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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Friday, July 11, 2008

One Thousand Posts In The Ground


1000 posts!

Carolina Naturally has made it to the one thousand post milestone.
Hopefully it has informed and entertained and provoked thought and reflection for all the loyal readers and the fly-by-night readers.
Since its first incarnation just over a year ago Carolina Naturally has been a voice of reason in an unreasonable world presenting news and events with a serious and a humorous outlook ... sometime making it a wee bit difficult to recognize the difference.

Thank you for supporting this blog world wide in all 197 countries - of whom 65 are regular visitors.

Trail Mix

Just some rambling thoughts mixed in with profound ideas:

Naked women on the wall.

Coke with Splenda is wonderful.

Serenity is having enough self control not to choke the living mud out of someone who desperately needs it!

Belly Dancers know how to move.

New houses, new dreams.

The lone wolf will survive because he is the toughest - he has to be for all he has to rely on is himself.

Money is the root of all evil they say ... what they don't say it the the excess and the lack of it is the root of all evil.

Nobody is perfect - I am nobody, therefore I am perfect!

I am getting old ... I remember when DEEP THROAT was the date movie every couple had to go see - and they actually watched the movie!

A lady in the bank today actually said "I can't be out of money, I still have checks!"

To know his importance in the scheme of things every man should have a dog who adores him completely and a cat who ignores him entirely!


Obama not doing NASCAR sponsorship

NASCAR's BAM Racing team has presented Barack Obama's presidential campaign with a potential sponsorship deal in the Sprint Cup series later this year, but it doesn't look like an Obama car will be burning rubber on the track anytime soon.

BAM team spokesman Rhett Vandiver told The Associated Press on Friday that the team made a sponsorship proposal to the Democratic presidential hopeful's campaign, and has made similar proposals to the campaign of Republican John McCain and at least one third-party candidate.

Late Friday, the Obama campaign said there would be no sponsorship.

"The Obama campaign will not be sponsoring a car in the Sprint Cup series, though we will continue to look for ways to reach out to voters and convey Senator Obama's message of change." said Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman

Sports Illustrated first reported the proposal on its Web site, saying Obama's campaign is in talks with BAM, a part-time operation that hasn't raced in recent weeks, to sponsor its No. 49 car in the Aug. 3 race at Pocono.

"The Obama campaign will not be sponsoring a car in the Sprint Cup series, though we will continue to look for ways to reach out to voters and convey Senator Obama's message of change." Bill Burton, Obama Campaign Spokesman

It would have been a fairly bold move within a sport whose competitors spend all year turning left on the track but tend to lean to the right politically.

BAM's choice of drivers and car brands might have been a little too sticky politically for the Obama camp.

The car, a Toyota - the only foreign automaker racing in NASCAR - would be driven by veteran Ken Schrader.

According to the Federal Election Commission's Web site, Schrader gave $1,000 to the campaign of North Carolina Republican congressman Robin Hayes in June 2004, and a total of $2,500 in 2003 and 2004 to the failed Virginia congressional campaign of Republican Kevin Triplett, a former NASCAR official.

Also according to the FEC, Mrs. Ann Schrader of Concord, N.C. and Ken Schrader Racing donated a total of $2,000 to President Bush's campaign in May 2004 and $900 to the North Carolina Republican Executive Committee in August 2004.

NASCAR has been playing an increasing role in politics, as so-called "NASCAR dads" were considered a key constituency in recent elections.

A Cup series car carried a George W. Bush logo in 2004 but wasn't officially associated with the campaign. And Democratic presidential hopeful Bob Graham sponsored a truck in the Craftsman Truck Series in 2003.

Antarctica Ice Shelf 'hanging on by a thread'


It's going to crack any day now... Does anybody care?

Link

Excerpt:
New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up,
in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.

Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread"
to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

"Since the connection to the island... helps stabilize the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge
will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said.

Are musicians owed royalties for performance of their music in torture chambers?

Interesting question there, isn't it?

