Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

February 23, 1820: The Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot led by a former soldier named Arthur Thistlewood to murder all British cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool was uncovered: 13 of the plotters were arrested. 5 of them were subsequently hanged and 5 others were transported to Australia...also a death sentence.
(Just kidding, Bally. Err maybe not. I don't know what their fate was afterward)

The Cato Street Conspiracy: Murderous Intent or Police Entrapment?

Shortly afterward the Tory government, led by Lord Liverpool, made things worse by bringing in the “Six Acts”, a series of incredibly oppressive laws designed to keep the people in control. The acts did everything from limiting free speech to giving the courts greater powers to prosecute dissenters and banning free assembly.

It was under this atmosphere that a group known as the Spencean Philanthropists, led by Arthur Thistlewood and his right-hand man George Edwards formed. They had one mission: wipe out the heads of the British leadership and form their own provisional government.

On the evening of Wednesday 23 February 1820, a group of around thirty men gathered on the top floor of an old, abandoned building in Cato Street, London. They had been plotting for months and things had reached a head. It was time to carry out what Thistlewood called the “West End Job”.

Thistlewood’s plan was brutal. One of his men would knock on the front door saying he had a parcel for the homeowner. Half the gang would then force their way inside and bind all the servants, killing them if they fought back.

The other half, led by Thistlewood, would head straight to the dining room. They would then rain down grenades on the assembled ministers, finishing off any survivors with guns and knives.

One of the group, James Ings, who was a retired butcher would then get to work. Working his way around the room, he would cut off the deceased ministers’ heads ready for display on the spikes of Westminster Bridge.

With the government quite literally beheaded Thistlewood then planned on taking the King Street Barracks, the Bishop of London’s house, the Light House barracks in Gray’s Inn Lane, and the Bank of England. With the bloodshed finished the conspirators would then set up shop in Mansion House, founding their provisional government.

It was hoped that as news spread of what they had done London’s downtrodden masses would rise up and help the conspirators. They were convinced that within hours men from all over the nation would flock to join the “Committee of Public Safety.”

It never happened.

The Setup

Instead, many of the Spencean Philanthropists left the building on Cato Street in handcuffs. They had been betrayed by one of their own. Edwards, Thistlewood’s most trusted confidant, had been a police spy from the beginning.

Feb 23, 1945: Ira Hamilton Hayes "Chief Falling Cloud" from the Pima Indigenous people, member of Gila River Indian Community, helped raise the flag over Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima, a defining moment of WWII. In 1949, he portrayed himself raising the flag in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne. Songwriter Peter La Farge wrote a song "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," which became popular nationwide in 1964 after being recorded by Johnny Cash. In 2006, Hayes was portrayed by Adam Beach in the World War II movie Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood.


Sadly, after a night of heavy drinking on January 23–24, 1955, he died of exposure due to the cold and alcohol poisoning. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on February 2, 1955.




Feb 23, 1954: the first mass immunization of schoolchildren with the Salk polio vaccine took place at the Arsenal Elementary School in Lawrenceville (Pittsburgh), PA.


Few practicing pediatricians have seen a case of acute polio, but in the 1950s, polio was one of the most feared diseases in the US. At its peak, in 1952, nearly 60,000 cases of polio were recorded, with over 20,000 people becoming paralyzed and over 3,000 dying of the disease. Poliomyelitis, or polio, is a highly infectious disease caused by the poliovirus, most commonly affecting children under 5 years of age.  It attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis which is often permanent and may include loss of function of the respiratory muscles.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a polio survivor who was left paralyzed from the waist down, founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which held an annual "March of Dimes" fundraiser for polio. It was because of this that the US Mint put FDR on the dime in 1945.

The idea for a polio vaccine had been around since 1910, but it wasn't until 1951 that Dr. Jonas Salk and his team at University of Pittsburgh  developed a method of cultivating polio virus in monkey kidney tissue. These viruses were then inactivated with formalin and used for vaccination.


With the support of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, field trials for the Salk vaccine were conducted on more than 1,800,000 children in the United States in 1954. The next year, the Salk vaccine was reported to be 80-90% effective. However, it turned out that the new vaccine had its risks.


It turns out, in April 1955, over 200,000 people received a vaccine made by Cutter Labs containing a virus that had not been adequately inactivated. These Cutter-produced vaccines resulted in 40,000 cases of polio, paralyzing 200 and killing 10. The first victim was 7 year old, Susan Pierce in Pocatello, Idaho. According to Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia stated, It was "one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic."

Eventually, an oral polio vaccine was created by Dr. Albert Sabin came into use, and Salk's injectable vaccine was phased out. Sabin refused to patent his vaccine, waiving commercial exploitation by big pharma industries, so that the low price would guarantee a more extensive spread of the treatment. However, due to a risk of the oral vaccine also causing polio, an improved form of Salk's vaccine was reintroduced in 1997 and is now the default method. Well, of course it is; no $$$ to be made in the pill.

After the vaccines developed by Salk and Sabin, polio was declared eradicated from the US in 1979, but it still exists globally. However, worldwide vaccination efforts have driven the number of reported cases to less than 50 annually.


So, why were polio cases declining so precipitously prior to widespread use of vaccines?

Widespread distribution of the vaccine started in 1955 (the red line), however approx 650,000 kids received the vaccine as part of the initial clinical trial in early 1954 (before the summer when polio peaks). Before that, it was normal year-to-year variation. Or maybe the human genome developed natural herd immunity.



Feb 23, 1967: Star Trek: A Taste of Armageddon in S1E23 aired. About the crew of the Enterprise visits a planet engaged in a completely computer-simulated war with a neighboring planet, but the casualties, including the Enterprise's crew, are supposed to be real.




UK #1 on this day in 1974: Suzi Quatro - Devil Gate Drive
(some trivia bits included in the vid)




Suzi Q still rockin 2025 down under... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_NWgejYyyc


Feb 23, 1986: The Fifth Missile (1986) based on the 1981 novel, "The Gold Crew" by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson premiered tonight.




Feb 23, 2014: Alice Herz-Sommer, also known as Alice Herz died at age 110 in London, then the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1903, was a Czech-born Israeli classical pianist, music teacher, who survived 2 years in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Amazingly, her son also survived the Nazi camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before emigrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death, and was the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor until Yisrael Kristal was recognized in 2017 at age 113.


The Lady in Number 6, filmed when Herz was 109, documents her life and won an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oxO3M6rAPw

The way Alice dealt with those horrible times is particularly inspiring. She says about the role of music: “I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope … it’s a sort of religion actually. Music is … is God. In difficult times you feel it, especially when you are suffering.” When asked by German journalists if she hated Germans, she replied: “I never hate, and I will never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.”

Alice Herz-Sommer

The song "Dancing Under the Gallows", by Chris While and Julie Matthews, from their 2014 album Who We Are, celebrates the life of Alice Herz-Sommer.


Feb 23, 2015: TIME. A Modern Antiaging Elixir. A drug from dirt and Siamese mice. Mouse UT2598 longevity diet laced with rapamycin traces its existence back to some dirt samples collected in 1964 on an expedition to Easter Island. I gotta get me some of that elixir dirt!


The Cure for Aging


Sunday cruising Reddit for some amusing stuff never disappoints and this one had me rolling outta my chair...


Reddit UFOs