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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."
 
Medford and Ashland, Oregon, 30K+ people, are being evacuated.k


Small fire by I-5


City of fire


Word on the ground from people living there is that it's a shitshow.

Apparently the homeless that camp out around the Expo, which is being used for refugees and evacuess, keep starting fires. Another fire at the Mall, although that one is supposedly getting under control.

The homeowners were told NOT to water their lawns or landscaping, including the big fields, because of water shortages (that seemed to really get bad after Hershey finally got their water tap in).

It's bad enough that Kate Brown of Portland Oregon fame, had to kneel down and ask Trump for federal disaster relief because she's had to announce a State of Emergency for Southern Oregon on the I-5 corridor.

This fire has been coming for over a decade, as Oregon won't let actual fire prevention work take place because the transplanted Californians and those retards in Portland don't want any thinning or brush cutting to take place. The entire Rogue Valley is a tinderbox every summer waiting for one bad spark and shitty winds.

Twitter has reports of a lot more closures than KOBI is announcing, and four people I have talked to personally have had the Sheriff come out and tell them to evacuate.

How did it all start?

A fucking Gender Reveal.

"AAAAAAAAND....... IT'S A..."
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BTW: That's a city of 80,000 people that's threatened by that fire. That picture is as of 8PM PST. It looks like the fire department is mostly fighting to keep I-5 clear so that people can get out. As of 5 minutes ago the local Twitter announced Highway 99 is closed. There are multiple other fires being reported.

It's already in populated areas. Houses, businesses, vehicles have already been burnt.

This is from earlier today.

I had a friend who lived in this place. It wasn't a run-down trailer park. This was a nice mobile home park.

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I know these areas.
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Worse, the fucking homeless are starting fires by the mall and by the Expo for some fucking reason. Bear Creek by I-5 is where a lot of them camp and fires keep cropping up, get handled, then lit again.

An as of 2 hours ago the Rogue Valley lost Air Support in fighting these fires.
 
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Colleges Where Majors Popular with Black Students Pay Well

The good news: There are some. The bad news: There aren’t many.

by The Editors

In the United States, there’s a direct correlation between the average earnings of a college major and what percentage of the major’s students are Black. In the highest-paying disciplines—subjects such as computer science, chemical engineering, and finance—Black students are a significantly smaller share of recent graduates than they are nationwide (in the case of those three, the share is below 5 percent, compared to a national share of roughly 10 percent). For the lowest-paying majors, the opposite is true. The subject with the highest share of Black graduates—health and medical administration—leads to first-year average incomes that are tens of thousands of dollars less than finance, and roughly half of what computer science and chemical engineering students go on to earn.

There are many reasons for this correlation, ranging from high school segregation to the relative emphasis these subjects place on bringing about positive social change (see Daniel Block, “Why STEM Needs Social Justice“). It has spurred intense efforts by both policymakers and many universities to graduate more people of color from high-paying fields.

These endeavors are important for the financial well-being of these communities and for the social well-being of the United States. But it’s also important that institutions respect the choices Black students make for themselves, and high-paying fields are far from the only ones worth studying. Indeed, the fields that Black students disproportionately graduate from are essential to both day-to-day life and academic inquiry. Without social workers, the U.S. safety net system would collapse. Sociology leads to a plethora of worthy careers, from political advocacy to urban planning to sociological research itself. This means it’s critical that we work not just to graduate more Black students from STEM majors. It means we need to figure out how to make sure the subjects more Black people already study lead to better-paying jobs.

To that end, the Washington Monthly has gathered newly available data from the Department of Education to examine at which specific colleges the majors (or “programs”) known for high Black enrollment, like social work, lead to above-average earnings. We started by looking at the 38 most popular majors in America and identifying the four with the largest share of recent Black graduates: health and medical administration (26.1 percent of recent graduates); social work (22 percent); criminal justice (20 percent); and sociology (18.6 percent). Next, to make sure we were working with a large enough sample size, we eliminated every school whose program graduated fewer than 50 students in the past two years and then, among these schools, calculated the median first-year earnings for each of the four programs. Then, we cut out all institutions where the first-time, full-time undergraduate Black graduation rate is below 50 percent (the graduation rate for these Black students nationwide is 40 percent) to eliminate institutions that saddle most of their Black students with debt without providing any credentials. To ensure that the graduation rate came from a large enough sample size to be meaningful, we took out every school that graduated fewer than 25 first-time, full-time Black students.

