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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, August 5, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally
We know - wingnut, right ...! 
 
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Today in History

1391
Castilian sailors in Barcelona, Spain set fire to a Jewish ghetto, killing 100 people and setting off four days of violence against Jews.
1763
Colonel Henry Bouquet decisively defeats the Indians at the Battle of Bushy Run in Pennsylvania during Pontiac‘s rebellion.
1762
Russia, Prussia and Austria sign a treaty agreeing on the partition of Poland.
1815
A peace treaty with Tripoli–which follows treaties with Algeria and Tunis–brings an end to the Barbary Wars.
1858
The first transatlantic cable is completed.
1861
Congress adopts the nation’s first income tax to finance the Civil War.
1864
The Union Navy captures Mobile Bay in Alabama.
1892
Harriet Tubman receives a pension from Congress for her work as a nurse, spy and scout during the Civil War.
1914
The British Expeditionary Force mobilizes for World War I.
1914
The first electric traffic signal lights are installed in Cleveland, Ohio.
1915
The Austro-German Army takes Warsaw, in present-day Poland, on the Eastern Front.
1916
The British navy defeats the Ottomans at the naval battle off Port Said, Egypt.
1921
Mustafa Kemal is appointed virtual ruler of the Ottoman Empire.
1941
The German army completes taking 410,000 Russian prisoners in Uman and Smolensk pockets in the Soviet Union.
1951
The United Nations Command suspends armistice talks with the North Koreans when armed troops are spotted in neutral areas.
1962
Actress Marilyn Monroe dies under mysterious circumstances.
1964
President Lyndon Johnson begins bombing North Vietnam in retaliation for Gulf of Tonkin incident and asks Congress to go to war against North Vietnam.
1974
Nixon admits he ordered a cover-up for political reasons.
1981
Reagan fires 11,500 striking air traffic controllers.
1992
Four police officers indicted on civil rights charges in the beating of Rodney King.
1995
Croatian forces capture the city of Knin, a Serb stronghold, during Operation Storm.
1997
Mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, goes on trial.
2012
A gunman in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, opens fire in a Sikh temple, killing six before committing suicide.

7 Athletes Who Had Their Olympic Medals Revoked

Imagine that you went to the Olympics and did not win a medal. Ten years later, you are notified that you won a medal after all! That’s what happened to the U.S. women’s gymnastic team of 2000, when the Chinese team’s bronze medal was revoked over one athlete being disqualified. Medals don’t get revoked often, but they make big stories when they do. The case of Jim Thorpe is the most familiar, even though it happened over 100 years ago.
Jim Thorpe is considered one of the best athletes of all time. He excelled in football, baseball, basketball, and track and field, and won gold medals for the pentathlon and decathlon during the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) later revoked Thorpe's medals when it was discovered that he played semi-professional baseball before the Summer Games began, which violated his amateur status and eligibility.
However, in 1983, 30 years after Thorpe's death, the IOC reinstated his two gold medals due to numerous pleas from the United States Olympic Committee.
Read about several other cases in which Olympic medals were revoked -two of them because of a bad attitude during the medal ceremony- at mental_floss.

34 Facts About Olympic History

There's only two days to go before the opening ceremonies for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. From the ancient Olympics and the 100+ years of modern Olympics, there’s a lot of trivia to tell, from origins to cheating to the changing events and athletes. Mike Rugnetta gives us those stories from Olympic history, in this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show.

Companies Might be Suppressing Employee Opinions When They Need Them the Most

Long-standing research shows that diversity of thought in organizations is vital to innovation and creativity. New research shows that during times of job insecurity, those vital ideas might be suppressed if they counter the organization’s values. The study by Sung Soo Kim, assistant professor of management at the Daniels College of Business in the University of Denver, was published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. Kim’s co-authors of the paper “Creating facades of conformity in the face of job insecurity: a study of consequences and conditions,” are Patricia Faison Hewlin and Young Ho Song of McGill University in Montreal.
  • The current study found that employees who feel their job security threatened were more likely to suppress personal values and pretend to embrace organizational values, and such responses were linked to their intention to leave and reduced affective commitment.
  • The results from this study highlight the importance of fostering organizational environments that encourage authenticity such that members are not compelled to suppress personal values and pretend to embrace organizational values in job-insecure environments.
  • The results also highlight how employees will enact their careers at different stages of their lives. In job insecure environments, older workers are more likely than younger workers to express divergent points of view.
“Our study further shows that employees create facades of conformity to cope with job insecurity but ironically, facades of conformity can have an adverse impact on one’s feelings of attachment to the organization, consistent with previous research on facades of conformity,” Kim says. “In other words, the actual effort to better ‘fit in’ via inauthentic expression can become taxing and foster a level of detachment from the organization that negatively affects one’s commitment to the organization and prompts one’s inclination to leave the organization.”

