Something you see with unfortunate frequency around times of high political contention are otherwise legitimate sites and publications taking the bait and turning a bullshit story into headline news. Case in point: this absurd story about states filing petitions to secede from the union in the wake of last Tuesday's election.

Huffington Post

To give credit where it's due, that's a fantastic headline. The way it's worded, you would think that we're on the verge of collapsing into the next Civil War. Residents? In more than a dozen states? How many more states are we talking? Four? 31? Is it all of them? Holy shit, it's all of them, isn't it? We're doomed. Every state wants to secede. DOOMED!

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The Huffington Post isn't the only site to jump on the story. Over at BuzzFeed, as we write this, it's the eighth most popular story in the "Hot on BuzzFeed" category, despite featuring not one picture of a boob as far as we can tell, so we're not sure what's so hot about it.