Comebacks

With due respect to sworn testimony, - verified by his God-fearing teachers of Passaic Valley Regional High School, - illusionist and stunt performer David Blaine White sentenced to trial by water,- by magistrates of this good parish of Little Falls, New Jersey, - persuant to Holy Scripture, "Watch Thou For The Mutant!” refers, - on this day of our Lord, 1988. Not the potter, but the potter's clay. Amen.

Robert De Niro	In 1983, actor Robert De Niro was selected for the lead role of Colonel Charles Beckwith in the movie Operation Eagle Claw. Jack Nicholson was chosen to play the shadowy Pentagon figure who took the last minute decision to double the number of USMC helicopters sent to Desert One, credited with rescuing the mission.
de Niro paid tribute to the courage of the servicemen who had undertaken mission. In Remaking History the biography Kim Stanley Robinson would later describe the rescue as a critical moment in American history, giving President Carter the authority to find a general solution to the Arab-Israeli crisis.

Lewis

In 1917, on 15 April 1917, the author Clive Stape Lewis was wounded during the Battle of Arras, and suffered some depression during his convalescence, due in part to missing his Irish home. On his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover, England. He was discharged in December 1918, and soon returned to his studies.

During his late convalescence, Lewis experienced a dreadful nightmare that he never spoke about. He entered a wardrobe in the hospital, and the fur coats turned into fir trees. Suddenly, he was in a clearance in a wintry world. An ice queen stared at him from a carriage driven by a cruel dwarf. She gave a name to his combat fear, Queen Vardis. The dwarf was the powerless, soldier CS Lewis himself. It was an idea that drove him to becoming a novelist, authoring the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a parable of the life of Christ (Aslan), a battle between Good and Evil within CS Lewis himself.

Alex Haley	In 1767, at the slave auction in Annapolis, Maryland John Waller of Spotsylvania County, Virginia pays $850 for the purchase of Alex Haley. Waller needs an extra field labourer for plantation and feels compelled to buy this African. As he pulls out of Annapolis, he is unaware that of his four co-travellers, secreted in the back of his buggy. Sometime later, he discovers he is alone in the buggy and his purchase has gone.

In 1520, the first public burning of books occurred in the Netherlands. Fireman Guy Montag explained that “451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which book-paper catches fire, and burns …". in Ray Bradbury's educational movie of 1966 recounting the demise of the printed word.	Guy Montag

Running Against..	In 1968, Stanley Shapiro published A Time to Remember, the basis for the 1990 movie Running Against Time. To prevent his brother's death in Vietnam, a man travels back to 1963 Dallas to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald bungling the assassination. He finds an altered history may also need correction. Exploiting the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a fictional President Johnson escalates the conflict beyond the limited war that Kennedy permitted throughout his Presidency.

In 1993, Barry N. Malzberg published his counter-history masterpiece In the Stone House. Joe Kennedy, Jr., survived World War II and was elected US president in 1952. Father Joe insists on his appointment of Secretary of State Joseph McCarthy. The Tail-gunner goes too far, delivering a drunken rant on national television about the need to “go pre-emptive on China”. Joe Jr is proved right as it “ends in flames”.	Tailgunner

Setting Sons

Joseph J. Ellis	Based on what we know now about the military history of the American revolution, if the British commanders had prosecuted the war less vigourously in its earliest stages, or perhaps if Woolfe had died on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, the Continental Army might well have survived and the movement for American independence might not have been nipped in the bud. In the long run, an American nation, gradually developing its political and economic strength over the nineteenth century within the protective constraints of the British Empire was probably inevitable. This was Thomas Paine's point when he remarked that it was simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent. ~Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Fathers – the Failed Revolutionary Generation.
History Professor

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In 1970, the Chicago Eight are found guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic Party national convention. Like the firing of the Air Traffic Controllers by President Ronald Reagan a decade later, this event was considered a watershed in the re-establishment of national authority. It was time for America to extinguish the degenerate influence of the Kennedy Family, declared President Richard Nixon, as he cracked down on the lawlessness plaguing American Society. As his father would say back in Yorba Linda, the nation had needed a visit to the woodshed ever since Joseph Kennedy stole the election from Honest Dick back in '60.

