This is NOT cosplay. These people really think they're protecting a Marine recruitment center.

San Francisco Middle Schools No Longer Teaching ‘Algebra 1

Van Zandt admits he has high expectations for his children. He also has high expectations for San Francisco Unified, which is why he and many parents like him were outraged when they learned Algebra 1 will no longer be taught in middle school under Common Core, the state’s new academic standards.

Instead, all students will have to wait until their freshman year in high school to take the class.

Valentina says delaying Algebra 1 is going to hurt gifted students because some classes are “too easy” or “aren’t very challenging” for high-achieving students.

The shift to now require Algebra 1 in high school may seem like a subtle change, but it hits on a deep-rooted debate over when advanced math should be introduced, and to which students.

Some say Algebra 1 at a young age causes students to flounder.

Others say students will be unprepared for tough college-prep courses in high school if they don’t take Algebra 1 early.



http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/07/22/san-francisco-middle-schools-no-longer-teaching-algebra-1

San Francisco Implements Pee-Repellant Paint Program

A splashy new idea for getting people to stop using San Francisco alleys and walls as toilets is being implemented in several of the city’s neighborhoods. The Department of Public Works is testing out a new paint that repels urine to discourage peeing on the sidewalk.

Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru said crews have installed a liquid-repellant paint in about 10 locations.

“When people urinate on the wall, the pee bounces back and hits your pants or gets you wet,” Nuru said. “So we are piloting it to see if we can discourage people from peeing on many of our hot spots.”

Around parts of San Francisco, the stink is obvious, and architect John Jackson says he’s had enough.

“Public peeing is an issue in the city,” Jackson said. “When I come to work that’s all I smell walking down the street.”


http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/weird/San-Francisco-Implements-Pee-Repellant-Paint-Program-318370591.html

Missouri GOP candidate for governor: I was gay until ‘religious experience’ saved me

Republican Missouri state senator threw his hat into the ring on Monday, announcing his run for the governorship by citing — among other things — his “23 years as a strong supporter of traditional marriage.”

According to the Riverfront Times, what State Senator Bob Dixon didn’t mention at his press conference was that he lived his life as a gay man for five years before having a “religious experience” in October, 1988.

Dixon had previously discussed his earlier sexual orientation at a Springfield city council meeting in 1991 without describing the specifics of the religious experience that set him off on a different path. Since that time he has married a woman, had three kids and served as a Missouri lawmaker for 15 years.

“It is my faith in God that helps me to daily set the compass,” Dixon said during his announcement. “I hope the people of Missouri will accept my record of service as a reflection of my faith in the Almighty, because that frankly is at the core of what I do.”

According to Dixon’s mother, Jean Dixon , she waged a battle as a lawmaker against Missouri State University’s 1989 production of the AIDS drama The Normal Heart in part because of her son’s homosexuality.

Dixon said her son attempted suicide prior to his gay conversion, while admitting that — for her — it was difficult to accept his homosexual lifestyle.


http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/missouri-gop-candidate-for-governor-i-was-gay-until-religious-experience-saved-me/

Hulk Hogan Fired by WWE Over 'Racial Tirade'

As of Thursday night, Hulkamania is no longer running wild on WWE.com.

At some point over the past 12 hours, World Wrestling Entertainment began scrubbing almost all mentions of Hulk Hogan from its website: He's no longer listed as a member of the WWE Hall of Fame (despite being inducted a decade ago), his merchandise has been removed from the WWE Shop and a search for his official WWE Superstar bio returns only an ominous "You are not authorized to access this page."

Hogan has also been removed as a judge on Tough Enough, WWE's reality competition that began its sixth season last month, and all references to current wrestler Curtis Axel's "Axelmania" gimmick – an obvious homage to the Hulkster – have also disappeared from the site.

So why has WWE distanced itself from one of the most iconic wrestlers of all time? According to several reports, the move was made after the company learned of an interview featuring Hogan launching into a "racial tirade," with some pointing to an appearance the Hulkster made on DJ Whoo Kid's Whoolywood Shuffle radio program. During that interview, Hogan uses the n-word while recalling working with wrestler Booker T and paraphrasing conversations he's had with several rappers…but the audio in question dates back to October 2012, and Whoo Kid himself clams that there was "nothing racist" about the interview.



http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/news/hulk-hogan-fired-by-wwe-over-racial-tirade-20150724 us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

How the National Rifle Association helped get Bernie Sanders elected

BURLINGTON, Vt. — A few days before Election Day in 1990, the National Rifle Association sent a letter to its 12,000 members in Vermont, with an urgent message about the race for the state’s single House seat.

Vote for the socialist, the gun rights group said. It’s important.

