The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally

The 12th Xmas Tree ...! 

 

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Dream House ... !

Today is - Gingerbread House Day

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Today in History

1753		George Washington, the adjutant of Virginia, delivers an ultimatum to the French forces at Fort Le Boeuf, south of Lake Erie, reiterating Britain’s claim to the entire Ohio River valley.
1770		The British soldiers responsible for the “Boston Massacre” are acquitted on murder charges.
1862		The Union loses its first ship to a torpedo, USS Cairo, in the Yazoo River.
1863		Orders are given in Richmond, Virginia, that no more supplies from the Union should be received by Federal prisoners.
1901		Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi receives the first transatlantic radio transmission in St. John’s Newfoundland.
1927		Communists forces seize Canton, China.
1930		The Spanish Civil War begins as rebels take a border town.
1930		The last Allied troops withdraw from the Saar region in Germany.
1931		Under pressure from the Communists in Canton, Chiang Kai-shek resigns as president of the Nanking Government but remains the head of the Nationalist government that holds nominal rule over most of China.
1943		The German Army launches Operation Winter Tempest, the relief of the Sixth Army trapped in Stalingrad.
1943		The exiled Czech government signs a treaty with the Soviet Union for postwar cooperation.
1956		The United Nations calls for immediate Soviet withdrawal from Hungary.
1964		Kenya becomes a republic.
1964		Three Buddhist leaders begin a hunger strike to protest the government in Saigon.
1967		The United States ends the airlift of 6,500 men in Vietnam.
1979		South Korean Army Major General Chun Doo-hwan, acting without authorization from President Choi Kyu-ha, orders the arrest of Army Chief of Staff General Jeong Seung-hwa, alleging that the chief of staff was involved in the assassination of ex-President Park Chung Hee.
1985		Arrow Air Flight 1285 crashes after takeoff at Gander, Newfoundland; among the 256 dead are 236 members of the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
1991		The Russian Federation becomes independent from the USSR.
1995		Willie Brown beats incumbent mayor Frank Jordon to become the first African-American mayor of San Francisco.
2000		The US Supreme Court announces its decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively ending legal changes to the results of that year’s Presidential election.

"Federal Benefit Payment"

The Social Security check is now (or soon will be) referred to as a "Federal Benefit Payment?" I'll be part of the one percent to forward this. I am forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you. Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it.
The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a "Federal Benefit Payment." This isn't a benefit. It is our money paid out of our earned income! Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too. It totaled 15% of our income before taxes.
If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that's close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.
If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375/month, including both you and your employers contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you'd have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved!
This is your personal investment. Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month.
That's almost three times more than today's average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the Social Security Administration. (Google it – it’s a fact).
And your retirement fund would last more than 33 years (until you're 98 if you retire at age 65)! I can only imagine how much better most average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.
Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger "Ponzi scheme" than Bernie Madoff ever did. They took our money and used it elsewhere. They forgot (oh yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn't have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they didn't pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently they've told us that the money won't support us for very much longer.
But is it our fault they misused our investments? And now, to add insult to injury, they're calling it a "benefit", as if we never worked to earn every penny of it.
Just because they borrowed the money doesn't mean that our investments were a charity!
Let's take a stand. We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government.
Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it.
Then call it what it is: Our Earned Retirement Income.

The Future Is Here

The Future Is Here, and It Looks a Lot Like This Oral Sex Café Staffed By Sex Robots

What a time to be alive

New Longest Non-Stop Flight

I once took a 16-hour nonstop flight from Chicago to Hong Kong, and was too excited to sleep during any of it. In economy. But there are longer commercial flights, and a new record-breaker is set to begin in 2018. Qantas has announced their new non-stop service between Perth and London, 8,989 miles, at 17.5 hours in the air. That may sound horrid in the abstract, but it beats taking multiple flights with layovers for those who need to go from one end of the earth to the other.