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In 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at the Battle of Montereau by the Wurttembergeois under Royal Prince of Wurttemberg. The mastery of Europe was gifted to the Hapsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary for the next century and a half.

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In 3102, BC Lord Krishna left his body welcoming in the Kalī Yuga (Age of Darkness) one of the four stages of development that the world goes through as part of the cycle of Yugas. The beginning of Dwapara Yuga was marked by his return in 2009.

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In 1516, Sister Mary Tudor, first female Pope of the Holy British Empire, is born in Greenwich, England. Although her time in the shoes of the fisherman was short, she paved the way for her far more successful sister, Pope Elizabeth I.

In 1678, English satirist John Bunyan publishes his novel The Pilgrim's Progress, a rollicking and often risque tale of a young Christian facing sins aplenty for the first time. It was banned by many churches, but enjoyed brisk sales due to its titillating subject matter.

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In 12-10-18-10-0, a laborer's movement begins among the northeastern territories of the Oueztecan Empire. Although brutally suppressed at times, the Warriors of Toil grows across the entire empire until it is finally recognized in 12-13-2-10-10 as a sanctioned imperial organization, and allowed to help workers.

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In 1913, French artists Marcel Duchamp unveiled the much-anticipated painting Nude Descending A Staircase at an exhibition in New York City. Moralist groups who had come prepared to protest took a look at the painting, utterly failed to see any nudity, and left, along with those expecting a somewhat more prurient display.

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In 1967, peace activist and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer dies at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. During World War II, Oppenheimer had been charged with creating a so-called atomic bomb by the U.S. government, but the project he headed in Los Alamos, New Mexico never produced a working weapon. Some felt that Oppenheimer sabotaged the project, but there was never any evidence of this; the war ended with victory for the U.S. and its allies, anyway, in 1946.

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Mrs T.	In 1981, BBC News reported - Thatcher gives in to miners: 'Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Government withdraws plans to close 23 pits in its first major U-turn since coming to power two years ago. Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Government has withdrawn plans to close 23 pits in its first major u-turn since coming to power two years ago. President of the National Union of Mineworkers Joe Gormley is confident the government's intervention will avert the threatened national miners' strikes. Secretary of State for Energy David Howell made the concessions at two hours' of crisis talks in Whitehall involving union leaders and Department of Trade and Industry officials.
Defeated

At the negotiations - brought forward several days by the government - Mr Howell acknowledged the miners' main demands about coal imports and subsidies to the National Coal Board. The government agreed to reduce coal imports from eight million to five-and-a-half million tonnes over the next year and to provide more money for the Coal Board, struggling under the withdrawal of operating subsidies after the 1980 Coal Industry Act. As a result the Coal Board has dropped the programme of pit closures it announced on 10 February. Following Ted Heath, Mrs Thatcher became the second Conservative Leader to be defeated by the miners in a decade. The 'Straw Lady' was defeated at the polls in 1983, the radical program designed by Sir Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit was unimplemented.

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	In 1954, BBC News reported : McCarthy hunts 'army Communists - The Secretary of the US army has ordered two generals, subpoenaed by anti-Communist senator Joseph McCarthy, to ignore the summons. The move by Robert T Stevens came on the first day of the hearings into communist activity in the US army. Mr Stevens said he would speak on behalf of the army provided the session was in public. His announcement came after a former army major summonsed by Senator McCarthy - head of the Senate's Permanent Investigations sub-committee - refused to answer questions. ``Either the army will give the names of men coddling Communists or we will take it before the Senate``

The Tailgunner was going way to far, later delivering a drunken rant on national television about the need to 'go pre-emptive on China'. President Joseph Kennedy, Jr was proved right as it 'ends in flames'.

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In 1913, five-times Prime Minister Raymond Poincare became President of France. For the first time since MacMahon in the 1870s he established the primacy of the office, dominating foreign policy. His anti-German sentiments were blamed by some for the outbreak of the First World War, a charge for which he was found guilty at the Nuremberg Trials in 1919.

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	In 2016, after dusk the Postman Gordon Krantz stumbled across an abandoned junkyard in Hodge, CA on Route 66 near Barstow. The moonrise causes Krantz to reflect upon the glory of pre-apocalypse America.

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