The Humble Libertarian original

There's no such thing as a stupid question. Let's just agree that we can't be sure it's a message from God. And then ask ourselves: "But what if it was?" for the sake of argument. Well if it was definitely a message from God... What do you think the message would be? Okay well what if the first thing that flashed into your mind after you read that (if anything) actually was the message from God? Might give you some critical insight to ponder that. One thing that flashes into my mind is that we seriously don't have enough control over the Moon. It's just flying around in circles up there willy nilly. It's one of the few aspects of nature that mankind hasn't yet subdued, as we were ordered to do by God Himself. And it's going and casting shadows on us while we're trying to go about our business! Ya know? Up there mocking us. Did you know the Moon is drawing a big X over the United States? No joke. You c...

Last year, a trio of New York researchers claimed humans had already lived as long as they possibly could. About 115 years, said Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers, that's the maximum human lifespan. Now a group of Canadian researchers challenges that assertion, saying its possible human existence may be boundless. "It does not mean that we know there is no limit. But because we can detect no limit it is possible that indeed there is no limit," said McGill University biologist Siegfried Hekimi. "Average human life span keeps increasing dramatically and maximum human lifespan seems to follow. I see no statistical or demonstrated biological reason how we would know that this must stop." - USA Today, How long can humans live? (June 28, 2017)

Stefan Molyneux breaks down the truth behind circumcision, including details on the procedure, it's history, rate of occurrence, claimed medical justifications, relation to masturbation, negative consequences and its morality.

We are the only species on earth that cooks its food - and we are also the cleverest species on the planet. The question is: do we cook because we're clever and imaginative, or are we clever and imaginative because our ancestors discovered cooking? Horizon examines the evidence that our ancestors' changing diet and their mastery of fire prompted anatomical and neurological changes that resulted in taking us out of the trees and into the kitchen. Loved the food porn and music. Especially of people eating it. Delightful and funny. Fascinating to consider just how huge a technological advancement it was for our ancestors to begin using fire, cooking food, and eating meat. Cooking is a useful and pleasurable external enhancement of our digestive system and process. We might be here because our ancestors tried something fun and new.

The Truth About Circumcision [Video] By: Stefan Molyneux Stefan Molyneux breaks down the truth behind circumcision, including details on the procedure, it's history, rate of occurrence, claimed medical justifications, relation to masturbation, negative consequences and it's morality.

Scientists have come up with a way to make whole brains transparent, so they can be labelled with molecular markers and imaged using a light microscope. The technique, called CLARITY, enabled its creators to produce the detailed 3D visualisations you see in this video. It works in mouse brains and human brains; here the team use it to look into the brain of a 7-year-old boy who had autism. This is just-- so cool.

Such an interesting interview on Stefan Molyneux's Freedomain Radio with Dr. Stuart Shanker. Key takeaways: Babies are born with all their neurons, but few connections. The stimuli they experience helps grow the connections and wire the circuitry of their brain. Their interaction with their parents is crucially important in helping them to grow well-ordered circuitry so they develop into successful children and adults. Specifically, soothing behavior from the parents helps teach them to grow connections that allow them to "self-soothe" and properly deal with stress and pain as they become more independent. Arousal and aversion are two reactions babies have to stimuli. Arousal is a response to stimulating factors and helps them develop curiosity and engagement with their environment. Aversion is a response to painful over-stimulation. Both of these reactions require a liberal amount of nurturing interaction with the parent to grow the baby's brain circuitry ...

As Voyager ventures out into the furthest reaches of our solar system, reaching a new region , I highly recommend the following video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's Authors@Google talk on Pluto and our solar system-- specifically the history behind the human family's understanding and classification of the solar system. It's soooo cool: Yeah, he wants more funding for NASA. No, I don't think that's a good thing. But I can still enjoy his vast knowledge and artful storytelling. One of my favorite quotes from the video came immediately before one of my least favorite quotes, during the Q&A when someone asked a question about children and funding for science education: "We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives, telling them to shut up and sit down." Awesome. Very libertarian, specifically Stefan Molyneux / unschooling movement libertarian. "Plus, Obama put science ...

Newt Gingrich is definitely regretting the commercial he once made with Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. It was 2008 and Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project cut the commercial, which featured former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sitting on a couch with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We don’t always see eye-to-eye, do we, Newt?” said Pelosi. “No,” answered Gingrich, “but we do agree– our country must take action to address climate change.” Now, as Newt Gingrich seeks the nomination of a political party whose members are often skeptical of man-made global warming concerns, he’s not seeing so “eye-to-eye” with his adversary from across the partisan aisle any longer. Late last year, Gingrich called the commercial “The single dumbest thing I’ve done in years.” He even chucked a chapter of his book on the environment from a “conservative” perspective. So what changed? 2011-12 Newt finds the actions of 2008 Newt completely inexplicable, superlatively “dumb” even. Between then and ...

In a major milestone for advocates of marijuana legalization, The Journal of the American Medical Association has published the results of a study which found that casual marijuana use does not harm lung function. It was just a few months ago in October that the California Medical Association adopted a position urging the legalization of marijuana at its annual meeting. At the time, I reported that the California Medical Association acknowledged in its position that marijuana carries health risks, not unlike the use of nicotine and alcohol, but qualified that it should also be legal and regulated like nicotine and alcohol, arguing that the effects of prohibition have caused more harm to public health and families than the potential risks of marijuana use. Even if you don’t completely agree with it, that position seems reasonable enough, and it’s a position that more and more health experts and even law enforcement officials are beginning to adopt. But, the findings in t...

