36 ISIS Fighters Killed by MOAB Strike, Canada May Legalize Marijuana, Syringe Vending Machines Hit Vegas: A.M. Links

DOD / Polaris/Newscom

• The U.S. bombing in Afghanistan Thursday was supposed to hit an area containing 600 to 800 active ISIS fighters. Defense officials said the actual number of ISIS members killed was 36; no civilians were harmed.
• Because "extensive questions surround … President Trump's first 'Muslim ban'" and "the government has refused to hand over information that would allow the public to evaluate how the ban was implemented," the American Civil Liberties Union "has filed dozens of lawsuits around the country to demand detail," the group announced Thursday.
• New vending machines in Las Vegas will dispense clean syringes. Customers will have to register with non-identifying details and be limited to two new needles per week.
• The Trump administration overturned an Obama-era rule that prevents states from withholding Title X family-planning funds from Planned Parenthood for ideological reasons.
• Canada is plotting the path to nationwide legalization of recreational marijuana sales.

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Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

Canada is plotting the path to nationwide legalization of recreational marijuana sales.

Right after they finish these Doritos, man.

[Bee Tagger]

If ever there was a time to plot a path to nationwide legalization of recreational meth sales.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Without nationalized dental care, the Canuckistanis can't afford to do meth.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

But just picture all that speeded up apologizing.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

Canada is plotting

I stopped reading there.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Too bad, because they just gave the go-ahead to commence Defence Scheme One.

THEY ARE TAKING THE HIPSTERS FIRST!

[ThomasD]

Thanks for the link, never heard of that one.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda....

[Rufus The Monocled]

Hello.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

Hi Rufus. Have a wonderful Friday!

[Bee Tagger]

Customers will have to register with non-identifying details

Social security number wasn't meant to be a national id, so just use that.

[gaoxiaen]

My SSN was my military ID number. Just sayin'.

[Fist of Etiquette]

The Trump administration overturned an Obama-era rule that prevents states from withholding Title X family-planning funds from Planned Parenthood for ideological reasons.

If only they were doing it for budgetary reasons.

[ThomasD]

You can't do that for budgetary reasons! There is plenty of money to go around, just ask the Federal Reserve.

[Fist of Etiquette]

New vending machines in Las Vegas will dispense clean syringes.

Full of penicillin.

[Bee Tagger]

limited to two new needles per week.

women in the crowd be like "if he's lucky!"

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

What is 16 million divided by 36?

[Bee Tagger]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=16,000,000+/+36

[Fist of Etiquette]

You can't put a price on good press.

[some guy]

More than the lifetime expected earnings of an ISIS member, that's for sure.

[Mike Laursen]

Not an original thought with me, but we could pretty much buy off everybody in the Middle East by cutting them a check every month, for way less than we blow on ineffective war spending.

[CatoTheChipper]

Cost of using the world's largest non-nuclear bomb to kill 36 ISIS members who were somehow located in Afghanistan? $444,444 per terrorist.

Aggrandizement to Trump's ego for doing so? Priceless.

[Shirley Knott]

"Plotting" seems a bit over the top for something that's gotten so much discussion. I don't think run of the mill plots are discussed in newspaper and web articles, at least prior to launching the action being plotted.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

I think they meant like on a chart.

[Zeb]

Plots aren't necessarily secret or nefarious. Kind of an odd word choice, though.

[This Machine Chips Fascists]

Plot your course to comprehension.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Because "extensive questions surround ... President Trump's first 'Muslim ban'" and "the government has refused to hand over information that would allow the public to evaluate how the ban was implemented..."

