Safe Zone LGBT Allies training makes a difference at Paul L. Foster School of Medicine

Posted on by

When Kent Carter was looking for a medical school to continue his studies, one of the factors he considered was how diverse his future campus might be.

"When I applied, I made sure to include my past involvement in LGBT activities in my applications," said Carter, a second year medical student at the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. "At some schools where I interviewed, when I got to that part of the interview, their entire demeanor toward me changed. They became very negative toward me. I made the decision when I applied that I don't want to be at a place where it was going to be an issue. When I came here, there were no issues and that made me feel more positive about coming here."

The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso created an Office of Diversity Affairs three years ago led by Jessica Caldern-Mora and Mayra Morales and recently launched the Safe Zone LGBT Allies training.

"Safe Zone training is something that's done in various undergrad and graduate school campuses around the country," said Caldern-Mora, senior director of the Office of Diversity Affairs. "We started a Gay and Straight Campus Alliance in 2012 and that was initiated by our office and current third-year medical students. They came on to campus and saw a need for this type of group."

The Safe Zone program was created to develop, enhance and maintain environments in workplaces, schools and other social settings that are culturally competent and supportive to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) individuals.

"It's about creating a welcoming, inclusive environment for gays, lesbians, bisexual or transgender individuals rather they be patients or colleagues," Caldern-Mora said. "It's about increasing the capacity to address the issues faced by the LGBT population and to train allies, individuals who serve as advocates on campus."

Since the Safe Zone program began in September, more than 170 medical and nursing students, faculty, residents and staff have been through the training.

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso's Office of Diversity Affairs is creating "Safe Zones" for the LGBT community. (Mark Lambie - El Paso Times)

"After the training, we provide all of our health care professional a rainbow pin so they can wear on their white coats to show that the are LGBT friendly," Caldern-Mora said. "We also give them placards and students place them on their lockers and physicians put them on their office door so we are seen more around campus so the LGBT population can see that we are an open campus."

Caldern-Mora said she does not have statistic on how many LGBT individuals are on campus.

More here:

Safe Zone LGBT Allies training makes a difference at Paul L. Foster School of Medicine

Mindy Kalings brother: Why I faked being black

Posted on by

People have asked for the last 15 years, Vijay, how did you come up with pretending like youre black to get into medical school? That was crazy, huh?

Uh, yeah, it was. But at the time it seemed like a good idea. I had toed the line in school my whole life. I sailed through a prestigious prep school with great grades. Had always been a model student. But college? Well, it was like Disneyland so many rides to take, so much fun to have. I joined a fraternity and committed a great deal of effort to fun. But about halfway through, I had an epiphany and it scared the crap out of me.

I wanted to be a doctor. Yes, its kind of a cultural thing, but Im also totally American, grew up in Boston and even got my middle name from Jo Jo White, one of the Celtics stars. My immigrant folks loved basketball. But I wanted to be a doctor mainly because my mom was a doctor and she was universally loved by her patients. I was immensely proud of her.

One of my closest friends, nicknamed Boots Indian-American like me shared my dream.

But what happened to Boots next chilled me to my marrow. He began applying to medical schools and we both figured he would sail through, get many interviews and then have his pick. Boots was a year older and medical school was everything he had worked for since starting at the University of Chicago. His grades and test scores were better than mine because, unlike me, he actually studied. But when he applied to 15 medical schools, got only two interviews and was accepted to exactly zero schools, he felt like a college running back who thinks hell go to the Patriots in the second round and is stunned when hes relegated to playing in the CFL.

Vijay Chokal-Ingams hair grew back after he had been accepted to and attended medical school. Hes pictured here in his white coat in 2002.Photo: Vijay Chokal-Ingam

My moment of clarity came at 3 in the morning at the Golden Nugget Diner on the North Side of Chicago as we sobered up from a party. He admitted his predicament and once I picked my jaw off the table, I resolved that I would do anything within reason to avoid his fate. Or maybe not within reason.

Now I was terrified. What were my chances of admission to medical school?

In the early 1990s, the Division of Community and Minority Programs of the Association of American Medical Colleges devised Project 3,000 by 2000. This program set the quantitative target (a quota official or unofficial) of increasing minority enrollment in US medical schools from 1,584 to 3,000 between 1990 to 2000.

Many medical schools, including St. Louis University, where I eventually attended, jumped on this program. But the question was whether, in order to achieve their quantitative goal, medical schools were compromising their academic standards, or were they simply going to aggressively recruit minority students? The work of Ward Connerly and Ellen and Jerry Cook suggested that many of the medical schools, especially those in the University of California system, chose the former option. The data suggested that the medical schools were discriminating against their Asian-American and white students and in favor of their black and Hispanic applicants.