Canadian copyfighter Howard Knopf has suggested (presumably with tongue firmly planted in cheek) that recording artists whose music is played by torturers in Gitmo are owed performance royalties:
Leaving aside the legal niceties about whose law if any applies in that dreadful place, one can only wonder if ASCAP might not want a piece of the action. After all, it went after the Girl Guides not so long ago. And if it could try to make a buck off Girl Guides, who are nice people, why not alleged terrorists? Why should terrorists enjoy free music?
Link

(Thanks to the folks over at Boing Boing for bringing this to our attention)

Pastor among suspects in illegal snake bust

"A venomous snake isn't a pet. You don't play with it. If you do, you're an idiot."
The pastor of a Kentucky church that handles snakes in religious rites was among 10 people arrested by wildlife officers in a crackdown on the venomous snake trade.

More than 100 snakes, many of them deadly, were confiscated in the undercover sting after Thursday's arrests, said Col. Bob Milligan, director of law enforcement for Kentucky Fish and Wildlife.

Most were taken from the Middlesboro home of Gregory James Coots, including 42 copperheads, 11 timber rattlesnakes, three cottonmouth water moccasins, a western diamondback rattlesnake, two cobras and a puff adder.

Handling snakes is practiced in a handful of fundamentalist churches across Appalachia, based on the interpretation of Bible verses saying true believers can take up serpents without being harmed. The practice is illegal in most states, including Kentucky.

Coots, 36, is pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in Middlesboro, where a Tennessee woman died after being bitten by a rattlesnake during a service in 1995. Her husband died when he was bitten by a snake in northeastern Alabama.

Coots was charged Thursday with buying, selling and possessing illegal reptiles. He had no listed telephone number and couldn't be reached for comment. There was no phone listing for the church.

"It is disturbing to me that individuals would keep such dangerous wildlife in their homes and in neighborhoods where they put their families, visitors and neighbors as such high risk," Milligan said.

The snakes, plus one alligator, were turned over to the nonprofit Kentucky Reptile Zoo in Slade. Most appeared to have been captured from the wild, with some imported from Asia and Africa.

Zoo Director Jim Harrison said some of the animals would likely have become exotic pets had they not been seized.

"There's been a large trade in exotics for years," he said. "Some people are just fascinated with them."

Undercover officers purchased more than 200 illegal reptiles during the investigation, some of which were advertised for sale on Web sites. One such Web site lists copperheads for $50 each and cobras for $450.

"You can purchase anything off the Internet except common sense," Harrison said. "A venomous snake isn't a pet. You don't play with it. If you do, you're an idiot."

*****
True that!

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A bit of wisdom floating in the ether

Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes

Oh, for the love of Sunshine!

Sunshine!

After the week of torrential downpours and thunderstorms

- one was so intense it literally blackened day into night better than any eclipse I've witnessed ... at 4:45PM I was looking out the window into a blackness I have only seen underground in caves when the torch has gone out -

it is nice to see the sun shining.

Now, I think we might have come close enough to erasing the drought we have experienced over the last two years that we can say the drought is over. I have not checked the official totals but if we aren't within spitting distance I'll be a monkey's uncle!

The birds are singing!

Holocaust siblings meet after 66 years

A frail Irene Famulak clutched her brother on the airport tarmac, her arm wrapped around him in a tight embrace, tears streaming down their faces. It was the first time since 1942 they had seen each other, when she was 17 and he was just 7.

That was the night the invading Nazis came to take her away from her Ukrainian home.

"I remember it well because I kissed him good-bye, and he pushed me away," she said of her brother. "I asked, 'Why did you do that?' And he said that he doesn't like kisses."

"The Nazis told my mother that I was being taken to work in a German labor camp for six months. But it was, of course, much longer. I was there for years."

Both siblings survived the Holocaust and grew up on different sides of the Iron Curtain, not knowing the fate of the other.

But after 66 years apart, Famulak, 83, was reunited with her long lost 73-year-old brother, Wssewolod Galezkij. They held each other close this time, cherishing the moment.

