PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR JULY 18

On this day in 1870, the First Vatican Council decrees the dogma of papal infallibility. That means the Pope can never be wrong. Imagine that.

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On this day in 1872, Britain introduces voting by secret ballot. Up until then, Brits had been using a complicated system that involved shaving candidates' names into stray dogs, then hurling the mutts into the Thames, where they were scooped up by raft-going hooligans who would call out the results while Freemasons in full apron'd regalia wandered the docksides recorded the tally. The hooligans would then kill, gut, cook and then eat the dogs, saving the penis for the Queen, of course.

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On this day in 1925, some Austrian dude by the name of Adolf Hitler publishes his personal manifesto: Mein Kampf. It barely makes a dent on the Top 10 charts.

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After being denied a permit to fly solo across the Atlantic, aviator Douglas Corrigan changed his official flight plans, declaring his intent to fly across America from New York to California instead. But mere minutes after taking off, Corrigan - who claimed, with a wink and a smile, that his compass was "busted" - doubled back and flew his plane to Ireland, earning himself the nickname "Wrong Way." That's BALLS! He completed his solo trans-Atlantic flight on this day in 1938.

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On this day in 1968, Intel is founded in Santa Clara, California.

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Happy Chappaquiddick Day! It was on this day in 1969 that Senator Ted Kennedy gave the conservative movement a gift that keeps on giving when he flipped an Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge, then swam ashore and spent the night in a hotel, leaving his passenger - campaign volunteer and Kennedy family friend Mary Jo Kopechne - to drown.

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On this day in 1984, sad sack loser-boy James Oliver Huberty walks into a San Ysidro McDonalds and starts shooting at the walls of heart-ache, bang, bang. By the time a police sniper's bullet ends his rampage, Huberty had snuffed out 21 lives.

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On this day in 2003, NBA star Kobe Bryant is charged with anally raping a 19-year old hotel employee, thus putting into motion a series of events that would ultimately lead to the revitalization of several small Central African nations' diamond industries.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR MAY 23

On this day in 1498, friar, preacher, reformer, prophet and heretic Girolamo Savonarola is burned at the stake in Florence, Italy, on the orders of Pope Alexander VI.

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On this day in 1618, four Catholics are thrown out a window in Bohemia, and even though they survive - it was a third floor window and they landed in a pile of horse-shit - it still kicks off the Thirty Years' War. This odd event is referred to as the Second Defenestration of Prague... which means there was a first. Which is weird.

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On this day in 1734, Austrian hypnotist and all-around weirdo Franz Anton Mesmer is born. One of his secrets? Inducing orgasm in female "patients".

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On this day in 1934, American bank robbers-cum-folk heroes Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed by police and killed in Black Lake, Louisiana.

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On this day in 1945, one day after being arrested by British forces, Heinrich Himmler, the closest thing to a High Priest of the Nazi Party and the leader-for-life of the elite S.S. "Schutzstaffel" storm-troopers - commits suicide before he can be questioned.

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On this day in 1958, communist dictator Mao Zedong launches China's Great Leap Forward, trying to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern communist society through the process of rapid industrialization and collectivization. The experiment ended in catastrophe, with an estimated death toll ranging from 18 million to 45 million, although some scholars question these numbers. Regardless, the failure led to Mao being criticized in party conferences, which led him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966, with a whole new slew of fresh terrors being inflicted upon that particularly masochistic population.

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On this day in 1961, the Ford Motor Company puts the finishing touches on a specially modified Lincoln Continental convertible sedan for use by the President of the USA. The jet-black Lincoln, with swing-back suicide doors, is dubbed the SS-100-X. Two and a half years later, John F. Kennedy is shot and killed in that very car, making it perhaps the single most widely-seen automobile in history.

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On this day in 1992, Italy's most prominent anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three body guards are killed by the Corleonesi clan with a half-ton bomb near Capaci, Sicily. His friend and colleague Paolo Borsellino will be assassinated less than 2 months later, making 1992 a turning point in the history of Italian Mafia prosecutions.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR MAY 18

On this day in 1152, King Henry II of England marries Eleanor of Aquitaine, an incredibly fascinating world-historic person in her own right.

