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


Friday, July 7, 2017

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally
Really, how ignorant can one be ...!
 
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Today in History

1742
A Spanish force invading Georgia runs headlong into the colony’s British defenders. The battle decides the fate of a colony.
1777
American troops give up Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, to the British.
1791
Benjamin Rush, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones found the Non-denominational African Church.
1795
Thomas Paine defends the principal of universal suffrage at the Constitutional Convention in Paris.
1798
Napoleon Bonaparte‘s army begins its march towards Cairo from Alexandria.
1807
Czar Alexander meets with Napoleon Bonaparte.
1814
Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley is published anonymously so as not to damage his reputation as a poet.
1815
After defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, the victorious Allies march into Paris.
1853
Japan opens its ports to trade with the West after 250 years of isolation.
1863
Confederate General Robert E. Lee, in Hagerstown, Maryland, reports his defeat at Gettysburg to President Jefferson Davis.
1925
Afrikaans is recognized as one of the official languages of South Africa, along with English and Dutch.
1927
Christopher Stone becomes the first British ‘disc jockey’ when he plays records for the BBC.
1941
Although a neutral country, the United States sends troops to occupy Iceland to keep it out of Germany’s hands.
1943
Adolf Hitler makes the V-2 missile program a top priority in armament planning.
1966
The U.S. Marine Corps launches Operation Hasting to drive the North Vietnamese Army back across the Demilitarized Zone in Vietnam.
1969
The first U.S. units to withdraw from South Vietnam leave Saigon.
1981
Sandra Day O’Connor becomes the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

Experts claim new photo proves theory that Amelia Earhart survived crash

Glass ceiling-shattering pilot Amelia Earhart vanished in 1937 while trying to fly around the world. But now, almost exactly 80 years later, there may be a new development in her disappearance.

My grandfather was a death row doctor

Eusebio Martinez was polite — even happy — as he entered the death chamber that August night in Huntsville in 1960. He may not have understood his time was up.
A few years earlier, Martinez had been convicted of murdering an infant girl whose parents had left her sleeping in their car while they visited a Midland nightclub. He’d been ruled “feeble-minded” by multiple psychiatrists and had to be shown how to get into the electric chair.
As he was strapped in, a priest leaned in and coached him to say “gracias” and a simple prayer. Just before the first bolt knifed through his brain, Martinez grinned and waved at the young Houston doctor who would declare him dead a few minutes later.
That doctor was my grandfather.

Cybersecurity gaps everywhere except Singapore

Singapore has a near-perfect approach to cybersecurity, but many other rich countries have holes in their defenses and some poorer countries are showing them how it should be done.

How Well Can You Spot Fake News?

If you get your news from the internet, or even worse, from social media, you can't always trust that it's true. However, with a little effort you can develop a sense of what sources to trust. Factitious is a game that checks how well you can distinguish reliable news and fake news stories. I scored 100%. I don't know if that's because I'm careful with sources, or because I'd already seen all the stories in the game. True, I was burned a few times when I started blogging and quickly learned to check sources, or sit on something if it didn't pass the "smell test." That said, this game concentrates on news stories, and does not dwell on politics or opinion pieces.

Psychologists have identified the kind of emotional intelligence that makes internet trolls so mean

What is it with people’s behavior online? Why the readiness to attack, the snarky tone, the lack of courtesy inherent to so many comments? The internet can bring out the worst in people, which when taken to extremes turns into trolling—that bizarre impulsive habit of hurting others online, without consequence.
Researchers in Australia set out to discover what traits in “normal” people (social media users above age 18 who did not appear to be trolls) that might make them susceptible to trolling behavior. Using an online questionnaire, the researchers at the School of Health Science and Psychology at Federation University in Mount Helen tested 415 men and women for a range of personality traits, as well as for online behavior that indicated a propensity to troll—such as agreeing with the statement, “Although some people think my posts/comments are offensive, I think they are funny.”
The researchers were looking for particular traits including social skills, psychopathy, sadism, and two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. Having high cognitive empathy simply means they can understand others’ emotions. Having high affective empathy means a person can experience, internalize, and respond to those emotions. The “trolls” in the study scored higher than average on two traits: psychopathy and cognitive empathy.
So even though “trolls” exhibit one kind of empathy, coupling it with psychopathy ultimately makes them nasty, the researchers suggested. Psychopathy, which includes a lack of care for others’ feelings, was measured using a scale where participants were asked to agree or disagree with a set of statements such as, “payback needs to be quick and nasty.”
High levels of cognitive empathy make these people adept at recognizing what will upset someone, and knowing when they’ve pushed the right buttons. The lack of affective empathy allows trolls not to experience or internalize the emotional experience of their victims.
“Results indicate that when high on trait psychopathy, trolls employ an empathic strategy of predicting and recognizing the emotional suffering of their victims, while abstaining from the experience of these negative emotions,” the researchers wrote. They added that because psychopathy is associated with thrill-seeking and impulsivity, it’s possible that “creating mayhem online is a central motivator to troll.” They also found that trolls were likely to be high in sadism—the will to hurt others—and were more likely to be male.
The study is forthcoming in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. It doesn’t offer advice on how to stop trolling behavior, but adds a wrinkle to our knowledge of why people act out online. In previous research, people who display psychopathic traits have shown a similar empathy imbalance: a lack affective empathy but normal levels of cognitive empathy. This study linked those psychopathic traits and higher cognitive empathy levels to people who are likely to troll.
Exploring the link between psychopathy, high cognitive empathy, and trolling could help deepen our understanding of the personality types that gravitate towards that behavior, and potentially help to stop them.