Remember the "ClimateGate" scandal I covered two years ago ( here and here )? Here's Ed Morrissey's recap at HotAir.com : "Two years ago, a group calling itself FOIA.org dumped a treasure trove of e-mails from climate-change advocates and researchers that revealed abundant evidence of data manipulation and dishonest attempts to silence and discredit critics. Called “Climategate,” the exposure greatly damaged the standing of the scientists involved and their public statements. Now the same group has celebrated the second anniversary of the Climategate release with another release of 5,000 e-mails, which have only begun to be parsed by interested bloggers." So it's happening all over again , and this time the media has jumped on the story lightning fast. Here are just a couple of the earliest findings as bloggers sift through the cache of compromised emails: (3115) Mann: By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year rec...

Doctors back euthanasia in severe dementia case : 'A 64-year-old woman suffering from severe senile dementia has become the first person in the Netherlands to be given euthanasia even though she could no longer express her wish to die, the Volkskrant reports on Wednesday. Euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands under strict conditions. For example, the patient must be suffering unbearable pain and the doctor must be convinced the patient is making an informed choice. The woman was a long-time supporter of euthanasia but became unable to make this clear as the disease progressed. Nevertheless, a medical committee approved her right to die, the paper says. The case has serious implications for Dutch euthanasia law because it means patients who are no longer able to state their wish can still be helped to die, Constance de Vries, who acts as a second opinion doctor for euthanasia cases, told the paper. The woman, who died in March, left a written statement when she was fully ...

Invented by a Chinese pharmacist in 2003, e-cigarettes are a remarkably effective solution to nicotine addiction in cigarettes smokers. One Italian researcher found that in 6 months of e-cigarette use, nearly a quarter of his sample group of 40 "hard-core smokers" had quit smoking altogether while over half cut their consumption of cigarettes by at least 50%. But the nanny statists aren't going to let a promising solution of effective harm reduction stand between them and their hatred of capitalism and independent individuals finding happiness by using something that an enterprising inventor created for profit. John Tierney reports in the New York Times : 'But there’s a powerful group working against this innovation — and it’s not Big Tobacco. It’s a coalition of government officials and antismoking groups who have been warning about the dangers of e-cigarettes and trying to ban their sale. The controversy is part of a long-running philosophical debate abou...

Read this short cartoon explaining the results of an experiment a group of scientists conducted on monkeys, and you'll see exactly why it's so hard to actually change things that need changing. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

" Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle " --that's the headline. PARIS — Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade. ... Figuring out the structure of proteins is vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them. But a microscope gives only a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of one-dimensional scrunched-up spaghetti. Pharmacologists, though, need a 3-D picture that "unfolds" the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs. This is where Foldit comes in. Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, it is a fun-for-purpose video game in which gamers, divided into competing groups, compete to unfold chains of amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- using a set of online tools. To the astonish...

What's especially satisfying about this news is how arrogant, how condescending, how incredibly smug the global warming alarmists have been all along in accusing the skeptics of being scientifically ignorant, backwards, hill billies clinging to our Bibles along with our belief in a flat world held up by pillars on the backs of elephants. The way many of them painted us, we would confine Galileo to his house all over again if he were alive today. I ask the climate alarmists now, what do you say to these new NASA data? How do you respond to these observable data and their implications, you who claim to represent science? You know the scientific method has more steps to it than just hypothesis, right? Ask any fourth grader. You've actually got to do some observation of the real world. You've got to take measurements. You've got to test the observed results against your hypothesis to see if it was correct... and your models were incorrect. No, that's not the opinion o...

From my most recent CAIVN article: "Any one of us could be an addict at any time. Addiction is not fundamentally a moral failing -- it's not a disease of weak-willed losers. When you look at the biology, the only model of addiction that makes sense is a disease-based model, and the only attitude towards addicts that makes sense is one of compassion." -David Linden, professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the chief editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology Read the entire article at CAIVN . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Optimism about a cure for HIV/AIDS is the highest it's been since David Ho pioneered the Highly Active Antiretroviral Treatment (HAART) drug cocktail in 1996. Just last week, the powerful antiretroviral drug Truvada was shown to be effective not only as treatment but also as prophylaxis: among participants who used the drug daily, there was a 90 percent reduction in infection, roughly comparable to using a condom. In light of this exciting news, Big Think spoke with some of the world's leading AIDS researchers, physicians, and activists about the state of the epidemic and the ongoing search for a cure. This three-day series will highlight the cutting-edge scientific research, examine the dangers of stigma, and investigate the political and economic challenges of battling HIV/AIDS globally and domestically. Read the rest at Big Think . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

"Ever meet a kindergartner who seemed naturally compassionate and cared about others' feelings? Who was cooperative and didn't demand his own way? Chances are, his parents held, carried and cuddled him a lot; he most likely was breastfed; he probably routinely slept with his parents; and he likely was encouraged to play outdoors with other children, according to new research findings from the University of Notre Dame." Read the entire article at PhysOrg.com Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Even though the earthquake that struck Chile Saturday was nearly 100 times more powerful than the one that struck Port-au-Prince, Haiti this January, the Chilean death toll was only in the hundreds, while Haiti's was upwards of 200,000 according to estimates. Why the difference?