1747 – The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital. “I caught it from a toilet seat…”

1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Robert E. Lee becomes general-in-chief.

1915 – World War I: Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare in the Battle of Bolimów against Russia. I can personally vouch for the effects of a good lungful of chlorine upon one’s dedication and clarity of thought.

1929 – The Soviet Union exiles Leon Trotsky. Today he’d get a department chair at any of several universities.

1930 – 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.

1943 – World War II: German Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, followed 2 days later by the remainder of his Sixth Army, ending one of the war’s fiercest battles. 91,000 Germans are taken prisoner. Only 5000 make it back to Germany after the war, some being held until 1955.

1953 – A North Sea flood causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands. FEMA slow to respond. Bush widely blamed.

1958 – Explorer program: Explorer 1 – The first successful launch of an American satellite into orbit. Also first documented use of transistors in space. Verifies the existence of the Van Allen Belt

1961 – Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 2 – Ham the Chimp travels into outer space.

1995 – President Bill Clinton authorizes a $20 billion loan to Mexico to stabilize its economy. Yeah, they’re plenty stable. Now, so are we. And who bails US out?

2010 – Dances with Smurfs Avatar became the first film to gross over $2 billion worldwide.

2011 – As global warming tightens its grip, a winter storm hits North America for the second time in the same month, causing $1.8 billion in damages across the United States and Canada and killing 24 people.

1649 – King Charles I of England is beheaded. When the people finally decide change is needed, even your title and castle WALLS won’t keep you safe.

1661 – Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, is ritually executed more than two years after his death, on the 12th anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed, sort of like President Trump’s impeachment trial or removing the statues and graves of Confederate veterans.

1703 – The Forty-seven ronin, under the command of Oishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master. Be careful when you mess with somebody who creates loyalty in his followers.

1800 – US population: 5,308,483; Black population 1,002,037 (18.9%)

1930 – The Politburo of the Soviet Union orders the extermination of the Kulaks. Just breaking a few million eggs to achieve that perfect omelet that socialism is famous for. That might have been as many as six million deaths, according to some reports.

1933 – Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. He’s charismatic, and a great speaker…

1945 – The Wilhelm Gustloff, overfilled with German refugees, sinks in the Baltic Sea after being torpedoed by a Soviet submarine, leading to the deadliest maritime disaster in known history, killing roughly 9,400 people, of which 5,000 were children being repatriated to Germany ahead of Soviet advances.

1945 – World War II: Raid at Cabanatuan: 126 American Rangers and Filipino resistance liberate 500 prisoners from the Cabanatuan POW camp.

1966 – Global warming grips the South as -27 degrees F (-33 C) is recorded in New Market, Alabama and -19 degrees F (-28 C), in Corinth, Mississippi, both state records.

1968 – Vietnam War: The Tet Offensive begins when Viet Cong forces launch a series of surprise attacks in South Vietnam. US and South Vietnamese forces beat back the VC and NVA, reducing them to an nonviable field force in the days to come, but are in turn whipped by the American media and the “Peace” movement in the US, who WANTED Communism in Vietnam, who paint the battle as an American loss.

1834 – US President Andrew Jackson orders first use of federal soldiers to suppress a labor dispute. Obama used willing shills in labor (SEIU, anyone?) labor to suppress EVERYBODY.

1845 – “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is published in the New York Evening Mirror. It’s his first published work.

1886 – Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile. First polar bear gets stranded on an ice floe.

1916 – World War I: Paris is first bombed by German zeppelins. War Zeppelins! I was born out of my time!

1944 – USS Missouri, the last battleship commissioned by the US Navy is launched. Still an impressive bit of technology 60-odd 70-odd years later…

1980 – The Rubik’s Cube makes its international debut at the Ideal Toy Corp. in Earl’s Court, London. I have a 2x2x2 and a 3x3x3 on my desk at work.

1985 – Final recording session of We Are The World, by the supergroup USA for Africa, providing a way for media superstar millionaires living in 20,000 square foot mansions to show us how much they care about starving children in Africa, and we, their worshipful public, should care, too. Send money!

2002 – In his State of the Union Address, United States President George W. Bush describes “regimes that sponsor terror” as an Axis of Evil, in which he includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Now it’s Schumer and Pelosi and Her Extraordinary Filthiness, Felonia von Pantsuit. And The Feeler and The Kneeler.

