At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter as long as the regime still invites the media to the good parties and gives them that ‘insider’ feeling.
Of course if you want to take that Titanic metaphor seriously, then we’d have Bruce Ismay chaining the passengers to the ship as it sinks.
1494 – Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas which divides the New World between the two countries. Brokered by the Pope, the treaty leaves out all those pesky Protestants as well as France, who’d not made it across the Atlantic yet.
1692 – Port Royal, Jamaica, is hit by a catastrophic earthquake; in just three minutes, 1,600 people are killed and 3,000 are seriously injured. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.
1863 – During the French intervention in Mexico, Mexico City is captured by French troops.
1892 – Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the “whites-only” car of a train; he would lose the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. This shows the infallible nature of Supreme Court rulings in that they overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education.
1917 – World War I: Passchendaele, Battle of Messines – Allied ammonal mines underneath German trenches in Mesen Ridge are detonated, killing 10,000 German troops. 500 tons of explosives, and 10,000 deaths is a drop in the bucket. Passchendaele lists over 850 THOUSAND killed, missing and wounded from both sides. Adolf Hitler is a survivor of Passchendaele.
1971 – The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment. Today this apparently does not apply if the writing upsets Muslims. (And what DOESN’T upset Muslims?)
1981 – In yet another brilliantly executed move, the Israeli Air Force destroys Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor during Operation Opera. The facility could have been used to make nuclear weapons.