Greetings people who are looking to avoid work on a Monday. Today I’m avoiding it entirely, because I took the day off. Why? Because I realized that I have something like 360 hours of stored up vacation time and I can’t cash it out, nor can I even donate it to people in my office who might need it. I actually asked about the latter and was told ‘no’ for ‘stupid reason goes here’ but I could donate it to a pool where people I don’t know could use it, or something, but I stopped listening because if I don’t know you you are not getting my vacation time. The result is I will be disappearing on a lot of Fridays and Mondays when the weather’s good.
That said, a mock draft we need and a mock draft you shall have, even if I likely won’t be around much because I’ve got a list of errands to run and things to address that could make a mock draft of its own. ‘Things Horatio Needs To Do That I Will Do For Him’ would be great for me, but probably draw the most limited response of any mock draft in the history of the world.
With that said, (and with the word salad now over 200 words!), this week we’re going to be drafting world-changing events. They can be man-made or natural. They can be acute or chronic. If it happened, and it had a significant effect on the world as we know it today, you can draft it.
Our commissioner is the one and only Sir David Attenborough,
seen here meeting with the DFO branch from the North Atlantic. Sir David’s calm, soothing voice will get us through a series of choices involving volcanoes, plagues, pollution, and, inevitably, a certain failed Austrian painter.
With the first pick I will take the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, a truly bad-ass event that occurred over 250 million years ago, was likely the result of volcanic eruptions in Siberia that basically poisoned everything while also superheating the planet, wiped out 70% of terrestrial vertebrae species, and which will, with any luck, recur sometime between now and November 5, 2024.
Either that or, as suggested in the feature image, that smug bastard Otto the Orange had something to do with it.
The rest of you are on the clock.
Edwin Drake’s 1859 oil well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, which started the modern petroleum industry. The results of this strike absolutely created the modern world and precipitated the momentous geo-political events that ensued. It might be the most important single event in the last 1000 years.
Petroleum was known throughout the world for centuries due to natural seepages, and oil drilling was already a thing, as well as refining petroleum into kerosene and other basic useful purposes. “Rock oil” was a sealant, a mortar, and a medicine, provided lighting when soaked in rags on sticks for centuries, and even used as a flammable weapon as far back as the ancient Greeks if not further.
But the Pennsylvania strike was in the right place, with the right crude, at the right time. Pennsylvania crude was known as “light and sweet,” meaning it was rich in the valuable fractions that produced kerosene (then the most valuable fraction) and other light elements that would find great use in the years ahead. The modern refining industry grew centered in Cleveland Ohio, which was a transportation crossroads of railroads, Great Lakes shipping, and close access to the Ohio River and thence the Mississippi. Three competing railroads (New York Central RR, Pennsylvania RR, & Erie RR) all crossed the oil regions and competed for oil shipments. In fact it started an oil boom.
In Cleveland, a company called Standard Oil was formed, headed by John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler, and they would soon dominate the rapidly growing petroleum industry, at one point owning over 90% of the U.S. market, fast dominating the world market, producing and marketing their products with a ruthless efficiency and secretly punishing their competitors that few could keep up and eventually sold out to “The Standard,” increasing its market share even more. In fact, Standard intentionally would not exceed 90% share because they didn’t want to be scrutinized as a monopoly (which eventually they were).
Later, even larger oil fields were discovered in Texas, the Gulf Coast, and California. The United States is still the largest oil producing country in the world, followed by Russia, and then Saudi Arabia.
Mass produced (and pure) Standard kerosene was revolutionary. It was “the new light;” clean, bright, and inexpensive, with new cold blast lanterns (provided cheap or free by Standard) that safely burned kerosene for bright light at night. It changed the way people lived. The invention of the electric light bulb coincides with the massive growth of the internal combustion engine in airplanes and automobiles. Other fractions created the modern chemical and plastics industries. All jet aircraft engines run on kerosene. Everything you do in life, since then a still today, is 100% dependent on petroleum products whether you know it or not.
From 1904 to 1910, the Royal Navy transitioned its ships from coal to oil at the insistence of First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher. The British Empire was the dominant economic superpower for 200 years; this transition would be the first and biggest nail in its coffin. Previously the Royal Navy and the even larger British merchant fleet used sailing ships powered by the wind (free power). Later they used coal, and Wales particularly is rich with high-quality “steaming” coal. Oil was more efficient as a fuel in many many ways, but Britain had no oil, and didn’t want to be dependent on the U.S. (and Standard) or crazy Venezuela. So they set up their own oil company in Persia (now Iran), way far away, vulnerable, and it led to the rise of the Shah, the crazy ayatollahs, and the the oil-sheikdoms in neighboring territories. The Shah kicks out the British, and eventually OPEC is formed, and the Mideast has been at war ever since.
World War II was about oil. Japan needed Indonesian oil after the U.S. embargoed American oil deliveries, and Japan eventually attacked Pearl Harbor to help secure it (they ultimately failed badly). Hitler invaded Russia to get to the oil fields of the Caucasus (and ultimately failed badly). The dominant American auto industry was crippled by the OPEC embargo of the Yom Kippur War. The invasion of Iraq in 2004 was about oil.