2009– Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich is removed from office following his conviction on several corruption charges, including the alleged solicitation of personal benefit in exchange for an appointment to the United States Senate as a replacement for then-U.S. president-elect Barack Obama.

1521 – The Diet of Worms begins, lasting until May 25, providing teen boy history students with chuckles ever since. Look at it. It’s a First Amendment case, and Martin Luther is being persecuted for saying things contrary to the powers of the day.

1871 – Franco-Prussian War: Siege of Paris ends in French defeat and an armistice. Yawwwwnnnnnn! However, the siege did encourage innovation in the Parisian diet.

A Latin Quarter menu contemporary with the siege reads in part:

* Consommé de cheval au millet. (horse soup)
* Brochettes de foie de chien à la maître d’hôtel. (dog-liver sandwich)
* Emincé de rable de chat. Sauce mayonnaise. (cat spread)
* Epaules et filets de chien braisés. Sauce aux tomates. (dog chops in tomato sauce)
* Civet de chat aux champignons. (cat with mushrooms)
* Côtelettes de chien aux petits pois. (dog with peas)
* Salamis de rats. Sauce Robert. (rats and gravy)
* Gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Sauce poivrade. (dog, rats, and gravy)
* Begonias au jus. (flowers)
* Plum-pudding au rhum et à la Moelle de Cheval. (horse)

Subsequent menus were printed in German.

1896 – Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent, becomes the first person to be convicted of speeding. He was fined one shilling, plus costs, for speeding at 8 mph (13 km/h), thereby exceeding the contemporary speed limit of 2 mph (3.2 km/h). Today, speeding tickets are a major factor in many communities’ Policing For Profit programs. A couple hundred for the community, a couple hundred for the courts. Officer Friendly gets shiny new toys to play with and the driver has years of increased insurance rates.

1915 – An act of the U.S. Congress creates the United States Coast Guard from Life Saving and Revenue Cutter Services. Happy birthday, Coasties!

1915 – US President Woodrow Wilson refuses to prohibit immigration of illiterates. Today the NEA and Department of Education makes sure they STAY that way and ACORN and the dimmocrat “community organizers” make sure they VOTE.

1981 – Ronald Reagan lifts Jimmuh ‘Doofus’ Carter’s remaining domestic petroleum price and allocation controls in the United States helping to end the 1979 energy crisis and begin the 1980s oil glut.

1985 – Slacktivist “Supergroup” USA for Africa (United Support of Artists for Africa) records the hit single We Are the World, to help raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief. Africa IMMEDIATELY stops starving, Right?!?!? No, dumba**, YOU’RE NOT the world, you’re a bunch of narcissistic, deluded pri*ks with exaggerated senses of self-importance, and most thinking people understand that. The huge majority of the ‘support’ raised goes to enrich the oligarchs in Africa who brought about the starvation in the first place.

1986 – Space Shuttle program: STS-51-L mission (Space Shuttle Challenger disaster) – Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart after liftoff killing all seven astronauts onboard. Lives lost on the pathway to the stars…

1991 – Dictator Siad Barre flees Somalia ending 22 year rule. He’s that last ruler of Somalia. It is now a lawless land ruled by survival of the fittest (sort of like an American inner city). Any “government” claimed is there to assuage the consciences of international busybodies.

1343 – Pope Clement VI issues the papal bull Unigenitus to justify the power of the pope and the use of indulgences. “You’re making up crap as you go along, huh?!?” Nearly 200 years later, Martin Luther would protest this.

1756 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is born.

1785 – The University of Georgia is founded, the first public university in the United States. Yeah, those people in the South, are, like, sooo backward, yahknow…

1880 – Thomas Edison patents electric incandescent lamp. 2012 – Congress revokes the patent.

1888 – In Washington, D.C., the National Geographic Society is founded.

1915 – US Marines occupy Haiti. Today in Haiti this is remembered as the “Golden Age”.

1924 – Lenin placed in Mausoleum in Red Square. Communism denies God and provides its own objects to worship.

1944 – World War II: The 900-day Siege of Leningrad is lifted. The occupants were reduced to cannibalism and eating bread made of flour mixed with sawdust, or in today’s marketing parlance, “fiber added”.

