Welcome to ...

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, January 11, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of Carolina Naturally.
As the cookie crumbles ...!
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 205 countries around the world daily.   
  
There are more people held as slaves today than at any other point in history ... !
Today is - Human Trafficking Awareness Day

You want the unvarnished truth?
Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told
Some of our readers today have been in:
The Americas
Brazil - Canada - Colombia - Honduras - Mexico - Nicaragua - Puerto Rico - United States
Europe
Albania - Austria - Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - England - France - Georgia - Germany  Greece - Hungary - Ireland - Italy - Latvia - Netherlands - Norway - Poland - Portugal - Romania  Russia - San Marino - Scotland - Serbia - Slovakia - Slovenia - Spain - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
India - Indonesia - Korea - Malaysia - Mauritius - Saudi Arabia - Singapore - Vietnam
Africa
Algeria - Ethiopia - Mozambique - South Africa
The Pacific
Australia - New Zealand - Philippines
Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here.

Today in History

49 BC
Julius Caesar leads his army across the Rubicon River, plunging Rome into civil war.
1843
Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” dies in Baltimore.
1861
Alabama secedes from the Union.
1862
Lincoln accepts Simon Cameron’s resignation as Secretary of War.
1887
At Fort Smith, Arkansas, hangman George Maledon dispatches four victims in a multiple hanging.
1904
British troops massacre 1,000 dervishes in Somaliland.
1916
Russian General Yudenich launches a WWI winter offensive and advances west.
1923
The French enter the town of Essen in the Ruhr valley, to extract Germany’s resources as war payment.
1934
The German police raid the homes of dissident clergy in Berlin.
1941
Adolf Hitler orders forces to be prepared to enter North Africa to assist the Italian effort, marking the establishment of the Afrika Korps.
1940
Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., becomes the U.S. Army’s first black general, his son would later become a general as well.
1942
Japan invades the Dutch East Indies at Borneo.
1943
The Soviet Red Army encircles Stalingrad.
1948
President Harry S. Truman proposes free, two-year community colleges for all who want an education.
1949
Negotiations in China between the Nationalists and Communists open as Tientsin is virtually lost to the Communists.
1964
A collection of previously unexhibited paintings by Pablo Picasso are displayed for the first time in Toronto.
1980
Honda announces it will build the first Japanese-owned passenger-car assembly plant in the United States–in Ohio.
1994
The Irish Government announces an end to a 15-year ban on broadcasting by the IRA and its political branch, Sinn Fein.
2003
Illinois Gov. George Ryan commutes the death sentences of 167 prisoners on the state’s death row in the wake of allegations that Chicago police detective and commander Jon Burge tortured confessions from some 200 suspects over a 19 year period.

Word for the day ...

Pandering
The word "pander", meaning to "pimp" is derived from Pandarus, a licentious figure who facilitates the affair between the protagonists in Troilus and Criseyde, a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer.  Pandarus appears with a similar role in Shakespeare's interpretation of the story, Troilus and Cressida.
The plot function of the aging lech Pandarus in Chaucer's and Shakespeare's famous works has given rise to the English terms a pander (in later usage a panderer), from Chaucer, meaning a person who furthers other people's illicit sexual amours; and to pander, from Shakespeare, as a verb denoting the same activity. A panderer is, specifically, a bawd — a male who arranges access to female sexual favors, the manager of prostitutes. Thus, in law, the charge of pandering is an accusation that an individual has sold the sexual services of another. The verb "to pander" is also used in a more general sense to suggest active or implicit encouragement of someone's weaknesses. The image at the top is Vermeer's portrayal of The Procuress.
The woman in black, the leering coupler, "in a nun's costume", could be the eponymous procuress, while the man to her right, "wearing a black beret and a doublet with slashed sleeves", has been identified as a self portrait of the artist.

Breitbart Labels Saudi Brutality 'Taking Care Of Business'

Breitbart Labels Saudi Brutality 'Taking Care Of Business'

The Last Straw ...

"Basically, they were setting up speed traps on I-75 to fund the municipal workings of that village – which they then stole."

USA Can Copy Canada's Criminal/Mental Health Gun Requirements

USA Can Copy Canada's Criminal/Mental Health Gun Requirements

Celebrity Gun Nut Threatens To Shoot His Girlfriend, Gets Arrested With His Pants Down – Literally

Celebrity Gun Nut Threatens To Shoot His Girlfriend, Gets Arrested With His Pants Down – Literally
Karma just owned this gun fetishist. Hard.
Read more 

Ethan Couch got hammered in Mexican strip clubs — then made his mom pay the $2,100 tab

Fugitive teen Ethan Couch, captured in a Mexico resort city after violating terms of his court-ordered probation. (Agence France-Presse)
“Affluenza” teen Ethan Couch reportedly spent thousands of dollars on alcohol and prostitutes at a Mexican strip club before he was apprehended for fleeing the country to avoid prosecution.

Students SHUT DOWN Fox Hack For Mocking ‘Rape Hysteria’ And ‘Repeated Consent’

It’s no secret that wingnuts believe with all of their hearts that serious, life-threatening issues that plague women every day of their lives...

