Holy Shit, The Cretaceous Coast!

We've got an election coming up in the United States. It's a midterm, which too many voters tend to think of like a bye week, but it's important. Go vote on November 4.

When you do, think about all the factors beyond your control that lead to the outcome of an election. Sometimes it's something stupid one of the candidates said or did to shoot themselves in the foot. Sometimes it's a wave of backlash against a single policy. And sometimes it's a 100-million-year-old geographic feature that used to be where you live.

I really hope some of you made this exact face.

That's the case for people living on the Cretaceous Coast, anyway. The Cretaceous Coast is, for the most part, a decidedly non-coastal region that stretches from Mississippi to the Carolinas. It's not easily distinguished on a modern topographical map, but in the Cretaceous Period it looked like this:

This looks different from the one at the top of this post because they are millions of years apart

Pretty easy to see right? Well, you can also see it on a county-based electoral map, like this one from 2012:

Seriously though, look back and forth. It's eerie.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Correlation isn't the same as causation, dummy," you sneer smugly as you sip your venti pumpkin spice latte and pat yourself on the back. Ordinarily, I'd agree with you. But not today. Today you're going to spit that pumpkin spice right back out onto your keyboard, you pretentious hipster. Because the Cretaceous Coast is demonstrably responsible for that strip of blue counties in the South.

Here's how it works: between 129 and 65 million years ago, the Cretaceous Coast was, in fact, a coast. That meant it was a hotbed of aquatic life, like plankton. When the water started receding, that life stayed behind and died, leaving a massive deposit of organic material. If you know anything about agriculture (and why wouldn't you in this day and age?), you know that organic material leads to ideal growing conditions for crops.

It can also be used to generate a representative of your race while all the actual humans are systematically destroyed.

Fast forward about 64,999,800 years to the early 1800s, and you've got yourself an agrarian, slave-based economy with nutrient-rich soil and an unprecedented boom in a cash crop (cotton) thanks to new industrial advances. The former Cretaceous Coast was primo real estate for plantation owners because it had some of the most hospitable soil on Earth for the humble cotton plant.

Not so hospitable for human rights, though

Now, I don't know if you were aware of this, but a lot of that cotton was actually picked by slaves. And at the time, chattel slavery was an institution that consisted almost entirely of white owners and black slaves. After the Civil War brought slavery to an end, most of those black slaves stayed where they were. Their families were there, and the only work many of them knew was there as well...and this time, they'd get paid to do it.

Eventually, those former slaves gained the right to vote. Some time later, they gained the actual ability to vote without being turned away at the polls or simply lynched for trying. Certain events transpired and certain party platforms were adopted, too complicated to go into here, that led to black voters almost universally voting for democrats in every election.

And that's how a geologic feature that hasn't been around since the dinosaurs continues to affect the political landscape of the American south to this very day.

Holy Shit.

And seriously, vote.

Holy Shit, Mentoring Biases!

#heforshe because I want my daughter to live in a world without the below scenario

Lately there's been a lot going on in the realm of gender politics. One of the big rallying cries for the Women's Rights movement of late has been the fact that women make about 77 cents for every dollar men make in the work force. One of the big answers to that cry has been that women tend to choose lower-paying jobs, so it's your own fault for not joining the STEM collective.

...and adding your biological and technological distinctiveness to their own

Well, not so fast.

It's generally accepted that, in order to really excel in any discipline, you need a good mentor. Academic mentoring is a time-honored tradition that dates back to probably around the time humans realized that they could use specific noises to pass their knowledge on to another person. It's an essential part of the learning experience.

With this in mind, researchers sent thousands of letters to professors asking if they'd be willing to be a mentor to the letter-writer. These requests were 100% identical, but were signed with different names. In the STEM fields, if the letters were signed by a female-sounding name (or what we'll politely call an "ethnic" name), not only were they less likely to get a willing mentor -- they hardly ever even got an answer.

These mentors are essentially the gatekeepers of lucrative career fields, and the sign they're currently hanging on the gate looks like this:

Wherein Brother Bear is kind of an asshole

This sort of thing has always bothered me, but now that I have a daughter?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Great War!

One hundred years and two days ago, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after a series of political machinations that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Due to a tangled web of alliances and escalations, this declaration of war was followed by at least half a dozen others in less than a week. The next four years tore Continental Europe apart, both figuratively and literally.

