I know lots of tolerant christians, they don't want to force their views on anyone and they don't partake in any activity that would harm me or my acquaintances directly or indirectly, no doubt I think their wrong, but I don't hate them for it. However there's not much difference between this person and a member of PETA asking that retailers refuse to sell fur coats.
Edit: Oh wait, wasn't I not going to post on this topic?
1. She actually compared a picture, just a picture, to the fucking genocide of Jewish people, and to hundreds of years of black oppression in the United States. Clearly she is not capable of objective, rational thinking.
2. When you run a store, pulling merchandise can be a pain in the ass. Depending on how your supply chain operations work, you have to call up the chain to the distributors to tell them not to send you any more of that clothing, and then you have to send that stuff back. Now, I would expect Nordstrom to have a fairly efficient supply chain, but it's still not going to be free to simply pull a product, because it will result in lost sales and extra costs in sending product back and forth. Therefore, I highly doubt that this was a simple agreement; the store probably concluded it was easier to just agree with the woman and pull the product to prevent a fuss and to prevent a loss of customers and future sales.
3. She is perfectly entitled to her opinion. I can at least accept her preference to not want to see offensive images in a store she frequents. The fucked up thing here is that she is deciding nobody else is entitled to their opinions, and she is making it a point to make sure they stop selling and distributing the product across the nation. Is this really necessary?
4. If the shirt is really a shirt made in poor taste, then market principles will prevail, resulting in too few people buying the shirt, and it'll stop being manufactured and distributed anyway.
The thing I thought was fucked up about it is pretty much the same as Ryan. The fact that the store was made to pull the product off its shelves for one complaint really is fucked up. I say "made to" because she didn't have to sue or seek gov't legislation, they knew it would be easier to just pull the shirt. They did what she wanted and she still got on her high horse and announced her intention to stop stores from selling the shirt throughout the nation. I am making a few presumptions here, but that doesn't strike me as the type of person who just kindly asked them to remove the shirt or would have taken "no" for an answer. If she lives in a community where there are many who agree with her, then she could do all she wants to get the store to remove that shirt. If they didn't do it for her, she could have gotten the community leaders together to protest or petition the store to remove the shirt and that would be just fine. It would work because her community agrees with her. But she's trying to take it away from everybody. She trying to stop the distribution of this "offensive" product to people who may not be offended by it.
ALSO:
I don’t see a problem with a company willingly taking away their own product. There are plenty of companies willing to sell offensive t-shirts for people enthused about that sort of thing. I don’t see this company pulling it’s own product as a big deal.
Unless I'm mistaken, Affliction is a clothing manufacturer who simply distributes to Nordstrom. So it isn't a case of a company pulling their own product, it's a company refusing to sell someone else's product. Which they still have a right to do, but it isn't just affecting one company.
Daniel Hurley was overcome by the solvents used in the can and collapsed in the bath at his family home. He died five days later in hospital.
An inquest heard Daniel died from cardiac arrhythmia, or abnormal heart rhythms, caused by exposure to solvents in the Lynx spray.
The company warns on its cans against over-spraying and says the product must be used in well ventilated places.
A coroner said people should read the warnings and be aware of the danger of the products they are using.
Daniel's father, Robert, said the youngster was proud of his appearance and was "lavish" in his use of deodorants and hair gels.
He said: "He was always putting gel on his hair and spraying deodorant and it was quite common for him to spray his clothing as well."
He said that three weeks earlier, Daniel, who was a "fit and healthy young man", had also collapsed in the bathroom but made an immediate recovery.
Mr Hurley said on the day that led to Daniel's death he had been making tea while his son was in the bathroom of their terraced home in Sandiacre, near Nottingham.
He said: "The bathroom is adjacent to the kitchen and I shouted to see if he was okay. I heard nothing so I shouted again but did not get a reply. I forced the door open and found Daniel in the bath.
"I pulled him out on to the floor and started cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. I checked for his heart rate and his breath but he was not breathing."
Daniel's mother, Lynsey, called an ambulance and he spent five days in intensive care at Nottingham's Queen's Medical Centre before he died on January 12.
Consultant pathologist Dr Andrew Hitchcock, who carried out a post mortem on Daniel, said he found no evidence of substance abuse.
There was also no evidence of any life-threatening disease, alcohol or drugs in Daniel's body.
He said: "What we have in this case is someone who may well have had a cardiac abnormality in the presence of the solvent. There is a very reasonable assumption that the passive inhalation of the solvent almost certainly led to his death."
