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Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Thursday, July 20, 2017

The Daily Drift

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Carolina Naturally
ALL you NEED to KNOW ...!
 
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Today in History

1402
Tamerlane’s Mongols defeat the Ottoman Turks at Angora.
1588
The Spanish Armada sets sail from Corunna.
1715
The Riot Act goes into effect in England.
1864
Confederate General John Bell Hood attacks Union forces under General William T. Sherman outside Atlanta.
1867
Imperial troops in Guizhou, China, kill 20,000 Miao rebels.
1881
Sioux chief Sitting Bull surrenders to the U.S. Army.
1917
Alexander Kerensky becomes the premier of Russia.
1942
The U.S. Army Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) begins its first training class at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.
1944
Adolf Hitler is wounded in an assassination attempt by German Army officers at Rastenburg.
1950
The U.S. Army’s Task Force Smith is pushed back by superior North Korean forces.
1951
King Abdullah of Jordan is assassinated.
1969
Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin become the first men to walk on the moon.
1976
The Viking spacecraft lands on Mars and begins taking soil samples.

Sexually abused children as young as 12 refused compensation on grounds they 'consented', warn charities

Hundreds of child victims refused payouts by Government agency since 2012, FOI figures reveal  
by May Bulman
child-sexual-abuse.jpgWhile the law states that it is a crime to have sexual activity with someone under the age of 16, the payment rules are being interpreted to suggest children can consent to their abuse
Sexually abused children as young as 12 are being refused compensation by a Government agency on the grounds that they “consented” to their abuse, charities have warned.
The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) has refused payouts to nearly 700 child victims of sexual abuse since 2012, ranging between £1,000 and £44,000, according to a Freedom of Information request.
The charity coalition, which includes Barnardo’s, Victim Support and Liberty, has written to the Justice Secretary David Lidington, demanding the government urgently reviews CICA’s guidelines.
While the law states that it is a crime to have sexual activity with someone under the age of 16, the payment rules are being interpreted to suggest children can consent to their abuse, the coalition said.
The charities are calling for the rules to be changed so no child groomed and manipulated into sexual abuse is denied compensation because they complied with their abuse through fear or lack of understanding.
YouGov polling for the campaign shows two thirds of people (66 per cent) of people think the rules should be amended so a child cannot be found to have “consented” to activities involved in their sexual exploitation.
In one case, a girl who was raped and sexually assaulted when she was 14 at the hands of a gang of older men who were subsequently jailed for 30 years was denied compensation by CICA on the grounds that “she had not been the victim of non-consensual sexual acts”.
She was reportedly left devastated feeling that she was somehow responsible for the abuse she’d suffered.
Director of Liberty Martha Spurrier said it was a “disgrace” that a state agency could imply child sex abuse victims who may have been brainwashed or manipulated had consented.
“Grooming is brainwashing – perpetrators manipulate children into situations that look like consent.  No child can consent to abuse, which is why the criminal law rightly says they are simply unable to do so,” she said.
“For a state agency to tell children who have survived these horrific crimes that they did consent – and deny them compensation – is a disgrace.  The Government must urgently change these guidelines.”
Barnardo’s chief executive Javed Khan called for the CICA’s guidelines to be “urgently reviewed” to prevent rules that are supposed to protect children from harming them, saying: “For children to be denied compensation on the grounds that they ‘consented’ to the abuse they have suffered is nothing short of scandalous.
“The very rules that are supposed to protect children are actually harming them. The Government must urgently review CICA’s guidelines so that young victims receive the redress they deserve. Ministers must guarantee that no child will ever be told that they consented to their own abuse.”

