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.


Friday, January 29, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of Carolina Naturally.
What A Scam ..! 
 
Carolina Naturally is read in 205 countries around the world daily.   
  
Good Girl ... !
Today is - Seeing Eye Dog 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 - Dominican Republic - Ecuador - Jamaica - Mexico - Nicaragua  Paraguay - Peru - Puerto Rico - United States
Europe
Austria - Belarus - Belgium - Bosnia and Herzegovina - Bulgaria - Croatia - Czech Republic  England - France - Georgia - Germany - Greece - Hungary - Italy - Latvia - Netherlands 
Norway - Poland - Portugal - Russia - San Marino - Scotland - Serbia - Slovakia - Slovenia 
Spain - Sweden - Switzerland - Ukraine - Wales
Asia
Azerbaijan - Bangladesh - Burma - China - Hong Kong - India - Indonesia - Iran - Kazakhstan
Korea - Pakistan - Saudi Arabia - Vietnam
Africa
Algeria - Angola - Zambia
The Pacific
Australia
Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here.

Today in History

1813
Jane Austin publishes Pride and Prejudice.
1861
Kansas is admitted into the Union as the 34th state.
1865
William Quantrill and his Confederate raiders attack Danville, Kentucky.
1918
The Supreme Allied Council meets at Versailles.
1926
Violette Neatley Anderson becomes the first African-American woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
1929
The Seeing Eye, America’s first school for training dogs to guide the blind, founded in Nashville, Tennessee.
1931
Winston Churchill resigns as Stanley Baldwin’s aide.
1942
German and Italian troops take Benghazi in North Africa.
1944
The world’s greatest warship, Missouri, is launched.
1950
Riots break out in Johannesburg, South Africa, over the policy of Apartheid.
1967
Thirty-seven civilians are killed by a U.S. helicopter attack in Vietnam.
1979
President Jimmy Carter commutes the sentence of Patty Hearst.
1984
Reagan announces that he will run for a second term.
1984
The Soviets issue a formal complaint against alleged U.S. arms treaty violations.
1991
Iraqi forces attack into Saudi Arabian town of Kafji, but are turned back by Coalition forces.

Non Sequitur

Was A Buddhist Monk Responsible For The Paris Climate Agreement?