Recording a verdict of accidental death, Dr Robert Hunter, Derby and South Derbyshire Coroner, said the cause of death was "cardiac arrhythmia, exacerbated by exposure to solvents".
He said he was satisfied that Unilever, the manufacturer of Lynx, gave enough warning on its cans that excessive amounts were not to be used in confined spaces.
But Dr Hunter warned: "I do not know how many people read the warnings about exposure awareness. But people need to know about the risks that these products have on the cardio-vascular system.
"Daniel copiously used deodorant in the bathroom and it seems the presence of a volatile agent caused the cardiac arrhythmia."
Each Lynx can carries a 90-word list of directions for use, warning that the product should be kept of the reach of children and not sprayed near the eyes or naked flames.
The last sentence of the directions reads: "Use in well ventilated places, avoid prolonged spraying".
A Lynx spokesman said: "We would like to express our most sincere condolences to the friends and family of Daniel Hurley after this tragic accident. Our thoughts are with them during this terribly sad time."
(CNN) -- A British man was jailed Tuesday for raping two of his daughters and fathering nine children over 27 years, a case with echoes of Austria's Josef Fritzl.
The two daughters were made pregnant 19 times; there were nine births, five miscarriages and five terminations. Seven of the children are alive but suffer genetic deformities.
The father, who cannot be named for legal reasons banning the identification of his victims and the surviving children, pleaded guilty Tuesday at Sheffield Crown Court, northern England, and was sentenced to serve 25 life sentences to run concurrently.
The judge said the minimum term the 56-year-old rapist should serve in jail should be 19½ years.
South Yorkshire Police Chief Superintendent Simon Torr said, "The victims of these terrible crimes have asked me to state the following: 'His detention in prison brings us only the knowledge that he cannot physically touch us again. The suffering he has caused will continue for many years, and we must now concentrate our thoughts on finding the strength to rebuild our lives.' "
Speaking for the police, Torr added, "The main concern ... is for those who have been so badly affected: the victims who have suffered a terrible ordeal. We will continue to offer them our full support to try and help them get on with their lives.
"As far as the sentence goes, we are satisfied that this offender has received the strongest possible punishment for his heinous crimes. Now we need to ensure continuing support for those who have suffered as a result of his actions."
The daughters first told police about their ordeal in June, but the abuse dated to 1981.
It emerged that in 1998 one daughter rang Childline, a charity to help abused kids, and asked for assurances about being able to keep her children if she came forward. When Childline could not make that guarantee, the daughter did nothing more to raise her plight. Watch how the case came to light »
The UK's Press Association reported that the rapes began in 1981 with daily attacks and that for long periods, they would be raped up to three times a week, and the assaults would continue through pregnancies. Their only reprieve came after they had just given birth or when they were ill because of the abuse.
If either daughter tried to refuse their father's attacks, they would be punched, kicked and or held to the flames of a gas fire, burning their eyes and arms, PA reported.
Despite visiting hospitals and meeting with social workers over the 27 years of abuse, no investigation was launched into the family.
The case comes in the wake of the death of a baby, known only as Baby P, which has dominated headlines in Britain. The baby endured horrendous torture and died despite being on the local authority's child protection register.
In Austria this year, Josef Fritzl was arrested, accused of keeping his daughter in a basement dungeon and fathering seven children through the rapes.
A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York died after he was trampled by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.
At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee, Jdimypai Damour, 34, of Jamaica, Queens, who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.
People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid Mr. Damour. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.
“They were like a stampede,” said Nassau Det. Lt. Michael Fleming. “Hundreds of people walked past him, over him or around him.”
Mr. Damour was taken from the Wal-Mart to nearby Franklin Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:03 a.m., the police said. His exact cause of death has not been determined. The police said that three other shoppers were injured and a 28-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was taken to the hospital for observation.
One shopper, Kimberly Cribbs, said she was standing near the back of the crowd at around 5 a.m. on Friday when people started rushing into the store. She said several people were knocked to the ground, and parents had to grab their children by the hand to keep them from being caught in the crush.
“They were falling all over each other,” she said. “It was terrible.”
Crowds began building outside the Wal-Mart at 9 p.m. Thursday and grew throughout the night, as eager shoppers queued up in a line that filled the sidewalk and stretched toward the boundary fence of the Green Acres Mall.
At 3:30 a.m., store employees called the Nassau police to report that the crowd was growing quickly, the police said. Officers came by to try to organize the line, but were called away to a Circuit City, a Best Buy and a B.J.’s Wholesale Club nearby, to deal with crowds there.
