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Liberals attack doughnut shop's good deed -- What in the sweet name of Santa Claus is wrong with them?

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Liberals attack doughnut shop's good deed -- What in the sweet name of Santa Claus is wrong with them?

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I don't even know where to begin with the content in this article, but I will try anyway. in this article the author points out that a mom and pop shop came under fire for the association with the salvation army. after reading this I was totally speechless, I could not even believe what I was reading. the ethical dilemma here is the LGBT group attacking the doughnut shops freedoms of assentation.

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What in the sweet name of Santa Claus is wrong with liberals?

A popular doughnut shop in Portland, Maine, was forced to apologize to the community after it offended customers by working with the Salvation Army to provide Christmas to a needy family.
Click here for a free subscription to Todd's newsletter: a must-read for Conservatives!
The Holy Donut had asked customers to help them with a gift drive for a local family with five children. Those customers who participated received free doughnuts.

The Holy Donut should be commended for helping a family in need and spreading a bit of Christmas cheer.

The doughnut shop reached out to the Salvation Army to find the family in need, the Press-Herald reports.

Instead of saluting the doughnut shop for doing a good deed - an online mob stormed their Facebook page. Many accused the Salvation Army of being anti-gay and discriminating against the LGBT community.

It was all untrue, of course - but the truth doesn't really matter these days.

"They proselytize to the people in their programs, they reject LGBT people from their shelters," one outraged customer wrote. "They have tried to scrub their image, but still discriminate."

For the record, the Salvation Army is a well-respected Christian ministry that provides shelter for the homeless, addiction programs and of course the iconic red kettles at Christmas time.

Nevertheless, some freedom-loving, donut eaters defended the popular mom-and-pop establishment.

"Going after a doughnut shop because they don't like their politics is exactly why people voted for Trump," one observer wrote online.

"I don't care if someone is L, G, B or T, but when they stand in the way of people helping people simply because their own personal noses are out of joint, they lose my respect and any sympathy I have for their cause," wrote another.

But the Press Herald reports that the anti-doughnut mob was unrelenting - going so far as to threaten boycotts unless the donut shop renounced its association with the Salvation Army.

"In case you forgot, a solid 70 percent of your clientele is part of the LGBTQ community," one rabble-rouser wrote. "You're making a silent statement that you're completely fine with their choices."

Ah yes, nothing quite like an old-fashioned yuletide public shaming.

"We do not support the Salvation Army or consider them our 'partner' for this project, they simply linked us to a needy family," the store owners wrote on Facebook. "We have nothing to gain here, we just wanted to help a family in need."

As unthinkable as it might be - a good number of the pro-LGBT protesters were upset that the donut shop dared to help a family in need during the Christmas season.

To quell the growing controversy, The Holy Donut threw themselves at the mercy of the surging mob.

"We take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to anyone that we have offended," the store owners wrote on Facebook. "We are an organization which prides itself on our track record of kindness and acceptance of everyone."

The Holy Donut should be commended for helping a family in need and spreading a bit of Christmas cheer.

They should also be commended for make delicious doughnuts. (I've been privileged to sample their Maple Bacon Maine Potato Donut).

And shame on all of you folks out there for harassing these good people and spreading out-right lies about the Salvation Army. Shame!

No doughnuts for you.

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Liberals attack doughnut shop's good deed -- What in the sweet name of Santa Claus is wrong with them?

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What in the sweet name of Santa Claus is wrong with liberals? A popular doughnut shop in Portland, Maine, was forced to apologize to the community after it offended customers by working with the Salvation Army to provide Christmas to a needy family. Click here for a free subscription to Todd's newsletter: a must-read for Conservatives!

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Would-be suicide bomber in New York City faces court hearing (Nathan Verhey Mod-4)

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Would-be suicide bomber in New York City faces court hearing (Nathan Verhey Mod-4)

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In this article the author discusses the bombing attempt that took place under time square by Akayed Ullah. the ethical dilemma presented in this article is terrorism. this is one of many recent terror attacks that has plagued America. as these attacks increase the strict security measures will only become worse.

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In less than 24 hours, authorities say a would-be suicide bomber's botched attack on a Manhattan transportation hub underneath Times Square became an open-and-shut case after a search of his apartment and hearing the suspect's his own words.

Akayed Ullah, who's expected to make his first court appearance on Wednesday, made it clear from a hospital bed where he was being treated for burns from a pipe bomb he strapped to his body that he was on a mission to punish the United States for attacking the Islamic State group, said Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim. A search of the Bangladeshi immigrant's apartment turned up bomb-making materials, including screws matching those found at the scene intended as carnage-creating shrapnel.

"His motivation," the prosecutor said, "was not mystery."