TLDR: Everything is about petroleum. Petroleum is power. Power is everything.
Best book resource: “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power” by Daniel Yergin
Best video resource: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power, (1992) a PBS documentary based on the above book
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2hSATHD634&list=PLYkO4hiKyrSRjZLQunIjgCsz4GrpDGPfN
(NOTE: This post is 100% Brick with just a few fact checks. No cut & paste, no AI. I love this shit and could talk about it for hours, despite having never worked in the oil industry. I have split atoms, though.)
Pick of the draft
april 30th, 1945
austrian painter creates a masterpiece using gray matter and crimsons with just one stroke
(kinda sorta copypasta from ww2 history vid youtube comments but i added some things to it)
Emperor Theodosius I making Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. That led to Rome reasserting its cultural influence across Europe by creating a standardized version of Christianity that eventually overturned secular law systems and replaced them with fun Roman values like corporal punishment, slavery, and only a few white dudes having power or being allowed to own property
(Fun fact: Celibacy wasn’t originally part of the Christian faith and only a few crazy ascetics practiced it. But then the Church realized that it was losing a bunch of wealth when high ranking clerics had kids because of the way Roman inheritance law worked. From then on they discouraged and eventually banned sex and marriage for the Religious)
April 19th, 1943, ie: “Bicycle day” Albert Hofmann does some chemical synthesis and takes a wild ride. The world would never be the same.
Alex Flemming. A good Canadian boy, who stumbled upon penicillin in London Ontario. Sure it was a bit of an accident, but still needed the smarts to know what was going ons.
1992: bush sr. wins re-election
-clinton family forever stuck in little rock
-that means we never hear from them again!
-dem party finally forced to fix their shit
-the 1994 gop hard-right re-birth in our timeline is instead the dnc hard-left rebirth
-1996 election is won by dnc new-blood that is more left-leading over old ass gop guy (dole? mccain?)
-dubya loses 2000 election to said dnc president
-9/11 never happens!
-trump never does, either!
April 14, 1865. Lincoln isn’t assassinated and reconstruction goes on for longer than it did
You could also take the Hayes -Tilden election and fix the South winning reconstruction
March 28, 1968. Jon H. Tavel patents the cordless vibrator.
My 4th and final pick is the electric storage battery. Just think of all the things in your lifetime that use them.
Many folks in the 1800’s (especially women) owe a debt to Joseph Lister* and his belief in Pasteur’s ‘germ theory’.
*not to be confused with Alton Lister, the mediocre backup center of some 80’s Bucks teams, who also dabbled in surgery
The day Al Gore thought campaigning for President in ‘00 was beneath him. We all could have been BMW Marxists by now.
tch
In Tennessee, I mean 😝
The downfall of the Democrats has always been hubris.
General consensus among the lie-bruls I look at is that Gore tried to run as far away from Clinton as he possibly could. Picking Lieberman as his running mate didn’t help.
My second pick, the errant pass that allowed the Buffalo bills to draft OJ simpson
Tighten your chinstrap because we’re going for a wild ride:
For those of you who don’t know, there’s this urban legend that if a butterfly effect, that if the 1968 buffalo bills had not narrowly lost a game late in their season, they would not have been able to draft OJ simpson first overall
The logic goes that if OJ goes to a different team, his movie career is different, then the murders don’t happen, Robert kardashian never gets involved, then presumably Kim kardashian never becomes famous yadda yadda…
It’s mostly nonsense though, Robert Kardashian and OJ were friends from their days together at USC, and by the tile the trial happen, Robert hadn’t practiced law for years (he reactivated his license to take the case, but ultimately he was not a big part of OJ’s legal team)
And on top of that, Robert was independently wealthy of his relationship with OJ, he would have found a way to make Kim famous regardless of who her godfather was.
And on top of that……
OJ met Nicole at a club he frequented in California while still playing for the bills, he had been to the nightclub when he was in college, so it doesn’t matter where he played, he would have met her eventually
Still, if there is a non zerp percent chance I can prevent the Kardashians from happening with this pick, I’m taking it
“I’m hoping she realizes that this would have happened to her no matter what…that if she had gone to Nell’s or Indochine or Mars or Au Bar instead of M.K., if she had simply not taken the cab with me to the Upper West Side, that this all would have happened anyway. I would have found her. This is the way the earth works. I decide not to bother with the camera tonight.” – Fitzpatrick Bateman
My 3rd pick is the invention of antibiotics. For obvious reasons.
French Revolution. Not only does it bring us the guillotine and a new French regime, but it also massively enabled/contributed to the American revolution.
Didn’t the American Revolution enable/inspire the French one? Louis wasn’t overthrown until after our war ended right?
The philosophies/work leading up to the french revolution led to ours and theirs. Ours culminated first but if theirs wasn’t bubbling there wouldn’t have been transatlantic cooperation bringing ours to fruition.
