Our grisly history

History isn’t often pretty. Archaeologists have been excavating a site called Towton, where a major battle was fought in the Wars of the Roses in 1461, and in which 28,000 people died and were buried in mass graves scattered about the battleground. It’s a fascinating story of the soldiers involved in the battle, and they were both diverse and contradicting certain stereotypes about medieval citizens.

The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. It is easier to be precise about younger individuals, thanks to the predictable ways in which teeth develop and bones fuse during a person’s adolescence and 20s. The youngest occupants of the mass grave were around 17 years old; the oldest, Towton 16, was around 50. Their stature varies greatly, too. The men’s height ranges from 1.5-1.8 metres (just under five feet to just under six feet), with the older men, almost certainly experienced soldiers, being the tallest.

This physical diversity is unsurprising, given the disparate types of men who took the battlefield that day. Yet as a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall–just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. “It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted,” says Mr Knüsel. Their health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their knee-bones show that they ate pretty healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong, too.

I can identify: the oldest there were up around my age, and certainly in much better physical shape, and there they were battering each other to death. And then there are bits I can’t identify with at all — they shredded each other with savagery. Some of the dead weren’t simply killed in the heat of battle, they were butchered by repeated blows to the head. This was far more brutal than was necessary to fell an enemy.

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Towton 25 suffered eight wounds to his head that day. The precise order can be worked out from the direction of fractures on his skull: when bone breaks, the cracks veer towards existing areas of weakness. The first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal.

The next one almost certainly was. From behind him someone swung a blade towards his skull, carving a down-to-up trajectory through the air. The blow opened a huge horizontal gash into the back of his head—picture a slit you could post an envelope through. Fractures raced down to the base of his skull and around the sides of his head. Fragments of bone were forced in to Towton 25’s brain, felling him.

His enemies were not done yet. Another small blow to the right and back of the head may have been enough to turn him over onto his back. Finally another blade arced towards him. This one bisected his face, opening a crevice that ran from his left eye to his right jaw. It cut deep: the edge of the blade reached to the back of his throat.

Yeesh. These were people so much like us, and we can’t have evolved much beyond that point biologically, yet this is an ugly story of what we often call inhumanity, but is probably more typically human.

But the shepherd never gets fleeced…

Soon, it will be the end of the year. Soon, all those various forms will come trickling into your mailbox, telling you how much money you earned. Soon, you will have to fill out a whole bunch of other forms and pay out your share to the state and federal government. For most of us, it’s a big bite, but if only we were ministers of the lord, it wouldn’t hurt so much.

Read this summary from a tax preparer who did a local priests taxes, and feel your wallet cringe.

The minister gets paid from his church, from which he received cash of $105,000 in 2009. He received a W-2 with wages of $40,000 and a “housing allowance” of $65,000. First, ministers, along with other state workers, are allowed to elect out of social security and Medicare. By electing out, they don’t have to pay into the programs and they don’t ever get to draw from the programs either.

Next, of his housing allowance of $65,000, he only has to recognize as income the portion that he did not spend on ANYTHING related to his house. So, he can essentially deduct mortgage interest, mortgage principal, taxes, utilities, HOA fees, insurance, furniture, appliances, silverware, napkins, gardeners, soap, towels, etc, etc, etc from his income. Normal people can only deduct their interest and property taxes. So, after all of his expenses, he only had to recognize about $9,000 of his housing allowance as income, for a total income of $49,000 ($40,000 in wages and $9,000 of excess housing allowance).

Next, even though he already deducted all of his housing expenses, including interest and property taxes, he still gets to use Schedule A like everyone else. So he is able to deduct his mortgage interest and property taxes again. (Technically, the first time was just an exclusion from income, so he’s not getting double deductions. But essentially he is. The end result is a double deduction).

Final tax bill for Mr Holy-Come-to-Jesus: $740, on an income of $105,000. Final bill for a secular citizen of equal financial status: $18,826.

