Barack Obama, squeal with glee because everybody knows that as soon as the dictator’s gone, two thousand years of tribal conflicts will go away and everybody will sit in a circle and drink Cokes and sing ‘Kumbayah’, just like in Pakistan the year before.