One Obama-era rule that Trump didn't have to overturn? Sunlight before signing.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

Thus explaining the ever more elaborate conspiracy theories about the Russians and God Emperor Trump:

Women Who Don't Have Babies Go Crazy
A girl recently told me that she hopes her female dog would breed. Otherwise, the dog may have a false pregnancy where she pretends she is pregnant and shows increasingly unstable behavior. This was the first time I learned about the scientific condition in dogs called pseudopregnancy. I was immediately struck by how similar it is to the behavior of adult human women who don't have babies, especially ones who live in the affluent West. After studying this condition extensively, I speculate that women who don't fulfill their biological program of having children exhibit the disturbing signs of false pregnancy by becoming insane....

[gaoxiaen]

NEEDZ MOAR MALTHUSIAN EXERCISE!

[Longtorso, Johnny]

Beta Of The Month: Masculinity Degeneration
...The ideal BOTM candidate is a beta male who has shamed himself by his actions, whether out of ignorance or misplaced belief in his pickup prowess, with women he likes. He is not a complete loser like the omega male; the beta's failures with women stem from his self-defeating behaviors. He is fixable, to an extent, which makes his appearance in the Beta of the Month series all the more shameful ? he had alternative paths, but he chose poorly....

[Zeb]

The funny thing (or a funny thing) about this sort of idiocy is that they seem to think that "betas" should all be "alphas" if they can be (or that's what this post suggests anyway). Do they really think that the world would be a better place if all men were the same kind of misogynist assholes that they are?

They also seem to make an odd assumption that dogs are a good model for human social interaction and reproductive biology.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Do they really think that the world would be a better place if all men were the same kind of misogynist assholes that they are?

Eat some brotein, bro! Get swole!

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

Is this Longtorso's blog?

[Libertarian]

Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where all the males are alphas.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

More like Lake Brobegone, am I right?

[Princess Trigger]

"...for ideological reasons."

I support Individual Liberty "for ideological reasons."

WTF Brown?

[Zeb]

I think you are misreading it. Obama's order forbade states from defunding providers for reasons other than their ability to provide services properly. "ideological reasons" was part of the description of Obama's order, not the description of Trump's reason for changing it.

[Rufus The Monocled]

The sentence was clunky because I read it both ways but thought it applied more too Trump.

[Zeb]

I guess it works both ways. I try to be charitable, so I assumed it was intended in the more descriptive, less editorializing sense.

[Libertarian]

Countless lawsuits fighting Trump's "Muslim ban" regarding immigration, yet apparently he's free to bomb the shit out of them overseas before they get in the refugee queue.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Charging Bull sculptor says Fearless Girl distorts his art, so he's fighting back

Art fight!

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

I call her The Dinner Is Getting Cold Girl.

[Libertarian]

Art fight? Isn't that how Jackson Pollock got his start?

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

The Mastermind Behind Coachella

The allure of the musical paradise that Tollett has conjured in the desert helped him sell almost two hundred thousand tickets to last year's Coachella, over two weekends, grossing ninety-five million dollars. Now, with Desert Trip?"Oldchella"?Tollett had pulled off a twin-weekend festival with a staggering hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar gross, the largest ever music-festival box office.

It seems so sticky.

[Juice]

Ugh. ate too much Coachella and I need to get to the Tollet.

[OBJ FRANKELSON]

I always thought Coachella sounds like it should be a venereal disease.

"Man, that chick gave me a case of the Coachella Drip!"

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Norway Is Building the World's Biggest Tunnel for Ships, and It's Absolutely Massive

The Stad Ship Tunnel, which is expected to cost some US$312 million to complete, will enable cruise liners, freight ships, and smaller vessels to take an underground shortcut through the Stad peninsula ? avoiding the rough winds and waters of the Stadhavet Sea, the most treacherous stretch of Norway's coastline.

When complete, the tunnel will stand some 49 metres (160.7 feet) tall, with a width of 36 metres (118.1 feet). Construction could begin as soon as 2019, and if the schedule doesn't blow out, the tunnel might be open for ships by 2023.

It will cost one-third more than the Golden Gate suicide net.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

"World's Biggest Tunnel" was my girlfriend's nickname in college.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

A glimpse of the Johnny Longtorso origin story?