We have to be the highest brow dick joke blog out there. Where else do you get Mel Brooks gifs combined with debate on root causes and effects of 18th Century geopolitics.
Plus, they helped us out tremendously due to the issues they had with the British. I’m sure that weakened them and made them more susceptible to revolution.
Also that.
Damn bread prices
Enlightenment philosophy wasn’t unique to the French, they mostly helped us because fuck the English
For my third pick, I’ll take the first woman to say “wrong hole!” in a non-angry manner
There’s lots of little things that went wrong that led to Trump, but I’m gonna go with gore losing the 2000 election due to bullshit
9/11 doesn’t happen (at least not then), bush’s disastrous 2nd term doesn’t happen.
There’s a decent chance gore does not get re-elected, in 2004, but who would the candidate have been?
Unfortunately, we get the drawback of Obama likelu not being elected in 2008, as it took people being so fed up with republican bullshit to over come 200 years of racism
but it’d be a double edged sword as it would have delayed the rise of the tea party.
And where would Hillary fit into all this? Does bengazhi attacks still happen? Would it matter if she wasn’t secretary of state then?
The personal home computer. Before its invention you had no idea what Billy Joe Batshit in Chicken Cutlet, Wyoming thought about women in the workplace and now we’re all richer for knowing.
2nd pick, NASAs Gemini program. Prior to that space exploration was “a man in a can”. It was a ride. The Gemini program perfected the tasks mankind needed to use existing technology to truely explore space. Rendezvous, docking and EVAs, so we could go further and build things in space.
Can I take the Industrial Revolution as a whole event?
Eh, that may be a little broad
But enough about Lowratio’s girlfriend!
A little broad?
Lowratio has entered the chat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCHcUmecm3U
Proved black holes exist was a side quest to measuring what was purely theorertical in gravitational waves. Oct. 16, 2017 big day for star watchin’..guys..
Got a late start so taking my second pick.
Plague.
Wiped out something like a quarter of the world’s population and pretty much enabled the Renaissance by ending feudalism and encouraging investment in farming beyond subsistence levels
George Washington discourages his former troops from rebelling against the Confederation Congress and installing Washington as King of the United States.
The invention of pottery. Can’t make decent wine without pottery!
Also a bunch of stuff about food storage, cooking, and improved tools for fishing, hunting, and gathering, but mostly the wine thing.
Trading up cause I gotta hit the road.
3. Commodore Perry arriving in Japan with a heavily armed vessel and saying “Guess what? You’re now open for trade with the United States!”
The British (Read: West Indies trading company) shoving a ton of hops into their beer to protect it at sea and investing the IPA. Without that there is no massive American craft beer scene.
I’ll go with Al Gore inventing the internet
2. Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World.
IX-XI century seafaring peoples of western Europe perfecting smoking fish and preserving other food stuffs in pots. Allowed for exploration of new worlds through longer journeys at sea.
In the first round.
Somewhere near Marcoing, France on the or precisely when, but sometime on Sept. 28, 1918 Pvt. Henry Tadley didn’t shoot an obviously wounded and retreating German soldier, one Pvt. Adolf.
There it is!
Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky arriving in Russia via train from Germany to lead the Communist Revolution.
The first undersea cable between England and France in August 1850. The communication age spawned there. Now we have this: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
The Beatles release Sgt Pepper permanently changing music.
Eff it, I’ll take the NFL blocking Trump from buying the Bills
1. I’ll take the invention of the forward pass in American football. Basically, it created a new religion that displaced Christianity.
LET’S GO BEARS
LET’S GO BEARS
Ah, the “Buddy Cole” chant.
Are we sure that the Bears even know that you’re allowed to make forward passes?
We had a great passer once, and just like jesus, he was cast out
2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami. Biggest geological event of both the 20th and 21st (so far) centuries. We’ve been able to glean just vast amounts of information from this event. It will be a big chapter in textbooks.
So many illegal mexican men are laying around America and collecting free stuff that they had to elect a Girl President.
I think they did it just to trigger Trump.
How far back is too far back?
Big Bang – Wikipedia
It spawned this, so it gets minus points for that:
I can’t plus this.
Bazinga!
I’ll take the Manhattan Project/invention of the atomic bomb.
Same scale as LemonJello’s pick
With my first pick, I’ve chosen an event that shook the very internet to its silicon-based core:
The founding of [Door Flies Open]
#upForWhatever
I’ll take the meteor that killed the dinosaurs (and didn’t have the courtesy to return during a Patriots Owl)
With my second pick, I’m taking the eruption of Krakatoa/Krakatau.
https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2023/07/24/best-of-summer-krakatau-the-loudest-sound
Welp, I know what I’m listening to this morning.
The way PTO and vacations are treated in this country is a joke.
Also The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand pretty much shaped the modern world. Thanks colonialism and intertwined alliances!
Okay, if we’re going extinction events, I’m going with the closer-to-home Chicxulub impact event.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
Why are you awake so early?
I start work at 6…
Gross
The early bird gets hepatitis.