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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.


Monday, October 7, 2013

The Daily Drift


They work wonders!

Carolina Naturally is read in 193 194 countries around the world daily.
 
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Today is World Habitat Day 

 

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Today in History

1571 In the last great clash of galleys, the Ottoman navy is defeated at Lepanto, Greece, by a Christian naval coalition under the overall command of Spain's Don Juan de Austria.
1765 Delegates from nine of the American colonies meet in New York to discuss the Stamp Act Crisis and colonial response to it.
1849 Edgar Allan Poe, aged 40, dies a tragic death in Baltimore. Never able to overcome his drinking habits, he was found in a delirious condition outside a saloon that was used as a voting place.
1870 French Minister of the Interior Leon Gambetta escapes besieged Paris by balloon, reaching the French provisional government in Tours.
1913 In attempting to find ways to lower the cost of the automobile and make it more affordable to ordinary Americans, Henry Ford took note of the work of efficiency experts like Frederick Taylor, the "father of scientific management." The result was the assembly line that reduced the time it took to manufacture a car, from 12 hours to 93 minutes.
1944 Prisoner uprising at Birkenau concentration camp.
1949 Iva Toguri D'Aquino, better known as Tokyo Rose, is sentenced to 10 years in prison for treason.
1949 East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, is formed.
1957 A fire in the Windscale plutonium production reactor (later called Sellafield) north of Liverpool, England, spreads radioactive iodine and polonium through the countryside and into the Irish Sea. Livestock in the immediate area were destroyed, along with 500,000 gallons of milk. At least 30, and possibly as many as 1,000, cancer deaths were subsequently linked to the accident.
1976 Hua Guofeng, premier of the People's Republic of China, succeeds the late Mao Zedong as chairman of the Communist Party of China.
1985 Four Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) hijackers seize the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and demand the release of 50 Palestinians held by Israel.
1993 The Great Flood of 1993 on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers ends, the worst US flood since 1927.
1996 Fox News Channel begins broadcasting.
2001 US invasion of Afghanistan in reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 begins; it will become the longest war in US history.
2003 California voters remove Democratic governor Gray Davis from office in the state's first successful recall of a sitting governor (only the second successful recall of a governor in US history); a Republican candidate, bodybuilder/actor Arnold Schwarzenegger wins the election to replace Davis 17 days later.

Non Sequitur

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Harpa

Iceland's Opera House

An asymmetrical glass building on Reykjavik's harbor, Harpa most resembles a shimmering iceberg, crashed onto the shore. Since opening in 2010, this outstanding opera and concert hall has won prominent architectural awards, welcomed over two million visitors and become one of the city's most recognizable landmarks.

Harpa was designed by the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects in co-operation with Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The development was intended to include a 400-room hotel, luxury apartments, retail units, restaurants, a car park and the new headquarters of Icelandic bank Landsbanki.

Mulberry High School students banned from homecoming

Mulberry, Florida - Two students running for homecoming king and queen at Mulberry High School were disqualified a day before the voting was to take place for what school officials called an "inappropriate activity".
Montana Fulkerson has her homecoming gown: a strapless, turquoise colored tulle and beaded dress.
"The idea was to feel like a princess like a queen," she says.
Her best friend, Dalton Wiggs, has a matching tuxm but they won't be going to the dance. School officials have banned the two seniors from all homecoming activities.
"It's our only chance to run for Homecoming King and Queen and they took that away from us," Wiggs says.
The two teens say because they were running against 19 other couples, they decided to try a new campaign strategy to win votes, so they handed out condoms with a catchy slogan.
"It says, 'Wrap these votes up. Tana and Wiggs'. We figured promoting safe sex wouldn't be a problem -- would be humorous. At the same time, some people found it inappropriate," Fulkerson says.
In a written statement, Polk County School District officials said:
"When school administrators became aware, they immediately instructed the students to stop this inappropriate activity. Homecoming is an extracurricular activity and participation is a privilege."
"They said we were promoting teenagers to have sex but if anything to promote safe sex," Fulkerson says.
Fulkerson says she's worn a purity ring since 7th grade.
"I don't believe in premarital sex," she says. "I don't believe in just giving yourself up to just anybody."
Dalton says the punishment is too harsh and that if he knew this was going to happen he would have done things differently.
Montana and Dalton came to school dressed in their homecoming outfits hoping to persuade school officials to change their minds, but they wouldn't budge. The teens say they will dress up again on Saturday and meet their friends after the homecoming dance and join them in the celebration.

