Laying the Groundwork for Committing Atrocities

Polarized Public Discourse and Political Purity Wars Can Start the Groundwork for Committing Atrocities

The wingnuts are already committing atrocities and will only get worse if we let them get away with it now.

China's Arrest of Activists Investigating Ivanka Trump-linked Factory Unprecedented

China's Arrest of Activists Investigating Ivanka Trump-linked Factory Unprecedented

Saudi Arabia and UAE Work the U.S. Media to Push for War

Emails Expose How Saudi Arabia and UAE Work the U.S. Media to Push for War

A Tour of Saturn’s Moons

Saturn’s moon Phoebe can seem unremarkable from Earth — just another run-of-the-mill space rock slowly tumbling along in its orbit, so distant and small that it’s invisible to most ground-based telescopes. That changed in June 2004. … Read more

NASA Finds Evidence of Diverse Environments in Curiosity Samples

 

NASA scientists have found a wide diversity of minerals in the initial samples of rocks collected by the Curiosity rover in the lowermost layers of Mount Sharp on Mars, suggesting that conditions changed in the … Read more

Shipworm

"Discovered in the mud of a shallow lagoon in the Philippines, a living creature of [shipworm] has never been described before – even though its existence has been known for more than 200 years thanks to fossils of the baseball bat-sized tubes that encase the creature." (video at the link)

A Couple of Deer

1. Reindeer can see ultraviolet light.  "In areas where reindeer live, the sun remains very low in the sky for long periods. This means the light is scattered such that the majority of light that reaches objects is blue or UV. Some parts of the environment absorb UV light and therefore to UV-sensitive reindeer, appear to be black, strongly contrasting with the snow."

2. "On January 5, 2015, the camera caught a glimpse of a young white-tailed deer standing near the skeleton with a human rib bone in its mouth..."  This was on a forensic science "body farm," but still... a deer?

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

Bacon wrapped and Peppered ...!
 

Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily. 

  

Corny ... !

Today is - Corn-On-The-Cob Day 

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Peppers!

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Today in History

1346		Charles IV of Luxembourg is elected Holy Roman Emperor.
1509		Henry VIII of England marries Catherine of Aragon.
1770		Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
1798		Napoleon Bonaparte takes the island of Malta.
1861		Union forces under General George B. McClellan repulse a Confederate force at Rich Mountain in western Virginia.
1865		Major General Henry W. Halleck finds documents and archives of the Confederate government in Richmond, Virginia. This discovery will lead to the publication of the official war records.
1895		Charles E. Duryea receives the first U.S. patent granted to an American inventor for a gasoline-driven automobile.
1903		King Alexander and Queen Draga of Belgrade are assassinated by members of the Serbia army.
1915		British troops take Cameroon in Africa.
1927		Charles Lindbergh, a captain in the US Army Air Corps Reserve, receives the first Distinguished Flying Cross ever awarded, for his solo trans-Atlantic flight.
1930		William Beebe, of the New York Zoological Society, dives to a record-setting depth of 1,426 feet off the coast of Bermuda, in a diving chamber called a bathysphere.
1934		The Disarmament Conference in Geneva ends in failure.
1940		The Italian Air Force bombs the British fortress at Malta in the Mediterranean.
1943		The Italian island of Pantelleria surrenders after a heavy air bombardment.
1944		U.S. carrier-based planes attack Japanese airfields on Guam , Rota, Saipan and Tinian islands, preparing for the invasion of Saipan.
1963		Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested in Florida for trying to integrate restaurants.
1967		Israel and Syria accept a U. N. cease-fire.
1987		Margaret Thatcher wins her third consecutive term as Prime Minister.

The House of David Baseball Team

Okay, what's going on here? These guys have hairstyles from the 1970s, but they're wearing baseball uniforms from the 1910s. Indeed, this photograph was taken around 1915. The players are from the Israelite House of David, a cult founded in 1903 in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Members were not allowed to engage in sex, drink alcohol, or cut their hair. But they were allowed to play baseball, and so the House of David baseball team became famous in their day -which lasted into the 1950s.