"I don't believe anyone has ever known such happiness. Now, I truly believe I can die satisfied," Galezkij said.

Famulak made the long journey to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after being contacted by the American Red Cross. The organization told her they had located her only surviving sibling.

Famulak said she spent World War II in a labor camp in Munich, Germany, working in the kitchens. She had been taken to the camp with her older sister. When it was liberated in 1945, Famulak stayed in Germany for several years, eventually emigrating to the United States in 1956.

She never saw her parents again after that day in 1942 when Nazis separated her from her family. She and her brother still have no idea what happened to their mother and father. Some of their siblings lived through the war, but later died; others, they never heard from again after being separated.

But her younger brother never gave up hope of tracking his sister down. He, too, was sent to a German labor camp, but after the war, he moved back to Ukraine, then a republic of the Soviet Union.

Under Soviet leader Josef Stalin, information on lost relatives was kept sealed, and Galezkij said it wasn't until reforms in the late 1980s, followed by the Soviet collapse, that he started making progress in finding his sister.

Even then, it took him more than 17 years to locate her in the United States. He broke down in tears as he spoke of his overwhelming happiness at finding her.

"When the Red Cross told me they had found her in America, it was such a joy," he said, sobbing.

In fact, he had to be taken to the hospital because he was so overcome when he first learned she was alive. At this week's reunion, there was a doctor on hand at the airport as a precaution.

Back in the United States, there were tears, too.

Linda Klein, the director of the American Red Cross Holocaust and War Victims Tracing Center, said the volunteer who helped the siblings find each other got caught up in the emotion herself.

"When I showed her the picture, she stood there and wept," Klein said. "She was beside herself."

Klein's group has reunited 1,500 families since it began work in 1990. She said the former Soviet Union released records in 1989 of concentration camps it liberated, greatly helping organizers find information on Holocaust victims.

The organization has 100 volunteers -- a third of them Holocaust survivors, Klein said. The group also helps families find information about their loved ones who died during the Holocaust. They have brought together more than 50 families this year. All of their work is free. She says it's often like "looking for a needle in a haystack."

"We're playing beat the clock right now," she said, adding, "It's about families that one day they were together and then they were apart."

"When a connection is made, there are just smiles all around."

That was the case for this family in Ukraine. Years of trauma, of separation, of not knowing what happened to loved ones, have been replaced by celebration.

In a picturesque orchard overlooking rolling fields, Galezkij, his wife and their neighbors laid out a feast for his American sister. As the vodka flowed, he told her how he had survived for a lifetime without her.

"He says he always thought he'd see me someday. He dreamt lots about me," Famulak said, as she sat next to her brother.

"And he wrote a song for me. When he went to sleep, he sang every night and cried."

With that, Galezkij, weakened by illness and age, burst into song. But this time, he sang the words with pure joy.

*****

It is nice when a sad story has a happy ending isn't it!


China's new Nude Beach

China's new nude beach gaining publicity just in time for the summer Olympics

Great debate is now raging on the Chinese internet about the appearance of a nude beach in Sanya and whether it should be acceptable or not. A reporter found a dozen middle-aged men in a deserted part of the Dadonghai Bay tanning nude and they didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that just a few dozen metres away, regular tourists and families are doing their thing. Tourists and residents interviewed by the reporter also don't seem to be greatly bothered by the presence of nudists on the beach either as long as they stick to their areas.

According to this article from the Hainan News Network, that part of the beach sees as many as 400-500 male and female nudists during peak season. While some local men seem pretty happy to join the crowd in their birthday suits, the females spotted on the beach are all foreigners. As with previous attempts to create nudist spots in Heilongjiang, Sichuan and Zhejiang provinces, the Sanya beach has sparked a huge public outcry, but Hainan tourism officials are neither clamping down on the beach nor actively promoting it as a destination.

While the Sanya beach evolved over the last two years because tourists were flocking to this spot, the last nude beach that received widespread attention in the Chinese media was actually an invention of forward-thinking Hangzhou tourism officials. Although located some 80km away from the provincial capital, the nude beach was quickly shut down by the authorities after a huge controversy broke out.

