Yes, we'd have a population of less than half, without so many of those irritating complications like China, India, Africa, poor people and the sickly. The concept of mega-cities like Tokyo and Mexico City just couldn't happen.

It's like sticking equal parts of good and bad into a blender, then trying to name the result.

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating

1521 ~ Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines, where he was killed by natives the following month.

1736 ~ Death of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian composer.

1789 ~ Birthday of Georg Ohm, German physicist and developer of Ohm's Law.

1850 ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel "The Scarlet Letter" was first published.

1898 ~ Death of Aubrey Beardsley, British Artist.

1926 ~ Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts.

1968 ~ The My Lai Massacre was carried out by U.S. troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley.

1978 ~ Aldo Moro was kidnapped by left-wing urban guerrillas in Italy and was later killed by his captors.

1984 ~ William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, was kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists; he died in captivity.

1988 ~ The Kurdish town of Halabjah in Iraq was attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents killing 5,000.

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Eudaimonia

180 ~ Death of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor.

461 ~ Death of Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland.

1673 ~ Jacques Marquette & Louis Jolliet began their exploration of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi river.

1834 ~ Birthday of Gottlieb Daimler, Engineer & Inventor.

1845 ~ The rubber band was patented by Stephen Perry.

1919 ~ Birthday of Nat King Cole, Singer. Oh! what a singer!

1942 ~ Gen. Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to become supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific theater during World War II.

1959 ~ Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled Tibet and traveled to India.

1973 ~ The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph Burst of Joy was taken.

1979 ~ Birthday of Stormy Daniels, Porn actress.

Feastdays & Holidays

Catholicism ~ Feast day of St Patrick: a public holiday in Ireland and Montserrat, widely celebrated in North America.

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Eudaimonia

1844 ~ Birthday of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Composer.

1850 ~ American Express was founded by Henry Wells & William Fargo.

1869 ~ Birthday of Neville Chamberlain, UK PM.

1962 ~ France and Algeria signed an agreement ending the Algerian War.

1965 ~ Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov became the first man to walk in space.

1978 ~ Death of Leigh Brackett, Science Fiction author.

1990 ~ In the largest art theft in U.S. history, 12 paintings, collectively worth more than $100 million, were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

1992 ~ Microsoft shipped Windows 3.1.

1992 ~ South Africa voted to end apartheid.

2003 ~ Death of Adam Osborne, British born computer pioneer.

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Eudaimonia

1687 ~ Explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle, searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River, was murdered.

1813 ~ Birthday of David Livingstone, Missionary & Explorer.

1906 ~ Birthday of Adolf Eichmann, Nazi official.

1915 ~ The U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles for the second time.

1932 ~ Sydney Harbor Bridge opened.

1950 ~ Death of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Author.

1953 ~ The Academy Awards were first televised.

1982 ~ Argentines landed on South Georgia Island, precipitating the Falklands War.

1987 ~ Death of Louis-Victor de Broglie, Physicist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1929.

2008 ~ Death of Arthur C. Clarke, Science Fiction author.

Feastdays & Holidays

The swallows return to Mission San Juan Capistrano in California.

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Eudaimonia

43 B.C. ~ Birthday of Ovid, Roman poet.

1727 ~ Death of Sir Isaac Newton, Physicist.

1815 ~ Napoleon returned to Paris after escaping from Elba, beginning his "Hundred Days" rule.

1852 ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published.

1916 ~ Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity.

1928 ~ Birthday of Fred Rogers, children's television host.

1969 ~ John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

1995 ~ A sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway killed 12 and wounded 1,300 people.

2000 ~ Former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, once known as H. Rap Brown, was captured following a shootout in Atlanta.

2003 ~ U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq from Kuwait.

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Eudaimonia

1685 ~ Birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer.

1839 ~ Birthday of Modest Mussorgsky, Russian composer.

1867 ~ Birthday of Florenz Ziegfeld, Broadway Impresario.

1945 ~ UK troops liberated Mandalay, Burma.

1960 ~ Police fired on demonstrators in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 and wounding 180.

1963 ~ The federal penitentiary on an island in San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz, was closed.

1965 ~ Rev. King led 3,200 people on the start of a civil rights march from Selma To Montgomery, Alabama.

1980 ~ President Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

1999 ~ Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones became the first men to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon.

2000 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the government lacked authority to regulate tobacco as an addictive drug.

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Eudaimonia

1683 ~ Anne Hutchinson was expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent.

1687 ~ Death of Jean Baptiste Lully, French Composer.

1832 ~ Death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Writer & Poet.

1882 ~ U.S. Congress outlawed polygamy.

1923 ~ Birthday of Marcel Marceau, Mime.

1963 ~ The British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, denied improper involvement with the model Christine Keeler.