Did you know ...

Easyjet refuses to let law professor fly because of critical tweet

That some of the richest corporations are double-dippers

About fighting back against online misogyny

What your email style says about your personality

These 20 white male power elites who belong in the hall of shame

That furloughed government workers are to rally at the capitol

"this is what repugicans have always feared. confronted with the reality of Obamacare, rather than the right's distorted image of it, people will cherish it"

84 year old Texas woman who has been voting for 60 years denied voter id 3 times

Be afraid, be very afraid ...

President Obama Warns Wall Street: Be Very Afraid Of House Republicans

President Obama went on CNBC and told John Harwood that CEOs and the street should be very worried about the suicide caucus (tea party) of the House repugicans because they may not raise the debt ceiling.

House repugicans Are Deciding Whether They Should Totally Cave to Obama Now or Later

obama-punch 
A senior House repugican has let it leak that repugicans are so desperate to get out of the government shutdown/debt ceiling standoff that they are debating whether to cave to President Obama now or later.
According to CNN:
One idea being considered to end the immediate fiscal impasse is a bill to fund the government and extend the nation’s borrowing authority for six weeks, a senior repugican member of the House told CNN Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger.
The congressman agreed to speak with CNN on the condition of anonymity.
The repugican lawmaker said a committee could then be set up to negotiate the fiscal issues dividing the two parties and negotiate a plan to keep the government funded for the rest of the year without the proverbial gun to their heads.
This idea of an extension being floated among repugicans would give everyone a temporary political reprieve. It would give them a way to reopen the government but bypass the issue of tying it to a change in Obamacare, as well as avert a crisis over whether to raise the nation’s debt limit by Oct. 17 when the Treasury Department has said it will run out of money to pay its bills.
House repugicans are pretending publicly that they won’t budge on their demand to delay Obamacare, but the truth is that they are flailing around and desperately searching for a way to get out of their promise to conservatives that they will get rid of the ACA. House repugicans have gone from demanding a one year delay of the ACA to looking for an escape hatch that will let them renew this fight later.
It is doubtful that Democrats would accept a six week deal on opening the government and the debt ceiling, because there is no guarantee that anything would be resolved during the six week extension. If Democrats agreed to the short term deal, it’s likely that they would find themselves back in the same place that they are now. The only difference would be that the next showdown would take place during the holiday season.
If you read between the lines, the real question that repugicans are debating is when they should totally cave. A six week extension would mean that they cave now, and hope that they can convince conservatives that they will continue to wage war against Obamacare later.
Politically there is no reason for Democrats to accept a short term funding/debt ceiling deal that would allow House repugicans to live to fight another day. President Obama is leading a unified Democratic Party that is out to put an end to the tea party madness.
The very intentional leaking of this short term proposal is a sign that President Obama and the Democrats have the House repugicans on the ropes. A six week short term deal that would reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling should be rejected by Democrats the very moment that it is offered.
House repugicans are dumping all of their Obamacare demands, but Democrats shouldn’t bail them out. Democrats should reject anything less than the passage of a clean CR, and long term raising of debt ceiling. There is still just one way out for House repugicans. The message from the president and congressional Democrats has stayed the same. House repugicans need to pass a clean CR, and raise the debt ceiling.