Kim said Ullah picked the morning rush on Monday to maximize casualties in his quest "to kill, to maim and to destroy."

Ullah, 27, with a hate-filled heart and an evil purpose," carried out the attack after researching how to build a bomb a year ago and planned his mission for several weeks, Kim said.

The bomb was assembled in the past week using fragments of a metal pipe, a battery and a Christmas tree light bulb, along with the metal screws, authorities said.

The defendant "had apparently hoped to die in his own misguided rage, taking as many innocent people as he could with him, but through incredible good fortune, his bomb did not seriously injure anyone other than himself," Kim said.

Ullah was charged with providing material support to a terrorist group, use of a weapon of mass destruction and three bomb-related counts. He could get up to life in prison.

With a tragedy averted and a growing certainty that he acted alone, attention turned to how best secure New York City's vast public transportation system and the daunting task of identifying those eager to do it harm.

The security "requires every single member of the public's help," said New York Police Commissioner James O'Neill. "It requires their vigilance."

There also was political fallout, heightened by news that Ullah had taunted President Donald Trump on Facebook with a post that read, "Trump you failed to protect your nation."

In reaction to the bombing, the president demanded a tightening of immigration rules that allowed Ullah to enter the country in 2011 on a visa available to certain relatives of U.S. citizens. Less than two months ago, an Uzbek immigrant who came to the U.S. through a visa lottery was accused of killing eight people in New York by mowing them down with a truck along a bike path.

"We're going to end both of them - the lottery system and chain migration. We're going to end them fast," Trump said at the White House.

Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley requested background information on Ullah's visa history and whether he'd ever been on a terrorism watch list.

Ullah lived with his father, mother and brother in a Brooklyn neighborhood with a large Bangladeshi community, residents said. He was licensed to drive a livery cab from 2012 to 2015, but the license was allowed to lapse, officials said.

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Would-be suicide bomber in New York City faces court hearing

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In less than 24 hours, authorities say a would-be suicide bomber's botched attack on a Manhattan transportation hub underneath Times Square became an open-and-shut case after a search of his apartment and hearing the suspect's his own words.

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‘Intelligent’ Policing and My Innocent Children (Nathan Verhey Mod-3)

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‘Intelligent’ Policing and My Innocent Children (Nathan Verhey Mod-3)

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in this article the author discuses the new technology that police are using predictive policing applications to predict when and where crime will occur and even who’s likely to commit or be a victim of certain crimes. the ethical dilemma here is that the ai used in the software has been know to develop raciest tendencies. this will also lead to more extreme cases of profiling. so in conclusion the ethical issue here is racism just like in module 2.

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This is especially frightening when combined with the fact that the current administration has already begun to reverse Obama-era criminal justice reform policies that were meant to make the system more just.

A.I. works by taking large volumes of information and distilling it down to simple concepts, categories and rules and then predicting future responses and outcomes. This is a function of the beliefs, assumptions and capabilities of the people who do the coding. A.I. learns by repetition and association, and all of that is based on the information we - humans who hold all the racial and often, specifically, anti-black biases of our society - feed it.

Just think of how Google's facial recognition programs labeled black people in photos "gorillas." Or how Microsoft's Tay, a bot designed to engage in Twitter conversations, devolved into a racial-epithet-tweeting machine within 24 hours.

These downsides of A.I. are no secret. Despite this, state and local law enforcement agencies have begun to use predictive policing applications fueled by A.I. like HunchLab, which combines historical crime data, moon phases, location, census data and even professional sports team schedules to predict when and where crime will occur and even who's likely to commit or be a victim of certain crimes.

The problem with historical crime data is that it's based upon policing practices that already disproportionately hone in on blacks, Latinos, and those who live in low-income areas.

If the police have discriminated in the past, predictive technology reinforces and perpetuates the problem, sending more officers after people who we know are already targeted and unfairly treated, given recent evidence like the Justice Department's reports on Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, and the findings of the San Francisco Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency Accountability and Fairness in Law Enforcement.

It's no wonder criminologists have raised red flags about the self-fulfilling nature of using historical crime data.

This hits close to home. An October 2016 study by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group concluded that if the Oakland Police Department used its 2010 record of drug-crimes information as the basis of an algorithm to guide policing, the department "would have dispatched officers almost exclusively to lower-income, minority neighborhoods," despite the fact that public-health-based estimates suggest that drug use is much more widespread, taking place in many other parts of the city where my family and I live.

Those "lower-income, minority neighborhoods" contain the barbershop where I take my son for his monthly haircut and our favorite hoagie shop. Would I let him run ahead of me if I knew that simply setting foot on those sidewalks would make him more likely to be seen as a criminal in the eyes of the law?

