The Daily Drift

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Carolina Naturally

Old Pine ...! 

 

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Today in History

1676
Nathaniel Bacon leads an uprising against English Governor William Berkeley at Jamestown, Virginia, resulting in the settlement being burned to the ground. Bacon’s Rebellion came in response to the governor’s repeated refusal to defend the colonists against the Indians.
1773
Phillis Wheatley, a slave from Boston, publishes a collection of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in London.
1807
Aaron Burr is arrested in Mississippi for complicity in a plot to establish a Southern empire in Louisiana and Mexico.
1821
William Becknell leads a group of traders from Independence, Mo., toward Santa Fe on what would become the Santa Fe Trail.
1836
Protestant missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman leads a party to Oregon. His wife, Narcissa, is one of the first white women to travel the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail emigrants who chose to follow Stephen Meek thought his shortcut would save weeks of hard travel. Instead, it brought them even greater misery.
1864
Confederate forces under General John Bell Hood evacuate Atlanta in anticipation of the arrival of Union General William T. Sherman‘s troops.
1870
The Prussian army crushes the French at Sedan, the last battle of the Franco-Prussian War.
1876
The Ottomans inflict a decisive defeat on the Serbs at Aleksinac.
1882
The first Labor Day is observed in New York City by the Carpenters and Joiners Union.
1894
By an act of Congress, Labor Day is declared a national holiday.
1902
The Austro-Hungarian army is called into the city of Agram to restore the peace as Serbs and Croats clash.
1904
Helen Keller graduates with honors from Radcliffe College.
1905
Alberta and Saskatchewan become Canadian provinces.
1916
Bulgaria declares war on Romania as the First World War expands.
1923
An earthquake levels the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, killing 300,000.
1939
Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II in Europe.
1942
A federal judge in Sacramento, Cal., upholds the government’s detention of Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals as a war measure.
1951
Australia, New Zealand and the United States sign the ANZUS Treaty, a mutual defense pact.
1969
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seizes power in Libya following a coup.
1970
Dr. Hugh Scott of Washington, D.C. becomes the first African-American superintendent of schools in a major U.S. city.
1972
America’s Bobby Fischer beats Russia’s Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, to become world chess champion.
1979
US spacecraft Pioneer 11 makes the first-ever flyby of Saturn.
1985
The wreck of the Titanic found by Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean Louis Michel in a joint U.S. and French expedition.
1998
On National Day, Vietnam releases 5,000 prisoners, including political dissidents.
2004
Armed terrorists take children and adults hostage in the Beslan school hostage crisis in North Ossetia, Russia.

Porn Industry Keeps Making Technological Advances

Porn Industry Keeps Making Technological Advances

Hundreds of mysterious spots that appeared on grass explained

Residents of Aberdeen, Scotland, were left wondering if they had been visited by aliens after waking up on Monday to find hundreds of mysterious markings on nearby grass land.
The tenants of the tower blocks in the Seaton area were left scratching their heads at the circle imprints on the grass. Some speculated that the Granite City had been visited by beings from another planet.
However, the council later came forward to say it is behind the circles. An Aberdeen City Council spokeswoman said: “The marks are not alien crop circles. They are preparatory work for planting trees as part of the £500,000 Seaton Backies project
“This is rejuvenating a neglected green space for family use. We are planting dozens of trees as part of the project to create shelter, and the spots where the trees are to be planted need to be free of weeds before then – the trees will be planted from late autumn to April.”

Pub wants return of ghost that was captured by Chinese artist

A pub's owner is requesting the return of a ghost, after its famous specter was captured by a Chinese artist. Lu Pingyuan claims to have captured the ghost of James Stanley, the seventh Earl of Derby, who is said to haunt the Ye Olde Man and Scythe, in Churchgate, Bolton, Greater Manchester. A sealed metal canister supposedly containing the spirit went on display this month at the Center for Chinese Contemporary Art, unbeknown to the pub’s owner, Richard Greenwood, after the artist became captivated by the story and traveled from Shanghai to Bolton to catch the ghost.
And after discovering that the town’s oldest pub is now missing its favorite phantom, Mr Greenwood is determined to have it returned to its rightful home. In a letter to Mr Lu, he said: “I would have liked to have been privy to your actions and indeed to the exhibition before the ghost of James Stanley was taken out of Bolton, his ties to the town and to Ye Olde Man and Scythe run very deeply. “I feel very strongly that James Stanley’s ghost should remain in Bolton and at Ye Olde Man and Scythe to preserve the natural order of things. That said I do believe that your exhibition should travel and be seen by many people around the world and I would like to contribute to this as long as at the end of your exhibition it returns home.”
Mr Greenwood has offered to donate the chair that the Earl sat at for his last meal to the exhibition, on the agreement that both it and the ghost are returned at the end of the tour. It is thought that the Royalist commander spent his last few hours at the pub before being executed outside the premises for his part in the Bolton massacre of 1644. Mr Lu came across his story after seeing CCTV footage that emerged in 2014, which appeared to show a ghoulish presence at one end of the bar. The artist, who claims he followed the ghost into the pub’s bathroom before performing an incantation to trap it, said: “I was totally captivated by the legend, that the ghost remained in the human world long after his decapitation.
“I wish him to exist and be treated as a real artwork and to present him around the globe, getting respect and tribute from people everywhere. I told his ghost about my proposal the second time I visited this place and James Stanley agreed that I can put him into a jar in order to exhibit him in galleries and museums alike. Therefore, in this way, he became a piece of art. I consider my exhibition at CFCCA to be the beginning of his worldwide trip. After this exhibition, I plan to prepare for the next one in 2017. My original thought is that after the world tour of exhibitions, I will discuss with him and ask him whether he would prefer to stay like this, as a piece of art, or go back to the Ye Olde Man and Scythe.”