thich-nhat-hanh-600x303
One of the guiding forces behind the scenes of the Paris climate agreement may well have been an 89-year-old Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk.
Christiana Figueres, who led the climate talks, has credited Thich Nhat Hanh with having played a pivotal role in helping her to develop the strength, wisdom and compassion needed to forge the unprecedented deal backed by 196 countries.
Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, says the teachings of Thay, as he is known to his hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, “literally fell into my lap” when she was going through a deep personal crisis three years ago.
She says the Buddhist philosophy of Thay, who is currently recovering from a serious stroke, helped her to deal with the crisis while also allowing her to maintain her focus on the climate talks.
Figueres said she realized that “I have to have something here, because otherwise I can’t deal with this and do my job, and it was very clear to me that there was no way that I could take a single day off,” she told The Huffington Post this week at the World Economic Forum‘s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
“This has been a six-year marathon with no rest in between,” she said. “I just really needed something to buttress me, and I don’t think that I would have had the inner stamina, the depth of optimism, the depth of commitment, the depth of the inspiration if I had not been accompanied by the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.”
So what did Thay teach her?
Figueres illustrates this via a visit she made to his monastery in Waldbrol, Germany, which was once a mental institution with 700 patients, before the Nazis came along to exterminate them and took over the premises for the Hitler Youth.
She says Thay chose to locate his monastery there “because he wanted to prove that it is completely possible to turn pain into love, to turn being a victim into being a victor, to turn hate into love and forgiveness, and he was intent in showing that in this place that had been associated with such absolute, inhuman cruelty.”
“The first thing that he did was he wrote to the Buddhist community and he said, ‘I want hearts. I want hand-sewn hearts, one for each of the patients who were killed here, so that we can begin to transform this building, and this space, and this energy,'” Figueres told HuffPost.
“It was such a powerful story for me, right? Because in many ways, that is the journey that we have been on in the climate negotiations,” she continued. “It is a journey from blaming each other, to actually collaborating. It’s a journey from feeling completely paralyzed, helpless, exposed to the elements, to actually feeling empowered that we can do this.”
“It’s actually been for me internally a beautiful journey of healing. So for me, I’ve sort of been living life at many different levels, because I had to turn my own personal crisis, I had to transform that,” Figueres went on to say. “I’m still in the midst of that, I’m not going to say I’m way over on the other side, but I had to do that for myself.”
“I felt this is exactly the energy that the climate change convention negotiations need, all inspired, you know, by this amazing teaching,” she said.
In fact when Thay arrived for the first time at the former Nazi headquarters, which has 400 rooms, he wrote a letter to the patients who died, which is read every day at the monastery by the monks and nuns who live there.
“Now the Sangha [community] has come, the Sangha has heard and understood your suffering and the injustice you endured,” it says. “The people who caused your suffering have also suffered a lot. They did not know what they were doing at that time. So please allow compassion and forgiveness to be born in your heart so that they also can have a chance to transform and heal. Please support the Sangha and the next many generations of practitioners so that we can transform these places of suffering into places of transformation and healing, not only for Waldbrol but for the whole country of Germany and the world.”
Thay, who is considered by many to be the father of mindfulness in the West and has been an environmentalist activist for more than two decades, has other monasteries around the world and has built the fastest-growing monastic order in the world. He is also well respected by senior leaders across the United States.
Last year, he was invited by the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, to the organization’s Washington headquarters for an event with the staff. Kim’s favorite book is Thay’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, and he praises the Zen monk’s practice for being “deeply passionate and compassionate toward those who are suffering.”
Thay visited Silicon Valley in 2013 at the invitation of Google and was also asked to lead a private day of mindfulness for CEOs of 15 of the world’s most powerful technology companies.
Marc Benioff, CEO of cloud computing giant Salesforce, has been actively supporting Thay’s rehabilitation after he fell ill.
Thay has led an extraordinary life, including a nomination for the Nobel peace prize from Martin Luther King in 1967 for his work in seeking an end to the Vietnam war. In his nomination King said: “I do not personally know of anyone more worthy of [this prize] than this gentle monk from Vietnam. His ideas for peace, if applied, would build a monument to ecumenism, to world brotherhood, to humanity.”

Wedding Haka

Benjamin Armstrong’s family and friends surprised him and his bride Aaliyah with a haka at their wedding reception in Aukland, New Zealand, last week. Aaliyah was moved to tears by the performance. After Benjamin and one of the bridesmaids joined in, the bride did, too.
Josh Starks gave us a little background in the comments:
This Haka is called Tika Tonu. It is a Maori Haka and was written in the Hawkes Bay, New Zealand in 1914 by a chief named Waimarama Puhara. He wrote it for his son and it is about the transition from boy to man.
The lyrics and translation are in the description of another YouTube video.

Research shows humans evolved to gossip

Research shows humans evolved to gossip -- and doing it well is a social skill instead of a character flaw

Zika Spreading

Mosquito-borne Zika virus expected to expand across US: Centers for Disease Control

Cancer Treatment Shows 'Remarkable' Ability To Reverse Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms

Cancer Treatment Shows 'Remarkable' Ability To Reverse Multiple Sclerosis Symptoms

Sweating Buckets

woman sitting in sauna sweating

Gold-Coated Haggis Costs $5,700

And it's worth every penny!
As we all know, haggis is the world's finest food. And if it's possible to improve upon perfection, then the haggis makers at Macsween have done it.
January 25 is Burns Night, an annual celebration of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, as well as all that is the good life, such as warm haggis, quality scotch, and bagpipe music. In short, it's an annual celebration of Scottish culture.
To mark the occasion, Macsweens has produced a line of haggis that comes with edible gold bits that you can sprinkle on top. The Scotsman reports:
With a price tag of £4,000, the beloved fixture of any Burns Supper has been handcrafted to the Macsween family recipe but with an infusion of rare ingredients which have been sourced from Scotland and the far corners of the globe.
The list includes Highland Wagyu beef, raised on a Perthshire farm where all cattle has its own name; white summer truffle from France, considered ‘diamonds of the kitchen’ by chefs the world over; and black pepper (tellicherry) from India, which can only be grown at a latitude of 2,000-3,000 feet above sea level.