The risks are even more acute (and unavoidable) for those who can afford to live only in the neighborhoods that A.I. would most likely lead officers to focus on.

There's yet another opportunity for racial bias to infuse the process when risk-assessment algorithms created by A.I. and machine learning are used to help to sentence criminals, as they already are in courts around the country.

Without a commitment to ensure that the data being used to fuel A.I. doesn't replicate historical racism, biases will be built into the foundation of many "intelligent" systems shaping how we live. It's not that I want this technology to be rejected. There are ways to make A.I. work. But before it is used in law enforcement, it must be thoroughly tested and proven not to disproportionately harm communities of color.

Until then my excitement about advances in tech will always be cautious. Innovation is at the core of the careers that allow me and my husband to provide a good life for our family. The same innovation, if not used properly, could take it all away.

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Opinion | 'Intelligent' Policing and My Innocent Children

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This is especially frightening when combined with the fact that the current administration has already begun to reverse Obama-era criminal justice reform policies that were meant to make the system more just. A.I. works by taking large volumes of information and distilling it down to simple concepts, categories and rules and then predicting future responses and outcomes.

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Animal lovers should support animal research, not condemn it. Here’s why(Nathan Verhey Mod-3)

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Animal lovers should support animal research, not condemn it. Here’s why(Nathan Verhey Mod-3)

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in this article the author champions medical research on animals because he says that they are the ones that benefit the most from this because it helps come up with better treatment for them. this this is a great example of cultural relativism because its always been kind of a sensitive issue because people think its unethical to test on animals its very similar to module 1 just in a little different direction.

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Every year, 12 million cats and dogs in the United States are diagnosed with cancer. For their owners, that diagnosis is both emotionally and financially devastating. The initial cancer diagnosis alone can cost $2,000. Subsequent chemotherapy and radiation can run up to $10,000.

Fortunately, scientists are on the cusp of discovering treatments that could help pets with cancer at a much lower cost - if we let them continue the animal medical research needed to make those discoveries. But all over the country, self-professed animal lovers are lobbying for limits on - or even an end to - medical research involving animals.

That's counterproductive, because animals are among the primary beneficiaries of such research. Consequently, animal lovers should be among the biggest supporters of animal medical research.

Consider work that's underway at the University of Minnesota. Earlier this year, scientists began clinical trials for a new treatment for hemangiosarcoma - a cancer that emerges from the blood vessels and kills half of dogs that contract it within six months. In the trial, the new therapy boosted six-month survival rates by 70 percent.

Or look to Colorado State University's Flint Animal Cancer Center, where clinical veterinarians conduct long-term outpatient studies for a variety of new treatments. Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug tested at the center that helped 80 percent of dogs with lymphoma, a cancer that develops in the immune system.

Pets are already benefitting directly from this research. Take Q Bentley, a dog from Washington, D.C., profiled by Bioscience Technology, a trade journal for scientists. Earlier this year, Q was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given only a few months to live.

Her owners decided to enroll her in a clinical trial for a new treatment at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech. Within a matter of weeks, Q's tumor shrank 50 percent. She's now happy and healthy.

Dogs aren't the only beneficiaries of such cutting-edge research. A new intravenous treatment developed at the University of Illinois has been shown to halve the size of tumors in cats with certain types of mouth cancer.

Some scientists are developing interventions that can prevent animals from getting cancer in the first place.

Years of animal trials have yielded a vaccine that shields cats from feline leukemia virus, which kills 85 percent of persistently infected cats within a few years.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have identified a protein that's present in greater-than-normal quantities in dogs with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer that afflicts more than 10,000 dogs a year. Eight in ten of these dogs don't live more than a year after their diagnosis.Future research could determine whether the protein actually causes tumor production - and which genes are responsible for ordering higher concentrations of the protein.

Despite all this scientific progress - and the many animals that have benefited from it - nearly half of all Americans oppose research in animals, according to a recent Gallup survey. Almost six in 10 voters want to cut federal funding for testing on dogs and cats.

Animal rights activists are, bizarrely, taking their fight to the humans who are actively saving animals - cancer researchers.

Consider People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This fall, PETA launched a public pressure campaign calling for Texas A&M scientists to stop research in dogs that could yield new treatments for muscular dystrophy, which can afflict dogs, cats and humans alike.

If groups like PETA were serious about their advocacy on behalf of animals, they'd lobby for even more research like that at Texas A&M, which could save countless pets - and humans, too - from a lifetime of pain and suffering.

Animal research gives sick pets a second chance - and lays the groundwork for treatments that could save others down the line. It's also responsible for some of the greatest breakthroughs in modern medical history, including the eradication of smallpox, innovative treatments for malaria, and the management of diabetes. All of these developments have helped both animals and humans.