Famous professional players occasionally donned fake beards and joined the team for games, including Grover Cleveland Alexander, Satchel Paige, and even Babe Ruth.(They considered signing the Sultan of Swat in 1934, but decided his hedonistic lifestyle would be a poor fit for the ascetic team.)
The hirsute athletes also popularized the art of the “pepper game,” a collection of Harlem Globetrotters-esque antics where they juggled and tossed balls, made them vanish only to pull them out of their beards, and even played innings while mounted on donkeys.
Playing as far afield as Hawaii and Mexico, the House of David continued to draw crowds until the 1950s, when the splintering of the scandal-wracked commune and rise of Major League Baseball led to a decline in popularity.

You can see plenty of pictures of the House of David baseball team and their junior league trainees at Retronaut.

Becoming a Stripper

The single most common reason why any woman starts dancing (and continues) is for the money. Dancers in most locations in the United States make on average two hundred dollars a shift, and, on some days, and in certain clubs, they may make much more. 

This means that for women with little formal education and few professional skills dancing is one of the best-paying occupations available.

Becoming a Stripper: What Motivates Women to Join the Industry

Earn Minimum Wage?

A person working a full-time minimum-wage job will find it virtually impossible to rent an affordable home anywhere in the US.

Earn Minimum Wage? You Can Afford to Live in Exactly 12 Counties in the U.S.

The DEA's Top 10 Most Insanely Ridiculous Slang Terms for Weed

The DEA's Top 10 Most Insanely Ridiculous Slang Terms for Weed

Hate crimes on the rise in America

Jeremy Christian was being led out of the court room when he shouted, “You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.”
Christian was charged with two counts of aggravated murder, one count of attempt to aggravated murder, two counts of second-degree intimidation and one count of first-degree assault, and three counts of unlawful use of a weapon in the recent Portland stabbings.
The 35 year-old man was hurling hate comments at two young women, one of them wearing a hijab when some men defended them and were stabbed by Christian.
Hate crimes in the country have seen a sharp surge in the past few years.

Hate crimes on the rise in America

It’s not just your color printer that could betray you

Hours after The Intercept dropped a leaked report detailing Russian efforts to hack the 2016 election, federal government investigators announced the arrest of the suspected leaker, 25-year-old NSA employee Reality Leigh Winner. According to a Department of Justice affidavit, Winner left a trail of physical and digital evidence identifying her as the leaker.

After reading the affidavit, Ted Han, director of technology at DocumentCloud, became curious about what incriminating information could have been hidden in the document. Zooming in on the PDF, he found what he was looking for — tiny yellow dots on the pages.

“Microdots basically provide a smoking gun,” Han said. “It sure makes it really easy to look up specifically what print job that document came from.” The pattern of dots, when looked up through a guide posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, reveal the exact date, time, and printer of the document

It’s not just your color printer that could betray you -- here are 5 other ways you’re being tracked

The solar energy revolution has arrived

Protecting coal jobs today makes as much sense as protecting typing pool jobs around the time personal computers caught on in the 1980s.
Solar technology will destroy coal and oil as energy sources even if Dumbass Trump stamps his feet, holds his breath and refuses to play with the rest of the world.
Solar is on the same kind of Moore’s law–like path that has made computing power so cheap.
Solar tech isn’t improving at computing’s breakneck pace, but it’s on a predictable, sustainable and impressive trajectory toward cheaper and better.
By about 2030—13 years from now—solar will be able to produce electricity at half the cost of coal and lower than the cost of any carbon source.

The solar energy revolution has arrived

Germany, California to tackle climate change together

Germany is teaming up with California to cooperate on tackling climate change following the U.S. government’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement.
Europe’s largest economy and the biggest U.S. state in economic terms will back the work of the “Under 2 Coalition,” which includes cities, regional governments and states, German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said on Saturday.

