Welcome to December 2

France gets something they've long lacked on this date in 1804.  An emperor!  Of their very own!  The fact that he's French only by a stroke of luck doesn't matter.  At any rate, the Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte (or Bonaparte to those who use the French spelling rather than the Italian) crowns himself, which was pretty controversial too- pretty much all other monarchs would be crowned by the pope or another religious person, as a sign that the crown came thru God.  Not our boy- he grabbed the crown fair and square, and wasn't gonna give anyone else any claim to playing a role.  So he didn't.  Oh, by the way, this took place at Notre Dame-the Cathedral, not the school.

And the very next year, guess who beats the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz?  It was a big, bloody, and (temporarily) decisive battle- but alas, any battle during those years had only a temporary impact, until the losers could get together the money and bodies to try again.

1823 is an important date in US history.  President Monroe declares a doctrine that any attempts by Europe to intervene in North or South American affairs (or take any land) would be A Really Bad Thing, and the US would be compelled to intervene.  He thought long and hard about it, and decided to call it The Monroe Doctrine.  There's no proof that anyone cared that much (except for the overall outcome), but Britain found it useful to them, so they supported it.  The fact that they already had most of the good stuff, and thus were essentially exempt played no role, I'm sure.  Oh, Monroe also said that the US was going to be neutral in European wars.  Again, everybody shrugged in boredom, for at least another 90 years, at which point Europe wondered what the hell was keeping the US from violating its own Doctrine.  Guess we don't care about that part anymore.  Or, since the Chinese, (arguably) Russians, and who knows who else are nibbling at the borders of the part about non-intervention in America, I guess nobody cares about that part either.

Ooh, does this sound familiar?  The president goes before Congress on this date and asks for money to "stimulate" the economy. To use the favorite term of Bloomberg News, it "unexpectedly" doesn't solve the problem overnight.  By the way, this was in 1930, so it takes quite a while for the results of the "stimulus" to kick in.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?

In 1961, Fidel Castro announces that he's a Marxist and that Cuba is going to be another communist paradise. He goes on to add that henceforth, the sun is gonna rise in the east and set in the west; and that water will from that date on, be "wet".

The "environmental protection agency" goes into action on this date in 1970.  It's possible that it did some good once, but eventually it becomes about as useful as the departments of energy and education.  Which is to say that it's useful mostly to get rid of billions of pesky, unneeded dollars.

That's about it for today.