5 random things I learned this week
- Graham Crackers were invented by Sylvester Graham as part of a vegetarian diet designed to keep people from masturbating. lol wut?
- There is a species of freshwater dolphin that lives in the Ganges River.
- California uses more gasoline than all of China. Also, the US uses more gas per day than the rest of the world combined.
- In 1954, the United States organized a coup d’état that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Guatemala. The reason for the coup: the United Fruit Company, now known as Chiquita Brands International, lobbied the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in response to his land redistribution program.
- In the 2004 presidential election, it is believed that ballot boxes in rural counties in Ohio were tampered with. Evidence that points to this tampering in known as the Connally Anomaly. Robert F. Kennedy wrote about it in this Rolling Stone article:
Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally — a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that’s exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes — a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report — recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts — suggests that ”thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.”(182)Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ”Down-ticket candidates shouldn’t outperform presidential candidates like that,” he says. ”That just doesn’t happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?”
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