September 19, 2018

After 27 years in prison, a man who loves golf walked free today.

What a wild story: a prisoner serving 39 years to life started making drawings of golf courses. The drawings made their way to Golf Digest, which wrote about him, then realized his conviction was sketchy, then investigated, and now he's free.

He had never in his life set foot on a golf course...





https://www.golfdigest.com/story/for-valentino-dixon-a-wrong-righted-murder-charge-vacated-by-court-after-serving-27-years-in-prison

September 17, 2018

Terrifying videos from a "Super Typhoon" ravaging Hong Kong

https://twitter.com/jenzhuscott/status/1041193839224975361

https://twitter.com/jenzhuscott/status/1041194429598453760

https://twitter.com/jenzhuscott/status/1041194682460430336

https://twitter.com/jenzhuscott/status/1041196122465742848

more: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a23278682/typhoon-mangkhut-videos-hong-kong/

September 14, 2018

Pharma chief defends 400% drug price rise as a 'moral requirement'

Price Gouging = Moral

Nostrum Laboratories’ Nirmal Mulye says he is right to charge as much as possible and slams FDA

A pharma executive has defended his decision to raise the price of an antibiotic mixture to more than $2,000 a bottle, arguing there was a “moral requirement to sell the product at the highest price”.

Last month, Nostrum Laboratories, a small Missouri-based drugmaker, more than quadrupled the price of a bottle of nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392, according to Elsevier’s Gold Standard drug database.

Nitrofurantoin is an antibiotic used to treat bladder infections that was first marketed in 1953, which appears on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. It comes in a tablet form as well as a liquid version that Nostrum makes.

In an interview, Nirmal Mulye, Nostrum chief executive, said he had priced the product according to market dynamics, adding: “I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can?.?.?.?to sell the product for the highest price.”


more: https://www.ft.com/content/48b0ce2c-b544-11e8-bbc3-ccd7de085ffe

August 27, 2018

Twitter: GOP candidate Kelli Ward "Political Correctness is like Cancer"

https://twitter.com/kelliwardaz/status/1034097219752742912

Feel free to join the flame fest (ratio)

BTW, I can't believe she's a doctor. I'm guessing she went into medicine not to heal but to hurt her patients.

August 23, 2018

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

Randy Carter is a member of the Director's Guild of America and has notched some significant credits during his Hollywood career. Administrative assistant on The Conversation. Part of the casting department for Apocalypse Now. Longtime first assistant director on Seinfeld. Work on The Blues Brothers, The Godfather II and more.

But the one project that Carter regrets never working on is a script he wrote that got optioned twice but was never produced. It's about the summer a then-17-year-old Carter and thousands of American teenage boys heeded the call of the federal government ... to work on farms.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.

<snip>

"They can do the work," Wirtz said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing the creation of the project, called A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower. "They are entitled to a chance at it." Standing besides him to lend gravitas were future Baseball Hall of Famers Stan Musial and Warren Spahn and future Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown.

Over the ensuing weeks, the Department of Labor, the Department of Agriculture, and the President's Council on Physical Fitness bought ads on radio and in magazines to try to lure lettermen. "Farm Work Builds Men!" screamed one such promotion, which featured 1964 Heisman Trophy winner John Huarte.

<snip>

One of them was Carter.

He was a junior at the now-closed University of San Diego High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Southern California. About 25 of his classmates decided to sign up for the A-TEAM because, as he recalls with a laugh more than 50 years later, "We thought, 'I'm not doing anything else this summer, so why not?' "

Funny enough, Carter says none of the recruits from his school — himself included — were actually athletes: "The football coach told [the sportsters], 'You're not going. We've got two-a-day practices — you're not going to go pick strawberries."

<snip>

He remembers the first day vividly. Work started before dawn, the better to avoid the unforgiving desert sun to come. "The wind is in your hair, and you don't think it's bad," Carter says. "Then you go out in the field, and the first ray of sun comes over the horizon. The first ray. Everyone looked at each other, and said, 'What did we do?' The thermometer went up like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. By 9 a.m., it was 110 degrees."

<snip>

The University High crew worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and they were not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in "any kind of defunct housing," according to Carter — old Army barracks, rooms made from discarded wood, and even buildings used to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

<snip>

"These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn't have the power or space for the American public to listen to them," she says. "The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren't able to mask that up."

She says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

Carter agrees.

"If we took a vote that first day, we would've left," he says of his friends. "But it literally became a thing of pride. We weren't going to be fired, and we weren't going to quit. We were going to finish it."

The students tried to make the most of their summer. On their Sundays off, they would swim in irrigation canals or hitchhike into downtown Blythe and try to get cowboys to buy them a six-pack of beer. Each high school team was supposed to have a college-age chaperone, but Carter said theirs would "be there for a day, and then disappear to go to Mexico or surfing."

<snip>

But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

"There's nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they're lazy," he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, 'Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.' "


more: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers

August 13, 2018

Look how Police in Luxembourg confront Nazis

Luxembourg was occupied by Nazis during World War 2 ...

General Patton fought Nazis there and is buried with 1000s of US Soldiers there

Hate Symbols are ILLEGAL in Luxembourg

August 3, 2018

This factory fired two Mexicans and the rest of them decided to leave with em

...best part of this video is the commentary

https://twitter.com/_kassbekillinem/status/1024857954657263617

The narrator was fired... but...

“I’m not mad about getting fired. Because it’s five million people who saw that. And it might change their view on things. Empowering people.

So me losing a job is nothing compared to the big picture. If we can get it in our heads that we are the people, we can change anything.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/wildcat-strike-indianapolis-shut-down

August 3, 2018

Man threatens Wendy's landscaper with gun after grass gets on car, police say

A Lawrence man is facing gun charges after brandishing a gun at a landscaper outside a fast-food restaurant, police said.

Lawrence police were called to the Wendy’s on Hampshire Street at about noon on Thursday for a report of a man threatening another man with a gun.

When police arrived at the restaurant, a landscaper told them while he was using a leaf blower, some grass clippings blew into the air onto a black Acura sedan. A man in that car then got into a verbal altercation with the landscaper and brandished a firearm that was tucked into his waistband, police said.

The car was located a few minutes later and the driver, identified as Franklin Mauel Laras, 21, was arrested. A firearm was found in his waistband, police said.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/man-threatens-wendys-landscaper-with-gun-after-grass-gets-on-car/22636685

August 1, 2018

How serious is the threat to US borders?

July 26, 2018

Betsy DeVos VANDALIZES student loan relief by an estimated $13 billion

Betsy DeVos proposes rules that would cut student loan relief by an estimated $13 billion

Students who are defrauded by their schools would have a harder time getting their federal loans erased under new rules proposed by the Trump administration Wednesday.

The proposal, which aims to replace a set of Obama-era rules that were never implemented, drew applause from the for-profit industry but sharp criticism from advocacy groups that represent student borrowers.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the proposal lays out clear rules schools must follow to avoid trouble, while also protecting students harmed by deception.

“Our commitment and our focus has been and remains on protecting students from fraud,” DeVos said.

Under the proposal, students would be eligible for loan relief if they can prove their schools knowingly misled them with statements or actions that directly led them to take out loans or enroll at the school.

That would be a higher bar than the borrower defense rules finalized under Obama in 2016 after the collapse of two for-profit schools, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute. Those rules allowed relief in a wider range of cases dealing with breach of contract.

Education Department documents supporting DeVos' proposal argue that while students should be protected from fraud, they also have an obligation to do research before picking schools.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-devos-student-loans-20180725-story.html

We can cheer at vandalism if we want and thankfully, no filthy rich students were harmed. :sacasm: