Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

March 19, 1831: First(?) documented bank heist in U.S. history, when burglars steal $245,000 (1831 value) from the City Bank (now Citibank) on Wall Street, using a set of copied keys. $5000 REWARD offered!

The theft is regarded as one of the first bank heists in U.S. history. Most of the money was recovered. The amount stolen would come to over $9.1 million in 2026 USD currency. I have no idea how Saturday Evening Post (2013 article) came up with $52 million.


Initial reports variously reported the names of the culprits as Edward Smith, Edward Jones, James Honeyman and James Murray. A modern source, drawing on period newspapers, identifies the thieves as James Honeyman and William J. Murray. Both were captured, convicted, and sentenced to five years in Sing Sing Prison.


America’s (Not Quite) First Bank Robbery


March 19, 1959: Operation Argus, a top secret experiment was revealed by the New York Times (with the quiet assent of the Eisenhower administration)



Behold, Burning The Sky with a shorter version, excerpted/adapted from his 2018 book, How the World Learned About the Pentagon’s Sky-High Nuclear Testing.




Operation Argus was conceived and executed in just five months in order to complete it before a multilateral moratorium on atmospheric nuclear testing began on October 31, 1958 (so-called good-faith gesture accompanied by the start of US-UK-Soviet negotiations on a nuclear test ban).

Physicists didn't really begin to grasp the nature and ensuing problem of EMP until a series of high-altitude tests over the Pacific Ocean three years later, in 1962.


"The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open."
— David Halberstam, The Fifties

“Once, when Senator Taft called for a reexamination of American foreign policy, Acheson retorted that the idea reminded him of a farmer “who goes out every morning and pulls up his crops to see how they have done during the night.”
― David Halberstam, The Fifties

“One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.”
― David Halberstam, The Fifties




Uranium Rush board game from 1955. Game board, Geiger counter, and pieces included. With its oversized Geiger counter and promises of getting rich, Uranium Rush packaged the dangerous and exploitative uranium industry as family-friendly entertainment. Geiger counter produces a buzzing sound if uranium is discovered.The information to the left of the cactus on the top of the box indicates that this was an "Educator Approved" Prestige Toy.




March 19, 1928: Patrick McGoohan, American-born Irish actor, writer, and director (The Prisoner, Secret Agent/ Danger Man), is born in Queens, New York. (but grew up in Ireland and England).

The Prisoner episodes in which No. 6, after torturous effort, believes he's escaped The Village, only to discover it was a demoralizing psyop. Obama voters who expected healthcare and no more wars or Trump voters who expected a drained swamp and no more wars should check them out.




March 19-25, 1966: "What’s So Bad About Television".
March 19, 1979: the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) launched.
March 19, 1984: Inside His World
March 19, 1990: NEWSWEEK, always on the cutting edge...




40-year-old Brittany Hudson's crime spree started with $10 million in fake Amazon invoices and ended with a forged Federal judge's signature.

Secret Service posted these pics. I'm guessing the Lamborghini & others will be going up for auction this summer. Even if she gets a lenient judge she's looking at 20 years to life. Each wire fraud count has a 20 year max prison term, 30 years if it involves a financial institution.


Jury convicts owner of Amazon delivery business for fraud schemes and forging federal judge’s signature


SSR-eyes stay undefeated...


These fraudsters need to be sent to a slave labor camp for 10 years.


In honor of Markwayne Mullin...