Germany, California to tackle climate change together

US no longer the ‘global center of science'

Tucked into a corner of physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed’s otherwise very cerebral-looking office is a computer with the '90s TV show, “Twin Peaks,” paused mid-scene.
The cult classic is constantly on in the background as Arkani-Hamed works on physics problems at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.
“I find watching it inspiring because, there, they’re trying to figure out some crazy stuff, and we’re trying to figure out some crazy stuff,” says Arkani-Hamed. “So, it’s actually really nice to have it playing in the background.”

A physicist who always dreamed of working in the US says it's no longer the ‘global center of science'

A solar eclipse once rallied Americans around science

Science journalist David Baron tells the story of the 1878 total eclipse of the sun, visible over the American Wild West. It drew astronomers, scientists and a famous young inventor to witness the event.
"Thomas Edison, age 31, right after he invented the phonograph and immediately before he invented the incandescent lamp, went to Wyoming to see a total eclipse," says Baron.
And so did thousands of others.
Baron's new book, "American Eclipse," makes the case that, like the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon, the eclipse of July 29, 1878, dominated newspaper headlines and inspired people in the United States to look at science differently.

 A solar eclipse once rallied Americans around science -- could it happen again?

Roman Libyan Treasure

Archaeologists have unearthed a cache of ancient Roman silver and bronze coins as well as other treasures in the ruins of a 1,700-year-old villa on the coast of Libya.
The team discovered the haul of 553 silver and bronze coins known as sterercii in the remarkably well-preserved 3rd century building in the ancient city of Ptolemais, Haaretz reported.

Haul of treasure discovered at Libya's ancient Roman ruins

Modern humans actually started much earlier than previously believed

According to the textbooks, all humans living today descended from a population that lived in east Africa around 200,000 years ago. This is based on reliable evidence, including genetic analyses of people from around the globe and fossil finds from Ethiopia of human-like skeletal remains from 195,000–165,000 years ago.
Now a large scientific team has discovered new fossil bones and stone tools that challenge this view. The new studies, published in Nature, push back the origins of our species by 100,000 years and suggest that early humans likely spanned across most of the African continent at the time.

Modern humans actually started much earlier than previously believed

Most ocean pollution comes from Asian rivers

Not all nations pollute equally — and some of them are responsible for far more of the world’s contamination than others.
According to a study released Wednesday, most of the plastic currently in the ocean came from Asian rivers.
Of the world’s 40,760 ocean-bound rivers, a mere 20 are responsible for two-thirds of the ocean’s pollution, according to the study by The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch foundation that develops technology to decontaminate waterways.
Most of those rivers are located in Asia. In the foundation’s study published Wednesday, they found that overwhelming majority of pollution in the ocean came from the Yangtze River in China.

Study finds most ocean pollution comes from Asian rivers

Dominating Nature Has Led to Widespread Devastation That Threatens Our Very Survival

The Notion That We Must Dominate Nature Has Led to Widespread Devastation That Threatens Our Very Survival

Bird Found Preserved in Amber

Picture a bird hatching from an egg and falling out of the nest in Burma. It landed on a part of the tree that had sap oozing from it and became stuck. More sap fell on the hatchling until it was completely encased in sap. Skip ahead 99 million years, and that bird, now a fossil encased in amber, was found and taken to the Hupoge Amber Museum in Tengchong City, China.

Unlike modern birds, this newborn hatchling is from a now-extinct branch of the family tree called Enantiornithines. Researchers say they would have looked a lot like modern-day avians, with the exception of some added features such as claws on their wing tips and small teeth tucked away in their beaks.

Read the article about this find at BGR and the scientific paper here.