The truth be told

The Big Lie Behind Rand Paul’s Pack of repugican cabal Shutdown Lies

Rand Paul 
The repugican cabal, driven by tea party extremism, has shut down the U.S. government, costing taxpayers on the order of $40-$80 million per day at a conservative estimate. Some estimates go as high as $300 million per day. According to Shutdowncost.com, as I write this, the shutdown has cost in excess of $1,593,276,000 and it is literally climbing by the second. Yet Rand Paul (r-KY) writes an op-ed on CNN.com on Friday with the disingenuous claim that he doesn’t understand why the WWII memorial isn’t open:
This week, we saw the outrageous spectacle of World War II veterans being told by our government that they couldn’t visit their own memorial. These former service members, who stared down the Japanese and the Nazis, were told that they couldn’t step through barricades arbitrarily placed in front of their memorial because the government has shut down. Some have speculated that it might have cost more to place the barricades there than to have done nothing at all.
This is a tear-jerker, and it is meant to be. But Paul is being as dishonest here as the day is long.
He says putting barricades up cost more than to have done nothing. But Rand Paul doesn’t mention that, the shutdown his cabal is responsible for is costing Americans more than if the repugicans had done nothing. And the shutdown is costing Americans more than a few barricades.
Let me put it this way: Not only do the spending cuts the repugican cabal demands not reduce the federal debt, but the shutdown repugicans initiated claiming Obamacare is costing Americans too much money, costs more money than Obamacare.
If this makes sense to you, you are probably a tea partier.
Yet Rand Paul says Obamacare makes no sense, because, apparently, giving millions of Americans access to insurance for the first time, and forcing insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, makes no sense.
He accuses President Obama of being “tone deaf” to Americans, completely ignoring the fact – and it is a fact – that the majority of Americans want Obamacare and that the majority of Americans do not want a government shutdown.
I think we know who is tone deaf, and it isn’t President Obama.
Then Rand Paul pulls out the Big Lie, the same one every repugican who began planning for this shutdown in 2010 are all using, that none of them wanted a shutdown. Keep in mind that they shut down the government using Obamacare as an excuse. Keep in mind that Obamacare is the law of the land, and more, a law upheld by the Supreme Court.
No one wanted a government shutdown. The repugicans have continued to offer multiple compromises that would keep the government open. I offered an amendment to keep the government open an additional week while negotiations continued. My proposal was rejected. In fact, all of our proposals were rejected.
Paul tells another lie when he claims, “Every attempt to bargain, negotiate or compromise has been rejected by the Democrats.”
Let us be clear: The repugicans have offered no compromises. They refused from the start to negotiate. Their demands – and they can be construed no other way – have been predicated on 44 unsuccessful votes to defund Obamacare, and when that failed, to delay it for a year, when, they hope, a new majority in the Senate will kill it for good. In other words, delaying Obamacare is, from their point of view, no different than killing it. Some compromise. Either way, it’s “kill Obamacare.”
Apparently, Rand Paul yearns to be known as the biggest liar in Washington, D.C., to judge by this next whopper:
Pundits like to talk about dysfunctional government in Washington. This week demonstrated how right they are. Our government is too big, inefficient and incompetent to possibly handle American health care effectively. Why can’t this administration get its act together?
A repugican-dominated House of Representatives rushing down a road to nowhere with no clear end-game in mind save unconditional surrender by the administration, and Paul says the administration doesn’t have IT’S act together?
Paul pulls out one lie after another, each worse than the last, arriving at the tried and untrue repugican claim that Obama is building the deficit at a record pace:
And what do we have to show for this largely dysfunctional government? Annual trillion dollar deficits and a $17 trillion debt than keeps climbing.
The truth is exactly the opposite. In fact, Obama is reducing the deficit at a record pace. It is a fact that the Obama administration has presided over the most rapid deficit reduction since World War II.
In fact, government spending under President Obama has grown at a slower rate than it did under any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, according to Bloomberg (that’s over 50 years ago, if you’re counting).
Where does that leave Paul’s op-ed? Lie, lie, another lie, followed by more lies. So does Rand Paul have anything to say that is not a lie?
No, sadly he does not. All Rand Paul has is lies.
And so the liar from Kentucky concludes, dishonestly, that because his party has shutdown the government over a law that has been upheld by the Supreme Court, that, “What Americans were reminded of this week — more than anything else — is that big government doesn’t work.”
What doesn’t work is the House of Representatives, which has spent 15+ percent of its time this year trying to get rid of a law that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. A law, moreover, that most Americans want.
The repugican cabal, to nobody’s surprise, is a cabal these days of liars and shills. But Rand Paul, apparently – and this is saying something when you consider the company he keeps – wants to be the liar of the century.
Right now, he has that award hands down.

