March 9, 2018

Mattel makes Frida Kahlo doll without the unibrow

http://time.com/5192561/frida-kahlo-barbie-mattel-dispute/

March 9, 2018

uhaul rental sf to las vegas $2085 las vegas to sf $132

usually, U-Haul truck rentals are advertised at an affordable sticker price, comfortably in the three-digit range. But a trend out of northern California is pushing that sticker price as high as $2,000, and moving Californians to disbelief.


The cost to rent a 26-foot U-Haul truck — big enough to move a three- to four-bedroom home — out of San Francisco headed to Las Vegas reached as high as $2,085 for four days. To rent the same truck going in the opposite direction is only a fraction of that cost — $132.

We used the uhaul.com website to confirm those numbers.

What’s causing the spike in U-Haul rental prices out of the Bay Area? There are more people leaving the northern California region than there are trucks available, according to the public policy think tank American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversation/sd-how-much-cost-to-move-out-of-san-francisco-california-20180306-htmlstory.html


The story has been the talk of Twitter where it has become part of a common narrative about the state of California’s cost of living.



Charlotte's Web
@char_broiled
True AF. I paid about $1,300 to rent a one way U-Haul moving from Oakland to Bend, Oregon. To rent one now going the other way it would be $265!!

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so its almost free to drive one back to CA

March 9, 2018

Trump coming to California. First time since elections. Expect the "Woodstock of demonstrations"

heard on radio today

March 8, 2018

Saudi women exercise their new right to jog

https://www.reuters.tv/v/Nau/2018/03/08/saudi-women-exercise-their-new-right-to-jog

March 8, 2018

Ben Carson's housing agency drops pledge to end housing discrimination

Department removes from its mission statement promises to build ‘inclusive’ communities ‘free from discrimination’

The US housing department, helmed by the former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, has proposed a new mission statement in which the pledge to build “inclusive” communities “free from discrimination” is removed.

The proposal comes just two weeks after the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services changed its mission statement to eliminate a passage that described the US as “a nation of immigrants”.


A 5 March internal memo, obtained by the Huffington Post, contained a draft of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (Hud) new, shortened mission statement, which emphasizes self-sufficiency. The author described it as “an effort to align Hud’s mission with the secretary’s priorities and that of the administration”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/07/ben-carson-housing-department-mission-statement-discrimination-inclusion

March 7, 2018

Barbarism: Texas judge ordered electric shocks to silence man on trial. Conviction thrown out.

In Tarrant County, Tex., defendants are sometimes strapped with a stun belt around their legs. The devices are used to deliver a shock in the event the person gets violent or attempts to escape.

But in the case of Terry Lee Morris, the device was used as punishment for refusing to answer a judge’s questions properly during his 2014 trial on charges of soliciting sexual performance from a 15-year-old girl, according to an appeals court. In fact, the judge shocked Morris three times, sending thousands of volts coursing through his body. It scared him so much that Morris never returned for the remainder of his trial and almost all of his sentencing hearing.

The action stunned the Texas Eighth Court of Appeals in El Paso, too. It has now thrown out Morris’s conviction on the grounds that the shocks, and Morris’s subsequent removal from the courtroom, violated his constitutional rights. Since he was too scared to come back to the courtroom, the court held that the shocks effectively barred him from attending his own trial, in violation of the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a defendant’s right to be present and confront witnesses during a trial.

*

The stun belt works in some ways like a shock collar used to train dogs. Activated by a button on a remote control, the stun belt delivers an eight-second, 50,000-volt shock to the person wearing it, which immobilizes him so that bailiffs can swiftly neutralize any security threats. When activated, the stun belt can cause the person to seize, suffer heart irregularities, urinate or defecate and suffer possibly crippling anxiety as a result of fear of the shocks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/03/07/barbarism-texas-judge-ordered-electric-shocks-to-man-during-trial-conviction-thrown-out/?utm_term=.6674d4228cbb

March 7, 2018

Male doctors are disappearing from gynecology. Not everybody is thrilled about it

Some patients wait until Dr. Jerome Chelliah snaps on his gloves to make the request. Others blurt it out as soon as he walks in the exam room.

“I’d rather see a female doctor,” they say.