[Rufus The Monocled]

Perfect for migra...er, refugees. Ahem.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Norway Is Building the World's Biggest Tunnel for Ships, and It's Absolutely Massive

The Stad Ship Tunnel, which is expected to cost some US$312 million to complete, will enable cruise liners, freight ships, and smaller vessels to take an underground shortcut through the Stad peninsula ? avoiding the rough winds and waters of the Stadhavet Sea, the most treacherous stretch of Norway's coastline.

When complete, the tunnel will stand some 49 metres (160.7 feet) tall, with a width of 36 metres (118.1 feet). Construction could begin as soon as 2019, and if the schedule doesn't blow out, the tunnel might be open for ships by 2023.

It will cost one-third more than the Golden Gate suicide net.

[Libertarian]

I saw this a few days ago. My main reaction was, "how the hell are they going to build this thing for only $312M?"

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

I would like for some engineering nerd commenter to explain that as well.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

What is 312 million divided by 16 million?

[OldMexican Blankety Blank]

New vending machines in Las Vegas will dispense clean syringes.

Somewhere, our Lord and Savior, Jeff Sessions, is crying.

[ThomasD]

Not an engineer, but as tunnels go this one is not especially long, just large. My wild guess is that they will do it in a process similar to underhand mining technique - where they use tunnel boring equipment to cut the uppermost portion, fix that with concrete and embedded steel to create a vault, then dig the rest of it out much like an open pit mining operation with coffer dams at both ends.

[Cyto]

Wait, true statement? Putting a suicide net on the Golden Gate bridge cost a couple hundred million bucks?

Expected to be finished by 2021, the project initially estimated to cost $76 million now has a price tag of over $200 million. Priya Clemens, spokesperson for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, says that increase is partly due to the "experimental" nature of the project, which led designers to underestimate how much it would actually cost to attach a net of this size across more than a mile and a half of open water and windy air.

Holy crap! How many suicides would this prevent? Wait, scratch that..... how many suicides would this alter?

Last year alone, a known 39 people died jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge

(from the same article)

Hm..... So assuming a portion of those folks decide to just give up on the idea of suicide rather than picking some other method, what's the cost per life saved? What number do we use in the transportation industry?

Jeez, that seems like a lot.

Then again, what is the cost of fishing 50 bodies a year out of the bay. That's gotta be in the millions too....

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Regarding the suicide net, I am curious as to how they would go about getting someone out of the net. I assume jumping off a bridge, landing on a net suspended over shark-infested waters and waiting for someone to crawl out to save you is fucking terrifying.

[Zeb]

That was smart of you to post this twice so Longtorso would get trapped in the first one.

[Zeb]

Also, that's pretty damn cool. I didn't know ship tunnels were a thing.

[Zeb]

Except for secret pirate bases in caves, of course.

[OBJ FRANKELSON]

And the lairs of Bond villains.

[Curt]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/14/.....index.html

Bye, Felicia.

24 hour might be some kind of record.

[OldMexican Blankety Blank]

During the investigation, a second video surfaced, shot from another angle by another witness.

How can our brave men and women in blue do their jobs of beating people into bloody pulps with all these cameras around? There ought to be a law!

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

Lena Dunham on 'Girls', gender politics and growing up

This is the motivation behind a planned tour of Lenny writers to red-state cities where, Dunham says, they want to "engage tough feminist broads". "It's easy to be like, 53 per cent of white women voted for Trump and I'm fucking ashamed."
She sips her juice and goes on: "It's also a reality that a lot of those women are dealing with pressures, problems and fears that I will never experience. So, attempting to sort of like shake hands across the aisle and understand and inhabit the psychology of women who are distrustful of the government as they've seen it, who are distrustful of other women, who vote along the lines that their husbands and fathers have always told them to."