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On this day in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte is proclaimed Emperor of the French by the French Senate, which kind of flies in the face of the ideals behind the entire Revolutionary Project, but whatever.

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On this day in 1896, a mass panic on Khodynka Field in Moscow during the festivities of the coronation of Russian Tsar Nicholas II on the day of his 28th birthday results in the deaths of... hold on, can this be right? 1,389 people?! Sheez, that must have been some serious-ass panicking!

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On this day in 1910, the Earth passes through the tail of Halley's Comet. Despite many contemporaneous prophecies to the contrary, life as we know it does not cease to exist right then and there.

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On this day in 1927, 45 second-to-sixth graders are killed and 58 more are wounded when a huge cache of explosives planted by anti-tax activist Andrew Kehoe explodes beneath a school in Bath, Michigan. It took Kehoe a year to plan his atrocity, and months to pack the school full of explosives which he then detonated remotely, herding his victims for maximum carnage, before blowing up his own shrapnel-packed car with himself inside it. He even issued a number of vague threats before doing the dirty deed, but nobody caught on.

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On this day in 1944, the Soviet Union exiles more than 200,000 Tartars from Crimea because they were collaborating with the Nazis. And to think… the only thing the USA did with their Nazi collaborators - Preznit Dubya's grand-daddy being chief among them - was give them a slap on the wrist and hand their descendants the keys to the White House. It's kind of funny, in an utterly fucking disgusting kind of way.

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On this day in 1974, India becomes the sixth nation in world history to explode an atomic bomb... not counting Atlantis.

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On this day in 1980, Mount Saint Helens erupts, gushing forth billions of gallons of volcanic ash, killing between 57 and 65 people (depending who you ask) and blasting away a huge chunk of the mountainside. 

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On this day in 1995, a crystal-meth-addicted, half-psychotic, authority-hating Army vet named Shawn Nelson steals an M60 Patton Tank from a National Guard base in San Diego and goes on a rampage, destroying cars, fire hydrants and other property before being gunned down by police after getting stuck on a median.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR MAY 7

On this day in 1794, French Revolutionary Robespierre proposes that the new state religion of the French First Republic be the Illuminati-inspired Cult of the Supreme Being. It fails to catch on.

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On this day in the year 1824, composer Ludwig von Beethoven's magnificent 9th (and final) Symphony - one of the only world-historic pieces of music - is performed for first time in front of an audience. The vocal section uses Freidrich Schiller's poem Ode To Joy, which is jam-packed with esoteric allusions that are ripe for exploitation as an expression of the beauties and charms of collectivism, which makes its eventual use as the "national anthem" of the European Union both amusing and somewhat troubling. Stanley Kubrick proved that he understood the essential duality of this piece of music - as well as the double-edged nature of genius in general - by highlighting it in an incredibly ironic way in his satirical sf masterpiece Clockwork Orange.

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On this day in 1896, one of the first and most prolific and inventive serial killers of all time is put to death for only a handful of the crimes he committed over a lifetime of almost unbelievable wickedness. His name was Herman Webster Mudgett, alias Doctor Henry Howard Holmes, and he built his own private "Murder Castle" in Chicago during the 1893 World Columbian Exposition - itself an event rife with parapolitical and paracultural over-and-undertones.

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On this day in 1952, the concept of the integrated circuit, also known as the "monolithic integrated circuit" and the "microchip" - the basis for all modern computing technology - is first presented to the public by Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. Culturally, economically and historically, it's a game-changer on pretty much every imaginable level.

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On this day in 1999, the British Antarctic Survey reports that the sky fell by no less than five miles over the preceding forty year period, as the upper limit of the ionosphere - beyond which lies the vacuum of space - collapsed from 190 to 185 miles altitude. Researchers at the time pointed to this startling phenomenon as "an important environmental warning sign," but yer old pal Jerky hasn't heard any more about it since the report was released. What gives?!