This is Beaumont-Hamel after almost a century of healing.

World War I isn't as sexy as its sequel. It's much messier. There's not a clear "bad guy" to hate. I mean, if you're looking for a villain, you're not going to do much better than friggin' Hitler. No such luck in The Great War. The villain there was the war itself. The trenches. The ineffectual artillery barrages and futile charges into certain death. The gas.

Which...you know...fuck that noise.

All told, nearly 18 million men, women, and children died as a direct result of the war. That's close to 2% of the population of the participating countries. Some fared worse than others. Serbia may have lost as much as 18% of their population, which...Jesus, can you imagine what that would do to your country? That's not to mention the specific battles like the Battle of the Somme, where the first day of the fighting cost 20,000 allied lives and resulted in a single mile change in the battle lines.

It was horrific, to say the least. And a lot of people will tell you it started because of a sandwich. Because several assassination attempts failed on the day Franz Ferdinand's death set the wheels in motion, and Gavrilo Princip happened to sit down and ruminate on the day's events with a sandwich from a deli that happened to be exactly where the Archduke's car would stop after the driver got turned around. Rest assured, though, that the sandwich had nothing to do with it.

It wasn't a coincidence. Princip went there not to ruminate, but because he suspected that the motorcade would come that way. Aside from that, the bare fact is (and I can't believe I find it necessary to explain this) sandwiches don't cause world wars. Not even a little bit. World Wars are caused by tangled webs of diplomacy, mass escalation at crises, and overconfident world leaders whose only experience with war is in fighting a vastly technologically inferior foe.

Which was this whole other thing

If it wasn't Franz Ferdinand, it probably would have been someone else. Germany, France, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary were positively itching for a fight. Germany was once the voice of reason. Otto von Bismark kept the whole thing together more or less by sheer force of will for quite some time. But then he was sacked, and the world began its inexorable march toward a preview of Armageddon. And no, I don't mean the campy oil industry wet dream film.

After the Great War came and went, nothing would ever be the same. My pet example of the effects of World War I is Dadaism. The avant-garde art movement was born of a complete rejection of everything in civilization up to that point, because that's what got us into this mess. Realism, reason, and logic were thrown out the window, and artists embraced the absurd. Because when you're dealing with constant explosions, fruitless sacrifices, and gas that melts your face and lungs, what else are you going to embrace?

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, John D. Rockefeller!

Let's talk about wealth. You know how we like to use the phrase "filthy rich?" Well, if wealth is filth, then John D. Rockefeller could single-handedly destroy Captain Planet by the sheer weight of his putrescence.

Though to be fair, Hitler almost destroyed him with a rude glance.

The man was moneyed. Big time. You think you have a wealthy relative? Your cousin or uncle who started a business and owns a McMansion? Pah. Plebe. Rockefeller could buy most small cities if he had been so inclined. He could have swooped in on his hometown of Cleveland, for example, and bought every single building within the city limits. Probably. I didn't look that up, it just seemed right. Sue me.

You think Bill Gates has wealth? Well, he does. He is currently the richest man on the planet, valued at over 72 Billion Dollars. That's after he gave much of his fortune away to charity. But adjusted for inflation, Bill Gates did not have as much money as John D. Rockefeller. Not by a loooooooooooong shot. Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller was worth about 665 Billion Dollars. More than NINE TIMES as much as Bill Gates.

Sorry, William.

You know how Occupy Wall Street took "We are the 99 percent" as their rallying cry? The "1%" in the time of Rockefeller...was Rockefeller. He was the sole member of the top 1% of wealth-holders in America. In fact, since he personally controlled 1.53% of the GDP of the United States, he could have legitimately claimed to be both a part of the 1% and joined in the chant, "We are the 99%." Because he was both.

To the great benefit of society, Rockefeller poured a massive amount of money back where it was needed through charitable giving. He was, in many ways, the founder of modern philanthropy. There's a good reason you hear the name Rockefeller fairly often, whether it's related to medicine, the arts, or education. His money played a key role in the establishment of as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Vassar, as well as a number of historically black colleges. In his early days, he was a Lincoln-supporter and a die-hard abolitionist.

