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Donald Trump says torture 'absolutely' works

Two things:

First, no it doesn't.

Second, f*** you, you orange f***ing f***er! You make me embarrassed to call myself an American.

General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
« on: January 22, 2017, 07:45:25 PM »
Found another stupid video in the mentions of that other video:

The stupid, it burns.

1. If you are the legal guardian of a child, especially an infant, withholding food from them to the point of starvation would be considered child neglect, and thus a form of aggression.

2. Property is the fruit of ones labor. It is literally an extension of their humanity. Property rights are human rights. Also, that extreme example is just that: an extreme example. No one would defend shooting a child for stepping onto a neighbor's lawn. No sane court would defend such a case.

3. That's not how wages work. Does this person not Econ 101. If nobody is forcing you to work on that factory, nobody is forcing you to labor on their behalf.

General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
« on: January 21, 2017, 10:06:43 PM »

Sweet Celestia! This video contains so much straw that you can barely find a needle in it!

Yo, Shane, can we have Lord Killian rip this strawman a new one? Consider this a request.


Gwyneth Paltrow believes that women can receive magical powers by sticking jade eggs up their hoo-hahs.

It's your typical celebrity-endorsed New Age woo.

I--I've got nothing.


You'd think that with the GOP set to strike down government-mandated healthcare, that they'd push the free market as a viable alternative; and yet they just struck down a bill that would allow Americans to purchase cheaper medicine from other countries:






And as for the man who helped strike down the bill, Cory Booker (a Democrat), to no one's surprise, he's bought and paid for by big pharmaceutical companies:


Granted, the guy is a Democrat, so unlike the Senate Republicans, he doesn't pretend to care about the free market. But he is supposed to pretend to care about healthcare, and thus preventing customers from access to affordable medicine is the exact opposite.

So a pox on both the houses of the Democrats and Republicans for voting this bill down. They have the inevitable deaths of Americans on their hands.

General Discussion / Re: Imagining A More Libertarian Future
« on: January 12, 2017, 04:05:27 PM »
Next Topic: High Speed Internet

More than 30 years ago, the very idea of having computers interconnected with one another through a "world wide web" was still a relatively novel concept with endless possibilities. Now, most of those possibilities have since been fully realized, as the internet has become a common staple of our everyday lives. The fact you're reading this post proves that. Now we use the internet for everything from communicating with other people, buying and selling goods and services, watching movies and television shows, listening and downloading music, and receiving breaking news.

The internet remains an important aspect of our lives now, and it will only continue to do so in the near future, especially with more and more smart devices, from our refrigerators to even our light bulbs, becoming connected to the "internet of things." As such, ensuring that every single person receives the fastest, most reliable service must be high priority. Sadly, that priority still remains low.

Despite 98 percent of Americans currently having access to broadband, that still leaves two percent of Americans without such access. Many of these people live in rural areas, where 39 percent of the population lack a proper high speed connection.

Even then, Americans experience slower, more expensive service compared to their international peers. As PBS explains: "For an Internet connection of 25 megabits per second, New Yorkers pay about $55 — nearly double that of what residents in London, Seoul, and Bucharest, Romania, pay. And residents in cities such as Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Paris get connections nearly eight times faster."

The reason for America's slow and limited access, according to Gizmodo, is two-fold: "technical restraints holding back the bandwidth needed to support modern-day internet traffic, and a lack of competition between the major carriers selling internet service to the end user." Not only does our telecommunications infrastructure still rely on outdated technology, but what little capable infrastructure exists is controlled by only three major cable companies, thus providing them a virtual oligarchy with limited competition.

As always, politicians have suggested government policies by which to address these issues. Many have argued that government should take the initiative in creating broadband infrastructure. In 2015, the USDA proposed $85.8 million in funding to strengthen and provide access to high speed broadband for rural areas. Many cities have proposed and created "municipal broadband" projects, with city governments providing high speed internet; however, as Reason Magazine details, many of these services were inefficient and inevitably sold to private companies.

So what's the best way to address the problems with America's high speed internet? How can we reach rural Americans without such service? Should the government create broadband infrastructure, or should we wait until cable companies consider such infrastructure profitable enough to create themselves?