Animal lovers should support animal research, not condemn it. Such research ensures that our beloved pets will be able to live longer, healthier lives.

Matthew R. Bailey is president of the Foundation for Biomedical Research.

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Animal lovers should support animal research, not condemn it. Here's why

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Every year, 12 million cats and dogs in the United States are diagnosed with cancer. For their owners, that diagnosis is both emotionally and financially devastating. The initial cancer diagnosis alone can cost $2,000. Subsequent chemotherapy and radiation can run up to $10,000.

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How a Colorado cake shop could erode civil rights for LGBTQ Americans (Nathan Verhey Mod-2)

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How a Colorado cake shop could erode civil rights for LGBTQ Americans (Nathan Verhey Mod-2)

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in this article the author is discussing the legal and ethical battle in Colorado in regards to civil liberties and wither or not the baker has the right to deny gay couples based on there sexual orientation and that this compromises there beliefs. I believe that this is completely asinine its just like a child getting upset because they cant have free candy. any privet business should be able to deny anyone they want, they will pay for it in the end if there decisions not accepted by the public but they shouldn't be forced to do something.

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Perhaps never since Marie Antoinette has cake been so important in politics.

On 5 December, the US supreme court will consider whether a private business can deny services to an LGBTQ couple on the grounds that it conflicts with their religious beliefs. The business in question is a cake shop in Colorado whose owner sees his cakes as a form of artistic expression and believes a state anti-discrimination law violates his first amendment rights.

"This case is not about a cake," said Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The law doesn't say anything about the words 'icing' or 'frosting' ... all the law says is if you make a product, and you offer that product to the public, when the customer comes in, you can't turn the customer away based on who the customer is."

The plaintiff, Masterpiece Cakeshop, is seeking an exception from a public accommodations law on the basis of free speech. Public accommodations laws were first instituted during the civil rights era to prohibit businesses from refusing to serve African Americans customers.

Under Colorado law, those protections extend to the LGBT community as well. But cakeshop owner Jack Phillips wants to see that change, saying serving a gay couple would violate his Christian beliefs. And though it might seem like a religious freedom case, the legal underpinning of Phillip's argument will be in free speech rights under the first amendment.

At a glance the issue might seem trivial - the couple could just go to another cake shop. But the underlying principle, which amounts to a constitutional challenge to LGBTQ nondiscrimination law, is far more profound. The court now has the power to turn that challenge into new legal precedent for the entire nation.

"What's at stake here is whether the constitution protects the right to discriminate," said Melling. "This is a completely radical proposition."

Phillips is represented by anti-gay activist Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right group that has previously argued for the criminalization of homosexuality and the mandatory sterilization of transgender people.

Some observers were surprised when in September the US government filed an amicus brief siding with Masterpiece Cakeshop, suspecting the brief of being less legal argument than political pandering, aimed at convincing readers the anti-discrimination laws targeted in the case should not be thought of as part and parcel of "race-based discrimination", which, the brief's authors noted, "may survive heightened first amendment scrutiny".

It was the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to roll back gay rights achieved under Barack Obama.

"What the US government does, which the bakery does not do in its brief, is openly say 'race is different'," said Melling. "There's nothing in the theories that are being presented by the bakery in this case, or other parties in other cases, that would limit these arguments to LGBT couples in this very context."

In fact, such concerns would seem to be quite appropriate. The supreme court has not previously ruled that for-profit businesses have a right to discriminate against any group under the constitution's freedom of speech clause. And in carving out an exception to that rule, through a freedom of speech exemption, the case has the potential to set a whole new precedent for civil rights law as we know it, undermining the legal premise for basic protections for any minority group.

Perhaps the justice department's unusual move shouldn't come as a shock. In a closed-door speech to ADF over the summer, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, thanked the organization - deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center - for its "important work", pledging to defend its "freedom of conscience".

The case is not the first to mount such challenges to LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws, citing religious faith. Three years ago, for instance, the high court declined to hear the appeal of a New Mexico photographer - also represented by ADF - who refused his services to a same-sex couple. A key difference is that the legal case was argued on the grounds of religious liberty. In grounding the cake case in first amendment rights now, ADF is trying something new.

But Rebecca Cokley, a disability rights activist with the liberal Center for American Progress, which hosted a panel on Thursday, sees a lot that's familiar too. "This is just the latest in a decades-long attempt to undermine public accommodations law," she said. "It's an old staircase in a new building."

The staircase began in 2012, when newly engaged Charlie Craig and David Mullins went out to get their wedding cake at the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado and were turned away. In refusing them, the owner explained that he didn't sell his cakes to same-sex couples.