I guess it’s all better than the travel times of the 1930s. Back in 1938 a trip from London to Brisbane, Australia (the longest on offer at the time) took 11 days and had over two dozen scheduled stops.

Tickets will go on sale in April of 2017, but no price has been announced.

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper

The Story Behind The 1932 Photo

Video Link

Breaking Up with Sugar

7 Essential Tips to Breaking Up with Sugar

Salt Makes You Fat

How Salt Makes You Fat

Sprinkle this on your food and you might grow a gut

Forget Cranberry Juice

Forget Cranberry Juice. This Biochemist Says He Has an Answer to Frequent Urinary Tract Infections

Dope, Sick, Money

Frequent use of large amounts of marijuana is causing people to get sick and costing them thousands

As more and more states legalize marijuana for either medical or recreational use a new illness is popping up and confusing doctors who have little experience with it.

Non Sequitur

The New Dystopia

The New Dystopia: What Comes After Dumbass Trump

Dumbass on Twitter

Dumbass Trump Attacks CNN In Twitter Meltdown Intended to Distract You From Russia Report

Dumbass Trump used his buddy network CNN as a foil to play tough guy against and distract the public from the alarming report by the CIA that Russia helped to steal the election for Dumbass Trump. Yes, it's another Saturday morning twitter meltdown from the thin-skinned slimy one.…

4chan, Fake 'News'

‘Weekend Update’ pounds the ‘crazy’ people who get their fake news on 4chan and Reddit

California Road Rage

Three California women drag man from truck to beat him in violent road-rage incident

Showerthoughts and other things ...

Showerthought: "When you consider the size of the universe, or even the size of our galaxy, "the speed of light" is actually painfully slow."
Showerthought:  "The abbreviation for down (dn) is just "up" upside-down."
Showerthought:  "You know you're old when you fall down and no one laughs."
Showerthought: "When people think about traveling to the past, they worry about accidentally changing the present, but no one in the present really thinks they can radically change the future."
A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second.
"A factoid is not a small fact. It's a mistaken assumption repeated so often that it is believed to be true. At least, that was the meaning ascribed to the word by Norman Mailer, who is widely credited with coining it, in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer said factoids were "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper"."
GMO crops don’t actually reduce pesticide use or produce more food.  "In fact, herbicide use, says the Times, has increased in the US by 21 percent since the introduction of GMO crops in the mid-1990s. In Europe, over the same time period, herbicide use has declined by 36 percent."
A list of U.S. Marine Corps acronyms and expressions.

‘Star of Bethlehem’

The science behind the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ reveals it was likely more than one planet

Bright stars top Xmas trees in homes around much of the world. But what was the "Star of Bethlehem?"

Jupiter's aurorae

"Jupiter has aurorae. Like Earth, the magnetic field of the gas giant funnels charged particles released from the Sun onto the poles. As these particles strike the atmosphere, electrons are temporarily knocked away from existing gas molecules. Electric force attracts these electrons back. As the electrons recombine to remake neutral molecules, auroral light is emitted. In the featured recently released composite image by the Hubble Space Telescope taken in ultraviolet light, the aurorae appear as annular sheets around the pole. Unlike Earth's aurorae, Jupiter's aurorae include several bright streaks and dots..."

We are entering the season when polar aurorae sometimes become visible at our latitude, so this seems an appropriate time to note that Jupiter also exhibits similar phenomena.  Text and image via NASA'a Astronomy Photo of the Day.

Sleeping with Cheetahs

Dolph C. Volker studied the heart rate of sleeping cheetahs by sleeping with them. This takes a certain kind of dedication to science that most of us don't have. He says he couldn't sleep because Faith was having dreams. If it were me, I wouldn't get any sleep because my bedmate was an apex predator known for its lightning speed and ability to eat animals much larger than me.

(YouTube link)

This video only covers the first night, as Volker slept with Faith. You can see more of the ten-night experiment at his YouTube channel. Because nothing is more relaxing than watching a man sleeping with cats.

Animal Pictures