Rocket To Russia

What we aimed at the Soviet Union from Turkey.What we could've nuked their asses w/ from Vandenberg A.F.B.1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
1962 Kennedy announces blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis
1962 JFK announces a blockade of Cuba

220 yrs. ago:

The first parachute jump of note is made by André-Jacques Garnerin from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris.

Leonardo da Vinci conceived the idea of the parachute in his writings, and the Frenchman Louis-Sebastien Lenormand fashioned a kind of parachute out of two umbrellas and jumped from a tree in 1783, but André-Jacques Garnerin was the first to design and test parachutes capable of slowing a man’s fall from a high altitude.

Garnerin first conceived of the possibility of using air resistance to slow an individual’s fall from a high altitude while a prisoner during the French Revolution. Although he never employed a parachute to escape from the high ramparts of the Hungarian prison where he spent three years, Garnerin never lost interest in the concept of the parachute. In 1797, he completed his first parachute, a canopy 23 feet in diameter and attached to a basket with suspension lines.

On October 22, 1797, Garnerin attached the parachute to a hydrogen balloon and ascended to an altitude of 3,200 feet. He then clambered into the basket and severed the parachute from the balloon. As he failed to include an air vent at the top of the prototype, Garnerin oscillated wildly in his descent, but he landed shaken but unhurt half a mile from the balloon’s takeoff site. In 1799, Garnerin’s wife, Jeanne-Genevieve, became the first female parachutist. In 1802, Garnerin made a spectacular jump from 8,000 feet during an exhibition in England. He died in a balloon accident in 1823 while preparing to test a new parachute.

110 yrs. ago:
1907 Ringling Brothers buys Barnum & Bailey. [Where are they now?]
99 yrs. ago:
1918 The cities of Baltimore and Washington run out of coffins during the "Spanish Influenza" epidemic. [Don't think I'm not begging the natural world for another, but much larger, pandemic.]
79 yrs. ago in "Just how fucking foolish can how many corporate entities be?":
1938 Chester Carlson invents the photocopier. He tries to sell the machine to IBM, RCA, Kodak and others, but they see no use for a gadget that makes nothing but copies.

And in the "These stupid sons-a-bitches never learn, do they?" category,

1954 As a result of the Geneva accords granting Communist control over North Vietnam, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorizes a crash program to train the South Vietnamese Army.

Three yrs. later, to the day:

U.S. military personnel suffer their first casualties in the war when 13 Americans are wounded in three terroristanti-imperialist bombings of Military Assistance Advisory Group and U.S. Information Service installations in Saigon. The rising tide of guerrilla activity in South Vietnam reached an estimated 30 terrorist incidents by the end of the year and at least 75 local officials were assassinated or kidnapped in the last quarter of 1957.

And today, across the world, it has yet to fucking stop. Every President from Eisenhower to Obama has been a pin-dicked loser afraid to appear weak by not slaughtering people on the other side of the planet. And now, the current occupier of the Executive Mansion, an incompetent cretin as well as a pin-dick whose fear of appearing weak is compounded by his cowardice & wilful ignorance. Now ask me why I'm in a permanent state of murderous rage.

[HISTORYNET/HISTORY]