According to Craig's mother, Debbie Munn, who had joined her son for what was supposed to be a joyous occasion, her son took it hard. "I noticed Charlie's shoulders were shaking," said Munn in a recently published account. "I soon realized he was crying. All I could do was embrace him and tell him I loved him and that we would get through this. As a parent, no matter how grown your children are, you want to shield them from harm."

Craig and Mullins eventually filed a complaint with the Civil Rights Commission of Colorado, one of 20-some states with laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation; and Phillips was duly ordered to cease discriminatory practices. But Phillips appealed against the order citing his first amendment rights. And though Colorado courts sided with the commission, this summer, the supreme court signed on to hear the case.

The plaintiff's side has sought to draw a line between its wedding cakes and other products sold by its small business; under such logic if the couple were to return and ask for, say, a birthday cake, they'd have encountered no difficulty.

It remains to be seen whether such distinctions will prove persuasive. But once again Justice Anthony Kennedy is expected to be the deciding vote. And with a case history tugging him in both directions, the case has observers on the edge of their seats.

A devout Catholic, Kennedy has shown sympathy to religious considerations, and often sided with small business owners in the past. However, he has also been a reliable defender of gay rights, casting the deciding vote for the sweeping Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex marriage everywhere in America.

Dariely Rodriguez, director of the Economic Justice Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said she finds the free speech exemption element of the case particularly troubling, as it's beyond even the scope of businesses with strong religious convictions.

"It could really apply to any business owner who has a strong opinion period," Rodriguez said of the free speech exemption. "It's not a theoretical concern."

Masterpiece Cakeshop is just one of a number of recent cases at the intersection of religious freedom and anti-discrimination law. In 2015 in Florida a federal discrimination lawsuit against a gun retailer who declared his shop a "Muslim Free Zone" was dismissed after the owner argued, successfully, that his sign was protected by the first amendment. And more recently, the American Civil Liberties Union brought a federal case against the owners of a gun range after a Muslim man was denied patronage based on faith.

"It's absolutely likely that if the court rules in favor of the baker we will see more cases like that," said Rodriguez. "It would definitely apply to businesses outside of the wedding context. It would apply to culinary arts, to hairdressers, to barbers, to fashion boutique stores - it's just endless."

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How a Colorado cake shop could erode civil rights for LGBTQ Americans

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Perhaps never since Marie Antoinette has cake been so important in politics. On 5 December, the US supreme court will consider whether a private business can deny services to an LGBTQ couple on the grounds that it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

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Is Lena Dunham's ‘hipster racism’ just old-fashioned prejudice? (Nathan Verhey Mod-2)

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Is Lena Dunham's ‘hipster racism’ just old-fashioned prejudice? (Nathan Verhey Mod-2)

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in this article she was attacked for her " hipster racism" and this is a particular type of racism that mainly comes from progressive whites thinking that there hip to racism and thus being able to say things that others cant. the author hit the nail on the head in there idea about this type of racism. just you think your to cool for school doesn't meat your to cool to be a raciest.

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It is, by now, a familiar cycle. First Lena Dunham, the writer-actor-director best known for creating and starring in HBO's Girls, does or says something incredibly tone-deaf and offensive. Outrage ensues and people explain to Dunham why her actions were offensive. She apologizes.

But she doesn't seem to listen, because a few months pass and Dunham does something else offensive. And then the cycle repeats itself.

The latest Dunham drama began last week when the actor Aurora Perrineau accused Murray Miller, a writer on Girls, of raping her when she was 17. Dunham has built her brand on being an outspoken feminist, and has publicly said you should always believe women; that women don't lie about rape. But to some, it seems what she meant was that white women don't lie about rape.

Because Dunham's first reaction to Perrineau's allegations was to get together with her Girls co-creator Jenni Konner and publicly accuse Perrineau, who is mixed race, of lying. This was particularly galling to many, since the recent #MeToo movement that has risen in response to a flood of sexual misconduct accusations against powerful men has focused on wealthy white women and largely ignored victims of colour.

Dunham's defence of Miller (for which she has now apologized) caused an immediate backlash and sparked calls for women of colour to "divest" from Dunham. In a statement which went viral, the writer Zinzi Clemmons talked about how, as a student at Brown University, she'd known a lot of people who'd moved in the same circles as friends of Dunham. Wealthy, well-educated liberals, with parents who were influential in the art world.

"Back in college, I avoided these people like the plague because of their well-known racism," Clemmons wrote. "I'd call their strain 'hipster racism'."

