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 and the present administration 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 troublesome.

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 present 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.