Did you know that tea party repugican Dennis Ross Admited that the repugican Shutdown is About Pride

dennis ross 
Dennis Ross, a repugican representative from Florida since 2011, admitted that the repugican shutdown is all about repugican pride, “I think now it’s a lot about pride.”
Ross is one of the most conservative House members according to the Club for Growth, and he is the first tea party member to say that he would support ending the five day repugican government shutdown with a spending deal that didn’t include changes to ObamaCare.
Jonathan Weisman at the New York Times reported:
“repugicans have to realize how many significant gains we’ve made over the last three years, and we have — not only in cutting spending but in really turning the tide on a lot of things,” Representative Dennis Ross, repugican of Florida, said on Saturday. “We can’t lose all that when there’s no connection now between the shutdown and the funding of Obamacare.”
He added: “I think now it’s a lot about pride.”
The repugican shutdown isn’t a policy argument and it never was, because no sane party would shutdown the government over a law already vetted by the voters, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It’s wingnut hubris.
Ross pointed out that the party “risked losing a fight over the scale of government while waging a quixotic war against the health care law.” True enough. The repugicans are undermining the core of their ideology by defending and refunding parts of the government.
Days ago I warned that repugicans were actually causing Americans to realize just how much good the government does for them. If the repugican cabal keeps the government shutdown long enough, even the most politically out of touch American will feel the pain, and will be hesitant to buy into the “government should be drowned” mantra of wingnuts.
Furthermore, repugicans have now placed themselves in the business of picking winners and losers in government – something they are allegedly 100% against.
And apparently this entire thing is about their pride. They have to get something before they refund the government, because they’re hurt and embarrassed.
Rep. Marlin Stutzman (r-IN) went all Rodney Dangerfield days ago, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
When whining about respect and pride doesn’t work, repugicans have practically taken to crying, “Leave us alone!” They don’t like being called extremists, so leave Britney alone, you meanies. How dare you speak the truth about repugicans while they’re destroying the economy. #Winning.
Ross’ comments demonstrate that repugicans don’t even know what they stand for anymore, and that’s why no one can guess what they’re going to do next. The one thing we can be sure of: tea party repugicans see themselves as comic book heroes defeating President Obama. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they can’t absorb the fact that they are losing this very public battle with the President.
The humbling of the repugican cabal is just getting warmed up, I fear. A bit of a reminder: “Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before stumbling.”
Here’s a tip for repugicans: If your cabal would stop fundraising off of promises that you should know you can’t deliver, like defunding ObamaCare, you could avoid the humiliation of caving in public yet again. But this would involve educating the tea party (including yourselves, apparently) about how government works, and telling your corporate donors to buzz off. In other words, it would require courage and integrity – two values the repugican cabal obviously can’t afford to embrace.

Just what is essential in government?

Meet two cancer patients whose treatment is on hold due to US government shutdown

An 8yo girl, and a father of 3

Maddie Major, 8, has leukemia.

Maddie Major has leukemia. She's 8 years old, and she's had it recur four times. The clinical trial she now needs, having exhausted all other options for treatment, cannot be approved by the FDA because the FDA has been shut down, along with the rest of the federal government. “I am completely blown away by how callus and how carelessly they’ve just kind of used us as their pawns to push their own agenda,” says her mom. From a Baltimore CBS TV affiliate's report:
Maddie’s cancer, pre-B cell ALL, is curable in 90 percent of the cases. Her daughter is in that 10 percent category. Six months ago, she went through a clinical trial that worked. Because of her relapse, she’s scheduled to have it again. Now, it’s up in the air.
Another patient affected by the halt in new clinical trials is Leo Finn of Cape Cod, a 48-year-old father of three waiting for approval on an experimental drug for his metastatic bile duct cancer.
Finn said he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in February, after tumors had spread to his liver and bones. At first, doctors tried standard chemotherapy drugs, but they shrank his tumors for only a short time. His Dana-Farber oncologist recommended that he try cabozantinib, a drug approved for thyroid cancer but still experimental to treat other cancers.
But before he could get the drug, the hospital had to launch a clinical trial, because no other patients with his type of cancer are receiving it. But the registration website, www.clinicaltrials.gov, is not able to process new requests.
Maddie and Leo are not alone. Each additional day the federal government shutdown continues is an additional day their cancer treatment is delayed. Does that sound like "non-essential government operations" to you?
Update: Looks like Leo may get to start the trial now, thanks to the intervention of Congressman Bill Keating.