You may have heard the term before. It's been around for over a decade and seems to have been popularized by an article by Carmen Van Kerckhove in Racialicious. The article noted that hipster racism is "a trend we noticed back in 2005, at the height of the Kill Whitey parties". In case they mercifully passed you by, they were ironic dance parties in Williamsburg, a then rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn, at which white hipsters parodied black hip-hop culture in order to "kill the whiteness inside".

The Kill Whitey parties are no longer a thing. The same can not be said of hipster racism - it is deeply embedded in popular culture.

'You think you have a right to everything'

But what is this hipsterised racism, and how would we recognise it? Rachel Dubrofsky, a communications expert at the University of South Florida, told the Guardian that hipster racism is the "domain of white, often progressive people who think they are hip to racism, which they mistakenly believe gives them permission to say and do racist things without actually being racist".

Another key tenet of hipster racism, Dubrofsky notes, is that it is veiled in irony. "I think hipster racism emerged as we saw an increase in ironic, self-reflexive humor in popular forms of media."

Examples of hipster racism are everywhere: as Dubrofsky notes, "the sheer ubiquity of [it] is remarkable." And because hipster racism is often characterized by "humour" it tends to be pervasive in comedy.

"Some of the most popular white women comedians are terrible hipster racists," Dubrofsky says. In August, for example, Tina Fey appeared on Saturday Night Live to talk about white nationalists marching on Charlottesville - which she did while making a joke about Thomas Jefferson raping his 14-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, calling her "that hot, light-skinned girl over by the butter churn". Amy Schumer is known for making jokes like: "I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual." Sarah Silverman has worn blackface on a number of occasions; she has since said publicly she deeply regrets it.

Hipster racism doesn't just present itself in off-colour humour; you can see it in the way certain on-trend types fetishize other races. A mixed-race employee at Vice Media told me, for example, about a white executive in her office who routinely uses people of colour as props to make him seem "cool". He often tries to banter with her about hip-hop, for example, assuming that she is obviously into hip-hop because she is half-black.

Some of the most popular white women comedians are terrible hipster racists

Rachel Dubrofsky, University of South Florida

"There was one time," she recalls, "when he wanted to have a business dinner for cool creative people and the invite list was all brown people. It made us feel like pets."

Hipster racism is thinking that you can use someone else's culture as a prop.

Another pervasive example of hipster racism is the staggering number of white people who don't seem to understand that there is no ironic way to say the N-word if you are not black. Earlier this month, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates was asked at a panel about whether it was OK for white hip-hop fans to rap along when they hear black rappers use the N-word in songs. As he eloquently explained: no, it's not.

"When you're white in this country you're taught that everything belongs to you," he said. "You think you have a right to everything."

Hipster racism is thinking that you have a right to the N-word, that if you - a liberal with black friends! - use it, somehow it isn't offensive.

'Racism is not only the domain of the ignorant'

Hipster racism is a racism that is in denial about its racism. However, that is also true of racism in general. As Ibram X Kendi, a professor at American University in Washington DC, told the Guardian: "The expression of racism is to fundamentally deny its expression."

Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, says that "in studying the history of racist ideas, I found that every group or articulator of racist ideas denied that their ideas are racist."

Hipster racists protest: but it's not racism, it's a joke! Meanwhile, non-hipster racists find justifications for their beliefs in science or scripture or sociology.

If hipster racism is basically just racism, why bother with the "hipster" bit? Why qualify it? As Dubrofsky explains, the phrase is "important because it forces us to look at the many different ways racism functions. It also pushes us to look beyond the question of intent."

She says: "Hipster racism helps us understand that even though someone might not have intended to be racist, they were. Hipster racism also makes apparent that racism is not a result of a lack of formal education. Racism is not only the domain of the supposedly ignorant."

Studying the history of racist ideas, I found every group or articulator of racist ideas denied their ideas are racist

Ibram X Kendi, American University

Hipster racism may be a 21st-century term, but progressives inadvertently perpetuating racism while supposedly challenging it has been happening for centuries. In his book, Kendi chronicles the history of "assimilationist ideas - these are ideas that consider themselves to be well-meaning - they reject a biological hierarchy but believe in a cultural or behavioral hierarchy." Abolitionists, for example, thought slavery was wrong but also believed it had turned black people into brutes and therefore advocated the civilizing of black people.

In the 20th century, the 1965 Moynihan report famously pathologized black families, arguing that the problems many African Americans were facing were down to the instability of their family structures. This idea persists, that broken black families are to blame for racial inequality in America. You can see it, for example, in a 2015 New York Times op-ed about the Baltimore riots in which David Brooks wrote: "The real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood."

With white supremacists marching on the streets, one might be tempted to dismiss hipster racism as not as serious as racism-racism. Hipster racists are not Richard Spencer. But increasingly light is been shed on a type of unwitting racism that, at best, trivializes people's experience. And that is no laughing matter.

