CAROLINA NATURALLY: Feb 10, 2013

Sunday, February 10, 2013

The Daily Drift

Some days you have to roll with it.

Some of our readers today have been in:

San Jose, Costa Rica

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Panevezys, Lithuania

Panama, Panama

Shah Alam, Malaysia

Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei

Bordeaux, France

Puchong, Malaysia

Belgrade, Serbia

Pretoria, South Africa

Windhoek, Namibia

Bialystok, Poland

Makati, Philippines

Klang, Malaysia

Peshawar, Pakistan

Surabaya, Indonesia

Krakow, Poland

Mykolayiv, Ukraine

Paris, France

Suva, Fiji

Lahore, Pakistan

Baghdad, Iraq

Minsk, Belarus

Katowice, Poland

Tawau, Malaysia

Abu Dahbi, United Arab Emirates

Leeds, England

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

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(New Year in Tibet)

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Today in History

1258		Huegu, a Mongol leader, seizes Baghdad, bringing and end to the Abbasid caliphate.
1620		Supporters of Marie de Medici, the queen mother, who has been exiled to Blois, are defeated by the king's troops at Ponts de Ce, France.
1763		The Treaty of Paris ends the French-Indian War. France gives up all her territories in the New World except New Orleans and a few scattered islands.
1799		Napoleon Bonaparte leaves Cairo, Egypt, for Syria, at the head of 13,000 men.
1814		Napoleon personally directs lightning strikes against enemy columns advancing toward Paris, beginning with a victory over the Russians at Champaubert.
1840		Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert.
1846		Led by religious leader Brigham Young, the first Mormons begin a long westward exodus from Nauvoo, Il., to Utah.
1863		P.T. Barnum's star midgets, Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, are married.
1904		Russia and Japan declare war on each other.
1915		President Wilson blasts the British for using the U.S. flag on merchant ships to deceive the Germans.
1939		Japanese occupy island of Hainan in French Indochina.
1941		London severs diplomatic relations with Romania.
1941		Iceland is attacked by German planes.
1942		The war halts civilian car production at Ford.
1945		B-29s hit the Tokyo area.
1955		Bell Aircraft displays a fixed-wing vertical takeoff plane.
1960		Adolph Coors, the beer brewer, is kidnapped in Golden, Colo.
1966		Protester David Miller is convicted of burning his draft card.
1979		The Metropolitan Museum announces the first major theft in 110-year history, $150,000 Greek marble head.
1986		The largest Mafia trial in history, with 474 defendants, opens in Palermo, Italy.

Which Would You Choose: Prom or Water Balloon Fight?

When Cincinnati's Withrow High School principal Sharon Johnson found that high school seniors were planning a massive water balloon fight at lunch, she made them choose between that and prom.
Guess which one the students chose:

“I didn’t think they were going to do it. I really thought they valued their prom,” said Johnson.
But toward the end of the lunch period, one student stood up and the water fight was on.
“I think that was the signal. They went haywire,” she said. “They had them in backpacks and duffel bags. There was water everywhere, running down the hallway. Kids were getting upset, kids were slipping and falling on the staircase.”
About 150 to 175 students were involved, she said.
So Johnson stuck to her guns and canceled prom. Letters were sent home to parents. Johnson said she’s only received about three phone calls from parents upset about the issue.

Malian troops fight Islamist rebel "infiltrators" in Gao

Malian government troops fought gunbattles with Islamist insurgents in the streets of the northern town of Gao on Sunday, highlighting fragile security in zones recently recaptured by a French-led military offensive. Gunfire resounded through the sandy streets and mud-colored houses of the ancient town on the Niger River, just hours after French and Malian forces reinforced a checkpoint that was attacked for the second time in two days by a suicide bomber.