The States That Do Nothing To Help Working Parents

Himmler diaries reveal chilling details of Nazi wartime life

Wartime diaries kept by top Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler, serialized this week in Germany’s daily Bild, offer chilling insights into the life of one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. Himmler, the head of the Nazi paramilitary SS, kept tabs on even the banal minutiae of his daily comings and goings, even as he oversaw the systematic slaughter of six million European Jews.
The journals, unearthed in Russia in 2013 and currently being studied at the German Historical Institute in Moscow, reveal a confidant of Adolf Hitler as a micromanager marked by deep contradictions.
They also “help to better make sense of key events and understand who took part in decision making for the regime,” researcher Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute told AFP.
“Now we can say exactly whom Himmler met each day, where he was, and who his closest advisers were.”
The documents, found in the archives of the Russia defense ministry, cover the years 1938, 1943 and 1944. The German institute plans to published an annotated version by 2018.
The journals for 1941 and 1942 were already discovered in 1991 in Russia, which holds 2.5 million documents from the Wehrmacht, the Nazi-era German military.
The image that emerges is of a caring family man who nevertheless kept mistresses and had secret children as part of one illicit love affair.
Himmler is shown to be a passionate stargazer and avid card player even as he ordered massacres and oversaw the death camps.
“The man who planned the Holocaust was obsessive about organizing his personal life,” Bild said.
“Between (poison) gas, execution orders and thousands of rendezvous, he took care of his family, his mistress and his hobbies.”
On January 3, 1943, for example, Himmler received one of many “therapeutic massages” from his doctor, took part in meetings, called his wife and daughter and then ordered, after midnight, the killing of several Polish families.
According to Bild, Himmler was an ambitious careerist who met with more than 1,600 people between 1943 and his suicide in British custody in May 1945.
“The number of contacts, as well as attempts by Himmler to gain influence through the SS on important institutions of the party, state and army, are impressive,” Uhl said.
“He tried, during the course of the war, to consolidate his power.”
Himmler’s secretaries, one of whom, Hedwig Potthast, bore him two children, noted down regular inspection tours to the concentration camps including Sachsenhausen, with Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, on March 10, 1938, and the Sobibor extermination camp on February 12, 1943.
“Himmler wanted to have a demonstration of the ‘effectiveness’ of killing by gas,” Bild said.

Black woman calls 911 during traffic stop because she fears Houston cop — who then attacks her

Newly released video disputes police claims about a black social worker’s violent arrest earlier this year while talking to a 911 dispatcher during a traffic stop in Houston.

Investigators probing whether Fox execs knew about Roger Ailes' alleged harassment

Of course they knew - they're still harassing their female employees as we speak ...

Student Suspended For Sexual Assault Complaint Argues The College Practiced ‘Anti-Male Bias’

20 Ways People Are Making Money From Pokémon GO

When you first saw people outside playing Pokémon GO, you might have thought, “What is this? It looks like fun. I want to try it!” But some folks’ first reaction is “What is this? And how can I monetize it for my own benefit?” Entrepreneurial types quickly figured out how to provide goods and services to avid Pokémon GO players, in quite a few different ways.
Uber is the latest way to travel. Instead of calling a cab, people call an Uber car to get them where they need to go. Now, Uber is cashing in on this Pokémon GO craze. Uber-for-Pokémon GO offers a way to avoid the car accidents people have been getting into while trying to catch Pokémon, as well as a way to avoid walking for miles searching for them. There is one Uber driver in New York that is offering to drive Pokémon GO players around to catch Pokémon. The fee is $20 per hour for one person, but if you bring someone with you it’s only $17 an hour each.
If you are not too into Uber or prefer catching Pokémon with a group of people, this Pokémon catching bus is for you. In New York, this bus is painted like a Pikachu and drives around all day and night so you can catch Pokémon. The charge is $0.99 per Pokestop, $24.99 to take over a gym, and $49.99 for egg-hatching services. Charging stations are available for your phones as well.
Others, too, figured out various needs of Pokémon GO players and went to work to fulfill them, for a price. Not mentioned are the criminals who just take money and phones from distracted players. Read about how lots of people are cashing in on the Pokémon GO craze at Money Inc.