1945 – World War II: The Red Army arrives at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

1967 – Apollo program: Apollo 1 – Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of the spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center.

1967 – Cold War: The Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom sign the Outer Space Treaty in Washington, D.C., banning deployment of nuclear weapons in space, and limiting the usage of the Moon and other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes. Yeah, right…

1973 – Paris Peace Accords officially end the Vietnam War. Colonel William Nolde falls, becoming the conflict’s last recorded American combat casualty. “Peace” comes after North Vietnam invades and subdues South Vietnam, overrunning Saigon in April of 1975. A million Vietnamese died after we “gave peace a chance”. Thousands of others fled the communists, many of them ending up in America, where they ADD to our society by NOT becoming a welfare-fed underclass.

1980 – Through cooperation between the U.S. and Canadian governments, six American diplomats secretly escape hostilities in Iran in the culmination of the Canadian caper. The rest will stay there in Iran until we get rid of the bumbling buffoon Jimmy Carter and get a REAL American president.

1984 – Pop singer Michael Jackson suffers second and third degree burns on his scalp during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in the Shrine Auditorium. Around the same time, comedian Richard Pryor sets himself alight while free-basing cocaine, giving rise to what one of my co-workers sensitively named “The Ignited Negro College Fund, because a mind is a terrible thing to baste.”

1996 – Colonel Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara deposes the first democratically elected president of Niger, Mahamane Ousmane, in a military coup. That’s more democracy than most of sub-Saharan Africa sees.

2010 – Apple announces the iPad.

2011 – Arab Spring: The Yemeni Revolution begins as over 16,000 protestors demonstrate in Sana’a. What Yemen has today is MUCH better, right? Obama’s foreign policy was almost literally ‘the bomb’.

1340 – King Edward III of England is declared King of France. Hell! By the year 2100 the doorman at Madame Gazonga’s House of Ill Repute in New Orleans will have been declared “King of France”. The Germans appear to have tired of the exercise… Or not…

1784 – Ben Franklin expresses unhappiness over the eagle as America’s symbol. Ben wanted the wild turkey. Today I’d tender a suggestion that it be the blood-sucking tick.

1788 – For my Aussie friends: The British First Fleet, led by Arthur Phillip, sails into Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) to establish Sydney, the first permanent European settlement on the continent. Commemorated as Australia Day. Twenty years later, in 1808 – They have the Rum Rebellion, the only successful (albeit short-lived) armed takeover of the government in Australia. That’s a good reason for a rebellion. Actually it was about government rules on what constituted free trade, and that’s a good reason, too. Australia is yet another nation doing quite well with Britain’s cast-offs.

1838 – Tennessee enacts the first prohibition law in the United States. Yeah. Tennessee. Noted for whiskey. You guys just KNOW how this turns out. Nothing like enacting laws you just KNOW are going to be ignored.

1861 – American Civil War: The state of Louisiana secedes from the Union.

1863 – American Civil War: Massachusetts Governor receives permission from Secretary of War to raise a militia organization for men of African descent.

1871 – US income tax, enacted to pay for the War of Northern Aggression (Civil War) is repealed, but it’s such a nifty idea that politicians bring it back later.

1885 – Troops loyal to The Mahdi conquer Khartoum, killing the Governor-General Charles George Gordon. The Mahdi is a delusional muslim who’s convinced thousands of other delusional muslims that he’s the Messiah. The claim sort of fell apart when he later died of typhus.

1905 – The Cullinan Diamond is found at the Premier Mine near Pretoria in South Africa. It’s 3,106.75 carats, or a pound and a third.

1907 – The Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) Mk III is officially introduced into British Military Service, and remains the oldest military rifle still in official use. It was still being made and issued in the 1980’s.

1907 – First federal corrupt election practices law passed. Dimmocrat lawyers go into overtime looking for loopholes, give up, and just make sure they try cases in front of dimmocrat judges and juries filled with people too stupid to get out of jury duty.

1911 – Glenn H. Curtiss flies the first successful American seaplane.

1918 – Finnish Civil War: A group of Red Guards hangs a red lantern atop the tower of Helsinki Workers’ Hall to symbolically mark the start of the war. Waiting to see a lantern here…

1924 – Saint Petersburg, Russia, is renamed Leningrad. Now it’s back to Saint Petersburg. Soon it will be Putinopolis.