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Is Lena Dunham's 'hipster racism' just old-fashioned prejudice?

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It is, by now, a familiar cycle. First Lena Dunham, the writer-actor-director best known for creating and starring in HBO's Girls, does or says something incredibly tone-deaf and offensive. Outrage ensues and people explain to Dunham why her actions were offensive. She apologizes.

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(Nathan Verhey Mod-1)

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An Italian doctor announced Friday that he will soon perform the world's first human head transplant in China because medical communities in the United States and Europe would not permit the controversial procedure.

"The Americans did not understand," Sergio Canavero told a news conference in Vienna.

Canavero said the Chinese government and Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese doctor partnering with him on the procedure, would confirm the surgery's date "within days" to signal its goal of becoming a world leader in all fields, including medicine.

"Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to restore China to greatness. He wants to make it the sole superpower in the world. I believe he is doing it," Canavero said.

In a phone interview with USA TODAY, Canavero decried the unwillingness of the U.S. or Europe to host the surgery. "No American medical institute or center would pursue this, and there is no will by the U.S. government to support it," he said.

Canavero would not divulge the identity of the Chinese donor or recipient. The donor will be the healthy body of a brain-dead patient matched for build with a recipient's disease-free head.

Canavero estimates the procedure will cost up to $100 million and involve several dozen surgeons and other specialists.

He will simultaneously sever the spinal cords of the donor and recipient with a diamond blade. To protect the recipient's brain from immediate death before it is attached to the body, it will be cooled to a state of deep hypothermia.

The recipient and donor will be in a sitting position to facilitate what's expected to be more than about 24 hours of laborious work to separate and then reconnect vertebral bones, jugular veins, the trachea, esophagus and other neck structures. Machines will help the recipient breathe, pumping blood through the body. The patient will be kept in a drug-induced coma for an unspecified recovery time.

Michael Sarr, a former surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the editor of the journal Surgery, said Canavero's procedure is radical.

Doctors "have always been taught that when you cut a nerve, the 'downstream side,' the part that takes a signal and conducts it to somewhere else, dies," he said. "The 'upstream side,' the part that generates the signal, dies back a little - a millimeter or two - and eventually regrows. As long as that 'downstream' channel is still there, it can regrow through that channel, but only for a length of about a foot."

This is why, he said, if you amputate your wrist and then re-implant it and line the nerves up well, you can recover function in your hand. But if your arm gets amputated at the shoulder, it won't be re-implanted because it will never lead to a functional hand.

"What Canavero will do differently is bathe the ends of the nerves in a solution that stabilizes the membranes and put them back together," Sarr said. "The nerves will be fused, but won't regrow. And he will do this not in the peripheral nerves such as you find in the arm, but in the spinal cord, where there's multiple types of nerve channels."

There has been some success using Canavero's proposed technique on mice and dogs. In one example, a dog walked after six weeks, albeit with an awkward gait. "Based on the classic thinking about how nerves regenerate it was unbelievable," Sarr said.

Canavero said his team has "rehearsed" his technique with human cadavers in China, but there are otherwise no known human trials. He said the 18-hour operation on two corpses showed it was possible to reconnect the spinal cord and blood vessels. Before the full transplant takes place, two brain-dead patients will undergo the surgery.

Most medical experts say it's a long shot, but even if the operation works the biggest obstacle may not be the science itself, but whether it should happen at all.

"There are too many risks at this point to go ahead with it," said Assya Pascalev, a biomedical ethicist at Howard University in Washington, D.C. "We don't have enough data with animal models, sufficient published and peer-reviewed results, and particularly data about mobility and morbidity on the animals that have had the procedure."

Pascalev said that any groundbreaking procedure is certain to face objections and skepticism, and requires a leap of faith.

"The first heart transplant, hand transplant, facial transplant: all were met with serious reservations," Pascaley said. "There are also regulatory concerns. China does not have the same medical standards and requirements that the United States and Europe have."

She added that there were major unanswered questions about the recipient if the surgery succeeds, such as whether he or she would have legal rights to children produced by the new body. "It's not just about a head adjusting to a new body. We might be dealing with a whole new person."

Canavero dismissed these concerns. "Western bioethicists needed to stop patronizing the world," he said. He added that China's receptiveness to hosting the surgery reflected its determination to replace the U.S. as the world leader in all fields.

"Who sent America to the Moon? It was Wernher von Braun," he said, referring to the German immigrant who was an early rocket developer and space-exploration advocate for the U.S.

James Giordano, a professor of medicine and neurosciences at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, agreed with Pascalev that not enough rigorous study has been done to support a procedure with so many risks.

