On this day in 1680, the first ever American to be killed by a tornado is… um… killed by a tornado. In Massachusetts no less!
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On this day in
1872, a man by the name of
John Blondel takes out a patent on the donut-cutter, thereby ushering in a bold new era of morbidly obese police officers.
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On this day in
1889, the first issue of the
Wall Street Journal is published. For a while, it was a pretty decent conservative journal, but as
this ridiculous interview with cartoon-like WSJ editorial board member
Dorothy Rabinowitz amply illustrates, it has long since lost the plot and gone batshit crazy.
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On this day in
1896, presidential hopeful
William Jennings Bryan gives his infamous "cross of gold" speech at the Democratic national convention. It's still an incredibly powerful piece of oratory.
Read it here.
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On this day in 1932, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches a Depression era low-point of… 41! Ouch.
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On this day in
1937, the nations of
Turkey,
Iran,
Iraq and
Afghanistan sign the
Treaty of Saadabad. And they all lived happily ever after.
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On this day in the year
1990, just past twelve-thirty in the afternoon, all the numbers in the standardized Western calendar and time code fall into absolute numeric sequence… or, in poker terms, a "straight." Here's how it works: 12:34:56, 7/8/90 equals 1234567890! Pretty cool, ain't it?
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On this day in
1996, the Israeli
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies publishes a paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” The paper, whose lead author is the notorious, slug-like neoconservative
Richard Perle, is meant to urge Israel's new PM,
Benjamin Netanyahu, to seek the downfall of Arab states by exploiting the inherent tensions within and among them. The first step? Remove
Saddam Hussein in order to "destabilize the entire Middle East", thus allowing governments in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and other countries to be replaced. Other suggestions include abandoning the Oslo Accords, abandoning the notion of land for peace, and reestablishing a policy of preemptive strikes. The paper also fleshes out a vision that analyst
Craig Unger has called "a secularized version of the theology of the American Christian Right", demanding “the unconditional acceptance of Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension”, and pushing the boundaries even further by using the Bible as grounds for Israeli dominion over all or parts of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and even Saudi Arabia.
This link explains how the ideas in "Clean Break" were ultimately recycled by neocon "intellectuals" at the
Project for a New American Century - PNAC - in their paper "Rebuilding America's Defenses", which controversially surmised that it would take "a new Pearl Harbor" for the nation to accept their proposed reforms... not too long before the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, provided the newly empowered* neoconservative movement with exactly that.
* via the Bush Crime Family's theft of the White House in 2000
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