View post:

Mindy Kalings brother: Why I faked being black

900bhp Tron Aventador LP700-4 with Armytrix Exhaust / Liberty Walk / Airrex / Forgiato mods – Video

Posted on by


900bhp Tron Aventador LP700-4 with Armytrix Exhaust / Liberty Walk / Airrex / Forgiato mods
Official website: http://www.armytrix.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/armytrix Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/armytrix?sub_confirmation=1 Inquiry: info@armytrix.com.

By: ARMYTRIX

See the original post:

900bhp Tron Aventador LP700-4 with Armytrix Exhaust / Liberty Walk / Airrex / Forgiato mods - Video

Liberty gets the better of Cleveland

Posted on by

The Liberty Panthers won their game at Cleveland on Tuesday, April 7, defeating the Indians by 10-5, while the Lady Panthers won, 6-0, over on Clevelands softball field.

Andrew Fregia hit a three-run homer for Liberty.

Hunter Anderson pitched for the Panthers, throwing seven strikeouts. He also went 2-3 at the plate, earning 2 RBIs.

Austin Walker hit a triple. Trevor Pierce, Reid Williams, and Miles Hortman each got two hits apiece. Dakota Whittaker and Colby Hale each got a base hit. Walker and Clark Mangum each earned a couple of RBIs.

In the softball game, Libertys Haylee Ford hit a triple in the top of the seventh, driving in two runs. Andee Geter, Kamryn Parker, and Katie Harris each hit doubles.

Parker doubled in the first inning to score Geter from second and then came home herself on a forced run. Geter hit her double in the second and Harris made hers in the third, but the score remained 2-0 until the seventh inning.

In the seventh, Parker bunted for a base hit and stole second. She then made home on a single hit by Kurstin Martin. Martin went to second and then third on two walks before taking home on a wild pitch. Then with runners on second and third, Ford hit a line-drive triple to right field for two runs.

Liberty pitcher Kaitlyn Slack threw six strikeouts. Clevelands Olivia Rivera threw eight strikeouts.

Rivera also got one of the Lady Indians two hits in the game. She singled on a grounder in the bottom of the sixth and made second when Brittany Daniels connected and reached first on an error. Before that Kayla Nelson had singled on a hard daisy clipper to center field in the second inning.

The rest is here:

Liberty gets the better of Cleveland

Volokh Conspiracy: Paul Krugman claims there basically arent any libertarians

Posted on by

In a recent post , famed economist Paul Krugman claims that there basically arent any libertarians out there because public opinion breaks down neatly along a liberal-conservative spectrum where almost everyone who favors government intervention in the economy is a social liberal and almost everyone who is skeptical of it is a social conservative. But Krugman cites no data to support his conclusion. And, in fact, extensive survey data contradicts it.

The relevant evidence has been catalogued by David Boaz, polling guru Nate Silver (who is far from being a libertarian himself), and economist Bryan Caplan. Depending on what measures you use, anywhere from about 10% to as many as 44 percent of Americans hold generally libertarian views in the sense that they favor strict limits on government power in both the economic and social spheres. I believe the lower estimates are more credible than the higher ones. But even the former are still a substantial fraction of the population.

Most of these people arent as consistent and thoroughgoing in their views as libertarian intellectuals are. But the same can be said of most conservatives and liberals in the general public relative to intellectual advocates of those viewpoints. At least within the Republican Party (which is a major focus of Krugmans post), the percentage of libertarians is rapidly increasing; younger Republicans are much more libertarian on social issues than their elders, while still being skeptical of government intervention in the economy.

Krugman also claims that almost no one holds views that are the opposite of libertarianism: combining social conservatism with support for extensive government intervention in the economy (he calls such people hardhats, though public opinion researchers more commonly call them populists). This too is clearly false. As Boaz and Caplan note, surveys show a substantial number of people who fall into that category. In recent years, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum both ran campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination on such a platform, and both attracted substantial support. Perhaps even more telling, George W. Bushs policies as president included a combination of social conservatism and the biggest new welfare state program in some forty years, as well as a major expansion of federal government involvement in education. Bush and his advisers clearly believed there were enough hardhats out there to make this program politically viable. In Europe, the combination of social conservatism and economic interventionism is even more common than in the US, as witness the recent resurgence of parties such as Frances National Front, which combine right-wing nationalism with support for a large welfare state. As a libertarian myself, Im no fan of hardhat/populist ideologies. But I cant deny that there are large numbers of people who support them.