A Tuareg soldier in the Malian army aims his rifle at a checkpoint along a road leading to the border with Niger in the northern city of Gao, Mali February 9, 2013. REUTERS/Francois Rihouay

"Islamists who have infiltrated the town are trying to attack our positions. But we're fighting back," a Malian army officer told Reuters by phone. Residents and a Reuters reporter in Gao said they heard bursts of gunfire and detonations.
A Reuters TV cameraman saw a figure clad in black robes and a black turban carrying a bag and running to avoid heavy gunfire from the soldiers. One Malian soldier said some of the rebel infiltrators were on motorbikes.
A fast-moving French military intervention launched last month in its former Sahel colony has driven al Qaeda-allied fighters from Mali's main northern towns, such as Gao and Timbuktu, into the northeast Adrar des Ifoghas mountains.
But with Mali's weak army unable to secure recaptured zones, and the deployment of a larger African security force slowed by delays and kit shortages, there are fears the Islamist jihadists will hit back with more guerrilla raids and suicide bombings.
Malian army officers said the north Gao checkpoint came under attack late on Saturday by a group of Islamist rebels who fired from a road and bridge that lead north through the desert scrub by the Niger River to Bourem, 80 km (50 miles) away.
"Our soldiers came under heavy gunfire from jihadists from the bridge ... At the same time, another one flanked round and jumped over the wall. He was able to set off his suicide belt," Malian Captain Sidiki Diarra told reporters.
Besides the bomber, who was blown to pieces, one Malian soldier was lightly wounded, Diarra added. In Friday's motorbike suicide bomber attack, a Malian soldier was also injured.
Diarra described Saturday's bomber as a "bearded Arab". Soldiers had collected body parts in a wheelbarrow and the bearded head of a light-skinned man was visible among them.
French military sappers carried out three controlled blasts in the area to destroy other devices and munitions found.
Since Gao and the UNESCO World Heritage city of Timbuktu were retaken last month, several Malian soldiers have been killed in landmine explosions on a main road leading north.
French and Malian officers say pockets of rebels are still in the bush and desert between the major towns and pose a threat of hit-and-run guerrilla raids and bomb attacks.
The French, who have around 4,000 troops backed by planes, helicopters and armored vehicles deployed in Mali, are now focusing their offensive operations several hundred kilometers (miles) north of Gao in a hunt for the Islamist insurgents.

Rand Paul to deliver tea party response to Obama's State of the Union Address and the repugican cabal's response

Marco Rubio giving official repugican cabal's response to State of the Union

The tea party leaders are turning to Sen. Rand Paul, r-Kentucky, to deliver their message following President Barack Obama's State of the Union address, a speech that will compete with the official repugican response.

Paul will make his remarks soon after Sen. Marco Rubio, r-Florida, wraps up the repugican response Tuesday night, a Paul spokeswoman confirms to CNN.
"We are giving a voice to the tea party movement when the mainstream media and the repugican establishment wants to write us off as dead," said Amy Kremer, chairman of the tea party express. This is the third year in a row that Kremer's organization has sponsored the tea party response.
The dueling repugican speeches come at a time when a very public rift is developing between the repugican establishment and wingnut agitators over the direction of the cabal. Some lunatic fringe agitators are specifically angry at Karl Rove and other repugicans for stating that they will choose sides in upcoming repugican primaries and only financially help candidates who have a chance of winning in the general election.
In Paul, tea party leaders have chosen a nationally known senator, who is identified more for his embrace of a libertarian ideology than aligning himself with his own political party's leaders.
The back-to-back addresses Tuesday night also features two young bi-violating hypocrites in the repugican cabal, each of whom are expected to seriously consider running for the White House in 2016.
Paul will deliver his remarks before an audience at the National Press Club, which is located just a stones throw away from the White House.
"We expect many of our supporters and many of Rand Paul's supporters, freedom loving, liberty loving Americans to be there because this is our time to be heard," Kremer said. "We are proud that Marco Rubio is giving the official repugican cabal response because he is a tea party wingnut and one of our own. But the repugican cabal doesn't necessarily speak for all conservatives and the tea party delusion has its own voice and this is our chance to be heard."
Rep. Michele Bachmann, r-Minnesota, delivered the tea party response in 2011, while Herman Cain gave it last year. Both candidates unsuccessfully sought the 2012 repugican presidential nomination.