Tigers' First Swim

There aren't many cat species who swim by their own choice. Tigers are one of them. Sydney's Australia Zoo has a pair of tiger cubs named Spot and Stripe. In this video, tiger expert Giles Clark introduces them to the tiger pool for their first swim. They aren't all that sure about the new concept, but once they are in the water, they are quite at home.

(YouTube link)

This is a clip from the BBC series Tigers About The House, which follows Clark's effort at hand-raising the rare Sumatran tiger clubs. He has to watch Spot and Stripe constantly, lest they stalk the family dog or get into other tiger business.

Diver Approached By Wild Seal Who Wants Belly Rub

Divers learn to steer clear of sharks and other predators who see them as a snack, and they tend to keep dolphins and other inquisitive mammals at bay for safety's sake, but their relationship with seals remains uncertain.That's because seals have been known to attack humans in the water for no apparent reason, and their playful and curious nature can result in injuries for humans they decide to use as a plaything.
But when diver Gary Grayson was approached by a curious seal while diving in the Scilly Isles he wasn't afraid or worried about being attacked- because he was just as curious about the little critter as the critter was about him.
Next thing you know the seal did something totally unexpected- he flipped over and asked Gary to rub his belly!

(YouTube Link)

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of
Carolina Naturally

Today is the 149th running of the Belmont Stakes ...!
 

Carolina Naturally is read in 210 countries around the world daily. 

  

Teatime ... !

Today is - Iced Tea Day 

 You want the unvarnished truth?

Don't forget to visit: The Truth Be Told

The Truth Hurts!

Don't forget to visit our sister blogs Here and Here

Today in History

1190		Frederick Barbarossa drowns in a river while leading an army of the Third Crusade.
1692		Bridget Bishop is hanged in Salem, Mass., for witchcraft.
1776		The Continental Congress appoints a committee to write a Declaration of Independence.
1801		Tripoli declares war on the U.S. for refusing to pay tribute.
1854		The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, holds its first graduation.
1861		Dorothea Dix is appointed superintendent of female nurses for the Union army.
1864		At the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads in Mississippi, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest defeats the numerically superior Union troops.
1898		U.S. Marines land in Cuba.
1905		Japan and Russia agree to peace talks brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt.
1909		An SOS signal is transmitted for the first time in an emergency when the Cunard liner SS Slavonia is wrecked off the Azores.
1916		Mecca, under control of the Turks, falls to the Arabs during the Great Arab Revolt.
1920		The Republican convention in Chicago endorses women’s suffrage.
1924		The Italian socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti is kidnapped and assassinated by Fascists in Rome.
1925		Tennessee adopts a new biology text book denying the theory of evolution.
1940		The Norwegian army capitulates to the Germans.
1942		Germany razes the town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia and kills more than 1,300 citizens in retribution of the murder of Reinhard Heydrich.
1943		The Allies begin bombing Germany around the clock.
1944		The U.S. VII and V corps, advancing from Normandy’s beaches, link up and begin moving inland.
1948		The news that the sound barrier has been broken is finally released to the public by the U.S. Air Force. Chuck Yeager, piloting the rocket airplane X-1, exceeded the speed of sound on October 14, 1947.
1963		Buddhist monk Ngo Quang Duc dies by self immolation in Saigon to protest persecution by the Diem government.
1970		A 15-man group of special forces troops begin training for Operation Kingpin, a POW rescue mission in North Vietnam.
1985		The Israeli army pulls out of Lebanon after 1,099 days of occupation.
1999		Serb forces begin their withdrawal from Kosovo after signing an agreement with the NATO powers.

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Receives Award ...

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Receives Award Named After Progressive Leader Henry Wallace

When Monty Python Took American Television to Court

The TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974. By 1974, some PBS stations in the U.S. were rebroadcasting the show, where it gathered a small but dedicated fan base. Eventually, ABC saw the value in the show. The network acquired the right to six episodes (which they were to present in two 90-minute specials) from Time-Life, which had gotten the rights from the BBC, which had an agreement with Monty Python that no episodes would ever be re-edited. You might see where this is going. ABC, as an American broadcast network, felt the need to heavily edit the British humor for American viewing -and to squeeze plenty of ads in.