California enacts law expanding legal protection for journalists

In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed a new law that gives journalists in the state "five days' notice before government agencies serve subpoenas on their records held by third parties, such as phone companies and internet service providers."

What it's like to live in a 300-year-old farmhouse in New York City

The Vander-Ende Onderdonk House, on the border between Brooklyn and Queens, is the oldest surviving Dutch Colonial house in NYC. It is not just a museum. Real people live in it, too, navigating low ceilings, strange angles, and a creepy cellar full of almost four centuries of artifacts.

Yelling at kids may be as damaging as spanking them

“If you yell at your child, you either create somebody who yells back at you or somebody who is shamed and retreats. You’re either growing aggression or growing shame. Those are not characteristics that any parents want in their kids.” What exactly is a parent to do? A Washington Post story digs into a University of Pittsburgh study released in September that examined 967 middle school students over a two-year period.
Those whose parents used “harsh verbal discipline” such as yelling, cursing and using insults were more likely to be depressed or have behavior problems. The study found it was also not effective in getting children to stop what they were doing, and that it was damaging even to children in homes that were generally warm and loving.

Why letting a pregnant woman's heart stop could save both her and her baby

I've been describing this Slate piece as the most awesome thing I really should not have read at 38 weeks pregnant. For decades, doctors thought that a pregnant woman whose heart stopped had pretty much no chance of survival. After trying to resuscitate her, attention would shift to rescuing the baby. But recent research suggests a better solution: Spend less time trying to get the mother's heart pumping again. Not only does it give the infants a better shot at survival, it also, insanely enough, saves more mothers. Turns out, once somebody removes the other human from your body, your failed heart will often just start pumping again on its own.

To Improve Your Social Skills, Read Complex Fiction

Spending time in the works of Milton, Faulkner or other great fiction writers doesn't just make you more knowledgeable of literature. It may actually improve your social skills.
David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, social scientists at the New School for Social Research in New York City, evaluated how well people performed on tests of empathy and emotional and social intelligence. Subjects did better on these tests after reading literary fiction, rather than serious nonfiction or popular fiction. Pam Belluck describes the experiment in the New York Times:
People ranging in age from 18 to 75 were recruited for each of five experiments. They were paid $2 or $3 each to read for a few minutes. Some were given excerpts from award-winning literary fiction (Don DeLillo, Wendell Berry). Others were given best sellers like Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” a Rosamunde Pilcher romance or a Robert Heinlein science fiction tale.
In one experiment, some participants were given nonfiction excerpts, but we’re not talking “All the President’s Men.” To maximize the contrast, the researchers — looking for nonfiction that was well-written, but not literary or about people — turned to Smithsonian Magazine. “How the Potato Changed the World” was one selection. “Bamboo Steps Up” was another.
After reading — or in some cases reading nothing — the participants took computerized tests that measure people’s ability to decode emotions or predict a person’s expectations or beliefs in a particular scenario. In one test, called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes,” subjects did just that: they studied 36 photographs of pairs of eyes and chose which of four adjectives best described the emotion each showed.
Is the woman with the smoky eyes aghast or doubtful? Is the man whose gaze has slivered to a squint suspicious or indecisive? Is she interested or irritated, flirtatious or hostile? Is he fantasizing or guilty, dominant or horrified? Or annoyed that his tech stock dropped half a percent on the Nasdaq in a round of late trading after news from the Middle East? (Just kidding — that last one isn’t on the test.)
Why does literature have this effect? Kidd and Castano conclude that the complexity of literary fiction compels readers to search for subtleties of meaning and nuance--skills that are essential for gauging the emotional responses and depth of real people. Kidd explains:
In literary fiction, like Dostoyevsky, “there is no single, overarching authorial voice,” he said. “Each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”

