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Not surprisingly, one of the things taught first-year law students is how to actually get someone into court. Two of the most fundamental principles are that the court has to have jurisdiction over the defendant and the defendant has to be served with notice of the suit. These can be stumbling blocks when a deity, God, say, is a party to a lawsuit.
One of the more publicized lawsuits against God was filed in Nebraska in 2007. Then-State Senator Ernie Chambers asked a state court for a permanent injunction against God. Among other things, Chambers alleged God had caused and would continue to cause “calamitous catastrophes resulting in the widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction.” These events included “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornados [sic], pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating drouths [sic], genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like.”
Chambers admitted that, “despite reasonable efforts,” to serve God with the lawsuit he had been unable to do so. That shouldn’t matter, he alleged, because God “in addition to being Omnipresent, also is all-knowing (‘Omniscient’).”
Chambers wasn’t actually mad at God. He told an Omaha television station that his lawsuit was filed in response to bills introduced in the Nebraska legislature to try and stop certain lawsuits from being filed. “The Constitution requires that the courthouse doors be open, so you cannot prohibit the filing of suits,” Chambers said. “Anyone can sue anyone they choose, even God.” Others reported the suit was to illustrate how easy it was to file frivolous lawsuits.
Regardless of the reason, the lawsuit didn’t go far. It was dismissed the following year on the rationale Chambers could never serve God. His reaction was much like his complaint. “Since God knows everything, God has notice of this lawsuit,’’ Chambers said.
Shortly before the Chambers lawsuit, a Romanian prison inmate took a different tack. Serving 20 years for murder, Pavel Mircea sued God for not protecting him against the devil. Mircea argued that his baptism was a contract with God to keep the devil away and keep him out of trouble. “He was supposed to protect me from all evils and instead he gave me to Satan who encouraged me to kill,” he claimed.
This lawsuit didn’t go far either. It was dismissed on the basis God isn’t a person in the eyes of the law and has no legal residence.
Other litigants have invoked deities in their cases. In a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania Lester Raymond Doss sued on his own behalf and on behalf of “Jehovah,” as well as the “the Hebrews and Wissdom” [sic]. He claimed he was the ” Sun of the Lordd of Godd [sic],” that “citizens of the earth try to apprehend and maim and kill [him],” and that “Americans (all of them) try to maim — put [him] in chains — injury — irons and attempt to kill [him] because [he is] righteous and virtuous[.]” He also claimed that the United States and U.S. Postal Service were not giving his correspondence to others. Therefore, “y’all owe me $3,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars for your crime and murder and lies and mercer [sic] that y’all have done against me.”
The court recognized that poor pro se litigants cannot be denied a day in court simply because their allegations are unlikely. “When allegations rise to the level of the irrational or the wholly incredible, however,” the court said, a complaint is frivolous as a matter of law. Therefore, the lawsuit was dismissed.
Last year, “Creator Lord God, aka Royal Clark Robertson” sued the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in federal court in Hawaii. I guess if you’re an inmate in Texas suing in Hawaii might give hope of a vacation there. But all Robertson claimed was “Let me endangers exists of all states T.D.C.J. and others gangs inmates and all gangs employees civils rights toward all my enemys [sic] gangs on deaths exists by my my [sic] majicals [sic] psychos powers amendments is to produces results 1st to 29th!” Not surprisingly, in December the suit was dismissed although Robertson could bring it again — if he filed it in Texas.
Litigants don’t discriminate among deities. Although less rare than God, Satan also appears in lawsuits in the United States, as the next Loco Lawsuits will explore.
To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the Loyal Opposition.
Woody Allen, Stardust Memories
The rivalry between Coke and Pepsi is caustic enough that the term “Cola Wars” is generally recognized in America. As part of that war, Pepsi actually acquired a flotilla of warships in 1989. So many in fact that Pepsi could have bee considered the sixth strongest military in the world at the time.