Man died while shaking crumbs off tablecloth

A small town in Italy’s Aosta region is in shock after a man fell to his death while shaking crumbs off a tablecloth. The 47-year-old fell eight meters to his death from the balcony of his second floor apartment in the Surpian area of Saint-Marcel, a town of 1,227 residents.
After having breakfast with his wife and two children, the man went to shake the crumbs off the tablecloth over the balcony. But the tablecloth slipped from his hands, and he fell over the balcony as he tried to retrieve it.
He died instantly. The unnamed man was very well known and respected in the town, where residents are still trying to come to terms with his death. His funeral was held on Wednesday.

Psychic Failure

Some people in life still haven’t grasped the fact that all people should be treated equally. Many still feel it is well within their rights to be...

Wingnut cabal chairwimp sued for evicting Muslim tenant

According to Jalal, she has also been called offensive names like "nasty Arab" and "slut," and received handwritten notes on her door reading, "Get the (expletive) out of my house. You're a (expletive) nasty Arabic pig."

The Great Nestlé-Deer Park Billion Dollar Poconos Water Grab

Flint Forces Families To Continue Paying For Poisoned Water

“It’s shocking that an entire U.S. city cannot drink its tap water. Now they’re shutting off residents for overdue bills. No one should have to pay for poisoned tap water.”
Flint Water 2National advocacy group Food & Water Watch has joined local Flint, Michigan residents calling for a moratorium on water service bills until the water flowing from taps is free of lead and other contaminants. The move is an effort to raise awareness about the alarming shutoff notices Flint residents are facing for non-payment, even as people are not able to drink their tap water or cook with it.
“In 2016, it’s shocking that an entire U.S. city cannot drink its tap water. Now they are shutting off residents for overdue bills. But no one should have to pay for poisoned tap water,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said. “Today we’re calling on Mayor Karen Weaver, City Administrator Natasha Henderson and Flint’s Chief Financial Officer Jody Lundquist to stop the water shut offs in Flint; restore service where it has been disconnected, which is necessary for basic sanitation and hygiene; and to cease billing Flint residents for water until this tragic situation has been corrected.”
“Skin rashes, hair loss and long-term health consequences that result from copper and lead poisoning are just some of the impacts that Flint residents like me and my family have been dealing with for over a year,” Melissa Mays, Flint resident and founder of Water You Fighting For?, said. “To be told our water was safe to drink when it wasn’t is criminal and to continue to have to pay for it is unconscionable.”
In 2014, Flint’s emergency manager Darnell Earley disconnected the city from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department and started providing residents with water from the Flint River in order to cut costs. Almost immediately after the switch, residents noticed changes in the smell, color and taste of the water coming out of their taps. Tests showed high levels of bacteria that forced the city to issue boil advisories. The city then upped the amount of chlorine it used to treat the polluted river water to kill pathogens, resulting in high levels of potentially carcinogenic disinfectant byproducts. The city failed to put in place proper corrosion controls based on direction from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, so lead and other heavy metals leached into Flint’s drinking water, poisoning residents for over a year.
Despite the fact that it knew about the problems with Flint’s water, Snyder’s junta and the Department of Environmental Quality told Flint residents that their water was safe to drink.
“Flint is not the first city to fall victim to the shortsighted quick fixes of emergency management, particularly in Michigan,” Hauter added. “Conservative-led austerity measures have stripped communities like Flint, Detroit and Highland Park of democracy, taking control of vital resources like water away from the people and placing them in the hands of incompetent emergency dictators who then cut corners, shut off water service and pave the way for corporate control. We must reverse the austerity measures that have brought Flint to this dire place and commit federal funding to upgrade our water infrastructure so no community suffers without access to safe, clean, affordable water.”

Michigan 'Militia' Cabal Turns On Wingnut Moron Snyder

Image credit: screen capture Genesee County Volunteer Militia
Even the "militia" is demanding that Michigan’s moron be held accountable over Flint’s poisoned water.