Volkswagen Cheated On Its Emissions Tests. Now, It’s Getting Sued

Quick Hits

Sunnis and Shiites: Islam's ancient divide, explained
London has a radical new approach to getting the homeless off the street
Women seeking divorce were coerced into giving sexual favors to Oklahoma City process server: officials
Could one shot every two months eradicate HIV?

Virtual Reality Is the Future ...

Women Can’t Expect Equality In The Boardroom Until At Least 2065

Clip-on Cribs Help Moms Bond with Their Babies

Mothers at the Gelderse Vallei Hospital in the Netherlands can get a new type of bed for their newborn babies while recovering from childbirth. These cribs clip onto maternity beds easily to provide the mothers with easy access to their babies. They're especially helpful for breastfeeding mothers who want to have their infants close by, as well as cesarean section patients who may be immobilized as a result of surgical birth.

The Underground Street Buried Beneath Keighley’s Royal Arcade

In 1901, the town of Keighley, West Yorkshire, UK, built an entirely new shopping district over top of a street of abandoned shops. The street level was adjusted, and new shop owners moved into the new Royal Arcade. The original shopping center was now underground, used as storage cellars for some of the new shops, but completely forgotten by everyone else. For a hundred years. Construction work in 2003 brought the underground street to public attention.
When builders found their way into the secret street more than a century later, while working in the cellars of the shops above, they discovered the original wooden shop-fronts and stable pens hauntingly frozen in time.
Electric lighting was installed to make the space easier to navigate during reconstruction work and it’s understood that various period items were also added for the benefit of future tours. Other items, however, may have been left over from the Victorian era, largely undisturbed since the abandoned underground street was sealed off and forgotten.
There are now plans to restore the complex and open it up to the public as a glimpse into the past. You can see plenty of pictures of this subterranean time capsule at Urban Ghosts.

Casually Explained ...

Evolution
 
A very dry reading of a script accompanies an explanation of evolution. The audio resembles a lecture class so much that you might miss the ridiculous things he says. But the crudely-drawn pictures help.
So when species specialized, ducks shed everything that benefits other species except buoyancy. Maybe they didn’t realize that all birds are pretty buoyant to begin with. At least ducks are delicious. But I was a bit surprised that platypuses don’t have stomachs. I had to look that up. Therefore, you can believe that, as weird as this lecture is, the facts are all facts. I am looking forward to more from Casually Explained.

Climate Change Is Bad For Farmers' Mental Health

Climate change starved the Earth’s ‘real King Kong’ into extinction

King Kong (Facebook) 
The largest ape to roam Earth died out 100,000 years ago because it failed to tuck into savanna grass after climate change hit its preferred diet of forest fruit, scientists suggest.
Gigantopithecus — the closest Nature ever came to producing a real King Kong — weighed five times as much as an adult man and probably stood three meters (nine feet) tall, according to sketchy estimates.
In its heyday a million years ago, it inhabited semi-tropical forests in southern China and mainland Southeast Asia.
Until now, though, almost nothing was known about the giant’s anatomical shape or habits.
The only fossil records are four partial lower jaws, and perhaps a thousand teeth — the first of which turned up in the 1930s in Hong Kong apothecaries where they were sold as “dragon’s teeth.”
These meagre remains “are clearly insufficient to say if the animal was bipedal or quadrupedal, and what would be its body proportions,” Herve Bocherens, a researcher at Tübingen University in Germany, told AFP.
Its closest modern cousin is the orangutan, but whether Gigantopithecus had the same golden-red hue, or was black like a gorilla is unknown.
Another mystery: its diet. Was it a meat-eater or a vegetarian? Did it share a taste for bamboo with its neighbor the prehistoric giant panda?
Answering this riddle might also tell us why a monster that surely had little to fear from other fauna went extinct.
– Adapt or die –
That’s where the teeth had a story to tell.
Examining slight variations in carbon isotopes found in tooth enamel, Bocherens and an international team of scientists showed that the primordial King Kong lived only in the forest, was a strict vegetarian, and probably wasn’t crazy about bamboo.
These narrow preferences did not pose a problem for Gigantopithecus until Earth was struck by a massive ice age during the Pleistocene Epoch, which stretched from about 2.6 million to 12,000 years ago.
That’s when Nature, evolution — and perhaps a refusal to try new foods — conspired to doom the giant ape, Bocherens explained.
“Due to its size, Gigantopithecus presumably depended on a large amount of food,” he said.
“When during the Pleistocene, more and more forested area turned into savanna landscapes, there was simply an insufficient food supply.”
And yet, according to the study, other apes and early humans in Africa that had comparable dental gear were able to survive similar transitions by eating the leaves, grass and roots offered by their new environments.
But for some reason, Asia’s giant ape — which was probably too heavy to climb trees, or swing in their branches — did not make the switch.
“Gigantopithecus probably did not have the same ecological flexibility and possibly lacked the physiological ability to resist stress and food shortage,” notes the study, which is to be published in a specialist journal, Quaternary International.
Whether the mega-ape could have adapted to a changing world but didn’t, or whether it was doomed by climate and its genes, is probably one mystery that will never be solved.
Climate change several hundred thousand years ago was also likely responsible for the disappearance of many other large animals from the Asians continent.

Dogs can suffer from sleeping disorders, too

Dogs can suffer from sleeping disorders, too

Animal Pictures