Melting ice sheet could release frozen Cold War-era waste

Camp Century, a U.S. military base built within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall.
But climate change has warmed the Arctic more than any other region on Earth, and a new study finds the portion of the ice sheet covering Camp Century could start to melt by the end of the century. If the ice melts, the camp’s infrastructure, as well as any remaining biological, chemical and radioactive waste, could re-enter the environment and potentially disrupt nearby ecosystems, according to the study’s authors.
Determining who is responsible for cleaning up the waste could also lead to political disputes not considered before, according to the study’s authors.
“Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different areas of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites,” said William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Toronto, Canada, and lead author of the new study. “It’s a new breed of political challenge we have to think about.”
The new study was published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The assumption that any waste could be buried forever under ice is unrealistic, according to James White, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not connected to the study.
“The question is whether it’s going to come out in hundreds of years, in thousands of years, or in tens of thousands of years,” White said. “This stuff was going to come out anyway, but what climate change did was press the gas pedal to the floor and say, ‘it’s going to come out a lot faster than you thought.'”
During the Cold War, U.S. military attention shifted to the Arctic — the shortest route between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. In April 1951, the U.S. and Denmark agreed to defend Greenland, a Danish territory, from Soviet attack, and the U.S. built several air bases in Greenland that year.
In 1959, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century 200 kilometers (125 miles) inland from the Greenland coast. Encased completely within the ice sheet, Camp Century became known as the “city under the ice.”
The camp’s official purpose was to test construction techniques in the Arctic and conduct scientific research. While in operation, the camp housed 85 to 200 soldiers and was powered by a nuclear reactor. Scientists at Camp Century took ice core samples providing climate data still cited in research today, Colgan said.
The camp also provided proof of concept for a top secret program to test the feasibility of building nuclear missile launch sites close enough to reach the Soviet Union. While never built, a larger planned camp based on the concept of Camp Century would have housed a 4,000-kilometer (2,500-mile) long tunnel system underneath the ice, capable of deploying up to 600 nuclear missiles.
Although the camp was built with Denmark’s approval, the missile launch program, known as Project Iceworm, was kept secret from the Danish government. Several years after the camp became operational, Project Iceworm was rejected by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the camp was decommissioned. The Army Corps of Engineers removed the nuclear reaction chamber but left the camp’s infrastructure and all other waste behind, assuming the ice sheet would secure them forever. In the decades since, falling snow has buried the camp roughly 35 meters (115 feet) further underneath the ice.
In the new study, Colgan and his team took an inventory of the wastes at Camp Century and ran climate model simulations to determine whether the waste will stay put in a warming Arctic. The team analyzed historical U.S. army engineering documents to determine where and how deep the wastes were buried and how much the ice cap had moved since the 1950s.
“Looking at the data, we can see right where it’s buried,” says Mike MacFerrin, a CIRES researcher who is co-author on the paper. MacFerrin analyzed ground-penetrating radar from NASA’s Operation IceBridge aircraft to pinpoint the camp’s current location and depth. “The radar shows smooth layers of snow and ice until reaching the camp. Then the signal gets messy. We don’t yet have enough detail to map exactly what all is down there, but the outline is clear.”
The team found the waste at Camp Century covers 55 hectares (136 acres), roughly the size of 100 football fields. They estimate the site contains 200,000 liters (53,000 gallons) of diesel fuel, enough for a car to circle the globe 80 times. Based on building materials used in the Arctic at the time, the authors speculate the site contains polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pollutants toxic to human health. They also estimate the site has 240,000 liters (63,000 gallons) of waste water, including sewage, along with an unknown amount of radioactive coolant from the nuclear generator.
Looking at existing business-as-usual climate projections, the team determined the wastes would not remain encased in ice forever, as was assumed by both the U.S. and Denmark when the camp was abandoned. Instead, they could melt and re-enter the environment.
“When we looked at the climate simulations, they suggested that rather than perpetual snowfall, it seems that as early as 2090, the site could transition from net snowfall to net melt,” Colgan said. “Once the site transitions from net snowfall to net melt, it’s only a matter of time before the wastes melt out; it becomes irreversible.”
Camp Century’s waste presents a significant environmental hazard, according to the study’s authors. When the ice melts, pollutants could be transported to the ocean, where they could disrupt marine ecosystems, Colgan said.
Based on ice sheet observations near Camp Century but at lower elevations, the camp’s waste could be exposed sooner than the study’s models predict, said Jennifer Mercer, a cryospheric scientist with the National Science Foundation who specializes in operations on the Greenland Ice Sheet and who was not connected to the study.
The study does not advocate for starting remediation activities at Camp Century now. The waste is buried tens of meters below the ice, and any cleanup activities would be costly and technically challenging, Colgan said.
“It really becomes a situation of waiting until the ice sheet has melted down to almost expose the wastes that anyone should advocate for site remediation,” he said.
But the new study does raise questions about who is responsible for cleaning up the waste when it is exposed. International law is clear about responsibility for preventing future hazardous waste, but ambiguous about who is liable for waste already discarded, said Jessica Green, a political scientist specializing in international environmental law at New York University who was not connected to the study. Although Camp Century was a U.S. base, it is on Danish soil, and although Greenland is a Danish territory, it is now self-governing, she said.
The implications of climate change on politically ambiguous abandoned wastes have not been considered before, according to the study’s authors.
“The study identifies a big hole in the extant set of laws and rules we have to deal with environmental problems globally,” Green said.