Trap Yoga

How black women are using ‘trap yoga’ as a mode of spiritual resistance

Obamacare Raised the Expectations of a Nation That Now Doesn’t Want to Go Back

Obamacare Raised the Expectations of a Nation That Now Doesn’t Want to Go Back
Wingnuts are trapped because Obamacare, for all of its lack of perfection, actually achieved the overarching goal of getting more Americans covered and forcing insurance companies to actually cover the things they promised they would cover.…

The Simple Trick Pharmaceutical Companies Use to Get You to Buy Drugs You Don't Need

Meet Your New Neighborhood Loan Sharks

Don't Text Your Ex

911 truther feared cult was coming for him

A Pennsylvania woman is being held without bail on homicide charges after fatally shooting her boyfriend in the forehead early Saturday morning, in what may be a cult-related murder.

What American flag-worship looks like to a new citizen

Three weeks after I first moved to the United States with my family, and one week into our American public school adventures, my youngest daughter asked me, “Mummy, did you know that we pray to the flag every morning at school?”

How One State's Prison System Utterly Tramples on Many Inmates' Voting Rights

Homophobic and racist tweets force wingnut Illinois governor to fire staffer on his first day

A staffer for wingnut Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner has been fired on the same day that homophobic tweets were uncovered in his Twitter timeline.

Colorado cops catch ‘proud to be fascist’ Dumbass Trump sycophant ...

William Scott Planer is the latest in the growing list of white supremacists who are vandalizing and attacking Jewish places of worship, cemeteries or schools across the United States.

‘You raped me’

A former Michigan police officer was sentenced to one year in jail and five years of probation after a woman accused him of rape after jailing her acquaintance on drunken driving charges.
Erich Fritz pleaded no contest last month to a single count of unlawful imprisonment, and prosecutors agreed to drop charges of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and kidnapping

California cop grabs woman selling flowers by the hair and slams her into the pavement

Police officers in Riverside County, California, are being investigated after a video surfaced on social media that showed them throwing a Spanish-speaking woman to the ground while she was trying to sell flowers.

Climate Change Will Have Unequal Economic Impacts Across U.S.

I was told I could not 'participate'

Federal government officials cancelled a planned Glacier National Park meeting between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a top government researcher.
The Washington Post reports, “the area’s top climate scientist was not permitted to share his expertise on global warming’s role in the retreating ice sheets with Zuckerberg, one of the most prominent business leaders to denounce President Trump’s June withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.”
U.S. Geological Survey research ecologist Daniel Fagre said he scheduled tour of Logan Pass with Zuckerberg was abruptly cancelled three days prior to the visit.
“I literally was told I would no longer be participating,” Fagre told The Post. “I’ve gotten nothing back. We’ve definitely been left in the dark.”

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Ants And Carnivorous Pitcher Plants

Carnivorous plants are seen as the ultimate bug eating machines, but their entice, entrap and devour technique only works on some bugs, and those who are immune to their tricks feed on them instead.But even weirder than the eaters of carnivorous plants are those industrious insects who develop a symbiotic relationship with the killer plant- like the Camponotus schmitzi ants that live on the Bornean pitcher plant:
An insect-eating pitcher plant teams up with ants to prevent mosquito larvae from stealing its nutrients, according to research published May 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Mathias Scharmann and colleagues from the University of Cambridge and the University Brunei Darussalam.
The unusual relationship between insect-eating pitcher plants and ants that live exclusively on them has long puzzled scientists. The Camponotus schmitzi ants live only on one species of Bornean pitcher plants (Nepenthes bicalcarata), where they walk across slippery pitcher traps, swim and dive in the plant's digestive fluids and consume nectar and prey that fall into the trap. Though the benefits to the ants are obvious, it has been harder to tell what exactly the plants gain. However, plants that harbor the insects grow larger than those that do not, suggesting a mutualistic relationship exists between the two.
Here's a related video from AntsCanada showing what happened when he introduced pitcher plants to a terrarium teeming with yellow ants. He thought it would help thin the population, but the colony had other ideas...

Dolphins have been decapitating their prey

Marine biologists discovered that some of the Gulf’s common bottlenose dolphins are decapitating marine catfish. The behavior is reportedly rare. Biologist Errol Ronje co-authored a report about the phenomenon published July 12. The report talked about the tactics that some dolphins used to consume their prey, namely catfish.

Animal Pictures