1066 – William the Conqueror invades England: the Norman Conquest begins. At the time he was known as “William the Bastard”. Nothing like winning to get you favorable publicity! Part of what makes us what we are…

1781 – American forces backed by a French fleet begin the siege of Yorktown, Virginia, during the American Revolutionary War. This was France before a revolution run by a bunch of ‘enlightened’ fops ruined the place.

1791 – France becomes the first country to emancipate its Jewish population. A hundred and fifty years later, they help the Nazis round them up for deportation and death.

1850 – US Navy abolishes flogging as punishment.

1928 – Sir Alexander Fleming notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin. He wasn’t “Sir” back then, just a science geek playing with bread mold.

1938 – Dutch Premier Colijn sends radio message “No war coming” . See! They had pacifist moonbats back then, too. 1940 – Nazi occupiers present “New Dutch Culture” in German. Premier Colijn is now right. The war was short and nasty and soon over and the Netherlands lost. Now they have ‘peace’.

1939 – Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agree on a division of Poland after their invasion during World War II. It’s a neat agreement between two blood-thirsty amoral dictators. Two years later Hitler decides that he wants ALL of Poland. And the Ukraine. And everything else.

1958 – France ratifies a new Constitution of France; the French Fifth Republic is then formed upon the formal adoption of the new constitution on October 4. The way things are going, the next one will be written in Arabic, based on sharia.

1961 – A military coup in Damascus effectively ends the United Arab Republic, the union between Egypt and Syria, which brings up a seldom-considered point: If the Arab world DIDN’T have a common enemy, Israel, they they’d be quite happily slaughtering each other.

2008 – Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid-fuel ground-launched vehicle to put a payload into orbit by the RatSat mission. Now commercial launches happen weekly while NASA works on muslim outreach.

2009 – The military junta leading Guinea attacks a protest rally, killing or wounding 1,400 people. Politics as usual in Africa.