Tag Archives: OddBox

Covington High School Teen Sues The Washington Post for $250 Million

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A Covington High School student caught on camera engaging in a stand-off with a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial last month is suing The Washington Post for $250 million in damages, alleging the newspaper “wrongfully targeted and bullied” the teen as part of a “a modern-day form of McCarthyism.”

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New Evidence Emerges of Possible Wrongdoing by Trump Inaugural Committee — ProPublica

New Evidence Emerges of Possible Wrongdoing by Trump Inaugural Committee — ProPublica:

saywhat-politics:

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Federal prosecutors in New York are circling Donald Trump’s inaugural committee as part of a wide-ranging investigation into possible money laundering, illegal contributions and cash-for-access schemes. Now, WNYC and ProPublica have identified evidence of potential tax law violations by the committee.

A spokesman confirmed that the nonprofit 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee paid the Trump International Hotel a rate of $175,000 per day for event space — in spite of internal objections at the time that the rate was far too high. If the committee is deemed by auditors or prosecutors to have paid an above-market rate, that could violate tax laws prohibiting self-dealing, according to experts.

Found: Two of the Quarries Responsible for the Megaliths of Stonehenge

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In 1923, British geologist Herbert Henry Thomas published a now-infamous study on Stonehenge, in which he claimed to know the precise location where the prehistoric architects had quarried the stones used in the massive monument. Turns out he was way off.

In a recently released study published in Antiquity, a team of archaeologists and geologists have reported the exact location of two of these quarries in western Wales. Stonehenge is made up of several different types of rocks collectively called “bluestones,” which have long been known to have come from somewhere in the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire. However, the researchers (who have been excavating the area for eight years) now know believe they know more precisely where this megalith quarrying took place 5,000 years ago, and how it was done.

The radiocarbon dates from charcoal from both quarries show that the stones were extracted around 3000 B.C., which lines up with the first stage of Stonehenge’s construction (when bluestones were erected in the Aubrey Holes) and with previously found dates for when people were buried near the Neolithic monument. Additionally, researchers found tools such as sharp hammer stones and stone wedges that appear to illustrate how the quarrying was performed. In a stroke of early engineering genius, the stone wedges were likely used to maneuver naturally occuring vertical pillars off of the parent rock by creating space between “joints.”

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These quarries sit about 180 miles away from Stonehenge, which is much farther than initially reported by Thomas in 1923. Mike Parker Pearson, who studies British prehistory at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, and led the project, says that this “shows an unusual degree of connectivity and unity between different tribal groups in the west and east of southern Britain, uniting to build Stonehenge despite their geographical distance apart.” Previously, scientists flirted with the idea that the early builders may have transported the bluestones south to Milford Haven and then brought them to Stonehenge’s location by water. But now, since both quarries are located on the hills’ north side, Pearson and his team think that people probably carried them east over land instead. “It is making us think that this was part of a coordinated and unified operation that extended across southern Britain and that Stonehenge’s purpose was to unify the two cultures (east and west) of Neolithic Britain,” he says.

Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales is one of the two geologists involved in the study, and his work contributed greatly to pinning down the exact quarry locations. Based on his findings, he says, it’s likely that the “bluestones were first erected to form a henge by a Neolithic population in Pembrokeshire, and then as that population migrated to Salisbury Plain they literally took their henge with them.”

One quarry site, Carn Goedog, is what principally produced dolerite (diorite) bluestones, a blue-green igneous rock with white spots. Craig Rhos-y-felin, the other quarry, is responsible for the rhyolite bluestones found at Stonehenge. Rhyolite is a similarly “hard” rock, but lighter blue in color. Though both quarry sites produced rocks that made their way to Stonehenge, Bevins says, they don’t have much in common beyond that. Rocks from both locations are “very well-jointed,” he says, “so extracting a ‘pillar-sized’ monolith would be a relatively easy task.” Bevins and his fellow geologist, Rob Ixer of University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, performed “detailed whole rock chemical analysis as well as detailed mineral chemistry analysis”—specifically involving flecks of zircons in the stone, which he calls “an innovative approach.” This analysis indicated a match between the rocks at Craig Rhos-y-felin and at least one type of rhyolite at Stonehenge.

The only other known megalith quarry in Neolithic Europe is one on the Orkney Islands, where the slabs lay horizontally, not vertically. Moving forward, the team plans to look for a dismantled bluestone circle close to theoe quarries. Depending on what they find, it may suggest whether Bevins is right, and Stonehenge once stood elsewhere before it was dismantled and moved, stone-by-stone, to the familiar Salisbury Plain.