So the US subsidizes the rich and the pious. Does anyone else see something wrong here?

Also, here’s the kicker:

To top it off, he wrote a letter to our firm asking for a discounted preparation fee because he is a minister of humble means. It made me sick to my stomach.

Who is to blame for all those priests raping children?

The pope has the answer, and it’s not the priests. Can you guess whose fault it all is?

If you guessed godless secular society, you’d be right. It doesn’t count for much, though, because you know it was an easy question.

I’m not sure how it works, though. He claims that secular society was making excuses for pedophiles, promoting moral relativism, which I don’t think was at all true…but let’s pretend it was, just to give him the full benefit of the doubt. Then what? A priest sees George Carlin, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace all busily promoting a lifestyle of hedonism and disregard for others, so he is unable to resist buggering the choir boys? Hey, I saw KC and the Sunshine Band live once, so now I have a penchant for cannibalism? Westboro Baptist Church pickets against gays, so suddenly I want to have sex with chickens?

Catholic logic doesn’t seem to have much to do with real logic.

The War on…Asgard?

The Council of Conservative Citizens is very angry, and is calling for a boycott of an upcoming movie that offends their values. The CofCC is a paleoconservative organization which has as its first principle the myth that the United States is a Christian country, so you might think that the reason it objects to the Marvel superhero movie Thor is that it promotes a pagan religion. You’d be wrong. They’re upset because Marvel Studios has declared war on Norse mythology, which you’d think they’d consider a good thing, except that it violates another of their principles, that America is supposed to be a white country.

You see, Marvel cast Idris Elba, a black man, to play the god Heimdall.

We may yet witness angrily protesting against the giving of offense to non-existent followers of a non-existent god whose religion is based on a practically non-existent connection between an ancient pagan faith and a comic book. I kind of expect the story to dribble away as everyone realizes how ridiculous they look, but then, I’ve been deeply wrong about how rational people are before. Oh, and I know about Asatru: it’s a wanna-be religion that mainly appeals to the stupidly macho; the Marvel comic book has nothing to do with any real religion, except that it stole its cast of characters from mythology.

And if you think the C of CC is cranky, you should see Stormfront! (Warning! That is a link to a rabidly racist site that I despise so much that references to it are on the comment filter list: you’ll have to refer to it by euphemisms — be creative — in the comments). They’re very indignant. Heimdall is supposed to be white, dammit. And you know what else is wrong with the casting?

Not only that, Natalie Portman (Jane Foster) is a Jew.

Man, those people must be completely incapable of watching a single movie ever made. They just sit in their living room fuming at all the blacks and Jews and Asians and Italians and Inuit and Lakota wandering about in their yards.

Hooray for me!

I want a prize. I just submitted the grades for two of my three classes this term, including the big intro biology class with two lecture sections. No one gave me a beer when I mentioned my classes were done…I need one now.

OK, so I have to finish the one last class — but that one had the take-home essay final. I want a reward now, not tomorrow when I finish that pile.

Fine, be that way. I’ll get back to work on the papers, right after I get the driveway and sidewalk cleared (we’re in the middle of a big snowstorm predicted to drop 5″-7″ of snow on us by the morning). But I better get that beer when they’re done, this time.

I think they’re getting more and more easily offended

This is getting ridiculous. Now people are getting irate at the use of a common word.

The teacher…was explaining to the class how the cold climate in Trevélez, Granada province, aided in the curing of the village’s most famous local product, jamón serrano. The boy told his teacher that hearing the word ‘ham’ in class was offensive to him because of his religion and asked his geography teacher to stop referring to the product which caused him offence.

El Mundo newspaper reports that the boy’s parents then reported the teacher to both the National Police and to the courts. It’s understood that an internal investigation is also underway by the education authority in Cádiz province.

Personally, I only have temper tantrums over “ham” when it’s preceded by “ken”.