1934 – German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact is signed, promising no attacks for ten years. This is called “diplomacy”. It works oh so well when you sign a treaty with a dictator…

1942 – World War II: The first United States forces arrive in Europe, landing in Northern Ireland. “Overpaid, oversexed, and over here” as the Brits said.

1945 – World War II: Audie Murphy in action that will later win him the Medal of Honor. He’s another man Michael Moore would call a coward.

1950 – India promulgates its constitution forming a republic and Rajendra Prasad is sworn in as its first president. Republic Day.

1980 – Israel and Egypt establish diplomatic relations. Egypt just as well do that, Israel having masterfully kicked Egyptian butt severely three times since 1948. Kinda makes up for that ’slavery’ thing…

1992 – Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) went into effect. If you are a trial lawyer, you celebrate this day.

1998 – Lewinsky scandal: On American television, U.S. President Bill Clinton says “I want to say one thing to the American people I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”. Actually, they got the context wrong, He was telling Monica Lewinsky that he did not have sex with “that woman”, referring to Hillary Clinton.

2004 – A whale explodes in the town of Tainan, Taiwan. A build-up of gas in the decomposing sperm whale is suspected of causing the explosion.

2004 – President Hamid Karzai signs the new constitution of Afghanistan. That country smells like Taiwan’s whale. Slow Joe gave the Taliban the opportunity for their own version of governance.

41 AD – After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate. They were caught off guard by the sudden death of Caligula and didn’t know what to do about a competent candidate after the reign of Caligula, marked by scandal and licentiousness.

750 AD – In the Battle of the Zab, the Abbasid rebels defeat the Umayyad Caliphate, leading to overthrow of the dynasty. With no infidels to slaughter, Muslims will quite happily hack away at each other.

1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn. She’s already pregnant, but he’s willing to fight the Church to marry her.

1585 – Walter Raleigh is knighted, shortly after renaming North America region “Virginia”, in honor of Elizabeth I, Queen of England, sometimes referred to as the “Virgin Queen”. If you’re going to kiss ass, leave a hickey.

1759 – Tipping my hat to my friends of Scottish ancestry, Robert Burns, Scottish poet, is born.

1825 – First US engineering college opens, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Troy, NY

E to the x, dy, dx,
E to the x, dx.
Secant, tangent, cosine, sine,
3.14159.
Square root, cube root, log base e,
Cheers for Rensselaer Poly T.

1858 – The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn becomes a popular wedding recessional after it is played on this day at the marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia. And that’s how that got started… Today many weddings are ostentatious displays of “Princess For A Day” and dad’s still paying off the bills when the divorce is final and dear daughter is two bikers and a rap star down the road to self-discovery.

1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco. I remember when a long distance phone call was a big deal: expensive, and usually a portent of some dire and drastic event.

1918 – The Ukrainian people declare independence from Bolshevik Russia. Russia says “no way”. Millions of Ukrainians die, but since it’s communists doing the killing, it’s like no big deal because everybody knows you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and communists are, like, good people who are trying to make the world a better place. And now Ukraine’s sitting in Russian crosshairs again.

1919 – The League of Nations is founded. With all the functionality of tits on a lizard…

1942 – World War II: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom. Like an ant climbing an elephant’s leg with rape on its mind.

1950 – 73 degrees F (23 C) is the highest temperature ever recorded in Cleveland in January. Environmentalists riot and trash SUV’s.

1971 – Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda’s president. Becomes the archtype for African dictators, wearing improbable “military” uniforms and terrorizing his people, until the top slot is taken over by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who tends to favor expensive tailored business suits.

1996 – Billy Bailey becomes the last person to be hanged in the USA. We still have the technology.

2011 – The first wave of the Egyptian revolution begins in Egypt, with a series of street demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labor strikes, and violent clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and throughout other cities in Egypt. The Left is sure that this is going to usher in a new golden age of Egypt. The ‘revolution’ is co-opted by previously organized fundamentalist Muslims almost immediately. “But it’s like “ARAB SPRING”, man! Freedom ‘n’ stuff, yaknow…” It’s part of the triumphant collusion between the international acumen of Barack Hussein Obama who was raised Muslim and his equally competent Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who’s all up into Muslim stuff herself since she’s bedding Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s squeeze.