683 – During the Siege of Mecca, the Kaaba catches fire and is burned down. This time it needs to disappear under a mushroom cloud. Let ’em bang their heads on the ground towards where their shrine USED to be.

1517 – Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. This move would result in the deaths of thousands on both sides of the discussion.

1846 – Donner party, unable to cross the Donner Pass, construct a winter camp. “What’s for lunch?”

1861 – American Civil War: Citing failing health, Union General Winfield Scott resigns as Commander of the United States Army. Getting his ass handed to him at the First Battle of Manassas (known by Yankees as ‘Bull Run’, for a popular activity at the end of the day) might have weighed in on the decision. His plan to strangle the South with blockades, however, eventually worked.

1917 – World War I: Battle of Beersheba – “last successful cavalry charge in history” done by the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade. Or maybe not. See “1942? below.

1918 – World War I: The Aster Revolution terminates the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, and Hungary achieves full sovereignty. See”1956? below.

1923 – The first of 160 consecutive days of 100 degrees at Marble Bar, Australia. Curse that Global Warming!

1941 – World War II: The destroyer USS Reuben James is torpedoed by a German U-boat near Iceland, killing more than 100 United States Navy sailors. It is the first U.S. Navy vessel sunk by enemy action in WWII.

1942 – Colonel Alessandro Bettoni (led) three mounted squadrons of Italians forward at a gallop into the Soviet lines… In the victorious charge the Italians lost 40 cavalrymen (including the commander of the 4th Squadron, Captain Abba) with another 79 wounded and almost 100 precious horses but they inflicted over 150 casualties on the Soviets and captured some 900 unfortunate Siberians along with a collection of sixty mortars, artillery pieces and machine guns.

1944 – Dr. jur. Erich Göstl, a member of the Waffen SS, is awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, to recognise extreme battlefield bravery, after losing his face and eyes during the Battle of Normandy. Bravery has no borders.

1956 – Hungarian Revolution of 1956: A Revolutionary Headquarters is established in Hungary. Following Imre Nagy’s announcement of October 30, banned non-Communist political parties are reformed, and the MDP is replaced by the MSZMP. József Mindszenty is released from prison. The Soviet Politburo makes the decision to crush the Revolution. Freedom won’t come for thirty-odd more years.

1956 – Suez Crisis: The United Kingdom and France begin bombing Egypt to force the reopening of the Suez Canal. You know you’re waaaaay down the food chain when you get bombed by France…

1968 – Vietnam War October surprise: Citing progress with the Paris peace talks, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announces to the nation that he has ordered a complete cessation of “all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam” effective November 1. There’s nothing quite like a dimmocrat president “managing” a war. LBJ’s perception of “progress” was as finely developed as his morals, and the war went on until the mid-70’s, and tens of thousands more American soldiers died while the war was “managed” instead of won by Johnson and Nixon.

2002 – A federal grand jury in Houston, Texas indicts former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow on 78 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to the collapse of his ex-employer. I work with some former Enron employees. The name is a nasty word.

2017 – A truck drives in a crowd of people in Lower Manhattan, killing eight people. A member of a radical sect of Presbyterians, no doubt.

758 AD – Guangzhou is sacked by Arab and Persian pirates. They were at it back then, too…

1501 – Ballet of Chestnuts: A banquet held by Cesare Borgia in the Papal Palace where fifty prostitutes or courtesans are in attendance for the entertainment of the guests. Back when a Pope knew how to party.

1503 – Queen Isabella of Spain bans violence against Indians. This royal edict is totally ignored as conquistadores run through the New World.

1534 – English Parliament passes Act of Supremacy, making King Henry VIII head of the English church – a role formerly held by the Pope.

1806 – Believing he is facing a much larger force, Prussian Lieutenant General Friedrich von Romberg, commanding 5,300 men, surrendered the city of Stettin to 800 French soldiers commanded by General Lassalle. French heads swell. The Prussians make note – ‘This crap ain’t happenin’ again.’

1817 – Simón Bolívar becomes President of the Third Republic of Venezuela. They still haven’t gotten a handle on that ‘republic’ thing.

1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States. Today it’d cause pants-shi**ing hysteria and we’d have to call out the National Guard. Lawyers would profit greatly.

1942 – Lt. Tony Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier and canteen assistant Tommy Brown from HMS Petard board U-559, retrieving material which would lead to the decryption of the German Enigma code, just one of many factors leading to the failure of Germany in the Atlantic.