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On this day in 2004, in one of the most heinous of many heinous landmarks that we collectively had to endure in the 'naughties, the sadistic and brutal beheading of American businessman Nick Berg is recorded on videotape and released on the Internet for all the world to see. I present to you an editorial that I wrote on the subject of the Berg conspiracy theories, reprinted now at my Useless Eater blog for archival purposes. Also reprinted is one of my best editorials (if I do say so myself), titled The Paradox of Polar Bears. It also touches on Berg's murder, but for much different reasons. I'd suggest you "enjoy", but somehow that just doesn't seem right in this case.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR APRIL 20

On this day in 1939, Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany. Six years later, in 1945, Hitler makes his final trip to the surface of the Fuhrerbunker in order to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth. After returning underground, he would never resurface alive.

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On this day in 1914, the Colorado National Guard and a goon squad hired by the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company march on a tent colony of striking miners and their families. Before the night was through, nineteen people – including eleven children – would be killed in an event that would come to be known as the Ludlow Massacre.

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On this day in 1939, jazz singer Billie Holiday records what many people consider to be the first Civil Rights song, Strange Fruit. Give it a listen; it’s real good.

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On this day in 1968, English politician Enoch Powell makes his controversial “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he takes a giant crap all over the UK’s surging non-White population. Give it a listen; it’s real bad.

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On this day in 1998, the left-wing German terrorist group Red Army Faction, also known as Baader-Meinhof, announces its dissolution after 28 years. Seeing as most of the terrorist attacks attributed to them (and many other left-wing European groups) were actually committed under the aegis of Gladio, a clandestine fascist remnant, they needn't really have bothered. This documentary is a good starting point if you want to understand the truth about the evolution of Western Civilization in the latter half of the 20th century.

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On this day in 1999, psycho-teens Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold live out the revenge fantasy dreams of Doom-playing teenage gun-nut Rammstein fans everywhere when they go on a record-breaking rampage at Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado. They left 13 dead and two dozen seriously wounded in their wake, before turning their guns on themselves. But they had even bigger plans. According to police reports at the time, Eric and Dylan wanted to – get this – hijack a couple jumbo jets, fly them to New York city, and crash them into skyscrapers. Perhaps if they had achieved their goal, 9/11 wouldn't have happened, seeing as no suicide-hijacker worth his salt wants to be thought of as a rip-off artist.

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On this day in 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil well explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning an oil spill that would last for six freaking months. Here is a rundown of all the conspiracy theories that have grown up around this generation-staining ecological holocaust.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR APRIL 16

On this day in the year 73 AD, the Jewish fortress of Masada falls to the Romans after several months of siege... or not. The only thing we really know for sure about this legendary siege and the site on which it is located is that the remains found there - which were given a state funeral with full military honors by the Israeli government in 1982 - mostly consisted of (ahem) pig bones.

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On this day in 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally ingests a small amount of the chemical byproduct known as LSD-25 while working at the Sandoz pharmaceutical research laboratory, thereby discovering its psychoactive properties. Since then, it's been a long strange trip through Nazi/CIA mind-control experiments, the offices of National Review Magazine, and really bad "jam" music.

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Despite the fact that George Orwell had used the term Cold War to describe the simmering tensions between Western and Soviet bloc nations on two previous occasions, popular convention has it that the financier, presidential advisor and One World Government proponent Bernard Baruch coined the term on this day in 1947, in a speech given in South Carolina. Google "The Baruch Plan" for some startling and revelatory reading.

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On this day in 2007, the deadliest killing spree in modern American history takes place at Virginia Tech, when an apocalyptically awkward South Korean student by the name of Seung-Hui Cho -- or was it someone else? -- guns down 32 and injures another 23 before turning the gun on himself. The fact that his sister works for McNeil/Veritas, a company with deep ties to the American intelligence apparatus, is of no interest whatsoever. And the fact that he went to high school with another "deranged lone nut-job" assassin is just one of those crazy coincidences that so often pop up in events of this nature.

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