How Lucky We Are ...

How Lucky We Are: How People Died 100+ Years Ago, and How We Die Today

2 Bundy Ranch Thugs Who Threatened Feds Going To Jail

Two of the 19 angry white men who threatened federal agents have plead guilty to conspiring with others at the Bundy Ranch stand-off in 2014. The one on the left is co-chair of Vets for Dumbass Trump.

“To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: The Pitchforks Are Coming”

 Capitalism and the Reformer, by Art Young, 

from The Best of Art Young © 1936 The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York City, via Harper's.

Excerpts from an open letter:
You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries...
What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now?
I see pitchforks.
At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind...
But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last...
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when...
The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts...
Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich business people like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around.

Full text of the letter here.

'I Was Checkmated

'I Was Checkmated': Wingnut Hack Quits After Being Embarrassed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

 

Chicago-area teacher who punished students for speaking Spanish resigns in disgrace

Chicago-area teacher who punished students for speaking Spanish resigns in disgrace

More than 80 percent of the students in the Berwyn South School District classified as Latino and when the story got out the community erupted with outrage.

SC teacher humiliates black 1st-grader by throwing away her shoes as punishment for fidgeting

SC teacher humiliates black 1st-grader by throwing away her shoes as punishment for fidgeting

Chartrese Edwards said her 6-year-old daughter, Taraji, started crying when she got ready for school, saying she didn’t want to wear the shoes her mother had picked out for her.

Man arrested for banging on window and making kissing noises to female rehab center employee

50-year-old Timothy Baker of Yorkville, Illinois, has been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and criminal trespass to property.

Police responded to Hillside Rehabilitation and Care Center after a report of a male banging on a window and making kissing noises to a female employee.
When police arrived at around 8:22 on Thursday, Baker was identified by the employee and arrested for disorderly conduct.
Baker was also charged with criminal trespass to property after previously being banned from the property.

Man named High arrested for possession of marijuana

Police say a man arrested for marijuana possession inside public housing in Hoboken, New Jersey, was High.

Hakem High, 25, of Hoboken, was arrested early on Sunday on charges of possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, and possession within 1,000 feet of a school and within 500 feet of public housing. "Ironic," Sgt. Edgardo Cruz, a Hoboken Police spokesman, said of the suspect's name.
High was also charged with aggravated assault, as well as trespassing on public housing property, Cruz said. Officers responded at 5am to a report of an assault inside a third-floor apartment in a building operated by the Hoboken Housing Authority, Cruz said.
Police found the victim with a black eye, and arrested High who was then found to be carrying 16 small zip-lock bags containing marijuana, Cruz said. He said the victim was treated at Hoboken University Medical Center. High was released pending a court appearance on Sept. 14.

The myth of "equal opportunity" in colonial America

Here's an extended excerpt from an "The Original Underclass," an article in the September issue of The Atlantic:
For England, the New World beckoned as more than a vast store of natural resources, Isenberg argues. It was also a place to dispose of the dregs of its own society. In the late 16th century, the geographer Richard Hakluyt argued that America could serve as a giant workhouse where the “fry [young children] of wandering beggars that grow up idly and hurtfully and burdenous to the Realm, might be unladen and better bred up.” The exportable poor, he wrote, were the “offals of our people.” In 1619, King James I was so fed up with vagrant boys milling around his Newmarket palace that he asked the Virginia Company to ship them overseas. Three years later, John Donne—yes, that John Donne—wrote about the colony of Virginia as if it were England’s spleen and liver, Isenberg writes, draining the “ill humors of the body … to breed good bloud.” Thus it was, she goes on, that the early settlers included so many “roguish highwaymen, mean vagrants, Irish rebels, known whores, and an assortment of convicts,” including one Elizabeth “Little Bess” Armstrong, sent to Virginia for stealing two spoons.
One of America’s founding myths, of course, is that the simple act of leaving England and boldly starting new lives in the colonies had an equalizing effect on the colonists, swiftly narrowing the distance between indentured servant and merchant, landowner and clerk—all except the African slave. Nonsense, Isenberg says: “Independence did not magically erase the British class system.” A “ruthless class order” was enforced at Jamestown, where one woman returned from 10 months of Indian captivity to be told that she owed 150 pounds of tobacco to her dead husband’s former master and would have to work off the debt. The Puritans were likewise “obsessed with class rank”—membership in the Cult and its core elect were elite privileges—not least because the early Massachusetts settlers included far more nonreligious riffraff than is generally realized. A version of the North Carolina constitution probably co-authored by John Locke was designed to “avoid erecting a numerous democracy.” ...