After that, we isolated the colleges where program graduates had above-average earnings relative to program graduates nationwide and where the program graduated an above-average share of Black students relative to its peers nationwide. The result is a list of the schools where the majors in which Black students are most represented lead to well-paying jobs, and where we feel as confident as we can that they are sharing in the returns.

The outcome is somewhat depressing: There are not many programs that meet these thresholds. You may notice, for example, that there’s no health and medical administration list. That’s because every health and medical administration program with above-average earnings and an above-average percentage of Black graduates has a Black graduation rate below 50 percent. For social work and criminal justice, it is only slightly better: Of the 417 criminal justice programs that graduated at least 50 students, only eight make the list. Only four of the 250 social work programs do. Sociology is the sole major of the four that has more than 10 programs that meet the above criteria (we have elected to list only the top 10), a relative abundance powered by the fact that the major is offered and popular at elite four-year schools.

For these top-performing programs, earnings on the whole are still significantly below what they are for high-paying fields. Columbia University’s sociology program, the highest-earning one on this list, has a median earning well below that of most engineering programs. None of the social work programs listed have first-year salaries that exceed $34,500—the median salary for recent college graduates nationwide. Research shows that students who graduate with degrees in more traditional liberal arts fields, like sociology, do eventually catch up to their STEM peers in incomes. But initial salaries are important, especially for students dealing with debt, so it’s distressing that none of these very worthwhile majors yields notably high immediate returns. It is further evidence that there are structural problems with American politics, economics, and society that need to be addressed. We seriously undervalue professions that prioritize helping others and the people of color who are overrepresented in their workforce. (The two are likely related: The high percentages of people of color in these industries could well be part of why, on average, they pay less.)

Even in a far fairer economy, of course, these kinds of fields likely won’t pay as much right out of college as the hard sciences do, which typically demand more taxing, technical knowledge. And to the extent that Black students are drawn to lower-paying fields to help fight structural oppression—for example, criminal justice majors are needed to help address mass incarceration—then the ultimate solution to this imbalance is eliminating systematic discrimination. Doing so might lead some Black students to choose other fields, while also reducing barriers to graduating from those fields.

But, needless to say, dismantling racism is a lengthy task. Until it happens, it’s especially critical that majors with high Black enrollment be more lucrative.

The good news is that they can be. There are schools that graduate these students into well-paying jobs. While none of the listed social work programs had earnings that exceeded $34,500, all of the sociology and criminal justice programs did. And it’s not just elite schools that made the cut. Almost half of the institutions are open-access public schools. Every social work program that appears is offered by a state school, and the only two nonselective institutions on the sociology list are public universities. One of them, the University of Houston, has the highest share of Black graduates of any of the sociology programs, and its median earnings outpace several far more famous colleges. It’s a positive sign that even less-selective institutions can help students in these majors get decent-paying jobs right out of college.

We were able to produce this list only because the Department of Education, after years of promises, finally released earnings data by specific school programs. There’s no doubt that this is useful. But it also has limits. First, thus far, the department only provides information for two years of graduates—2015 and 2016. (To make sure we matched earnings with graduates, we measured the shares of Black graduates using the same years.) Second, it only gives us such data for graduates who are one year out of college. It would be much more helpful if the department provided program-level earnings for classes that are multiple years, and ideally decades, out of school.

The relative paucity of information presents other constraints. The Department of Education does not break down earnings data by race. As a result, it is impossible for us to know if Black students are sharing equally in the above-median earnings. Given that Black people make less than other Americans in the same fields and with the same levels of education, it’s likely that they are not. (Our belief is that the relatively high share of Black graduates in these particular programs means that they are likely still enjoying some of the higher-than-average returns.)