Chelliah thinks he can be a sensitive obstetrician-gynecologist even though he’s a man. But he has no choice but to comply.

“I’ve been rejected many times over,” he said. “As a person of color, I face discrimination in other ways, but it’s not so blatant.… People have no problem saying they don’t want you.”

**

In 1970, 7% of gynecologists were women. Now 59% are.

**

These trends have influenced men too. Some feel socially excluded from OB-GYN departments in medical schools; they tend to be havens for women. Others say they don’t want to perpetuate a history of men telling women what to do with their bodies.

Tanmaya Sambare, 24, signed up for a class called “Mommies and Babies” in his first year at Stanford University medical school. But he started to think he wouldn’t be able to sufficiently empathize with pregnant patients, he said.

“No matter how hard I try I think it’s just capped ... because I don’t have a uterus. It’s not my fault, it’s not anyone’s fault,” he said.

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-male-gynos-20180307-htmlstory.html

March 7, 2018

In one of Chinas biggest cities, the women-only subway cars are full of men.

Room is hard to find. So when the Guangzhou government began reserving cars for female passengers worried about being groped and harassed, they filled up — but not with the intended passengers.

“Men are totally clueless,” said Lu Lili, a 28-year-old bank employee, who was waiting for a train on Guangzhou’s Line 1 to appear. “It’s basically all the men trying to squeeze in.”

She gestured at the passengers like her, waiting for a women-only car. Many were men.

“In the past, there would be workers trying to tell them and remind them repeatedly: ‘This is a women-only car,’” she said. “But all these men still want to rush over. They really are uncivilized.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/business/china-women-only-subway-cars.html

March 7, 2018

Exodus from Puerto Rico grows as island struggles to rebound from Hurricane Maria

Exodus from Puerto Rico grows as island struggles to rebound from Hurricane Maria

Rodríguez reluctantly abandoned Puerto Rico after several feet of floodwater spilled into his home during Hurricane Maria in September, destroying his instruments, albums and handwritten compositions. The 78-year-old joined hundreds of thousands of other islanders who boarded flights in the past five months, creating a growing diaspora that, as time passes, is increasingly unlikely to return. Rodríguez and his wife, like so many others, picked Florida, and their stateside sojourn was supposed to be temporary.


They didn’t expect stability back home to be so elusive for so long.

“I’m still here,” Rodríguez said with a sigh from his niece’s house in Homestead, Fla., in mid-February. If the past decade of Puerto Rican history is any indication, his stay could become permanent. “Destiny will decide what happens next.”


The government of Puerto Rico’s guess is that by the end of 2018, 200,000 more residents will have left the U.S. territory for good, moving to places such as Florida, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New England. It would mean another drop of more than 5 percent in the island’s population.

www.washingtonpost.com/national/exodus-from-puerto-rico-grows-as-island-struggles-to-rebound-from-hurricane-maria/2018/03/06/b2fcb996-16c3-11e8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html?utm_term=.3fa1656469f1

March 7, 2018

Ruling: If you live in a car, it's your home...and not to be towed or excessively ticketed

m.sfgate.com/news/article/Homeless-living-in-cars-RVs-Seattle-San-Francisco-12733075.php



Seattle's methods for handling people living in vehicles could be in for a shakeup.

Seattle residents living in their cars, trucks or RVs, police usually have to follow city parking codes, including a 72-hour limit on parking in one place. But a recent court ruling in favor of a man who lost his home when his truck was towed calls into question city impound rules.

It was enforcement of those rules that triggered the towing and impounding of Steven G. Long's GMC Sierra pickup truck, where he had been living since 2014 when he was evicted because he couldn't make the rent on his apartment, according to a news release from Columbia Legal Services, the organization that represented Long in a lawsuit.

The fees charged by the city for towing and impounding Long's truck were excessive and amounted to a violation of the state Constitution and state homestead laws, a King County Superior Court judge ruled on Friday.

Even if it's only an old pickup truck, the place where a person lives is a home under state law, and holding that home hostage in order to collect a debt is illegal, the judge ruled, according to Ann LoGerfo, one of two Columbia Legal Services attorneys who handled the case on for Long.