As Sequester Looms, the repugican cabal Already Cost Us $18.9 Billion With Their Debt Ceiling Fiasco

As the sequester looms, Americans should remember something about the cabal of “fiscal responsibility”. repugicans were allegedly so concerned over spending that they refused to raise our debt ceiling, and yet at the same time, they also frivolously wasted 18.9 billion taxpayer dollars playing debt ceiling games.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, founded in 2007 by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell, did an analysis of the risks and costs of the debt ceiling standoff. They reported, “The United States hit its debt limit on December 31, 2012. The Treasury Secretary then began tapping into roughly $200 billion of emergency borrowing authority – referred to as “extraordinary measures” – to allow for an additional period of fully-funded government operations.”
“Estimate of the ten-year cost to taxpayers of the 2011 debt limit standoff = $18.9 billion.”
Steve Bell, a former repugican cabal Senate aide who co-authored the analysis for the Bipartisan Policy Center said, “This is what they wasted last year.” Yes, that’s what repugicans wasted over their debt ceiling standoff alone, not including the money they wasted showboating repeal ObamaCare votes.
Read the analysis here:

Debt Limit Analysis by

A few snippets:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report detailing additional costs to taxpayers as a result of the delayed 2011 debt limit increase.
‒A substantial cost to taxpayers stemmed from elevated interest rates on U.S. Securities issued in 2011 prior to when the debt limit was increased in August.
‒GAO conducted an economic analysis to estimate the resulting change in interest rates.
For Fiscal Year 2011, GAO estimated additional interest costs to taxpayers of $1.3 billion.
The cost of the event to the federal government, however, continues to accrue because many of the bonds issued during that period remain outstanding.
‒BPC extended GAO’s methodology to analyze the long term cost to taxpayers stemming from the elevated interest rates.
‒Estimate of the ten-year cost to taxpayers of the 2011 debt limit standoff = $18.9 billion
To put this in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the “Doc Fix” to prevent the scheduled 27% cut to Medicare physician payments for 2012 cost $18 billion over ten years.

Instead of chasing John Boehner’s blame game over the sequester, we should be discussing the fact that repugicans wasted $18.9 billion over the next 10 years through their debt ceiling obstruction alone. How do they explain the disparity between their casual abuse of taxpayer money and their claims that we have a spending problem?
I’m waiting for just one of the Sunday shows to address this obscene waste of taxpayer money in the middle of a recession, but it seems they are very busy following repugican distractions down the faux outrage path over the deficit. Meanwhile, “the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the “Doc Fix” to prevent the scheduled 27% cut to Medicare physician payments for 2012 cost $18 billion over ten years.”
So, the very spending that repugicans are pretending to be so upset about when it’s spent on the American people’s health is of no concern when they waste it playing Debt Ceiling Drama for a willing press.
This shows that repugicans don’t really believe there’s a spending problem. The repugicans are looking like Scroogian misers, wasting the taxpayers’ money on partisan games.

What’s changed about the repugican cabal is that they’re willing to sabotage the economy

How the world’s biggest spenders attack the most conservative government spendthrift since Eisenhower

Speaking to House Democrats Friday, Bill Clinton reminded his audience how repugicans’ concerns about the deficit depend on who is in the White House.
Having eliminated the deficit he inherited from Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and then being forced to watch the work he did be erased by George W. Bush in months, Clinton knows better than anyone how convenient the repugican cabal’s deficit “concerns” can be.
After we’ve created jobs for 35 months in a row and are finally seeing real evidence of a housing recovery, the repugican cabal has decided that they are willing — no, glad! — that the sequestration that they voted for in 2011 is going into effect, even though the CBO has made it clear that this would threaten 1 million jobs and likely put us back in recession.
But the repugican cabal is fine with this because they say it was the President’s idea, which is like saying that paying a ransom was the kidnapped child’s mother’s idea. The sequestration only exists because the repugican cabal took the debt limit hostage for the first time in history in 2011 and demanded cuts that have proved to hurt the economy.
I believe they did this because repugicans understand better than anyone else why they won in 2010. It wasn’t because they cared about spending or debt or even Obamacare — growth in spending under Obama is lower than it’s been since the 1950s.
The repugican cabal won in 2010 because the economy sucked.
So they slowed down the recovery in 2011 to try to repeat their success in 2012. Because the president made the right choices with the measures to rescue the economy in 2009 and eke out a second stimulus in late 2010, it didn’t work.
Now in 2013, the repugican cabal is willing to go right into a sequestration that they admit will “help the enemy” and “tank the economy” because Charles Krauthammer has convinced them that they they will be able to blame it on the president. Hey, it worked in 2010!
The choose this path as if the State of the Union won’t give President Obama a chance to lay out the reality of the situation: repugicans prefer cuts that kill jobs to ending tax breaks on big oil, private jets and hedge fund managers who pay lower tax rates than nurses.