Random Celebrity Photos

Marilyn

Prison Profiteers

Extracting billions by exploiting prisoners and their families

America imprisons more people than any other nation in the history of the Earth, and those prisoners' only lifeline to the outside world is the prison phone-system, from which they must make collect-calls. Those calls are billed by Global Tel Link and companies like it, companies that offers kickbacks to the prisons that use its services, which bill prisoners' families more than a dollar a minute, hundreds of times more than free-market carriers. GTL is making over $500M by exploiting the vulnerable families of the most emiserated people in America, and its competitors are making hundreds of millions more. 2.7M American children have to ration their calls to their incarcerated parents, undermining the cohesion of prisoners' families and their ability to support prisoners on release.
This point is made in a long and sad article on prison profiteering by Liliana Segura in The Nation. Worse than phone profiteering is the cruelty of the prison medical contractors, who ration vital treatments to prisoners, leaving them in agony and worse. For example, Correctional Medical Services "discourages treatment for hepatitis," leaving prisoners with hep. C to slide into permanent, profound disability.
These problems are much worse in private prisons, who are guaranteed occupancy by the states and counties that contract with them -- effectively, the government promises to lock up a minimum number of its citizens as a condition of doing business with private prisons. These prisons are not subject to freedom of information requests, are not inspected in the same way as public prisons, and have profit-taking built into their billion-dollar business, meaning that every dollar they spend on care and rehabilitation for prisoners is a dollar they don't return to their shareholders.
The ACLU is campaigning against prison profiteers and they deserve your support.
I dealt with Global Tel* Link for only a few months. But for Tim’s relatives, this had been their reality for years. GTL makes more than $500 million a year exploiting families like his, who face the choice between paying exorbitant phone rates to keep in touch with incarcerated loved ones—up to $1.13 per minute—or simply giving up on regular phone calls. Like many other telecommunications companies that enjoy profitable monopolies on prison and jail contracts across the country, GTL wins its contracts by offering a kickback—or “commission”—to the prison or jail systems it serves. As an exhaustive 2011 study in Prison Legal News explained, the kickback is “based on a percentage of the gross revenue generated by prisoners’ phone calls…. [The] commissions dwarf all other considerations and are a controlling factor when awarding prison phone contracts.”
The higher a kickback, in other words, the more likely a company is to win the contract. These high kickbacks translate into higher phone rates for family members—usually the very people who can least afford it. Like the vast majority of those who pass through the massive jail and court complex known as 201 Poplar in downtown Memphis, Tim’s family was not wealthy. When it came time for his trial last spring, his mother would be in court every day, only to leave straight for her night job, cleaning office buildings.
Global Tel* Link is one of five companies profiled in a new video series called “Prison Profiteers,” a collaboration between Beyond Bars—a Brave New Films project—the ACLU, and The Nation. With 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, prisons are big business; the goal of the series is to expose the myriad ways people enrich themselves off crime and punishment. Defenders of for-profit prison services pitch them as superior, efficient, money-saving options for cash-strapped states and localities that can ill-afford the costs of mass incarceration. (And indeed, historically, state-run services have often proven abysmal in themselves.) But not only do such privatized services often end up more expensive in reality, they can incur huge unseen costs to inmates and their families.
With 2.3 Million People Incarcerated in the US, Prisons Are Big Business

Man charged with meth offenses

A traffic stop led to drug charges against a Florida man on Tuesday evening. At approximately 8:19pm a Deputy from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office affected a traffic stop on a Gold Ford Ranger due to the vehicle having no tail lights and no tag.

The three occupants were removed from the vehicle in order for the K-9 unit to conduct a free air sniff. When they were asked if they had any weapons on or about their persons, William Dwayne Goodson, voluntarily removed a small plastic container and a plastic baggie, both containing finished methamphetamines, from his pocket and placed it on the hood of the patrol car.
Also found on his person was a straw with suspected methamphetamine residue and package of “Cush,” which is a suspected synthetic marijuana product. During the course of the deployment, K-9 Toby indicated a positive alert for the presence of narcotics. A probable cause search revealed the presence of several listed chemicals commonly used in the manufacture of methamphetamines including Lye, Coleman Fuel, and Muriatic Acid.