1963 ~ The Beatles' first album, Please Please Me, was released in the UK.

1972 ~ The Equal Rights Amendment To The U.S. Constitution was sent to the states for ratification.

1993 ~ The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips.

2004 ~ Death (by Israeli Hellfire missile) of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and spiritual leader of Hamas.

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Eudaimonia

"Death (by Israeli Hellfire missile) of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, co-founder and spiritual leader of Hamas."

I wonder if there was intentional irony in the Hamas leader dying in a blaze of hellfire?

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating

يموت ملؤها الكره للإنسان!

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Eudaimonia

1749 ~ Birthday of Pierre Simon de Laplace, Mathematician & Astronomer.

1775 ~ Patrick Henry delivered his famous speech - "give me liberty or give me death" in Williamsburg, Virginia.

1857 ~ Elisha Otis's first elevator was installed at 488 Broadway, New York City.

1882 ~ Birthday of Emmy Noether, Mathematician. Now there's a lady who had a tough row to hoe!

1912 ~ Birthday of Wernher von Braun, Engineer.

1923 ~ Birthday of Roger Bannister, athlete, first man to run the "Miracle Mile"

1983 ~ President Ronald Reagan made his initial proposal to develop technology to intercept missiles.

1989 ~ Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced cold fusion at the University of Utah.

1989 ~ A 1,000-foot diameter Near-Earth asteroid (4581 Asclepius) missed the Earth by 400,000 miles.

2001 ~ The Russian space station Mir was de-orbited, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

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Eudaimonia

1874 ~ Birthday of Harry Houdini, Magician.

1882 ~ Robert Koch announced the discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis.

1882 ~ Death of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet.

1893 ~ Birthday of Walter Baade, Astronomer.

1905 ~ Death of Jules Verne, Author.

1944 ~ In occupied Rome, the Nazis executed more than 300 civilians in reprisal for an attack by Italian partisans the day before that killed 32 German soldiers.

1965 ~ Ranger 9 broadcast live TV as it crashed-landed onto the Moon.

1980 ~ Archbishop Óscar Romero was killed by gunmen while celebrating Mass in San Salvador.

1989 ~ The Exxon Valdez spilled 270,000 barrels of oil after running aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound.

1999 ~ NATO launched air strikes against Yugoslavia. This marked the first time NATO attacked a sovereign nation.

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Eudaimonia

1634 ~ The first settlers arrived in Maryland (led by Lord Baltimore).

1807 ~ The Slave Trade Act became law, abolishing slavery in the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

1867 ~ Birthday of Arturo Toscanini, Conductor.

1918 ~ Death of Claude Debussy, Composer.

1942 ~ Birthday of Aretha Franklin, Singer.

1957 ~ The European Economic Community was established (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).

1975 ~ King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot to death by a nephew with a history of mental illness.

1978 ~ Birthday of Teanna Kai, Porn actress.

1992 ~ Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returned to Earth from the Mir space station after a 10-month stay, during which his native country, the Soviet Union, ceased to exist.

1998 ~ President Clinton acknowledged during his Africa tour that "we did not act quickly enough" to stop the slaughter of one million Rwandans four years earlier.

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Eudaimonia

1827 ~ Death of Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer.

1892 ~ Death of Walt Whitman, Poet.

1904 ~ Birthday of Joseph Campbell, Author & Mythologist.

1964 ~ The musical “Funny Girl”, starring Barbra Streisand, opened on Broadway.

1979 ~ Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in Washington, DC.

1983 ~ Death of Anthony Blunt, British art historian and spy.

1981 ~ The "Gang of Four", Roy Jenkins, David Owen, William Rodgers and Shirley Williams, founded the Social Democratic Party.

1997 ~ The 39 Heaven's Gate cult suicides.

1999 ~ The Melissa worm infected e-mail systems around the world.

2005 ~ Death of James Callaghan, UK Prime Minister.

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Eudaimonia

1836 ~ Antonio López de Santa Anna ordered the Mexican army to kill about 400 Texans at Goliad, Texas.

1845 ~ Birthday of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, physicist, awarded the first Nobel Prize in physics.

1863 ~ Birthday of Sir Henry Royce, automobile pioneer.

1871 ~ First international rugby football match, England v. Scotland, played in Edinburgh at Raeburn Place.

1886 ~ Birthday of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Architect.

1958 ~ Nikita Khrushchev became Premier of the USSR.

1968 ~ Death of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

1972 ~ Death of M. C. Escher, Dutch artist.

1977 ~ A KLM Boeing 747, attempting to take off, crashed into a Pan Am 747 on the Canary Island of Tenerife, killing 582 people.

2002 ~ Passover Massacre: A suicide bomber killed 28 people in Netanya, Israel.

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Eudaimonia