“Bernie Sanders is a more honorable choice for Vermont sportsmen than ­Peter Smith,” wrote Wayne LaPierre, who was — and still is — a top official at the national NRA, backing Sanders over the Republican incumbent.......

As a candidate in 1990, Sanders won over gun rights groups by promising to oppose one bill they hated — a measure that would establish a waiting period for handgun sales. In Congress, he kept that promise. The dynamic served as an early demonstration that, despite his pure-leftist persona, Sanders was at his core a pragmatic politician, calculating that he couldn’t win in rural Vermont without doing something for gun owners.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-nra-helped-put-bernie-sanders-in-congress/2015/07/19/ed1be26c-2bfe-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html

GOP Sen. Was 'Being Very Sarcastic' With 'Idiot Inner City Kids' Reference

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said on Thursday that he regrets using the phrase "idiot inner city kids" while discussing education during a Monday radio interview, the Washington Post reported.

The senator joined 1310 WIBA–Milwaukee on Monday to discuss school choice, where he lamented that liberal politicians send their children to private school while pushing against school choice initiatives.

"It’s unbelievable to me that liberals, that President Obama, of course he sends his children to private school, as did Al Gore, and Bill Clinton and every other celebrated liberal," Johnson said. "They just don’t want to let those idiot inner city kids that they purport to be so supportive of…they just don’t want to give them the same opportunity their own kids have. I think it’s disgraceful."

Johnson then told the Post on Thursday that he was being sarcastic and trying to express how liberals think of inner city youth.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ron-johnson-idiot-inner-city-kids

Why 62,000 Abercrombie & Fitch Employees Are Suing The Company

Last week, a California federal judge certified a class-action suit for approximately 62,000 Abercrombie & Fitch employees who claim they were forced to purchase the company's clothes to wear on the job. Reed Marcy, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, joined HuffPost Live on Monday to outline the case.

According to Marcy, employees were treated wrongfully in two different ways. The first is a claim of "compelled purchases," meaning the company forced workers to buy new Abercrombie clothes "each time a new sales guide came out" -- a violation of the state's labor codes. The suit further alleges the retailer failed to reimburse employees despite obligating them to wear a specific "uniform" -- another violation.

The employees were also harmed, Marcy said, by being sent home or losing shifts for showing up "out of uniform" or failing to meet the copious requirements about hair color, fingernail length, makeup style and other requirements of the controversial "look policy," which Marcy described as discriminatory and illegal.

Abercrombie & Fitch has not yet responded to HuffPost Live's request for comment.

On June 1, the Supreme Court ruled against Abercrombie & Fitch in the separate case of Samantha Elauf, who claimed she was denied a job at the store because of her hijab, despite a successful job interview.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/abercrombie-fitch-lawsuit-look-policy_55ae70e6e4b08f57d5d29286?

"Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.

In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, together with their Corps of Discovery, set off from St. Louis on America’s first official cross-country expedition. Eighteen months later, they reached the Pacific Ocean and made camp near the present-day town of Astoria, Oregon. The United States was, at the time, twenty-nine years old. Canada was not yet a country. The continent’s far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. Native Americans had lived in the Northwest for millennia, but they had no written language, and the many things to which the arriving Europeans subjected them did not include seismological inquiries. The newcomers took the land they encountered at face value, and at face value it was a find: vast, cheap, temperate, fertile, and, to all appearances, remarkably benign.

A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet. It took another fifty years to uncover and interpret the region’s seismic history. Geology, as even geologists will tell you, is not normally the sexiest of disciplines; it hunkers down with earthly stuff while the glory accrues to the human and the cosmic—to genetics, neuroscience, physics. But, sooner or later, every field has its field day, and the discovery of the Cascadia subduction zone stands as one of the greatest scientific detective stories of our time.



http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

Ex-cop says Sandra Bland died because she was ‘arrogant from the beginning’

CNN contributor and former NYPD detective Harry Houck argued on Tuesday that a Texas woman would not have died in police custody if she had not been “arrogant from the very beginning.”

Disturbing dashcam video released on Tuesday shows a Texas trooper pulling Sandra Bland over for failure to signal, but the incident quickly escalates when she refuses to put out a lit cigarette, prompting the officer to remove her from the vehicle. The 28-year-old black woman was found dead in a county jail cell three days later under suspicious circumstances.

“An officer does have the choice to bring anyone out of the vehicle when he stops them for his own safety,” Houck told CNN’s Don Lemon on Tuesday. “The whole thing here is that she was very arrogant from the beginning, very dismissive of the officer, alright?”

CNN political contributor Marc Lamont Hill pointed out that Bland did not have a legal responsibility to “kiss the officer’s butt.”


http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/cnn-panel-explodes-after-ex-cop-says-sandra-bland-died-because-she-was-arrogant-from-the-beginning/