The Transom‘s Ben Domenech says the president has misjudged the repugican cabal:

This is a post-financial crisis, post-TARP, post-bailout repugican cabal, where concerns about unrestricted spending and out of control budgets take precedence over concerns about spending at the Pentagon.

Mark this wishful thinking for when the repugican cabal does in some way cave on the sequestration. Domenech is imagining that the libertarian forces of the tea party have won out to the essence of his cabal, which is to pleasure defense contractors, bankers and polluters who will all suffer if the cuts go into effect. I’d have to believe something like this to be a repugican these days, too.
But the truth is much darker.
The only reason the repugican cabal is even willing to consider letting the sequestration go through is because they’re willing to sabotage the economy. A freeze in defense spending and reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles would be welcome measures to restore fiscal sanity.
But cuts now, austerity now, will have the same effect here as they are having in the UK — recession and more debt.
The repugican cabal has been willing to blow up the debt for three decades. They were willing to stall the economy in the mid 90s with government shutdowns. But since Bush destroyed the repugican cabal's brand with reckless warmongering, fiscal insanity and undeniable incompetence, they’ve dropped all pretense.
They’re willing to do just about anything — from stopping people for voting to sabotaging the economy — if it will help them get power. The least we can do is point that out.

The truth be told

Did you know ...

These dangerous gun myths

That navy exercises threaten the lives of 31 million marine mammals

That Twitter is a better predictor of the flu than the CDC

That an asteroid will pass by earth closer than the moon and orbiting satellites on Feb. 15

DHS watchdog: DHS can search all your devices within 100 mi of US border

The DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties -- a watchdog that's supposed to keep the DHS in check -- has concluded that it's fine for the DHS to stop anyone within 100 miles of the US border, without any suspicion or warrant, and search all the data on all their devices. But they won't say why:

“There should be a reasonable, articulate reason why the search of our electronic devices could lead to evidence of a crime,” Catherine Crump, an ACLU staff attorney, said in a telephone interview. “That’s a low threshold.”
The DHS watchdog’s conclusion isn’t surprising, as the DHS is taking that position in litigation in which the ACLU is challenging the suspicionless, electronic-device searches and seizures along the nation’s borders. But that conclusion nevertheless is alarming considering it came from the DHS civil rights watchdog, which maintains its mission is “promoting respect for civil rights and civil liberties.”
“This is a civil liberties watchdog office. If it is doing its job property, it is supposed to objectively evaluate. It has the power to recommend safeguards to safeguard Americans’ rights,” Crump said. “The office has not done that and the public has the right to know why.”
Toward that goal, the ACLU on Friday filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to see the full report that the executive summary discusses.

DHS Watchdog OKs ‘Suspicionless’ Seizure of Electronic Devices Along Border

Phone smuggling prisoner revealed when his butt began ringing

A Sri Lankan prisoner who tried to hide his mobile phone during a search of his cell was caught out when guards heard ring tones from his rear-end, a hospital official has said.
The 58-year-old convict had to be admitted to the national hospital in Colombo where doctors later retrieved the handset from his rectum.

“The man had concealed the phone inside his person,” the official said. “Unfortunately for him, the phone rang at the wrong time and guards knew he had a phone at the wrong end.”

He said the man was in hospital for two days but was discharged and sent back to prison on Friday after the mobile phone was taken out. The prisoner is serving a 10-year term for theft at the high security Welikada jail in the capital.

How Samsung Went From A Dried Fish Exporter To One Of The Top Names In Tech

Samsung was founded by Byung-Chull Lee in 1938 in Taegu, South Korea. The company started as a food exporter in Korea and shipped items like dried fish and flour to China. In the past year and a half, Samsung, a company that makes everything from dishwashers to smartphones, has become one the most powerful and recognizable names in tech. So, how did Samsung get to where it is today?

Found: Largest Prime Number with Over 17 Million Digits

Quick: what's the larest prime number that you know? Well, computer science professor Curtis Cooper (that's him on the left) of the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg has just found one that has 17,425,170 digits.
All he had to do was run 1,000 computers non-stop for 39 days:

On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 2^57,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global "grassroots supercomputing"[1] project in Internet history.