In addition, the department does not provide program-level debt estimates that include family debt, meaning that researchers, including ourselves, cannot accurately measure how much graduates of these programs owe lenders. Given that people of color take on more debt on average than others, the government must determine and then release this information so we can better understand which programs are most financially helpful for minority communities. Similarly, the proxy we used to determine Black graduation rates—first-time, full-time students—is imperfect because it does not capture returning or part-time students, of which Black people also make up a disproportionate percentage. We used it anyway, because the Department of Education provides no part-time or returning student graduation data that is broken down by race. It also doesn’t provide graduation rates broken down by each school’s particular programs.

To fully explore which schools do the best job of helping Black students go into well-paying jobs, researchers need as much granular program-level data as possible that includes outcomes by race. In theory, getting it should be straightforward: Congress must simply repeal a 2008 law that bans the government from being able to track by racial category students’ outcomes after college. There’s already a bipartisan collection of senators who support eliminating this prohibition. In the meantime, the Department of Education can keep publishing data on program-level outcomes so we can see how graduates fare several years after college.

But for now, we hope that our findings more fully illustrate the unfortunate state of majors, race, and earnings—as well as provide some glimmers of hope.

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  • Horrifying
Reactions: millais
The Medford fires died down slightly during the night.

Today, they're back and raging. Additional fires are popping up with locals suspecting arson by homeless camps (Medford has that problem often enough that the FBI has had to come in and find the homeless person burning shit down) in the areas.

This community right here is just gone.

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While this isn't a blip on the National News because Burn Loot Murder and Pantifa are taking up the news cycle along with Orange Man Bad, the entire Rogue Valley in Oregon is in danger.

Two hours ago people on I5 were advised to "Use any means necessary to get off of Interstate-5 including on foot. Evacuate to the south of on milepost, north of the other, heading East.

Central Point is mandatory evacuation and looks like they might lose it.

Winds are picking up.

Medford itself is 80K people. Fatalities are already being reporting.

Ashland, Central Point, Phoenix, White City, Table Rock, all are under threat. All fire departments available are fighting the fires. Helicopters dropping water and planes dropping fire retardant are constantly in use.

Every time they start getting stuff under control, a new fire pops up.

I know 3 people now that have lost their homes, over a dozen who had to evacuate.

EDIT: Mandatory evacuations are coming in. Firefighters are getting tired and injuries among them are starting to set in.

They're fighting to keep the airport clear.

Kate Brown is being urged to call out the National Guard.

Red Cross is overburdened between NorCal and So-OR. Friend had to go to three different hotels, two of them got hit with evac orders.

Fires keep popping up near known homeless encampments.
 
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  • Dick Powers posts photos and videos of himself at one with nature on Instagram
  • He has been tending to the land on his parent's ranch in Montana naked for years
  • Hopes to expand naked ranching repertoire by offering guided tours of the area
A self-described naked rancher has won hundreds of Instagram fans with snaps of him exploring the great outdoors without any clothes on.



Dick Powers, 36, from Montana, spends his days herding cattle, chopping wood and fishing on his family's 1,800-acre plot.

He explained being naked 'frees his spirits' and hopes to one day expand his ranching business by offering tours to fellow naturists.


He said: 'I love being naked and I love being a naturist. Anything which involves a blade I avoid for safety reasons.


Dick Powers, known as the Naked Rancher to his Instagram followers, posts pictures and videos of himself herding cattle, chopping wood and fishing in his family's 1,800 acres


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Dick Powers, known as the Naked Rancher to his Instagram followers, posts pictures and videos of himself herding cattle, chopping wood and fishing in his family's 1,800 acres
The 36 year old has been helping to run his parent's ranch in Montana, USA,since 2017,  where his desire to ditch formal wear for his birthday suit was first discovered


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The 36 year old has been helping to run his parent's ranch in Montana, USA,since 2017, where his desire to ditch formal wear for his birthday suit was first discovered
He shares his naked endeavors on his Instagram account, which has more than 1,000 followers, despite his parents not knowing he is a naturist and loves to tend to their land


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He shares his naked endeavors on his Instagram account, which has more than 1,000 followers, despite his parents not knowing he is a naturist and loves to tend to their land
'I will chop wood with an axe, but that's as far I will go - I don't want to slice anything off! I did once wear chaps and a helmet to use the chainsaw for an Instagram pic, but if I'm honest I regretted it.