When the special aired at 11:30 p.m. on October 3, 1975, 22 minutes had been clipped from the original material. Gone was a cat used as a doorbell; a mention of “colonic irrigation” had also disappeared. ABC’s censors had snipped several “Good Lords,” “damns,” and other near-profanities. Any mentions of pooping were also trimmed. For Python fans, it was something akin to comedy castration.
The group didn’t learn the full extent of ABC’s meddling until late November, when they were shown a tape of the edited broadcast. Outraged, they demanded that ABC not re-air it.
The network had planned something worse: A second special was due in December, with the remaining three episodes due to be spliced in a similar manner.
With just days before that second program was scheduled to air, the Pythons filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against ABC. They wanted their work removed from American broadcast television.

And that's where the story really begins. Read about the ensuring legal battle and its results at Mental Floss.

Interesting Facts about Poets

(YouTube link)

Even if you're not into poetry, you have to admit that the folks who became famous by writing it are tres interesting. From William Shakespeare to Maya Angelou, John Green knows a weird fact when he sees it. You'll learn some really weird trivia about many different poets in this , the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.

Naked Coffee with Heidi

Heidi Klum On Her Coffee Table Book Of Nude Photos More here.

These 'Playboy' Models Recreated Their Old Cover Shoots

These 'Playboy' Models Recreated Their Old Cover Shoots and the Results Are Amazing

Damn, ladies!

The 10 Most Beautiful Ceilings in the World

If you love buildings from a time where craftsmanship and beauty went into every inch, in which form was as important as function, then you will appreciate seeing the most beautiful ceilings in the world. Each gives us a reason to look up and to marvel at the work that went into them. For example, shown above is the Castello di Sammezzano in Leccio, Italy.

The mesmerizing ceiling, vaults and decor of the Peacock Room in this abandoned Italian palazzo near Florence speak for themselves. Peacocks, and other exotica, were the source of the inspired decoration to be found throughout the seemingly endless empty rooms of this daydream building. The Moorish-style makeover of what was a much older palace was the life work of Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d’Aragona. Although the aristocratic Italian architect, engineer, botanist, philosopher and politician never visited the Levant or the Orient, he imagined a world of exquisite and highly exotic forms and colors that he brought to life in Leccio between 1843 and 1889. A hotel in the 20th Century, the palazzo and its polychromatic Peacock Room are in limbo today.

See nine more gorgeous ceilings in a list from the BBC

The World's Largest Parkour Course

This is the Skyladder Parkour Course at Tianman Mountain in China. It consists of 999 steps and has an average incline of 45 degrees. Calen Chan, a 19-year-old free-runner from Utah, got to run all the way down. With a GoPro camera held in his mouth!

(YouTube link)

Oh yeah, the video might make you a little dizzy.

Myths About War You Believe

(Because Of Movies)

Hollywood has to take shortcuts to tell an epic war story, or we'd never get films into the theaters. Complex stories are simplified, time-frames are shortened, and (at least before CGI) sets are as small as they could get away with. The vast majority of Americans who've never been in a battle easily get the wrong idea about what war is like if what they know comes from watching movies. For example, the trenches of World War I are shown to illustrate the horrors of that war: tiny, muddy, crowded hideaways where soldiers are constantly under fire. As they were in use for years, those trenches were actually much more sophisticated.   

In fact, the complexity of the trenches was designed to counter another favored stereotype of the First World War -- that soldiers were seen as easily replaceable machine-gun fodder. The trenches were cut as zig-zags so that, should an enemy force breach the lines, all the troops weren't just standing in a straight headshot-able line from the North Sea to the Alps. Also, the walls were paneled with wood and the parapets reinforced with a ceaseless line of sandbags, and there were large medical stations installed throughout, because even these generals took care not to just let entire regiments die from gangrene and patience.