And what about the lack of competition among what few cable companies provide broadband? Should the government break up these "monopolies"? Should the government provide its own municipal broadband service to compete with private companies? Or should laws and regulations be relaxed as to better facilitate new competitors?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

I'm sure most of you have already heard the story about four Chicago teens kidnapping a mentally-disabled kid and beating him up--all on Facebook Live!

That, in and of itself, is infuriating enough, but perhaps even more infuriating is the Chicago PD's response to it.

This is what Chicago Commander Kevin Duffin had to say about the incident:

“Kids make stupid mistakes, I shouldn’t call them kids, they are legally adults, but they are young adults and they make stupid decisions. That certainly will be part of whether or not we seek a hate crime, determine whether or not this is sincere or stupid ranting and raving.”

Kids make stupid mistakes?

Stealing a candy bar during a free candy giveaway is a stupid mistake.

Running through a red light and crashing into another car mere seconds before the light would have turned green would be a stupid mistake.

Getting caught cheating during a test, only to learn that you were copying the answers to the worst student in the class, would be a stupid mistake.

Livestreaming yourself and your friends torturing and beating up a mentally-disabled person whom you kidnapped while flinging racial slurs at him?

That is not a mistake. That is straight up psychopathy!

Idiot Extraordinaire somehow feels like too kind of a title to give him.

General Discussion / Imagining A More Libertarian Future
« on: January 05, 2017, 02:57:34 PM »
Currently, I'm running a series of open thread posts on  my blog to elicit discussion on future technologies and developments and the best political/economic policies by which to help bring them about. I've decided to repost those open threads here as to prompt discussion here as well.

Here's my first post thus far about self-driving cars and infrastructure:

What were once considered science fiction are quickly becoming reality. Companies like Tesla and Uber are currently developing their own autonomous vehicles, with Google set to release its own Waymo model as soon as this year. As many as 10 million self-driving cars are speculated to be on the road by 2020. In fact, self-driving cars are expected to become so commonplace that human driving may be prohibited!

But while self-driving cars are awesome, they’re only as good as the roads they’ll be driving themselves on. Sadly, our crumbling roads are not in the best shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded American roads with a D+, and the Global Competitiveness Report ranked America 16th in the world for overall quality of infrastructure. Most Americans, ranging from business to labor, agree that our roads need to be fixed. The question remains: “How?”

Politicians from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have suggested increasing infrastructure spending (potentially through a gas tax hike) to help fund construction projects. However, conservatives and libertarians have pointed out that most government infrastructure spending tends to be grossly inefficient, and many so called “shovel ready jobs” are revealed to be corporate boondoggles. As Steve Chapman from Reason Magazine explained: “Pouring funds into highways, bridges, airports, dams and other projects is easy. Spending money wisely is hard.”

So the question still remains: who will build the roads? Should the public sector invest in increased infrastructure spending, or is there a better, more efficient solution to be found through the private sector? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

So, yes, feel free to reply with your own thoughts and comments here.

Self-Driving Cars Will Make Organ Shortages Even Worse

That's a real headline, folks! The actual article isn't better:


Yes, those new-fangled self-driving cars will be a menace to society because less people will be dying in car accidents, and therefore, we'll end up with less organs for transplants!

Seriously, how twisted can you be when you try to spin a potential decline in traffic accidents as a bad thing?

And are we really at risk of losing potential organ donors due to self-driving cars? Even the article itself states that only 1 out of 5 organ donations come from the victim of a car crash. That means the other four do not.

But of course, what can we do if we no longer harvest organs from car crash victims? It's not like we have the technology print organs out of thin air.

Oh wait!

I'm sure most of you have already seen this video discussed by Thunderf00t and the Amazing Atheist. But here it is in all its un-glory without need for commentary:

And here's a Reason Magazine article with more context about the video. These people are as stupid as they sound:


"I have a question for all the science people. There is a place in KZN called Umhlab'uyalingana. They believe that through the magic' you call it black magic' they call it witchcraft' you are able to send lightening to strike someone. Can you explain that scientifically because it's something that happens?"

Many people laughed at this remark because, well, witchcraft is not something that happens. But according to the student, witchcraft is like Isaac Newton's theory of gravity—it's just one way of explaining the world, among many.

"Decolonising the science would mean doing away with it entirely and starting all over again to deal with how we respond to the environment and how we understand it," the student continued.