The Koch Brothers Are Behind a Plot to Open Up the Grand Canyon Watershed to Toxic Uranium Mining

Do Trees Communicate with Each Other?

Trees are connected to other trees around them by a network of fungi underground called a mycorrhizal fungal network. Chemicals are sent from tree to tree through the fungus, in a kind of communication that can take hours to detect and centuries for humans to even notice. If this were only a transfer of chemicals, we wouldn’t call it communication, but new research led by Dr. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia shows that trees send different chemical messages to each other depending on conditions. For example, when researchers shaded one tree, a nearby tree of a different species began sharing nutrients with it. But trees prefer to share with their close kin. 
"If you're a mother and you have children, you recognize your children and you treat them in certain ways. We're finding that trees will do the same thing. They'll adjust their competitive behaviour to make room for their own kin and they send those signals through mycorrhizal networks," says Simard.
"We found that the biggest oldest trees had more connections to other trees than smaller trees. It stands to reason because they have more root systems," she says.
"So when a seedling establishes on the forest floor, if it's near one of these mother trees it just links into that network and accesses that huge resource network."
Read more about this fascinating research on tree communication at ABC Science.

Hear! Hear!

Extreme marathon runner to be reunited with little stray Chinese dog that adopted him

An extreme marathon is to be reunited with a stray dog that befriended him during a gruelling race in China, thanks to a crowdfunding appeal. Dion Leonard was taking part in the 4 Desert Race when he met Gobi in the Tian Shan mountain range. The pair quickly became friends after Gobi matched Dion step for step along the seven-day, 250-kilometre route. However, he had to leave Gobi at the finishing line and hoped to bring him home to Edinburgh, Scotland.
Mr Leonard launched a crowdfunding appeal to raise the £5,000 needed to cover the medical and quarantine costs in order to "bring Gobi home". That target was smashed within 24 hours, with 272 backers raising more than £8,600. He said the pair had quickly formed a bond. "Basically on day two she decided to run with me on one of the stages, which was around 25-30 kilometers over the Tian Shan mountain range.
"She'd actually been with us the day before running through one of the largest sand dunes in China, so she was well-versed in running with all the competitors there, but on day two she decided to stick with me. She would run ahead of me and wait for me 20 or 30 meters down the road and then I'd have to catch up with her ... she's such a small dog but had a massive heart. "There were times during the race when, you know I'm there to race and compete and I'm trying to do my best to win the race but we had to cross some really large rivers where I would have to carry her over them.
"I didn't actually have the time to do it but I realized then that I had to take her with me and the bond was made." Mr Leonard said Gobi was still in the desert in China and was being looked after by a friend. He said they were in the process of trying to organize for her to be taken to Beijing for medical tests and quarantine procedures before she could be flown to the UK. He said he was hopeful she would be in Scotland in time for Christmas. "That would be amazing", he said. "That would be the best Christmas present ever. I'm hopeful that will happen and I'm really thankful for all the support funding-wise because that's certainly made things a lot easier."

Police officer attempted to detain two cows that had been reportedly menacing cars

A police officer in Maine attempted to pull over two cows after they were reportedly menacing cars on Thursday afternoon.
Officer Ernest MacVane was responding to two young cows that had escaped and wandered onto a road. He says he made the video of an attempted arrest of the cows for his 10-year-old son and fellow officers.
In the video posted on the Windham Police Department's Facebook page, MacVane says: "We have a possible mad cow situation here. We're gonna handle this. Alright you guys I need you to step to the side and put your hands up."

He warned the bovines after they attempted to flee: "Don't run from me - I'm the police!" He also told them: "Down on the ground, stop resisting!" MacVane says he hopes the video gives people a laugh and puts a human face on police officers.

Bears in Lake Tahoe

A mama bear took her two cubs down to the beach to play and maybe give them a swimming lesson. What’s strange is that this is Lake Tahoe, on a public beach, where many humans were also enjoying the water.
These are black bears, which are less aggressive than brown bears, grizzlies, or polar bears, but a mother with cubs can still be dangerous if you get too close. -

Bear Mistakes Garbage Truck For Meals On Wheels

Since food is a top priority as far as bears are concerned, what better way to get around than on a rolling buffet? One bear in Los Alamos, New Mexico, decided to give this a try after hitching a ride on a garbage truck.It all had a happy ending as the truck backed up to a tree and the bear disembarked. The driver then pulled off to continue his route with no one - bear or human - being harmed in the process.

Animal Pictures