The story has it’s inceptions three decades earlier. In the summer of 1959, the U.S. sponsored the American National Exhibit in Moscow, designed to show Soviet people how Americans lived. Today, it’s most remembered for the so-called kitchen debate between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. But it also allowed Pepsi to open the door to the Russian market.
Pepsi had a booth at the exhibition and late Pepsi C.E.O. Donald Kendall told Nixon, “[S]omehow, I had to get a Pepsi in Khrushchev’s hand.” After the kitchen debate, Nixon steered Khrushchev to the Pepsi booth. Soon pictures of Khrushchev drinking from a Pepsi cup were transmitted around the world. By the time the exhibition closed six weeks later hundreds of thousands of Soviet people tasted more than three million cups of the drink.
 Soviet Pepsi label Within 10 days of Nixon’s 1972 reelection as president, Kendall announced that Pepsi would become the first American consumer product manufactured and sold in the Soviet Union. The 10-year deal gave Pepsi exclusive rights to the Soviet market, preventing Coca-Cola from importing its cola products into any Warsaw Pact countries. Because the Soviet ruble was inconvertible on the world market, the Soviets paid for the syrup used to make Pepsi by giving Pepsi exclusive U.S. rights to sell Stolichnaya vodka (“Stoli”) and some other Soviet-produced alcohol.
The first bottle of Pepsi came off the line of a Soviet bottling plant in 1974. It was the first of some 23 plants to open in the Soviet Union. In 1989 Pepsi sold $500 million worth of soda in the Soviet Union. In contrast, Stoli sales in the U.S. totaled about $156 million. Plainly, Stoli sales wouldn’t cover demand or allow for increased production.
So in May 1989, Pepsi reached a deal with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev: Pepsi would get 17 decommissioned, obsolete Soviet diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate. Pepsi also bought new Soviet oil tankers. In one fell swoop, Pepsi was one of the world’s 10 largest military powers. The submarines were in terrible disrepair and the surface warships weren’t much better. Pepsi sold the warships for scrap and leased out or sold the new oil tankers.
It wasn’t the last time Pepsi would trade cola syrup for ships. In April 1990 it reached a deal with the Soviets estimated to net $3 billion in sales of Pepsi in the Soviet Union and vodka in America. As part of the agreement, the Soviet Union would trade at least 10 tankers and freighters valued at more than $300 million.
Unfortunately for Pepsi, the Soviet Union fell in 1991, taking with it Pepsi’s exclusive deal. Uncompleted ships from the 1990 deal were stranded uncomplete and Pepsi now had to negotiate with more than a dozen different states instead of a monolith. Even worse from Pepsi’s standpoint, by 2019 Coca-Cola was the most popular non-alcoholic drink in Russia; Pepsi was third.
Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi
Ain’t singin’ for Coke
I don’t sing for nobody
Makes me look like a joke
Neil Young, Title Track, This Note’s for You
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubez
- How Real Is “Cancel Culture?” (“When moderate Americans are afraid to voice their views, it allows those who operate at political extremes—often in bad-faith—to dominate the discussion.”)
Idiocy of the Week
Nonbookish Linkage
- Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade is an online treasure trove of information about slave trade in America
- The story of an English village that self-quarantined to stop the Black Death from spreading to others
Bookish Linkage
Stupidity is a sickness that goes very well with fear.
Phillipe Claudel, Brodeck
No, this isn’t another installment of Loco Lawsuits. Nor does it deal with the multibillion dollar sales of erectile dysfunction drugs. While some today may be embarrassed to even ask about or pick up an ED prescription, that’s nothing compared to dealing with ED in the Middle Ages.
Under medieval Church law, impotence was one of the few grounds for divorce. Because marriage was a sacrament it was governed by canon law so divorce cases ended up in ecclesiastical courts. Court records in York, England, have given historians a window into impotence cases. Still, they were uncommon. According to one study, there are extant records for two such cases in the 14th Century and five in the 15th Century.