Admittedly, Krugmans claim might be right if we interpret his framework literally. He defines libertarians as people who combine social liberalism with the view that there should be no social insurance. As David Boaz notes in his critique, the latter is an extreme definition that would exclude such prominent libertarian thinkers as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek (both of whom were willing to accept a strictly limited welfare state); it would also rule out the vast majority of those people who hold roughly libertarian views in the general population. But if Krugman means that definition literally, it would also prove there are no conservatives either. After all, very few people who consider themselves to be conservatives favor the complete abolition of the welfare state, as opposed to its restriction to levels smaller than that favored by the left. In the 2012 election, the GOP even ran on a platform attacking Obama for supposedly cutting Medicare too much.

Its also possible to try to justify Krugmans claim by arguing that most of those people who hold seemingly libertarian views havent thought carefully about their implications and are not completely consistent in their beliefs. This is likely true. But it is also true of most conservatives and liberals. Political ignorance and irrationality are very common across the political spectrum and only a small minority of voters think carefully about their views and make a systematic attempt at consistency. Libertarian-leaning voters are not an exception to this trend. But it is worth noting that, controlling for other variables, increasing political knowledge tends to make people more libertarian in their views than they would be otherwise.

Finally, Krugman is wrong to suggest that the difference between supporters and opponents of more extensive government intervention in the economy is solely or even primarily about social insurance that breaks down traditional structures of authority. In many places, early expansions of government intervention in the economy were in part intended to reinforce rather than break down traditional structures of authority, which is one reason why it was often pioneered by right-wingers like Otto von Bismarck. More recently, there are have been many forms of government intervention that tend to benefit the relatively affluent and and well-connected interest groups at the expense of the poor. If you dont want to take my word for it, read Krugmans own recent columns on zoning and farm subsidies.

In his critique of Krugmans post, Bryan Caplan suggests that Krugmans neglect of readily available evidence in this case gives us reason to doubt his reliability more generally. I dont go quite that far. As I see it, this is yet another case where a pundit gets into trouble by pontificating on issues outside their expertise.

Even if you are a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist like Krugman, its easy to go wrong in commenting on a subject you may not have much knowledge about. Moreover, in dealing with such issues, we are more likely to act like political fans and default to simplistic frameworks that make it easy to feel good about our own views, while dismissing those of the opposition.

In this case, postulating a simplistic one-dimensional distribution of political opinion enables Krugman to claim that virtually all of the people who oppose his views on government intervention in the economy do not, in reality, love liberty, and also to ignore the fact that many people who endorse a large welfare state also have illiberal social views. These assumptions make it easy to divide the world into good guys who want to break down traditional forms of authority and bad guys who want to maintain them. But, however comforting it might be, this approach fails to capture the true distribution of political opinion.

Read the original here:

Volokh Conspiracy: Paul Krugman claims there basically arent any libertarians

Rand Paul on why a "libertarian-ish" Republican can win

Posted on by

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, says he's one of the most conservative members of the Senate on issues like spending, taxes and demanding balanced budgets. But there's no denying that he has a whole other set of what he calls "libertarian-ish" issues that define his political ideology.

In an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, Paul said those issues include a belief in privacy and a reform in the criminal justice system to make sure everyone is treated fairly under the law.

"We still have a large problem in our country that, if you are black, you're not always being treated fairly under the law. And I want to fix that," he said.

Paul - who announced last week that he is running for president in 2016 - has been a vocal proponent of trying to make the party more inclusive. He says he's not finding resistance among other members of his party as he tries to do that.

Play Video

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be bogged down by scandals, includ...

In a separate interview, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said the GOP is working on expanding the map of states where they can win.

"There's no doubt that we have to be about perfect. And the other side can be about good. And so the fact is that we do have the higher burden," he said. "When I talk to people every day, even people who are trying to defeat me in the nomination process, come up and say, 'Oh, yeah, but we do like that you're trying to make the party bigger.' So I'm not finding much objection from Republicans," he said. "It means not just showing up once every four years, five months before the election. It means talking for two and three years, in these communities, about things that we have in common before you go in and sell the final product."

Paul noted that he has traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee as part of these efforts.

"I've tried to say to the African-American population: One, I'm going to fix the criminal justice system. Two, I believe in your privacy. And three, I believe in economic opportunity," Paul said.

The rest is here:

Rand Paul on why a "libertarian-ish" Republican can win

Bloons TD 5 173 Floating Islands Schwer – [ Deutsch | German | Gameplay | Let’s Play ] – Video

Posted on by


Bloons TD 5 173 Floating Islands Schwer - [ Deutsch | German | Gameplay | Let #39;s Play ]
MODERATION: ZockerAndiLP PLAYLIST: http://tinyurl.com/q2jfx26 KANAL ABBONIEREN: http://goo.gl/7DqoYh Inhalt: Bloons Tower Defense 5 ist wie der Name schon sagt ein Tower Defense Game.

By: Gameplay Deluxe

Original post:

Bloons TD 5 173 Floating Islands Schwer - [ Deutsch | German | Gameplay | Let's Play ] - Video