1953 – Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document National Security Council Paper No. 162/2, which states that the United States’ arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat. All that help we gave the Soviets in WW II comes back to bite us in the ass.

1960 – Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. On the day before, a guy woke up in a cheap hotel sitting in a bathtub of ice with a huge incision in his side…

1961 – Because of “violations of Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honor inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlin wall with a plain granite marker instead. The soviets aren’t the only ones who will rewrite history to fit an agenda. On the same day, Tsar Bomba, the largest man-made explosion ever made, equivalent to 58 MILLION tons of TNT, was conducted by the USSR.

1983 – The first democratic elections in Argentina after seven years of military rule (and a royal ass-kicking by Britain over the Falkland Islands) are held.

1988 – Philip Morris buys Kraft Foods for U.S. $13.1 billion. Now one of their product lines consists of questionable products known to cause cancer, sold under heavy advertising. The rest is cigarettes.

1995 – Quebec sovereignists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada (vote was 50.6% to 49.4%).

1787 – Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni receives its first performance in Prague. You need this overture.

1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ‘29 or “Black Tuesday,” ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression. Leads to the election of a dimmocrat president and the massive expansion of the federal government. Seconds, anyone?

1944 – The city of Breda in the Netherlands is liberated by 1st Polish Armoured Division. If only they’d had Charles de Gaulle, they could’ve singlehandedly liberated Paris.

1945 – The first commercially-made ballpoint pens went on sale — at Gimbels Department Store in New York City. The pens sold for $12.50 and racked up a tidy profit of $500,000 in the first month!

1955 – The Soviet battleship Novorossiysk strikes a World War II mine in the harbor at Sevastopol. NO, the USSR didn’t BUILD it. It was an Italian battleship – reparations after WW II.

1956 – Suez Crisis begins: Israeli forces invade the Sinai Peninsula and push Egyptian forces back toward the Suez Canal. This works so well that the Israelis do it again in 1967 and 1973.

1966 – The National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed. An alternative name, the “National Association of Gals” (NAG) doesn’t make the cut. It gives homely women a way to appear meaningful in mainstream society.

1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. Al Gore curiously absent, probably off getting his chakras re-aligned.

1998 – Space Shuttle Discovery blasts off on STS-95 with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space. Senator Glenn is a dimmocrat, an excellent example of heroism in younger years NOT translating to wisdom in later years.

2012 – Hurricane Sandy hits the east coast of the United States, killing 148 directly and 138 indirectly, while leaving nearly $70 billion in damages and causing major power outages, finally replacing Hurricane Katrina as the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT hurricane in history because it, like hit NEW YORK where Really Important People™ live.

1664 – The Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, is established.

1775 – American Revolutionary War: A British proclamation forbids residents from leaving Boston. That recent bombing and the police orders in the aftermath show that Boston is a lot more amenable to government control than it was in 1775. Leave the city? How about ‘Don’t leave your HOUSE.” And they obeyed. Sad.

1886 – In New York Harbor, President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty. Like many things French, it’s magnificent. And hollow.

1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January. And we all know how well that little bit of government tampering turned out. Works equally well for drugs, huh? Now, the Left wants to try it with guns.

1940 – World War II: Greece rejects Italy’s ultimatum. The Greco-Italian War begins. Italy invades Greece through Albania, marking Greece’s entry into World War II. When the Italians can’t maintain control, they have to call the Germans in, which is not a happy development for anybody except the Germans who are here instead of getting ready to fight a couple of million screaming Soviets in Russian winter.

1956 – Elvis Presley receives a polio vaccination on national TV. This single event is credited with raising immunization levels in the United States from 0.6% to over 80% in just six months. Because of this polio is almost unknown today, a great step up from permanent crippling disease and a life in an iron lung, but vaccines’re bad, MMM-kay?!?

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev announces that he had ordered the removal of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. The world steps back from the brink of nuclear war. Today John Fonda Kerry would call him up and say “Forget that! I hate America too!”

2006 – The funeral service takes place for those executed at Bykivnia forest, outside Kiev, Ukraine. 817 Ukrainian civilians (out of some 100,000) executed by Bolsheviks at Bykivnia in 1930s – early 1940s are reburied. Just remember that these deaths were the result of a centralized, powerful government who KNEW how best to run the country and this was ONE of many graves filled with people who got in the way of the advent of a socialist utopia.

312 AD – Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross. This moves him to declare the entire Roman Empire to be Christian. Nothing like a politician using religion to further his goals.

