Yep Its Stupid

TV producer and award-winning writer Travon Free issued an apology early Thursday for multiple old tweets that were derogatory toward Jews and joked about Adolf Hitler. Mr. Free , the producer of HBO ’s “Camping” who won two Emmys as a writer for “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” said the nearly decade-old tweets that resurfaced this week were a poor attempt to be funny. “Got cut off in traffic by a Jew. WWHD? (what would Hitler do?)” the writer tweeted in 2010, before deleting it on Wednesday. “Happy 122nd birthday Hitler. It’s a good thing you’re not around to see how much you motivated the Jewish community to run everything,” read a now-deleted 2011 tweet, according to a screenshot  posted  by the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council. Several other offensive tweets remained on Mr. Free ’s account as of Thursday afternooon. How come no one ever channels their inner Hitler anymore? — Travon...

“I’ll give you ten bucks to eat that.” That was the dare facing 17-year-old Liam McGuigan on a school footy trip on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. His response: “It won’t kill me.” Liam picked up a slug, put it in his mouth and swallowed it. He now realises how incredibly lucky he is to be telling his story, particularly this week, after a Sydney man died from doing the same thing . In the days that followed Liam’s dare, the Year 12 student started feeling lethargic. His muscles stopped working. “I went to hospital and they thought it might be my appendix. So they took that out,” he tells news.com.au from Brisbane. Doctors were wrong. Within hours he was in the back of an ambulance, stripped naked, covered in ice to reduce his soaring temperature. Liam’s body was shutting down because the slug he swallowed was carrying a parasitic worm. When the slug died, the worm found a new home in his spinal cord and “basically a...

UPDATED : Authorities have identified Ian David Long, a former Marine, as the gunman who killed at least 12 people, including a sheriff’s deputy, and injured dozens more in a mass shooting at a bar and restaurant in Thousand Oaks, about 40 miles west of Los Angeles. Long was found dead inside the Borderline Bar & Grill, a popular country-and-Western venue that was hosting its weekly college night when the attack occurred late Wednesday. Ventura County Sheriff Geoff Dean said Thursday that Long is believed to have killed himself. The 28-year-old was known to authorities through minor incidents, including a traffic accident and a case of battery at a local bar, in which Long was the victim. Sheriff’s deputies also visited Long’s home last April following reports of a disturbance. “They went to the house; they talked to him. He was somewhat irate, acting a little irrationally,” Dean said, adding that mental health specialists were called out to s...

President Trump waves during a campaign rally in Indianapolis, Ind., November 2, 2018. (Carlos Barria/Reuters) Downplaying a good economy in favor of an appeal to the base on borders breaks all the rules. L ast Friday’s jobs report was just the latest in a series of statistics that allow Republicans to boast of a booming economy. The unemployment rate is at a 50-year low. Hiring is up. Wages are up. And growth is at a robust rate that few thought possible a few years ago as President Barack Obama presided over an anemic post-recession economy. Advertisement Advertisement Under normal circumstances, such good economic news would be the centerpiece of any incumbent party’s midterm-election campaign. But that’s not the case for Republicans in 2018. Some GOP candidates are talking about the importance of not allowing a Democratic Congress to get in the way of an administration whose tax cuts and, even more important, regulatory-reform policies have fueled the economic ...

Before social media, urban legends were spread by sensationalist supermarket tabloids like the "National Enquirer". by Erik Lacitis These are busy times for America"s most popular hoax-debunking website: did the UN declare war on America and order Trump to let the migrant caravan in? False. Did Pharrell Williams send President Trump a "cease and desist" letter for using his song Happy ? Mixture of true and false. Did a "new deadly spider" species kill several people? False. The command centre for Snopes.com is in a 97-year-old frame house in Tacoma, a mid-sized port city south of Seattle. From his bedroom office, his laptop balanced atop some books and a cardboard box, Snopes publisher and chief executive David Mikkelson runs the site and manages 16 staff spread across the US, half of them fact-checkers, the rest on the business and web side. All those viral hoaxes, spread by social media, have created a market for fact-checking sites, and Snopes, w...

A former MMA fighter’s ‘stupid idea’ of running 29K on his 29th birthday has opened up a new platform for ‘strong men’ – who feel they are not allowed to speak about mental health issues – to share their struggles. Suicide is now the single biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK – with 84 taking their own lives every week. Most of those men were never diagnosed with mental health issues and suffered in silence. Social pressure and norms suggesting men should be ‘strong and silent’ stops many from seeking help, which is something ex-professional fighters Chris Baugh and Charlie Watts are standing up against. Charlie ‘the Ox’ Watts is fighting to get men to speak about mental health issues (Picture: Manor) ‘We are ex-athletes and ex-fighters and we are aware that we are seen as “strong men” and people have ideas about what that means. We want to show that you can be a fighter and you...

A couple of years ago, a Florida man was fined US$48,000 (RM199,728) by the Federal Communications Commission for employing an illegal signal jammer during his commutes to prevent nearby drivers from using their cellphones.  I can relate. I bet you can too.  It"s illegal to have a cellphone in your hand while behind the wheel in California and at least a dozen other states. But that doesn"t stop people from doing it.  Not a day goes by without encountering thoughtless, self-entitled fools endangering themselves and those around them by talking or texting while on the road.  That"s why I"m calling on the auto industry to install signal-jamming technology in steering wheels so drivers (but not passengers) are unable to give in to the temptation of playing with their gadgets while piloting 2,000 pounds of steel at speeds topping 60 miles an hour.  Admittedly, the matter is complicated.  “If it"s an option for parents to get their kids off on the right fo...