"I felt like a lot of young people, of young women, were not understanding her [Clinton's] power and just how interesting, forward-thinking and formidable she was. And so I felt like I could potentially be a voice to let people know that you can be a millennial with generally radical politics and be super-psyched about Hillary Clinton," Dunham says.

[Libertarian]

I guess I'm a lot like Lena Dunham, because I can't figure out the psychology of women who *aren't* distrustful of government. How much more evidence do you need, Lena, that government doesn't care about you and is, actually, harmful to those it pretends to help?

[Zeb]

How the hell does anyone think you should trust the government?

Is this a new thing? It seems like it's getting more common for people of the left to just declare that they think the government's great and anyone who disagrees is just nuts or racist or something. You used to get a lot more "the government has lots of problems, but we still need it". Which is a bit incoherent if you ask me, but at least it's not a flat denial of obvious reality.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

I felt like a lot of young people, of young women, were not understanding her [Clinton's] power and just how interesting, forward-thinking and formidable she was.

If you have to explain that a very public figure is interesting, said figure is not interesting.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

I felt like a lot of young people, of young women, were not understanding her [Clinton's] power and just how interesting, forward-thinking and formidable she was.

If you have to explain that a very public figure is interesting, said figure is not interesting.

[Rufus The Monocled]

I'm flabbergasted at how anyone - even people like Dunham - can characterize Hillary as 'forward' thinking.

Truly baffling.

She's as backward a twat as they come and doesn't give a single rat's ass about people. She's in it for Clinton Inc.

Period.

[Red Rocks Baiting n Inciting]

It's both hilarious and infuriating that upper class urbanite shitlibs like Dunham always act as if interacting with non-shitlibs is like a remake of Gorillas in the Mist. It's a marker of just how pampered and insular their social world and their ideology is, and how provincial and immature they are emotionally.

[OldMexican Blankety Blank]

New vending machines in Las Vegas will dispense clean syringes.

Somewhere, our Lord and Savior, Jeff Sessions, is crying.

[gaoxiaen]

Someone please crucify him.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

The above Lena Dunham interview was on the Financial Times website. When I cut and pasted, I received this message:
"High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our T and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email [e-mail] to buy additional rights."

[OldMexican Blankety Blank]

You have done the right thing. Now, go and sin no more.

[Meh.]

Yeah, it won't let me read the article unless I subscribe 🙁 The suspense of wondering if Lena would explain how Hillary was interesting and formidable is killing me, but I have to pass this time.

[Crusty Juggler aka "Chad"]

The Trump administration overturned an Obama-era rule that prevents states from withholding Title X family-planning funds from Planned Parenthood for ideological reasons.

The ban on birth control begins. You don't own my body, white man!

[Curt]

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/1.....-stack-dom

United admits the flight was neither oversold nor overbooked. "there's really no word for it", said a spokesman.

Yeah, it's really hard to condense we-took-a-seat- back-from-a-paying- customer-and-then- had-him-beaten-and-physically- removed-from-the-plane- for-our-own-convenience-and-profit into a single word.

[Chipper Mourning Will Grigg]

I thought the word was "re-accommodation."

[creech]

He was beaten? I thought he hit his head as he was being dragged out of the cramped seating row. I'm surprised anyone could be removed from airline seats if they resisted, without some injury resulting. It's not like a protester going limp in the street and having the cops pick you up.

[Cynical Asshole]

36 ISIS Fighters Killed by MOAB Strike

Wow, a whole 36 "ISIS fighters." And we know for a fact that they were all "ISIS fighters" how, exactly? I wonder how much it cost to drop that bomb? Something tells me there's probably more cost effective ways to kill 36 people.

[ThomasD]

Well yeah, but only a cynical asshole wouldn't care about which 36 people he killed.

[Fascist loofa-faced shitgibbon]

I guarantee at least one of those people were from craft services.

[Juice]

Yeah, what the hell would "fighters" from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria be doing in Afghanistan?