And just in case you thought to yourself that nobody in their right minds would take these folks seriously, here's a sympathetic op-ed defending them. This is not satire, folks! I wish it were:

Essentially the UCT student in the video was not saying UCT must stop teaching science, but that institutions should also take some of the unexplained, traditionally African phenomena and place them under the same microscope they would any other unexplained phenomena.  Traditional African medicine should be a field of scientific study with as much gravitas as the contents of Gray’s Anatomy (textbook not that awful TV show).

Discrediting legitimate scientific hypotheses merely because they aren’t western European is what the issue is here. Not science itself. You pretty much can’t disprove science unless you use science to counter it, much like Newton’s Third Law.

I'd say that feminist SJWs are equally as dangerous as YECs, but that would be false equivalency. Nobody in academia takes YECs seriously. However, academia as a whole is sympathetic towards feminist SJWs.

General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
« on: September 17, 2016, 06:02:41 PM »

Funny, because I'm pretty sure our cavemen ancestors had a strictly plant-based diet, and yet with our "medicine" we manage to outlive them.

Props to Charles Thomas for sharing this fail of an article on Facebook. Seriously, this is an article that exists. And, no, sadly, this is not The Onion:

Five Reasons Measles is Better Than Autism

Again, that is a real article. No, it is not The Onion. Sadly, it is not. Here's how the dimbulb who wrote this article shared it on Facebook:

Wow. If there was a dictionary entry on "projection", this image would be right underneath it. This woman is projecting so much that she can be used to summon Batman.

As for the article itself, here's a quick sample of the bogosity:

When a child gets autism? There’s no easy bouncing back. A bowl of chicken soup ain’t gonna solve this problem (though soup can help to heal autism).

Autism results in long-term neurological damage with can affect a child for lifetime, though there are children who recover through the hard work of their warrior mamas! Indeed, many studies … have found that gut health has a profound impact on the behaviors of those on the autism spectrum, and interventions such as diet and probiotic supplementation may be helpful.

Yeah, you know what's really hard to bounce back from? Measles. We're not talking about the Chicken Pox here. This was a much deadlier disease that could do serious damage to people. And as for Autism? Very few cases are the "regressive" type that she harps on about. Many of them such as myself are "high-functioning."

If you want an excellent rebuttal to this bogosity, I'd suggest reading this blog post, which does a good job smacking down the scientific ignorance and "neuro-bigotry":



Shane, I've noticed that you've yet to name Donald Trump as either a Biggest Bogon Emitter or Idiot Extraordinaire. I think this most recent comment of his should place him as IE.

This is the type of economic illiteracy we'd come to expect from Democrats--which he used to be up until 2008. I'd expect someone like Paul Krugman to say something like that. In fact, Krugbot HAS said something like that:

I'm not the least bit surprised that Trump would say something like this. I am flabbergasted that too many libertarians are actually supporting this guy. He's as fiscally conservative as Hillary Clinton! If that doesn't make him Idiot Extraordinaire, I don't know what will.

I just heard of this on Radio Dead Air's WTFIWWY Live. I can think of no better nomination:

Canadian City Plans to Track Offenders With Technology That Doesn't Even Exist

On Thursday, the tiny Canadian city of Williams Lake in British Columbia may have just beat them all with a shitty idea of awe-inspiring proportions: the city unanimously passed a motion to implant GPS tracking devices into so-called “high profile offenders” after their release from jail, so law enforcement can be aware of their activities at all times. Councillor Scott Nelson, who put the motion forward, told me over the phone that ankle-worn GPS devices don’t go “far enough,” and that chosen offenders could be harassers, sex offenders, or “people smashing stuff in the community.”

Appalling implications for civil liberties aside—the BC Civil Liberties Association has already labeled the plan a “non-starter” under Canadian law, and the Privacy Commissioner’s Office confirmed to Motherboard that it was not consulted about nor made aware of the plan—the idea has another huge flaw: implantable GPS devices do not currently exist commercially.

Say it with me, people: 1984 was not supposed to be a guide book!

General Discussion / Re: Fail Quotes
« on: January 18, 2016, 05:32:27 PM »
Some Bernie Sander supporter shared my "Average Bernie Sander Supporter" meme, and the comments are exactly what you would expect from them:

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