That's just the beginning of the complexity of World War I trenches. They were sometimes even connected underground to larger staging areas. Read about them and four other parts of war that aren't exactly as Hollywood portrays them at Cracked.

Drug War Outrage

Drug War Outrage: Students Sue After Entire High School Illegally Groped and Molested by Cops

900 students at a Georgia high school were groped by law enforcement officers during a drug sweep that was conducted without a warrant and didn't yield any drugs.

More here.

Aspirin and Heart Attacks

​Aspirin Might Not Help Your Heart As Much As You Think

​Does it really ward off heart attacks?

Chronic Pain and Early Death

Why People With Chronic Pain May Die Earlier

​Prolonged suffering could put you at increased risk of an early death

Hawaii To Defy Dumbass Trump’s Paris Agreement Withdrawal

Hawaii Is The First State To Defy Dumbass Trump’s Paris Agreement Withdrawal

This is great!

(So is North Carolina!)

Is Climate Change Making Us Sick?

Is Climate Change Making Us Sick? Two Out of Three U.S. Doctors Say Yes, but Dumbass Trump Doesn't Care

Most Extreme Weather

You may have noticed this spring felt a little warmer than usual even though summer is taking its time in some parts of the country. This spring, classified meteorologically as the months of March, April and May, was 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average. The spring average temperature was 53.5 degrees Fahrenheit across the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported.

The weather so far this year has been some of the most extreme in the last century

Oops: T-rex Didn't Have Feathers After All

Quite a few years ago, paleontologists discovered that dinosaurs were the ancient ancestors of birds, and since then, a few dinosaur fossils have been found with evidence of feathers, including two tyrannosauroids that predated T. rex. That led us to picture Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinos as feathered reptiles. Now, a new study by Phil R. Bell of Australia's University of New England says that T. rex had scales.

Bell and his colleagues examined skin from T. rex and four relatives from fairly late in tyrannosaur history: Albertosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Tarbosaurus. Tyrannosaur skin is rare, Bell said, in part because paleontologists historically favored smashing through skin to get to bones.
From these skin patches, representing the tyrannosaur abdomen, chest, pelvis, neck and tail, the researchers found nothing but scales. If feathers existed, they did so only along the animals' back or spines.
“This doesn't rule out feathers on even the biggest tyrannosaurs,” said University of London paleontologist David Hone, who was not involved in the research, “but does suggest they lacked a full coat of feathers.”

That's good news for the producers of Jurassic Park. Read more about the study at The Washington Post.

Tickling Mohan

Mohan is one of the red panda triplets at Symbio Wildlife Park in New South Wales, Australia. The others are Raja and Phingu. In this video, Mohan busy being cute for zoo visitors, and enjoys getting his belly rubbed.

(YouTube link)

There, that should make your whole work day go better.

Baby Black Rhino Practices His Charging Skills

... Even Though His Horn Hasn't Grown In Yet

Baby Black Rhino Practices His Charging Skills Even Though His Horn Hasn't Grown In Yet Rhinos are born to be bad-asses, but before they can take down a Jeep with their charge they have to start small- by charging at little plastic barrels.The eager little black rhino in this video is Moyo, and he was born just a few weeks ago at the Saint Louis Zoo. Moyo's part of the zoo's Species Survival Plan for critically endangered species, and since there are only about 5000 black rhinos left in the wild his birth is important to species conservation.
Plus he has already starred in his own viral video!:

Our “tough guy” Moyo doesn’t have his horns yet, but that doesn’t stop him practicing his charge! The 2-week-old black rhinoceros calf is very active and zookeepers provide him with a variety of toys and enrichment throughout the day. Play is important for baby animals – it’s how they learn the skills they will need as adults.

(YouTube Link)

Animal Pictures