More | Want to learn more about the largest prime numbers? Here you go.

Picasso's Genius Revealed

Picasso's Genius Revealed: He Used Common House Paint

Art scholars get confirmation of a long-held suspicion that the boundary-pushing master used basic house paint instead of traditional artists' paint.

The Fascinating Phenomenon of Whistled Languages

Learn about a type of language you probably never knew existed; one that mimics the sounds and pitch of ordinary speech and can travel distances as great as two miles! More

Random Celebrity Photo

Hermione grew up

The Hypersonic Spaceplanes of Yesteryear

Like now, hypersonic air travel was on paper in the 1950s. It just never got off the ground.

That's No Moon!

That's a minimoon, actually. And while there's one big Moon that everyone knows and loves, it's not the only natural satellite that orbits the Earth:

Scientists believe that at any given time there are about a thousand larger-than-a-softball minimoons in our planet's gravitational pull, and about one or two of those are the size of dishwashers. They stay around Earth for between six and 18 months before heading off, back in thrall to the sun's gravitational pull.
Larger minimoons arrive too, but less frequently. A minimoon about the size of a school bus probably comes and hangs out every half century or so; one the size of a football field may come about once every 100,000 years. "A hundred thousand years is about the time frame that human beings have been doing things like leaving their handprints on cave walls, so maybe in that time frame somebody once actually looked into the sky and saw a mini-moon moving across the sky," Robert Jedicke, who studies these minimoons, told National Geographic last year.

The truth hurts

What Is The Ring Of Fire?

The Ring of Fire is an area where a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. In a 25,000 miles (40,000 km) horseshoe shape, it is associated with a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, and volcanic belts and/or plate movements.

The Ring of Fire has 452 volcanoes and is home to over 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes.

Spotted Lake (British Columbia)

Most of the water in the lake evaporates over the summer, leaving behind large “spots” of minerals. Depending on the mineral composition left behind, the spots will be of white, pale yellow, green or blue in color...

During the First World War, minerals from the lake were harvested for manufacture of ammunition...

Known as Kliluk to the natives of the Okanagan Valley, the lake is a sacred and culturally significant site whose potential for commercial exploitation recently generated much controversy. The therapeutic quality of the waters has been known for millennia - the Native Indians used the mud and waters of the lake to heal aches and ailments...

The lake and surrounding land were purchased by the First Nations and Indian Affairs Department in 2001.

Perfect Beaches And Lakes With Crystal Clear Water

A rundown of the best beaches and lakes with crystal clear water in the world.

Random Photo

Could Soil Bacteria Be Good For Your Mood?

Researchers have found that different types of exposure to a certain species of soil bacteria can have neurological effects and could impact mood as a result. More

The Seal that killed and ate Sharks

All those seals that were killed by sharks? They're being avenged by this one crazy Rambo seal that killed and ate five sharks. Divers Chris and Monique Fallows of Apex Predators told GrindTV:

"In more than 2,000 expeditions working with sharks over the last 21 years, this is the only time I have ever seen a seal kill several sharks and I can find no record of such an event happening elsewhere."
The seal consumed the stomach and livers of the first two sharks, before killing three others.

Ailing homeless man rescued after attaching help note to his dog

A homeless man in Thurston County, Washington state, who suffered a medical emergency has his dog, an Australian Shepherd mix named Buddy, to thank for saving his life. On Wednesday afternoon, a woman was walking her dog along railway tracks in Tumwater when she spotted another dog with a note attached to its harness.

The desperate note said: “Help. Send help. No joke, cannot walk. Medicine not working. Need doctor.” The woman who found the note dialed 911, but the note wasn’t signed, and police did not know where the note came from. Police heard a homeless man with a dog was living in the area, and eventually found him in an elaborate camp in the woods.

“He was absolutely immobile. He was in his camp and couldn’t move from his location. He didn’t have a phone to call anybody. No way to reach out to anybody for help, and he was afraid he was going to die,” said Detective Jen Kolb of the Tumwater Police Department.

YouTube link. Original video link.

Police said the note was a desperate, last-ditch effort to survive, and the homeless man attached it to his dog’s harness and sent him off. The man was treated and later released from hospital and reunited with Buddy.

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