“My dad came to America in the 90’s.  He worked at one of those…

Perfect immigrant that president Trump want to keep out or deport if he can. tumblr_pn5brtLqiH1qggwnvo1_500.jpg

“My dad came to America in the 90’s.  He worked at one of those stalls on 34th street selling ‘I Love New York’ t-shirts and plastic Statues of Liberty.  One of his coworkers had a sister back in Bangladesh, which was my mom. The whole thing was arranged over the phone.  Even the wedding was done over the phone. Everyone was on the line: my grandparents, my uncles, the Islamic priest.  My parents didn’t even meet in person until five months after the wedding.  I’m the oldest child in our extended family. Plus I’m the first one to grow up in America, so everyone is watching me. I’m like the lab rat for the American Dream. I was initially told that I was going to be a doctor. One of my earliest memories is sitting in my SpongeBob chair, practicing my numbers and letters.  In first grade my parents hired my kindergarten teacher to tutor me after school. My mother would actually negotiate with my teachers during parent-teacher conferences.  When I didn’t have a perfect grade in 5th grade science, she convinced my teacher to let me build a baking soda volcano for extra credit.  We didn’t have food coloring so we used Bengali spices for the lava.  Right now I’m in my first year of college. My parents have let go of the doctor thing. I think they trust me now because they’ve seen me accomplish a lot of things. But I still feel a lot of pressure.  A lot of people are watching me back in Bangladesh.  The sense of family is so big there.  If one person gets lifted up, everyone gets lifted up.  So everyone wants me to do well. And I want to do well for them.”

Bangor Opera House in Bangor, Maine

Bangor Opera House.

From the 1860s through the turn of the century, the town of Bangor was nicknamed the “little Broadway of the North.” At the time there were between seven and nine opera houses in the city, all of which sat upwards of 2,000 people. Today, only one remains.

The Bangor Opera House, now home to the year-round Penobscot Theatre Company, is the last remaining opera house in this former theatrical hub in northern Maine. First built in 1889, the opera house has lived many lives since then, but stands today as the jewel in the crown of Bangor once again.

Not long after it was built, the 19th-century opera house was destroyed in a fire. It was rebuilt in 1920 as an Egyptian-art deco vaudeville house that hosted celebrities like Oscar Wilde and Mae West.

Then in 1953, the building was turned into a cinema house and the entire 30-foot-tall proscenium arch became a giant movie screen. It operated as a movie theatre until the 1980s (the last movie shown here was Ghostbusters 2) and was transformed yet again, this time into a Pentecostal church. When the Penobscot Theatre Company finally purchased the building, it was in terrible disrepair. The theatre company has inhabited the building since 1999 and has done a remarkable job in restoring it to its former glory.

Nowadays the theater company offers behind-the-scenes tours of the Bangor Opera House. They take visitors backstage to learn little-known facts about the history of the theater, which is built into a cliff with the first two rows of seats underground, is equipped with hidden passages, and still uses the original floor, grid, and rope mechanisms. Perhaps unsurprisingly given its turbulent history, the opera house is also well-known as a haunted locale. It reportedly has three ghosts in residence and has been featured on ghost-hunting television shows.

Desperate teens of anti-vaxxers are turning to Reddit for vaccination advice

Hyper sensitive people duped by those who enjoy spreading misinformation. Desperate teens of anti-vaxxers are turning to Reddit for vaccination advice:

dailydot:

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As a kid, Ethan wasn’t allowed to be vaccinated. Ethan’s parents are one of the up to 10 percent of Americans who are against some form of vaccination, often believing that preventing disease in children is a government conspiracy.

But Ethan is not his parents. When he turned 18, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He wasn’t sure where else to begin, so he turned to Reddit.

“Where do I go to get vaccinated? Can I get vaccinated at my age?” Ethan asked his fellow redditors in December.

Ethan’s post flooded with over 1,000 comments from users offering their encouragement and support, along with practical advice.


Anti-vaxxers have also mastered the art of social media, where they effectively disseminate misinformation via platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Ethan said his mom is part of many online social groups, with many of them relating to “mothers against vaccines,” and he often sees her posting about how vaccines are a government conspiracy and harmful on Facebook.  

“My mom would publish and share videos, articles, and stuff like that about vaccines being bad,” Ethan said. “It’s almost as if she had been radicalized, or indoctrinated at some point. She holds that stuff as gospel.”

Ana Lucía Schmidt, a co-researcher of the seven-and-a-half-year study “Polarization of the Vaccination Debate on Facebook,” told the Daily Dot that the anti-vaxxing community’s social media usage is a classic example of confirmation bias.

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