Fox Yappers Try To Pin Flint Water Crisis On EPA And Local Officials

If You're Poor, Justice in America Doesn't Look the Same

15 things the catholic cult teaches that are ruining your sex life — even if you’re not religious

One of the most fundamental ways wingnut religion delusion hooks people is by creating deep psychological hang-ups about sex.

Texas Ammosexual Accidentally Shoots Himself In The Foot In Cult


That "Constitution" The Bundy Terrorists Tote Around Is A Perverted Version Of The Real Thing

You may have seen the pocket version of the United States Constitution the Bundy Bunch carries around. The distinctive picture of George Washington on...

Oregon terrorist pulled his young daughters from school and brought them to armed standoff

Oregon terrorist pulled his young daughters from school and brought them to armed standoff
Yeah, they're still there despite several of them being arrested.
Yes, they're still using children as human shields.

NC man shot and killed Good Samaritan trying to help him with stalled car in blizzard

A North Carolina man is in custody after being accused of executing a Good Samaritan who tried to help him after spinning out in his car during the massive East Coast blizzard.

Man who tried to steal police car unaware of officer behind wheel ended up sitting on his lap

A suspected car thief trying to run from police in Tacoma, Washington, got a surprise when he tried to steal a police patrol car and ended up sitting on an officer’s lap.
Fife police Lt. Tom Thompson said the man was spotted acting suspiciously near a motel at around 8:30pm on Tuesday, so a patrol sergeant stopped to check the license on the car he was driving. It came back as stolen. As the sergeant followed the suspect, identified as David Boulet, Boulet jumped from the car and ran.
Police said Boulet climbed a fence and ran through traffic in both the north and southbound lanes of Interstate 5, dodging cars. Meanwhile, a Tacoma police officer, hearing the chase over the radio, stopped on the Port of Tacoma road overpass and turned on his red and blue lights. Thompson said Boulet ran from the freeway through heavy brush and onto the overpass, apparently looking for a getaway car.
He spotted the patrol car with lights flashing, ran towards it, pulled the door open, got in and sat down on the officer’s lap, apparently unaware that the officer was still behind the wheel. Thompson said the officer was stunned at first, then recognized Boulet’s description as the suspect leading police on a foot pursuit. Boulet was wrestled to the ground and placed under arrest.

Loch Ness Trench Spurs Monster Speculation

A newly discovered trench in Loch Ness is said to be the lake's deepest.
But could it be the home of Nessie?

Oxford Museum May Hold New Species of Plesiosaur

Tests are underway to determine if the long-necked, dinosaur-era marine reptile is new to science.

Things You Should Never Do In Front Of Your Dog

dog standing between couple
5 Things You Should Never Do In Front Of Your Dog
Seemingly harmless stuff could trigger bad behavior
 

Panda Makes a Snow Angel

Tian Tian is an 18-year old panda that lives at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The winter snow storm has hit that region hard, but Tian Tian and his friends are having a great time there. This morning, caretakers spotted him rolling playfully in the snow. Pandas have thick coats and the cold doesn't bother them at all.

RIP Sarah, the World’s Fastest Land Animal

Sarah became one of our favorite animals, as we posted about her several times over the years. One of the cheetahs at the Cincinnati Zoo, Sarah broke the speed record for any land mammal recorded, twice. In 2009, she covered 100 meters in 6.13 seconds. In 2012, she broke her own record by covering the distance in 5.95 seconds. She attained a speed of over 61 miles per hour! She also worked as a Cat Ambassador for the zoo, visiting countless schools and making TV appearances. Sarah was euthanized Wednesday at the Cincinnati Zoo at the age of 15. Cheetahs live an average of eight to twelve years, and Sarah’s quality of life had diminished with old age. Cathryn Hilker, Sarah’s closest human, wrote a eulogy for the cheetah. Here’s a small sample of a beautiful story:
She will be remembered by thousands of school children who heard her loud purr or heard her nails clicking on the table top where she stayed during the program. My memories are imprinted in my heart and mind of a tiny brave little cheetah who grew up and turned into the elegant animal that the mature cheetah is. The claw marks from her tiny little claws when she was a cub remain on my bedspread to this day and the hole she chewed through my zoo jacket and the awkward job I did of sewing it up will remain there for the rest of my life.
Sarah was preceded in death by her canine companion, Lexi. 

Animal Pictures