Generally, ecclesiastic courts utilized an inquisitorial method, meaning the court itself was responsible for gathering and evaluating the evidence. Given the nature of the issues, these cases tended to rely heavily on medical examination. In fact, some European countries, particularly France, used “trials by congress.” Essentially, this was copulation before an assembly of doctors and ecclesiastical lawyers. Talk about pressure to perform sexually.
While England rarely resorted to trials by congress, even standard impotence cases in York could come awfully close. In a 1370 case, for example, three women were tasked with physically examining the husband. They reported:
that the member of the [husband] is like an empty intestine of mottled skin and it does not have any flesh in it, nor veins in the skin, and the middle of its front is totally black. And said witness stroked it with her hands and put it in semen and having thus been stroked and put in that place it neither expanded nor grew.
In a 1441 case several women fondled the husband’s penis while “embracing him around the neck and kissing him.” Reportedly, the women remained dressed during their “examination.” A report of a case two years later said a witness
exposed her naked breasts and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the [husband]. And she embraced and frequently kissed the [husband], and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should then and there prove and render himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long.
Other times men were the witnesses. For example, in the 1370 case a man testified he’d seen the husband and wife attempting to have sex in a barn. He said that although the couple were “applying themselves with zeal,” the husband’s “rod was lowered and in no way rising or becoming erect.” In a 1368 case the husband went into hiding when asked to undergo a physical exam. As a result, the court let a man testify that the wife swore that “she often tried to find the place of the [husband’s] genitals with her hands when she lay in bed with [him] and he was asleep, and that she could not stroke nor find anything there[.]”
If the accounts of these “physical examinations” are correct, more than common ED may have been involved. But such issues haven’t disappeared. Just last year a court in British Columbia granted an annulment to a woman who claimed her husband couldn’t have an erection. Fortunately, the only evidence considered was on paper, not physical demonstrations.
If a man and a woman have united in marriage and afterward the woman says of the man that he is impotent, if anyone can prove that this is true, she may take another [husband].
Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, The Penitential of Theodore
“Defecation and urination have been bothersome aspects of space travel from the beginning of manned space flight.”
This conspicuous observation opens the second chapter of a 1976 NASA report called Biomedical Results of Apollo, which summarized what was learned from biomedical research in the Apollo missions. The report reveals the rather primitive nature of “fecal containment” during the Apollo missions.
 NASA “fecal bag” Basically, during flight astronauts used “a plastic bag which was taped to the buttocks to capture feces.” Yet in space it isn’t that simple. One astronaut estimated the process took about 45 minutes. During lunar surface activity and spacewalks the “containment system” was also basic but more customary: “a pair of undershorts with layers of absorbent material,” i.e., a space diaper. (NASA’s current technical name is “the Maximum Absorbency Garment.”)
“The collection process required a great deal of skill to preclude escape of feces from the collection bag and consequent soiling of the crew, their clothing, or cabin surfaces,” NASA noted. The May 1969 Apollo 10 mission, a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 moon landing, demonstrated that astronauts could, in fact, have close encounters of the turd kind.
On the sixth day of the mission, the transcript of the mission’s command module communications contains the following exchange among mission commander Thomas Stafford, command module plot John Young and lunar module pilot Gene Cernan:
Stafford: Oh – Who did it?
Young: Who did what?
Cernan: What?
Stafford: Who did it? (Laughter)
Cernan: Where did that come from?
Stafford: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.
Young: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.
Cernan: I don’t think it’s one of mine.
Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that awey.
Young: God almighty. (Laughter)
As if that wasn’t bad enough, eight minutes later:
Cernan: …Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a –
Stafford/Young: (Laughter)
….
Stafford: It was just floating around?
Cernan: Yes.
….
Cernan: (Laughter) I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. (Laughter).
Young: What the hell is going on here?
Neither these events nor the Apollo 10 mission itself is mentioned in the final NASA report. Its final assessment contains this astute observation: “In general, the Apollo waste management system worked satisfactorily from an engineering standpoint. From the point of view of crew acceptance, however, the system must be given poor marks.”
Everything in space obeys the laws of physics.
Werner von Braun, TIME, February 17, 1958
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