We'll see how long it lasts ... knowing how the Chinese officialdom works (and it is no different than how 'officialdom' works anywhere) it will either be ignored completely or quashed with the fervent zeal of a fanatic - in any case I''d be willing to lay odds 'ignored' will be the 'official' policy during the Olympics ... afterward ...



Did You Know ...

That F.W. Woolworth, who established his first five-and-dime store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1879, used to check his employee's alertness by shoplifting merchandise from his own stores.

Thought for the Day

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but they may not be the right thousand words.

Strange Inspirations

Mother and Child Reunion is a famous Paul Simon song that got its inspiration from a menu item of the same name offered in a restaurant in Chinatown in New York City.

The dish featured chicken and eggs.

An American life? It's worth less today.

It's not just the American dollar that's losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life isn't worth what it used to be.

The "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May - a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs $18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At $7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at $6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Some environmentalists accuse the cabal of changing the value to avoid tougher rules - a charge the EPA denies.

"It appears that they're cooking the books in regards to the value of life," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. "Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death."

Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the administration of the shrub's father and now director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said: "It's hard to imagine that it has other than a political motivation."

Agency officials say they were just following what the science told them.

The EPA figure is not based on people's earning capacity, or their potential contributions to society, or how much they are loved and needed by their friends and family - some of the factors used in insurance claims and wrongful-death lawsuits.

Instead, economists calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks. Most of the data is drawn from payroll statistics; some comes from opinion surveys. According to the EPA, people shouldn't think of the number as a price tag on a life.

The EPA made the changes in two steps. First, in 2004, the agency cut the estimated value of a life by 8 percent. Then, in a rule governing train and boat air pollution this May, the agency took away the normal adjustment for one year's inflation. Between the two changes, the value of a life fell 11 percent, based on today's dollar.

EPA officials say the adjustment was not significant and was based on better economic studies. The reduction reflects consumer preferences, said Al McGartland, director of EPA's office of policy, economics and innovation.

"It's our best estimate of what consumers are willing to pay to reduce similar risks to their own lives," McGartland said.

But EPA's cut "doesn't make sense," said Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi. EPA partly based its reduction on his work. "As people become more affluent, the value of statistical lives go up as well. It has to." Viscusi also said no study has shown that Americans are less willing to pay to reduce risks.

At the same time that EPA was trimming the value of life, the Department of Transportation twice raised its life value figure. But its number is still lower than the EPA's.

EPA traditionally has put the highest value on life of any government agency and still does, despite efforts by administrations to bring uniformity to that figure among all departments.

Not all of EPA uses the reduced value. The agency's water division never adopted the change and in 2006 used $8.7 million in current dollars.

From 1996 to 2003, EPA kept the value of a statistical life generally around $7.8 million to $7.96 million in current dollars, according to reports analyzed by The AP. In 2004, for a major air pollution rule, the agency lowered the value to $7.15 million in current dollars.

Just how the EPA came up with that figure is complicated and involves two dueling analyses.

Viscusi wrote one of those big studies, coming up with a value of $8.8 million in current dollars. The other study put the number between $2 million and $3.3 million. The co-author of that study, Laura Taylor of North Carolina State University, said her figure was lower because it emphasized differences in pay for various risky jobs, not just risky industries as a whole.

EPA took portions of each study and essentially split the difference - a decision two of the agency's advisory boards faulted or questioned.

"This sort of number-crunching is basically numerology," said Granger Morgan, chairman of EPA's Science Advisory Board and an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "This is not a scientific issue."

Other, similar calculations by the cabal have proved politically explosive. In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 percent less than that of people under 70. After the move became public, the agency reversed itself.

Talk about 'cooking the numbers'!

Woman pleads innocent to killing pregnant woman

Update:

A woman pleaded innocent yesterday to stabbing a pregnant woman to death and cutting the baby out of her womb.