Of course, on the other hand, he was also a die-hard capitalist, which meant crushing his competition underfoot when they didn't measure up and leaving them destitute. That's business, to be sure, but there weren't as many protections against monopolies back then. Rockefeller was one of the classic Robber Barons of the 19th Century who, intentionally or not, set about establishing a new type of aristocracy through their control of the economy. Anyone who ended up starving, they argued, was simply a victim of evolution. They called it Social Darwinism, and it was based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of the works of Charles Darwin.

Come on, guys, I said natural selection.

A number of new regulations and New Deals came along that would help to mitigate the control of the Robber Barons and give the middle class a stronger ground to stand on, but my personal favorite was a proposal (watered down before passing and later repealed) called the Wealth Tax Act. If it had been made into a law, it would have charged a staggering 79% tax on the top earners in America. The threshold for this tax bracket, though, was high. So high, in fact, that it would effectively be levied only to a single person. They could have just called it the John D. Rockefeller Tax.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Oil!

Oil!

That's right, oil. Black gold. Texas tea. A number of other metaphors, not all of which are featured in the introduction of The Beverly Hillbillies.

Though I don't personally see the use in a Clampett-less oil metaphor.

More specifically, petroleum, which is one of those pesky words that mix their etymological roots. It comes from the Greek word petra (stone) and the the Latin word oleum (oil). At least it's not as bad as the scientific name for swordfish (Xiphias gladius. Greek and Latin for sword sword. Come on, science. It's like you're not even trying.)

More to the point, petroleum has been a part of human society for at least 4,000 years, when it was used in its semi-solid state (asphalt) to build the walls and towers of Babylon. In 1847, oil got its big break, like a young, diamond-in-the-rough musician impressing a talent agent at a dive bar with her moxie and soothing, soulful voice. Except instead of a talent agent, it was a Glaswegian chemist named James Young.

With a remarkably bitchin' dwarf beard.

And instead of moxie and vocals, it was petroleum's ability to turn into kerosene that piqued Young's interest. From there, it was a meteoric rise to world superstardom. Especially when gasoline was invented a few decades later.

Suddenly, petroleum became one of the most vital natural resources of all time. Like all precious resources, it moved nations to violence. Ever wonder why Japan was being such a dick in 1941 with the whole surprise attack thing? Well, the U.S. wasn't too happy about their expansion, so we cut off their supply of sweet, sweet oil.

Around the same time, Hitler went on an ill-fated vacation into Russia. He talked a big talk about living space and the evils of Communism and Slavic people, but I'm pretty sure those plump Caucasus Oil Fields had something to do with it as well.

Oh, and hey, remember how the U.S. has been involved to some extent in every major conflict of the Middle East for the past century or so? I wonder what that could be all about. Well, it starts with a dinosaur and a bunch of rock (nature's extremely slow juicer)...

Mmm. Fossily.

Except WAIT.

No.

It doesn't.

There's been an abundance of dead dinosaur jokes concerning oil lately, and I want to dispel that myth here and now. It's important to remember that just because everything we know about dinosaurs was gleaned from fossils doesn't mean that all fossils are dinosaurs. It especially doesn't mean that "fossil fuels" are dinosaurs.

The weird thing is, fossil fuels are organic matter. Petroleum is essentially made of algae and bacteria, buried under sedimentary rock and heated over millions of years by geothermal energy. The millions of years thing is a problem. In 1965, new oil discovery reached its peak. In the 1980s, oil production began to outpace oil discovery. By many estimates, peak oil has either already occurred or is expected in the very near future.

It's not gonna go back up.

That's a very, very bad thing. I mean, on the plus side we'd have to worry about climate change a little bit less. On the downside, though...we'd pretty much be looking at a thorough, worldwide economic collapse. Petroleum is in everything. On top of being the linchpin of the transportation industry, it is a key ingredient in plastic. Try to go a single day without using something that is plastic. If you're reading this on a computer, you probably already failed that challenge. If you're reading it on something that is not a computer, I'll probably have an idea for my next topic.

With that in mind, it might be time to consider investing a little bit more in alternative energy. Because oil, a foundational pillar of the global economy, is starting to crack.

Unless, that is, we can replicate a process that takes millions of years and do it in a few minutes. Which is apparently not out of the question.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Emperor Norton!

Joshua Abraham Norton was an English-born, South African-raised immigrant to the United States. He gained citizenship and took up residence in San Francisco, where he made a terrible decision to invest in a rice shipment with his inherited fortune. After the price of rice plummeted, he lost all his properties and declared bankruptcy.