Class distinctions were maintained above all in the apportionment of land. In Virginia in 1700, indentured servants had virtually no chance to own any, and by 1770, less than 10 percent of white Virginians had claim to more than half the land. In 1729 in North Carolina, a colony with 36,000 people, there were only 3,281 listed grants, and 309 grantees owned nearly half the land. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude,” Isenberg writes. “It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.”...
The Founding Fathers were, as Isenberg sees it, complicit in perpetuating these stark class divides. George Washington believed that only the “lower class of people” should serve as foot soldiers in the Continental Army. Thomas Jefferson envisioned his public schools educating talented students “raked from the rubbish” of the lower class, and argued that ranking humans like animal breeds was perfectly natural. “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs and other domestic animals,” he wrote. “Why not that of man?” John Adams believed the “passion for distinction” was a powerful human force: “There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lowest of the human species.”
We have not read the book, but the review is enticing.

Oldest fossils found in Greenland, from time Earth was like Mars

The earliest fossil evidence of life on Earth has been found in rocks 3.7 billion years old in Greenland, raising chances of life on Mars aeons ago when both planets were similarly desolate, scientists said on Wednesday.

Oldest fossils found in Greenland, from time Earth was like Mars

New pterosaur fossil reveals birds and small reptiles flew side by side

Some pterosaurs were the largest flying animals ever seen on Earth. These extinct flying reptiles that lived above the dinosaurs’ heads could grow wingspans of up to 11 meters and dominated the skies of the late Cretaceous period, the last age of the giant reptiles.

New pterosaur fossil reveals birds and small reptiles flew side by side

Hubble's "Ultra Deep Field" photo

This is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Starting in late 2003, astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, relatively empty part of our sky (only a few stars from the Milky Way visible), and created an exposure nearly 12 days long over a four-month period. The result is this amazing image, looking back through time at thousands of galaxies that range from 1 to 13 billion light-years away from Earth. Some 10,000 galaxies were observed in this tiny patch of sky (a tenth the size of the full moon) - each galaxy a home to billions of stars.  
Selected from a gallery of 50 photos chosen by The Big Picture as the most significant images of the past decade. We wish we could post all 50. Absolutely worth a click and scroll.

Police investigating the theft of 500 cows suspect they were stolen over a period of time

Police investigating reports that 500 cows have been stolen from a farm in Ashburton, New Zealand, say they probably happened in multiple thefts over a period of time. It is not known exactly when they began disappearing, as their absence was only noticed recently.

Police said it was "unlikely the theft of hundreds of animals could be completed at once, and is more likely that multiple thefts could be carried out over a period of time". The cows are reportedly worth at least NZ$750,000 (£415,000, $545,000) in total.
A friend said the farmer was "absolutely gobsmacked, and deeply embarrassed". "If you had three-quarters of a million dollars go missing, you wouldn't want to talk about it either," said Willy Leferink. Locals said they had never heard of cattle rustling on such a scale before.
The farm's original 1,300 cows are thought to have last been counted in July. Sr Sgt Scott Banfield of Ashburton Police urged farmers to check on their stock numbers once a week. "Farmers should also be keeping an eye out for unexpected signs of herding near their boundary lines too." New Zealand is home to around 10 million cows, more than twice the human population.

Flaming mice probably a factor in Frog Hollow fire

Fire Chief Larry Hector’s best guess is that flaming mice on the run rekindled a fire at Frog Hollow in the Walla Walla Valley, Washington, that had began earlier on Saturday. “Mice come out of the fire, on fire, and run into the unburned stuff. And start the fire all over again,” Hector explained.

Hector heads Walla Walla County Fire District 6 out of Touchet and was incident commander for three separate fires that scorched about 300 acres of mostly alfalfa stubble in the Touchet area. The original fire was started by a combine, the second started under a power line and the third was caused when a hawk struck a different power line and brought it down, he said.
A fourth burn was a restart of the original Frog Hollow Road blaze, he said, and that came under control at about 5pm. The situation forced the evacuation of one family in Frog Hollow Road for a few hours, and other residents left nearby homes as a precaution, said Liz Jessee, director of Walla Walla County Emergency Management.
Fighting flames exacerbated by high winds was a collaborative effort that brought about two dozen firefighters from five fire stations, Hector said. The main fire began just before noon, closing several roads in the area. The fires were contained by 4pm, with the rekindled blaze coming under control by about 5pm, she noted. Residents of the community were allowed to return home at 3:30pm.

Animal Pictures