In a post Miranda statement, Goodson stated that the items found were in his possession for the purpose of manufacturing methamphetamines. Members of the Jackson County Drug Task Force responded due to the presence of the hazardous chemicals. Goodson took responsibility for all of the illegal substances found and was subsequently lodged in the Jackson County Correctional Facility to await first appearance. The other two occupants were released.

Daily Comic Relief

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The world's first Trillionaire

... for a few hours at least

An East Texas man was checking his account online, as many of us do, when he saw his balance being higher than he remembered. A lot higher. With a lot more zeroes.
Yes, his bank statement said he had over four trillion dollars in his account.
I volunteered to become his friend.
The world's first trillionaire was projected to be Bill Gates, but Reggie Theus beat him to it.
"Lately you're known as the four trillion dollar man," I said to Reggie.
"Well, I was definitely surprised when I looked in my account and saw that much money in there" he laughed

Underwater Aeroplanes

The New Toy For The Super Rich

The billionaires who crowded into the Monaco yacht show last week found a new gadget to play with - the DeepFlight Super Falcon underwater aeroplane.

Its designer is London-born marine engineer Graham Hawkes who creates submersibles that look like they should come straight out of a James Bond film. Built with 8.8 feet wide wings, and able to go to a depth of 1600 feet the Super Falcon is yours for $1.7 million.

Astronomical News

One of the most symbolic of scientific institutions has become the latest casualty of the political ineptitude on Capitol Hill.
A "microlensing" survey has revealed a massive planet deep inside the Milky Way's galactic bulge.
Comet ISON is rapidly approaching its potential death-dive toward the sun -- here are the top 5 facts about this enigmatic celestial object that you should know.

Woman drove through the night for nine hours to save dog bitten by snake

A mercy dash from Western Australia to the Northern Territory has saved the life of a beloved pet dog bitten by a mulga snake. Pania the dog came off second best after a tangle with the snake on Tuesday afternoon at a remote Indigenous community, west of Docker River. The nearest veterinarian was nearly 700 kilometres away at Alice Springs.
Debbie Osborne from the Alice Springs Veterinary Hospital says she was alerted by the dog's owner that she was starting the nine-hour drive to the Red Centre town. Ms Osbourne says the dog was in poor condition when it arrived at the clinic around 4.30am. "[The dog] was not standing ... shallow breathing and in quite a bad way," she said. Pania, though, had managed to kill the snake. "Because the snake was dead, we told them to bring the snake in so we could get a positive on it," Ms Osborne said.
"What was important was for the vet to get the snake identified first, and then discuss what needed to be done." Local snake catcher Rex Neindorf arrived shortly afterwards ... identifying the dead snake as a King Brown (or Mulga Snake). "If it had been one of the more common Eastern or Western Browns, the dog would have been dead in half an hour," says Rex. "The venom of the King Brown is not as toxic."

"King Browns are actually a type of black snake so we have to use the black snake anti-venom to treat it," says Debbie. "The muscles will recover now that the anti-venom has [been administered] but the most important thing now is to protect her kidneys ... she's not out of the woods yet but it's looking hopeful."

Prehistoric Elephant Had A Huge Spork For A Mouth

Animals don't waste energy developing worthless characteristics. Traits that help a species survive get passed along through generations, while those that are no longer useful fade away.

Platybelodon was an ancestor of the modern elephant that looked like it got hit in the face with a shovel, then absorbed that shovel into its mouth. When Platybelodon were first described in the 1920s, their lower incisors were thought to function to shovel, scoop, and dig. But recent analysis of tusk wear surfaces show that they were used more as scythes to cut tough vegetation.

Bison Battle In Yellowstone National Park

When it's summer in America's Yellowstone national park, herds of elk, pronghorn and bison return from their winter feeding grounds to take advantage of America's richest natural grasslands. But soon the bison begin to fight for mating rites.


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Animal Pictures

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Knurrender Wolf by Jakob W.