Norton challenged the company with which he invested, claiming that they misled him about the quality of the rice. The California Supreme Court ultimately ruled against him, creating a deep-seated dissatisfaction within the fiery passion-pit of his belly. Like so many Facebook users today, Joshua Norton decided to express his displeasure with empty spectacles.

Which are a thing, I guess.

At least we hope that was his idea, because it would be a little bit disturbing if he actually believed that he could legitimately declare himself "Emperor of these United States."

Like so many modern-day secessionist petitioners (and unlike the very real secessionist Confederacy that began two years later), Norton expressed his political dissent with a powerful act of almost whimsical ignorance. The strange part, though, is that it sort of caught on.

Norton went around to all the local newspapers in San Francisco to hand deliver a letter, which read:

At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of S. F., Cal., declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Feb. next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity. 

—NORTON I, Emperor of the United States.

The papers printed it, because why wouldn't you? No one had done anything so ridiculous before, and readers were eating that shit up.

Emperor Norton didn't just declare his reign and then let it go, either. He issued edicts ranging from abolishing both Congress and the Democratic and Republican parties to the criminalization of the colloquial San Francisco name, "Frisco." He even decided on a whim to add "Protector of Mexico" to his title.

It was here. This is where you heard the word "Frisco." From ICP. I'm sorry.

It got to the point where, despite being destitute, Emperor Norton was treated like royalty. Literally. He had an entourage. People paid deference to him. And not just people: high-end restaurants set tables aside for him on permanent reserve. They put plaques on his table to commemorate his visits. Theaters could guarantee improved ticket sales simply by reserving a balcony seat for the Emperor. He issued currency, and local businesses honored it. I mean...what?

Here's what's really crazy: he wouldn't have made that bad of an emperor, all things considered. Some of his proclamations were incredibly visionary and insightful. There are factions to this day who want to rename the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to the Emperor Norton Bridge, because it was his idea first. The most they've accomplished so far is a plaque commemorating his role in the inception of the bridge.

Pictured: An actual goddamn plaque on an actual goddamn bridge.

During a riot against Chinese immigrants, Norton stepped out into the street, blocking the rioters from their prey, and recited the Lord's Prayer over and over again until the rioters realized that murdering people because of their race is kind of uncool and decided to go home. Around that same time he demanded that the international community establish a League of Nations similar to the actual League of Nations that would be created about 30 years later. Part of that decree called for an end to all hostilities between religions. We still haven't nailed that one down yet.

In January of 1880, Emperor Joshua Norton I collapsed in the street and died before an ambulance could reach him. The next day, San Francisco was in mourning. Obituaries solemnly expressed their grief. Plans for his funeral were modest at best, but the city's populace stepped in and produced a lavish ceremony worthy of his title. It is estimated that about 30,000 people, about 13% of the population of San Francisco at the time, attended.

From the ashes of financial ruin and political outrage, Joshua Norton rose to the honorary status of United States Emperor. He is unique in American History for that. Others have imitated him, but never with anywhere near his success. He was penniless, almost a vagrant, and simultaneously, he was royalty.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Hot Coffee!

When you read the words "frivolous lawsuit," there are two cases that will immediately leap to your mind. In both examples, you're probably wrong.

First, there's the one your cousin told you about, where the guy sued a homeowner for injuries sustained while attempting to rob his home. This one is easy. It's a damn lie, is all. No such case exists, and any similar ones were either dismissed out of hand or easily won by the defense.

The case your cousin was thinking about was actually a fictional one from the movie Liar, Liar, in which Jim Carrey's secretary relates the legend as though it were a fact to underscore the film's underlying thesis that lawyers are sometimes assholes.

Who's the liar liar now, Greta?

The second is the one where a lady sued McDonald's for a bunch of money and won because she spilled hot coffee on herself and got burned. That one is true. You just haven't heard the full story.

The story you usually hear -- the one that begs us all to consider tort reform -- is that some lady tried to drive around town while holding hot coffee in her lap and, surprise, she got some superficial burns. Because of some ambulance chasing hack of a lawyer (the story continues), she got a huge payout based on the lack of warning labels, and that's why we need warning labels for obviously dangerous things.

When will the government learn?