'All my posts tend to be organic and natural, while that one felt like it was mainly for my followers.'



Dick, who is now ranch manager, says his love of nature was awoken as a child growing up in Florida's Everglades.

'I played a lot of sport growing up and was part of the American Indian Scouts - which is similar to regular Scouts, but a lot more primitive,' he said.

'You learn how to survive off the land in a more traditional manner, like the Native Americans do.


The naturist said he likes to keep his content on social media as natural as possible, explaining one time he decided to wear chaps and a helmet to use the chainsaw for an Instagram picture  but soon regretted it. Pictured: Dick driving through the mountain ranges of the ranch


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The naturist said he likes to keep his content on social media as natural as possible, explaining one time he decided to wear chaps and a helmet to use the chainsaw for an Instagram picture but soon regretted it. Pictured: Dick driving through the mountain ranges of the ranch
The ranch manager said his love for nature first started when he was a child, growing up in the Florida Everglades, and learned how to survive in the wild as part of the American Indian Scouts. Dick pictured taking an ice cold dip


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The ranch manager said his love for nature first started when he was a child, growing up in the Florida Everglades, and learned how to survive in the wild as part of the American Indian Scouts. Dick pictured taking an ice cold dip
The keen naturist, pictured admiring the spectacular view, studied geology at the University of Wyoming from 2007 - where the Rocky Mountains were just a short drive away


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The keen naturist, pictured admiring the spectacular view, studied geology at the University of Wyoming from 2007 - where the Rocky Mountains were just a short drive away
'It was there that I started to build a connection with nature.'

Brainy, too, Dick loved science and, in September 2007 won a place at the University of Wyoming to study geology.

He said: 'I'd always enjoyed the outdoors and science was my preferred subject at school, so I wanted a profession that would let me do both.'

With the Rocky Mountains just a short drive away from his university campus, for the next three years Dick threw himself into his studies.

Impressed by their son's beautiful surroundings, at the start of 2009, Dick's parents decided to leave Florida and relocate to the bordering state of Montana.

'It was always a dream of my dad's to move to the mountains and have his own ranch,' Dick explained. 'He'd been a businessman his whole life and it was his time to enjoy his golden years.'

After graduating in 2010, Dick spent three years working on an oil rig, clearing his student debt and saving.



He said: 'I was a rig geologist, but in all honesty I didn't really enjoy it. I would help with the drilling before the oil started being rigged.


After visiting Dick at university, his parents were so impressed with the landscape that they decided to leave their home in Florida in 2009 and buy a ranch in Montana instead


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After visiting Dick at university, his parents were so impressed with the landscape that they decided to leave their home in Florida in 2009 and buy a ranch in Montana instead
His father had always dreamed of owning a ranch and when they came to visit they decided to make a change. They moved to Montana and Dick went to work on an oil rig from 2010


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His father had always dreamed of owning a ranch and when they came to visit they decided to make a change. They moved to Montana and Dick went to work on an oil rig from 2010
He worked on the oil rig for three years to pay off his student debt and save some money before going back to the University of Montana to study renewable energy development


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He worked on the oil rig for three years to pay off his student debt and save some money before going back to the University of Montana to study renewable energy development
'I was in my late 20s, though, and enjoyed how much money I was making but, after three years, it was time to get out.'

Using his savings, in 2015 he funded a post graduate degree studying renewable energy development at the University of Montana - a stone's throw from his parents' ranch, where he spent weekends working the land.

'It's a big old chunk of land for the old man to manage on his own,' he said.

'We have 200 cattle that need seeing to all year round, we have a huge hay operation and logging season requires a hell of a lot of man power.'

Living on and off in the guest wing of his parents' five-bedroom house since graduating in 2017, he became ranch manager the following year but, despite their close relationship, he has not told his parents he is a naturist.

'Instead of using my post grad degree, I became quite the handy man and that eventually led to me taking over from my dad at the ranch,' he said.

'It was here that I discovered the wonders of geothermal hot baths, as there are dozens of these incredible hot water holes dotted around The Rockies and most have signs saying clothing optional.

'As kids we ran around naked, so I've never been shy and there's nothing quite like taking a dip completely naked - you feel at one with the world.



lol hick
 
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