A half-dozen Wal-Mart employees lined up in the entryway trying to hold back the crowd by pushing against the locked sliding doors, but they were overwhelmed by the force of the crowd, Lieutenant Fleming said.
As the doors snapped open and people streamed in, several people fell on top of one another. The 34-year-old employee who died was at the bottom of the pile, the police said.
On Friday, Wal-Mart released a statement saying that the man who was killed had been working for Wal-Mart through a temp agency. The company called the death “a tragic situation,” and said it was working with police.
“The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority,” Wal-Mart said in a statement.
Lieutenant Fleming said that the store “could have done more” to prevent the melee.
“I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it’s not,” he said. “This certainly was foreseeable.”
Well, how else do you propose they get in 5 minutes early? Through a window?
In all seriousness though, this is not the first person to be trampled to death on Black Friday in this exact scenario. I could swear I heard stories just like this last year and the year before. Really puts the name "Black Friday" in perspective.
New rifts form on Antarctic ice shelf(CNN) -- Scientists have identified new rifts on an Antarctic ice shelf that could lead to it breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula, the European Space Agency said. The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a large sheet of floating ice south of South America, is connected to two Antarctic islands by a strip of ice. That ice "bridge" has lost about 2,000 square kilometers (about 772 square miles) this year, the ESA said.
A satellite image captured November 26 shows new rifts on the ice shelf that make it dangerously close to breaking away from the strip of ice -- and the islands to which it's connected, the ESA said.
Scientists first spotted rifts in the ice shelf in late February, and they noticed further deterioration the following week. The period marks the end of the South Pole summer and is the time when such events are most likely, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Before the new rifts were spotted this week, the last cracks were noticed July 21.
"These new rifts, which have joined previously existing rifts on the ice shelf, threaten to break up the chunk of ice located beneath the 21 July date, which would cause the bridge to lose its stabilization and collapse," said Angelika Humbert, a scientist from Germany's Muenster University who spotted the cracks with Matthias Braun of the University of Bonn. Wilkins is the size of the state of Connecticut or about half the area of Scotland. It is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened.
If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level, because it is already floating, scientists say.
Scambos said the ice shelf is not on the path of the increasingly popular tourist ships that travel from South America to Antarctica. But some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse.
The ice shelf had been stable for most of the past century before it began retreating in the 1990s.
Several ice shelves -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones -- have collapsed in the past three decades, the British Antarctic Survey said.Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula -- the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America -- has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.
Well, yes, but when the sea ice goes, the land ice, which will cause a rise, gets closer to the ocean. Also, on a technicality, the sea ice will cause a minimal rise in sea level, as it is not completly submerged and not displacing its entire mass while floating.
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But the dinosaur thing was...sorta a makeshift analogy I guess, just disregard it; it was like 6:00am ok? hahah
Edit: Oh wait, wasn't I not going to post on this topic?
Don't get me wrong, I do think PETA is batshit insane.
2. When you run a store, pulling merchandise can be a pain in the ass. Depending on how your supply chain operations work, you have to call up the chain to the distributors to tell them not to send you any more of that clothing, and then you have to send that stuff back. Now, I would expect Nordstrom to have a fairly efficient supply chain, but it's still not going to be free to simply pull a product, because it will result in lost sales and extra costs in sending product back and forth. Therefore, I highly doubt that this was a simple agreement; the store probably concluded it was easier to just agree with the woman and pull the product to prevent a fuss and to prevent a loss of customers and future sales.
3. She is perfectly entitled to her opinion. I can at least accept her preference to not want to see offensive images in a store she frequents. The fucked up thing here is that she is deciding nobody else is entitled to their opinions, and she is making it a point to make sure they stop selling and distributing the product across the nation. Is this really necessary?
4. If the shirt is really a shirt made in poor taste, then market principles will prevail, resulting in too few people buying the shirt, and it'll stop being manufactured and distributed anyway.
Whew.
ALSO: Unless I'm mistaken, Affliction is a clothing manufacturer who simply distributes to Nordstrom. So it isn't a case of a company pulling their own product, it's a company refusing to sell someone else's product. Which they still have a right to do, but it isn't just affecting one company.
Why on earth would you know that off the top of your head???
How embarrassing.
Edit: Nevermind, listen to John.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!
This is ridiculous... *sigh* Humans are so scary sometimes.
In all seriousness though, this is not the first person to be trampled to death on Black Friday in this exact scenario. I could swear I heard stories just like this last year and the year before. Really puts the name "Black Friday" in perspective.
From cnn.com
wat
As a matter of fact, any floating object will always displace exactly its mass of water (or whichever liquid it happens to be floating in.)