The first and possibly most important bullshit stain on that story is the extent of the injuries. We aren't talking superficial burns that she whined about and wore extra bandages to milk in court. Stella Liebeck, the 79-year-old plaintiff in the case, suffered severe, third-degree burns on 6 percent of her skin. She had lesser burns on 16% of her skin. Keep in mind that a third-degree burn less than one percent of your skin will send your ass straight to intensive care.

 If that's not enough, the most severe burns were on her knees, thighs, buttocks, and groin. If you named all the worst places on your body to get third-degree burns, a couple of those are bound to be in the top 5.

Number one, of course, is the ego.

 Liebeck spent 8 days in the hospital for skin grafts and follow-up care, during which she lost 20% of her body weight, ending up at a morbidly lean 83 pounds. After that, she spent two years receiving medical treatment related to the incident.

There is no justifiable description of this case that could suggest she was milking the injuries. They were honestly horrific, and you're lucky I'm in too good a mood to dig up the images of them.

Very, very lucky.

The second blow to the already fragile "frivolous lawsuit" characterization is the fact that Liebeck wasn't driving. She wasn't even in her own car. She was with her grandson, who had pulled over so she could put cream and sugar into her coffee. The car had no cup holders, which is how she ended up holding the cup in the worst possible spilling position.

Finally, the things that ultimately made McDonald's liable in the incident were the fact that the corporate policy on coffee was to keep it at a scorching 190 °F -- a temperature that will cause third-degree burns within 2 seconds of contact -- and the fact that the cup designs were flimsy and prone to lid malfunction. In fact, this was not the first burn-related lawsuit McDonald's had faced. They settled all the previous ones out of court.

At least they encouraged a modicum of environmental consciousness.

The company's defense was that customers were expected to order coffee from the drive-thru and let it cool while they traveled, drinking it once they arrived at their destination. It would have been a compelling argument if their own research hadn't revealed that almost all drive-thru customers started drinking their coffee immediately after buying it. The fact that the company openly admitted that they didn't share the extent of the burn risk with their customers certainly didn't help. Nor did the fact that they had already turned down a settlement offer for $20,000 in medical costs.

So Stella Liebeck won. The jury slapped McDonald's with a multimillion dollar fine to cover both Liebeck's medical expenses and punitive damages. The judge lowered the payout, and McDonald's decided not to appeal when they were able to negotiate a settlement for an undisclosed sum less than $600,000.

There are examples of people abusing the legal system, but this wasn't one of them. Even if the case would have been struck down on appeal, it wasn't nearly as black-and-white as the legends make it out to be.

Also, most of the time people try to abuse the legal system for financial gain, their cases are dismissed before reaching a trial. And when they're not, they're usually shot down in court. Because for all its faults, the legal system actually kind of works.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Great Mississippi Flood!

Remember when Katrina hit New Orleans, and everyone talked about how it was the biggest natural, social, economic, and political disaster to ever be caused by the weather?

Well, it wasn't.

It didn't even end this guy's career.

That dubious honor belongs to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The Great Flood actually had its origins in 1926, when an unusually high volume of summer rain started testing the capacity of levees all along the Mississippi. By September, tributaries in Iowa and Kansas were ready to burst from their cages. By Christmas, the water level of the tributary Cumberland River had already reached 56.2 feet in Nashville, a record that still hasn't been topped.

Not even during this monstrosity

Finally, in the Spring of 1927, the levees started to break in earnest. 27,000 square miles of land along the river was devastated by the ensuing floods. That's almost the size of South Carolina. The flood hit areas of Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.

The damage clocked in at over $400 million, and 246 people lost their lives. In some areas, the flooding carried the force and twice the water volume of Niagara Falls. At its widest extent, the Mississippi grew to a staggering 60 miles, which is more than twice the size of the freaking Amazon at its greatest extent. During the wet season.

Take a close look at the map. It's big.

Politically speaking, the hardest hit area was New Orleans. State officials in Louisiana made some difficult and terrible decisions to protect the city. Decisions that involved literally blowing up nearby levees and intentionally flooding the Parishes of St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Then it got even messier.

Helpful.

The people of St. Bernard and Plaquemines were understandably a little miffed about having their homes destroyed by elected officials. That annoyance would later turn to downright anger when it turned out that the effort was entirely unnecessary anyway, and New Orleans had already been spared. Natural breaches in other levees relieved pressure on the levees around New Orleans, so their involuntary sacrifice was in vain.

Then it gets even messier.