1806 – The French Army enters in Berlin. This pi**es off the Germans. The Germans say “Oh, that’s how you wanna play” and they return the favor several times in the next century and a half. Like in 1870, when Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrenders to Prussian forces at Metz along with 140,000 French soldiers in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.

1810 – United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida. That gives us the little dangly bits of Alabama and Mississippi as well as the Louisiana parishes east of the Mississippi River. Today we call those “the Florida parishes”.

1838 – Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated. Today’s ‘leadership’ welcomes the Religion of Peace with open arms.

1962 – Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down over Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile. Of course it’s Soviet-supplied. The best the Cubans could have done on their own is fling a banana at him as he flew over.

1964 – Ronald Reagan delivers a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. The speech launched his political career and came to be known as “A Time for Choosing”. Today’s republican ‘party’ revels in its ‘Never Trump’ faction. It’s time for the party to die.

1971 – Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire. “Yeah, we’re a basket case of corruption but if we change the name it’ll confuse people for a while and we can get MORE money…

1775 – King George III goes before Parliament to declare the American colonies in rebellion, and authorized a military response to quell the American Revolution.

1776 – Benjamin Franklin departed from America for France on a mission to seek French support for the American Revolution. The French DID help. This was before their own revolution and was pretty much the last decent act they performed as a nation.

1825 – The Erie Canal opens, allowing direct passage from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Waterways were the arteries of American commerce and industry back then. Still are, but a lot of people don’t know that.

1861 – The Pony Express officially ceased operations, put out of business by the modern technology. Today they’d lobby a few congressmen and get a stimulus package for the Pony Express and have them put a federal tax on each mile of telegraph lines, a per-message tax on each message, and EPA would be filing a restraining order preventing telegraph operation until a study was completed on the effects of the telegraph line’s magnetic field on the western short-snouted warble toad.

1881 – The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place at Tombstone, Arizona. 30 shots in thirty seconds? You can see worse than that in just about any major city on a given Saturday night nowadays. That wouldn’t make a decent drive-by on a Chicago Saturday night.

1917 – World War I: Battle of Caporetto; Italy suffers a catastrophic defeat at the forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The young unknown Oberleutnant Erwin Rommel captures Mount Matajur with only 100 Germans against a force of over 7000 Italians.

1936 – The first electric generator at Hoover Dam went into full operation. The first run of major electrical equipment is one FINE feeling. I have the privilege of having been in on several. Equally intense is the feeling that passes over you when the first button is pushed and ALL the lights in the plant go out. Gladly, that one was NOT within MY area of responsibility but I walked right to the utility substation knowing what the problem was.

1940 – The P-51 Mustang makes its maiden flight. It goes on to become arguably the finest piston-engine fighter ever. Of course, making that statement in the presence of aviation enthusiasts will start fistfights.

1943 – World War II: First flight of the Dornier Do 335 “Pfeil”. Off the factory floor, it would do 474 MPH, the fastest piston-engined fighter to go into service, another miracle of German engineering, and like much of German technology in WW II, a case of too little, too late.

1944 – World War II: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ends, and with it, the Japanese navy as a viable force. They’ll still be worrisome, but never again will they be a real fleet.

1949 – President Truman signs a bill increasing minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents an hour. When I went to work in 1966, it was a buck and a quarter.

1956 – Hungarian Revolution: In the towns of Mosonmagyaróvár and Esztergom, Antifa Hungarian secret police forces massacre civilians who protest the ‘correct’ political party. As rebel strongholds in Budapest hold, fighting spreads throughout the country.

1958 – Pan American Airways makes the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York City to Paris, France.

1967 – Mohammad Reza Pahlavi crowns himself Emperor of Iran and then crowns his wife Farah as Empress of Iran. He’ll run the country until sterling diplomacy at the hands of the current second-worst president in American history pulls the rug out from under him in favor of the Religion of Peace as defined by Ayatollah Khomeini.

1992 – The London Ambulance Service is thrown into chaos after the implementation of a new CAD, or Computer Aided Dispatch, system which failed. The Obama regime achieved similar success with the ObamaCare rollout software.

1995 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Mossad agents assassinate Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shaqaqi in his hotel in Malta. This is ever so much more savage and barbaric than exploding a bomb in a pizza parlor at lunchtime.

2002 – Moscow theater hostage crisis: Approximately 50 Radical Russian Orthodox Christians Muslim Chechen terrorists and 150 hostages die when Russian Spetsnaz storm a theater building in Moscow, which had been occupied by the terrorists during a musical performance three days before.