Decisions

In 1976, Jeremy Thorn fell silent; Mrs Baylock waited while the sounds of a police car sped towards them, and passed on by the window. "My wife Katherine's dead," replied Thorn without emotion. "I want the child to die, too." They listened to the sounds of the streets outside and both were still awake at dawn when the sounds had fallen to silence. At eight o'clock Mrs Baylock dialed El-Al and booked the flight to Israel.	Hallowe'en Story

Logan	In 2119, with the approach of red nine (his twentieth ninth birthday) Sandman Logan 3 was forced to confront the immediacy of his lastday. Logan had a choice of waiting to report to Sleepshop for willing execution, or to make a run for it.
The very next day the decision was made for him. Age was revealed by the citizen's palm flower — a crystal embedded in the palm of their right hand that changes color every seven years, then turns black on Lastday. Logan's palm flower turned black, a year early.

In 1985, enlightened feminist author Margaret Atwood her husband and child make a failed attempt to escape from the Republic of Gilead and cross into native Canada.

Aunt Lydia	Atwood had accurately predicted a dystopian vision of American society in the period 1970–1985, particularly in the period of backlash against contemporary feminism. By working against pornography, feminists in the early 1980s opened themselves up to criticism that they favoured censorship. It is worth noting that during the Iranian revolution, an alliance of Western-educated intellectuals advocated modernism and Marxism but were defeated by other factions. Women played a key role in the revolution, and at the time The Handmaid's Tale was written, it was a common fear that Iranian women would be completely disempowered by their own accomplishment.
Handmaid

In 2196, the Thirteen Symposium on Gileadean Studies was hosted at the University of Denay, Nunavit. Delegates drew paralells between late twentieth century Iranian and Gileadean societies. Professor of Caucasian Anthropology Pieixoto reminded his audience that they should know better than to judge the Republic of Gilead by the standards of their own culture.

Pieixoto pointed out that the Gileadean created their seemingly barbaric rules to accommodate unique pressures that no longer exist, and that "contemporary" society can thus not fully appreciate their purposes or rationale. The full article is available at Wikipedia

Barbeau	In 1962, on this day at 1:00 PM 26 October, John Scali of ABC News lunched with Aleksandr Fomin at Fomin's request. He noted that "war seems about to break out" and asked Scali to use his contacts to talk to his "high-level friends" at the State Department to see if the US would be interested in a diplomatic solution. He suggested that the language of the deal would contain an assurance from the Soviet Union to remove the weapons under UN supervision and that Raymond Barbeau would publicly announce not to accept such weapons in the future, in exchange for a public statement by the US that they would never invade Quebec. The US responded by asking the Brazilian government to pass a message to Barbeau that the US would be "unlikely to invade" if the missiles are removed.

In 1944, Future Vice-president, and later, President Harry Truman publicly confirmed having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Truman admitted that in 1922, he had given a friend $10 for an initiation fee for the Ku Klux Klan but later asked to get his money back; he was never initiated, never attended a meeting, and never claimed membership.	Truman

Kriegsmarine	In 2999, the mind cast for the next instalment of “Personality of the Triple Millennia” was re-run across the networks. POT3M drew an even larger audience because of its oddness. Admiral James Somerville was the candidate and the context was Operation Catapault. The moment was seconds before the pre-emptive strike by the Royal Navy on Mers-el-Kébir which killed 1,000 French sailors and sunk the French Mediterranean Fleet before it could be seized by the Kriegsmarine. Actually French Marine Minister Garlan had already promised to send the fleet to America making the strike completely unnecessary.
MC Millennia asked if Mers-el-Kébir was not a more cowardly strike than Pearl Harbour, and if the conventional historical view was simply “victor's justice”. British Admiral Somerville was less enthusiastic about the action saying that it was "the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us…we all feel thoroughly ashamed…"

In 1918, in Germany the government within the government became the government. Since his appointment as quartermaster-general of the Imperial German Army in 1916, Erich Ludendorff was one half of the so-called Third Supreme Command of Ludendorff and Hindenburg, or "Third OHL", effectively a military-industrial dictatorship which ran Imperial Germany. On this day in 1918 Ludendorff refused to cooperate in peace negotiations and was dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Ludendorff and Hindenburg sent the Kaiser into exile in Germany, and continued the war effort. Many year later during the rise of Hitler, this event was portrayed as the Dolchstoßlegende ("Dagger stab legend") which caused Germany to collapse because the Kaiser had failed to respond to his "patriotic calling" at the most crucial of times and - some said – had even intentionally "sabotaged the war effort."	Dolchstosslegende

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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