The charge of aggravated first-degree murder against Phiengchai Sisouvanh Synhavong, 23, carries either the death penalty or life in prison without parole, if she is convicted. Prosecutors have 30 days to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

Araceli Camacho Gomez, 27, was found dead in a city park on June 27, stabbed multiple times. Her baby had been cut from her body.

Police have said Sisouvanh Synhavong tried to pass off the baby as her own in calls to emergency dispatchers. Authorities have said there was no evidence the women knew each other.

The baby boy is in serious condition at a hospital in Spokane. Camacho Gomez's husband, Juan Campos-Gomez, who was in the court, said he plans to take his wife's body back to Mexico to be buried when it is released.

Sisouvanh Synhavong was granted credentials as a nursing assistant by the state Department of Health in 2005. She applied for renewal of her credentials in March.

The next hearing in the case is set for Aug. 6.

Indonesia executes man for 42 murders

Indonesia executed a man convicted of killing 42 women and girls in a series of ritual slayings he believed would give him magical powers, his lawyer said Friday.

Ahmad Suradji, 57, was killed by firing squad late Thursday in western Indonesia despite a last minute appeal by Amnesty International, a U.K.-based human rights advocacy group that opposes capital punishment in all cases.

"He appeared resigned to his fate," said Attorney General Office's spokesman Bonaventura Nainggolan. "His final wish was to see his wife. We fulfilled this."

Suradji was arrested in May 1997 following the discovery of a body in a field close to his house in Lubukpakan, a village in North Sumatra province. Forty-one other corpses were later found nearby.

Police have said the victims came to Suradji because they believed he had supernatural powers. The victims were believed to have been seeking his help in making their husbands or boyfriends faithful, find a partner or get rich.

He lured them to the field and buried them up to the waist, telling them it was part of the ritual. He then strangled them and buried their bodies with the heads pointing toward his house.

He has told police he believed the 11-year killing spree would boost his magical powers.

Suradji's wife, Tumini, was also sentenced to death for assisting with the murders, but her sentence was later reduced to life in prison.

Belief in sorcery and the supernatural is common across Indonesia, especially in poor, rural areas where education levels are low.

Media reports said authorities were forced to cancel a plan to bury Suradji's body in a public cemetery because up to 100 relatives of his victims were waiting there, planning to disrupt the funeral.

As of Friday morning, his body remained at the morgue of a local hospital.

Indonesia resumed executions in June 2008 after a 14-month hiatus, when two Nigerians were put to death for drug trafficking.

Authorities do not release official statistics on the death penalty, but at least 112 people are known to be under death sentences in Indonesia. The time and place of executions are never made public before they occur.

According to Amnesty International, authorities are preparing to execute at least four other Indonesians. One of them is also a sorcerer, who was found guilty of killing 8 people. The other three are Islamic militants.

*****

The belief that taking the life of another gives the taker the taken one's 'power', 'life force', or what have you is as old as humanity and is just as boneheaded today as it was when the first idiot came up with the idea eons ago. Indonesia could have saved the expense of the bullets used to kill this particular fool - all they had to do was turn him over to the victims relatives that were waiting at the cemetery before hand and they could have carried out the sentence and the internment all at the same time.

Chatter

This installment of CHATTER deals with Trolls.

It seems the subject of internet trolls is again on the forefront of several forums. We all know what they are and in most cases who they are. They are pervasive and they are quick to accuse anyone and everyone else of being exactly what they are.

The chatter is about these individuals and the lack of a life they have. For the most part on the various forums they are absent from the conversations - an odd but welcome respite. On other forums it is the trolls complaining about themselves although they won't admit it - almost every poster on those threads are the very trolls they are whining about ... and that I find to be quite funny.

I have noticed an increase in the most insidious of the internet trolls recently ... that being the oatmeal and tapioca pudding troll - who seek to discourage all but the most banal of banalities on every forum they infest ... they are harder to spot until it is too late in some cases than their flamboyant brethren but are still from under whatever slime covered rock in the fetid swamp they are hatched in to slither out and infest the world from.

So, look carefully when cruising the net because the slow drivers cause the most accident just like they do in the real world.