Oregon wingnuts buck cabal extremists and spend $36 million on health care for undocumented children

Ted Ferrioli, the wingnut leader of Oregon’s state Senate, said this week that he is preparing to take heat from wingnut voters after the legislature passed a plan to spend $36 million on health care for undocumented children.

Vegetable coloring agent may suppress inflammation

Vegetable coloring agent may suppress inflammationLutein, a nutrient found in several highly colored vegetables and fruits, can suppress inflammation, according to a new study by researchers at Linkoping University, Sweden. The results, published in Atherosclerosis, suggest that lutein itself has … Read more

Early-Life Pain May Lead To Obesity Risk, Especially In Females

Early-Life Pain May Lead To Obesity Risk, Especially In FemalesInflammatory pain at birth changes how the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory and eating behavior, works later in life, and this pain also causes adult rats to eat more frequently and … Read more

‘My job is making me sick’

Heather Poole has worked for American Airlines for a while but after Sept. 20 things began to go wrong. That was when the airlines announced its new uniform made by Twin Hill.

Have You Ever Tried a Fad Diet to Lose Weight?

Russians told to drink more wine

Woman uses Craigslist to hire hitman to poison ex-husband

An Oklahoma woman was arrested after trying to use Craigslist to hire someone to travel to Israel and kill her ex-husband with ricin.
Woman uses Craigslist to hire hitman to poison ex-husband

Women not welcome at Harvard’s Fox Club

The doors to Harvard’s Fox Club have once again been shut in the face of women.

Vatican Drug-Fueled Gay Orgy Raided

The Vatican is facing fresh embarrassment after police broke up what’s being described as a drug-fueled gay orgy at one of its priest’s apartments.

Nazis destroyed the first gay rights movement

Very recently, Germany’s Cabinet approved a bill that will expunge the convictions of tens of thousands of German men for “homosexual acts” under that country’s anti-gay law known as “Paragraph 175.” That law dates back to 1871, when modern Germany’s first legal code was created.
It was repealed in 1994. But there was a serious movement to repeal the law in 1929 as part of a wider LGBTQ rights movement. That was just before the Nazis came to power, magnified the anti-gay law, then sought to annihilate gay and transgender Europeans.
The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

Maryland coach with HIV accused of sexually assaulting 7 boys

A former aid and track coach at a Maryland school was arrested Friday on suspicion of sexually assaulting several male students and recording some of the abuse on video, according to multiple local reports.
The 30-year-old man, Carlos Deangelo Bell, was arrested from his home in Charles County, following six months of investigations into accusations of him assaulting at least seven boys. He even reportedly made videos, including on school property, of some of the attacks.
The county sheriff’s office also said the number of victims could be more than seven. Bell told investigators he was HIV positive, and investigators found evidence corroborating the diagnosis, CNN reported.

America Is Suffering from a Plague

Mistreatment Caught On Tape

Helpless 89-year-old dementia patient punched 11 times by cold-hearted care worker

Mom feared beating by United employees

Mom feared beating by United employees — so she gave up toddler son’s $1,000 seat to standby passenger

Hobby Lobby billionaire ordered to hand over Iraqi treasure trove

The United States Department of Justice filed a civil complaint in federal court demanding that Hobby Lobby “forfeit” thousands of Iraqi artifacts illegally smuggled into the country.

If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases right now, would we stop climate change?

Earth’s climate is changing rapidly. We know this from billions of observations, documented in thousands of journal papers and texts and summarized every few years by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The primary cause of that change is the release of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas.

The fastest stars in the galaxy are galactic runaways

Scientists have discovered that the fastest stars in the Milky Way—which travel at over two million miles per hour—originally came from other galaxies, having escaped their homes after stellar explosions pushed them away at almost the speed of light.
The discovery solves a longstanding mystery about how and why these hypervelocity stars travel at such great speeds.

A supermassive black hole is suffering from ‘indigestion’

A dwarf galaxy about 26 million light-years away has been found with a supermassive black hole at its center that suffers from periodic “indigestion.” The phenomenon leads to the matter being blasted out into the interstellar medium from NGC 5195, which is in the process of merging with its larger neighbor NGC 5194, also called the Whirlpool Galaxy.

Is there alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus?

Things just got a little more complicated for the scientists searching our outer solar system for alien life, after the discovery that an organic molecule was probably created by a process in outer space rather than an extraterrestrial creature on one of Saturn’s moons.
Is there alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus?

Praying mantises hunt birds all over the world

Praying mantises are fearsome predators in the world of insects. They have heads that turn 180 degrees, quick reflexes, and powerful raptorial legs. And of course, there's that that the females often kill the males during or after mating. It turns out that praying mantises are even more ferocious than we thought and they eat small birds also. A recent review found that praying mantises all around the world eat birds, though it isn't very common.
Praying mantises hunt birds all over the world

Rare wild horses are making a stunning return to Mongolia

Przewalski's horses once roamed Central Asia in abundance, but they met a similar fate to many species the planet has known: Hunters and expanding farmland wiped them out.
The wild horse was driven to extinction in the 1960s. But members of the species have survived, in captivity in Europe. For the past decade, veterinary experts have slowly reintroduced the species to its age-old habitat.

The Most Famous Dog Who Ever Lived

You may be familiar with the story of Hachiko, the loyal Akita that returned for years hopping to greet his deceased owner at the train station (if not, go grab a hankie). But there are details of the story that you probably don't know. Evan Hadfield tells us the story with some extra background and more insight into how Hachiko became a national hero in Japan.
In fact, Hachiko's fame ended up saving his breed. That's a good dog. This is the latest episode of the video series Chris Hadfield's Rare Earth.

Animal Pictures