At the time, most citizens of St. Bernard and Plaquemines were focusing on the whole "not drowning" part of daily life rather than the "whose fault is this" part. The government was happy to help with that, so long as you were white. If you were black, you had to wait your turn. Then you had to spend some time in a refugee camp with the kind of hospitality you would expect from House Frey.

Heh.

Then you would never, ever receive a dime of promised federal aid. And you'd be forced at gunpoint to rebuild levees. For some reason, "forced to work" and "not receiving a dime" sounds familiar in this context.

It was kind of shitty.

So the Republican Party sprang into action. They were in power at the time, and then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover had his eye on the White House for 1928. By promising a major effort for reform and the introduction of civil rights legislation, he was able to keep the story somewhat sub rosa. After he was elected, he weaseled his way out of it and started the grand tradition of the Republican Party losing the black vote -- a tradition which continues to this day.


The aftermath of the flood in the black community is also considered one of the main catalysts for the Great Migration, which eventually saw over 6 million black people pack up their shit and get the hell out of Dixie. It was one of the biggest internal demographic shifts in U.S. History, and it was more or less caused by the rain.


Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the Cadaver Synod!

Pope Stephen VI had a problem. Well, his sponsors had a problem. Stephen's predecessor (not his immediate predecessor, who had a William Henry Harrison-like truncated reign) was both fairly popular and not a huge fan of the current Holy Roman Emperor. Pope Formosus, in his time, actually invited rivals of the Emperor to invade Italy and seize Rome for themselves.

As you might imagine, this made the folks in charge (House Spoleto) a little bit unhappy. Having reaffirmed their claim on Rome by giving up any claim to the rest of Italy, they were finally in a position where they could get back at Formosus. Unfortunately for them, he had died in 896, and it was 897. They wanted to hold a trial and strip him of his title, but he was already dead. What were the Spoletos to do?

If you answered, "Dig up the old Pope's remains, dress him up in his old vestments, and put him on trial anyway," congratulations! You're just as batshit insane as old Pope Steve and company, who did exactly that.

Clint Eastwood later performed a misunderstood stage adaptation of the event at the Republican National Convention.

It's hard not to think that the whole ordeal happened just to give me the surreal pleasure of writing these words: Pope Stephen dug up Pope Formosus' body and had it placed on the witness chair. He asked the corpse such leading questions as, "When you were bishop of Porto, why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?" A deacon loyal to the (living) Pope provided the departed Pope's answers, which were presumably something like, "Probably because I'm such a dick."

The ghost of Formosus was found guilty of perjury, moving his bishopric office (which was super bad in canon law), and holding a bishopric before being ordained. His body was ceremoniously stripped of vestments, three fingers of his right hand were removed (the ones used for blessing), and all acts and ordinations he performed were declared null and void. He was then buried in a graveyard for foreigners. Stephen's faction wasn't satisfied with that, so they dug him back up a short while later and haphazardly tossed him into the Tiber River.

Which they presumably then charged with murder.

Unluckily for Stephen, people in the late 9th Century weren't actually all that stupid. They saw the farcical trial for what it was: petty papal politics. They also saw it as horrifically disrespectful of the dead. Not just any dead, either. The dead Pope. God's literal voice on Earth, according to Catholic doctrine. Treating any body with callous disrespect would have been bad. Treating a pope's body led directly to uprising.

Rumors abounded that the body of Formosus washed up on the shores of the Tiber and began performing miracles. Despite having been dead for some time, the Cadaver Synod made him a martyr. A few months later, an uprising led to Pope Stephen VI being deposed, imprisoned, and later strangled to death in jail. Further trials featuring dead bodies were banned in what I hope was called the "Oh My God, I Can't Believe We Have to Specify This" Edict.

"It's Like Having to Specify That You Shouldn't Rape Altar Boys."

Formosus was post-posthumously acquitted and reburied at St. Peter's Basilica, and the results of the trial were declared dumb as hell and thus void. In 904, Pope Sergius III, who served as a judge at the Synod, more or less said "Nuh uh." While he didn't bother digging up the corpse again, he declared the original trial's result to be legitimate, requiring all the clergy ordained by Formosus to go through the process again.

That was pretty much the end of it. A bit of a compromise. A tit for tat, with the tit being "Everyone has to say I was right all along" and the tat being "I won't subject a corpse to another line of questioning."

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Moon Landings!

Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: we put human beings into a small capsule attached to several enormous machines that create aimed and sustained explosions which carried them off of the goddamn planet all the way to the goddamn moon, both of which are in constant motion. They landed and walked on the surface of the moon, then came back home and survived re-entry. We did this six times, and for some reason we haven't even really tried to do it again in over 40 years.

Look at her face. She misses us.

Holy shit.

There is no part of the concept of people walking the surface of the moon that is not profoundly incredible. Literally incredible to a lot of people. Otherwise we wouldn't have the conspiracy theories about it being a hoax. Which are just plain wrong.

Apollo 11, the first manned spacecraft to bring human beings to the moon, had less computing power than a modern graphing calculator. It traveled through 238,900 miles of pure nothing to deposit people onto the lunar surface. Imagine what we could do with the power we have today?

Astronauts could pipe in some tunes!

And have you paid attention to rockets? Do you know what they are? They're pretty much the same thing as missiles. NASA managed to point one of those things at a moving target (albeit a big and predictable one) with enough accuracy and controlled chaos that they could not only fling astronauts to the moon, but do it safely.

Don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke...

Neil Armstrong stepped out of the landing module and he was, by most definitions, an alien. Then he flubbed his line (no really, it was supposed to be "one small step for a man," which makes more sense), planted a flag too close to the landing site, picked up some rocks, and went back to Earth. And they made it. Safely. After knocking over the flag during takeoff. Don't worry, even the ones that weren't knocked over have been bleached white by the untempered radiation of the sun by now.

The real kicker for me, though, is the fact that the United States, the only country to have ever put human beings onto the surface of another celestial body, did so six times within a three year period, then never did it again. The entire time we were at it, the public, half awed by the monumental accomplishment they were witnessing, were clamoring about "more important problems back home." You hear the same argument today.

How is this not worthy of attention?

To which I like to say, "Are you fucking kidding me? Look at that shit. Look at what we did, America. Jesus. The moon. We went there." Saying that we shouldn't try exploring space until we've solved all of the problems on Earth is like saying you shouldn't try to get a job until you've figured out how to stop needing to eat. It's pure bullshit.

And seriously, look at that. It's a man on the moon.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Independence Day!

July 4th is the day when Americans come together and, according to The Simpsons, "Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it." We celebrate it on the 4th of July because we apparently don't really know what independence means.

Is it the moment the treaty is signed that ends the Revolution in our favor?

You can almost smell their haughty reluctance as they sign away the colonies.

Certainly not! That's September 3rd, 1783. That's a good seven years after we claim our country was born, and as far as we're concerned, September 3rd this year is just another Tuesday

Of course, we all know that July 4th, 1776 was when America voted for Independence. That's the moment, right? That's when we decided that this whole Revolutionary War was for keepsies, and screw the British. Because before that, many of the founding fathers actually wanted representation rather than full independence.

Well, not quite. I mean, that's all true, except that the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence on July 2nd (which is the date John Adams wanted as Independence Day). Thomas Jefferson was chosen to write the document that would officially announce the decision, and on July 4th, he presented one of several drafts to the Congress, who chose it for its florid prose and its proclamation that all men were created equal.

Then everyone signed it and had a beer and shot fireworks.

HA! Right. First of all, they didn't finish signing it until November. Second, remember that thing called slavery? That was still around in America back then, and some people were mighty uncomfortable about that "equality" bit in the draft. So why did they unanimously vote to adopt it?

Because it was fucking hot outside, and there were so many goddamned flies and mosquitoes that everyone wanted to get this freedom thing over with and go home. So after much bickering about who gets what kind of freedom, the less progressive delegates finally just gave up and saved their racism for the Articles of Confederation and Constitution, where they would find a way to both legally define human beings as sub-human and count them as population for the purposes of representation.

Which was just...super uncool.

But still. There it was.

This is a big deal.

 "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." One of the most important written phrases in the history of language, and certainly one of the defining phrases of the past 250 years. It's been used as a rallying cry for social progress by everyone from freedom fighters to the civil rights and gay rights movements.

It's an immortal declaration, and at it's core it means that nothing, not even the majority rule of a democracy, can take away your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It means that no form of government has the right to take those things away from you, and if they try, "it is [your] right, it is [your] duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for [your] future security."

And but for the heat and some flies, it may have ended up in an abandoned draft.

Holy shit.