He said patients might be better served if Canavero focused on spinal reconstruction, not transplants. Yet he also gave him some credit for his pioneering work.

"He's run the ethical flag up the poles and said, 'Look, I'm not an ethicist, I'm a neurologist and this may be an avant-garde technique, I recognize there is a high possibility for failure, but this is the only way we can push the envelope and probe the cutting edge to determine what works, what doesn't and why.'"

Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2ANIl5p

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Italian doctor says world's first human head transplant 'imminent'

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An Italian doctor announced Friday that he will soon perform the world's first human head transplant in China because medical communities in the United States and Europe would not permit the controversial procedure. "The Americans did not understand," Sergio Canavero told a news conference in Vienna.

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top general says he would reject "illegal" nuclear strike order(Nathan Verhey Mod-1)

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top general says he would reject "illegal" nuclear strike order(Nathan Verhey Mod-1)

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in this article Gen. Hyten states that if he received an order he believed to be illegal he would not execute, but instead suggest other options. this shows the small scope of authority on nuclear strikes. he will have to make a sound argument when rejecting these orders on why they are illegal, as well as avoiding fallacies such as ad hominem thinking it must be illegal because he's trump so it must be illegal.

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The top nuclear commander in the U.S. said Saturday that he would reject an "illegal" nuclear attack order from President Donald Trump, and would instead steer the commander in chief to other "options."

"If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail," Air Force Gen. John Hyten told an audience at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia. "You could go to jail for the rest of your life."

Hyten, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command who oversees America's nuclear arsenal, spoke at a forum titled "Nukes: The Fire and the Fury," as recorded in a video on the event's Facebook page. He didn't define what exactly would constitute an illegal launch order. But Hyten said he has been trained for the past 36 years in the law of armed conflict, and mentioned the consideration of such elements as proportional response and unnecessary suffering that would be caused by such a conflagration.

In the event Trump suggests an illegal strike, Hyten described a scenario in which he would present Trump with legal choices.

"I provide advice to the president. He will tell me what to do," Hyten said. "And if it's illegal, guess what's going to happen? I'm going to say, 'Mr. President, that's illegal.' And guess what he's going to do? He's going to say, 'What would be legal?' And we'll come up with options... a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that's the way it works. It's not that complicated."

"I think some people think we're stupid," he said. "We're not stupid people. We think about these things a lot. When you have this responsibility, how do you not think about it? What people forget is that this is a military mission and military function."

In congressional testimony earlier this month, retired Gen. Robert Kehler, who served as the head of Strategic Command from 2011 to 2013, also said that the military is only obligated to follow legal orders.

Hyten's comments, first reported by CBS News, come in the wake of taunting threats against North Korea by the president. In August, Trump told reporters that if North Korea continued to threaten the U.S., its actions would be met "with fire and fury the likes of which this world has never seen before." Many interpreted this to mean a nuclear strike.

Trump also threatened in a United Nations speech to " totally destroy " the country of 26 million people if its leader, Kim Jong Un, threatened the U.S.

"This is a very serious subject and the world is a very dangerous place right now," Hyten said Saturday.

The general said his command must provide "strategic deterrence." If that fails, "we'll have a decisive response," he said, and must be "combat-ready to do that all the time."

Hyten's job, he said, is to "create the conditions for diplomacy to work by being ready all the time, and we are ready every minute of every day."

The forum Saturday included a video that showed scenes of nuclear devastation beneath the song "We'll Meet Again" ― the same music used at the end of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 antiwar film "Dr. Strangelove," which famously ends with a nuclear holocaust. Hyten said he has seen the movie nearly half a dozen times.

Hyten referred to a 2016 speech by then-President Barack Obama calling for a nuclear-free world. While he seemed moved by the speech, Hyten said, "I don't believe we'll ever get to a nuclear-free world."

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Top General Says He Would Reject An 'Illegal' Nuclear Strike Order From Trump

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The top nuclear commander in the U.S. said Saturday that he would reject an "illegal" nuclear attack order from President Donald Trump, and would instead steer the commander in chief to other "options." "If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail," Air Force Gen.

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scientists made low fat pigs by editing there genes with CRISPR(Nathan Verhey Mod-1)

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scientists made low fat pigs by editing there genes with CRISPR(Nathan Verhey Mod-1)

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in this article it highlights a use of CRISPR by modifying pig genes to burn body fat for warmth. gene modification is a very big ethical dilemma, because it is viewed as "playing god". at the same time this could be used to treat a multitude of genetic disorders. as this technology defining the code of ethics will be a big issue for 21st century scientists.

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Scientists created low-fat pigs by editing their genes with CRISPR

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Raising pigs for food is a tricky business-mostly because of their fat, the part that makes bacon so tasty.