Hmmm... guys, the fellow being pranked is a professional manzai comedian. Knowing Japanese comedy shows - like this one - he is already scarred. In fact, this one is famous for making an incredibly weird grimace while crying out "Kuyashii desu!", i.e. "I'm vexed!". Example. Also, knowing the Japanese comedy world, while they are not lawsuit happy at all (like the rest of Japanese society) they do get the consent of the comedians' managers before pulling any kind of prank, since the talent agencies that represent the comedians do care about their image. Other pranks include diving in near-boiling water, getting your apartment ransacked on live TV while you're on the other side of Japan, etc.

>> ^Crake:
"All the other large and small tribes and peoples have the first mission to perish in the revolutionary world storm."
and here's the definition of the verb "zu untergehen" - compare the original German title of the movie The Downfall: "Der Untergang"
Sorry to harp on, but optimistic mistranslation of Marx' works isn't something the world needs


Sorry to harp on, but your lack of proficiency in the German language isn't something the world needs either. "Untergehen" can be, in some instances, translated as "perish" but only in the sense of material/conceptual destruction over a period of time. For example, you can say that a culture has perished or a now-ruined city comes from a civilization that has perished. I.e.: "untergehen" is figurative and much more soft than perish. In fact, the primary meaning is "to sink". Compare untergehen and perish in the Pons dictionary. Also remember that the film "Der Untergang" is translated as "Downfall" and not "Holocaust" or "Perish" or whatever.

A more literal translation is this: "All other tribes and peoples, large and small, have from their inception this Mission, to sink in the revolutionary global storm." It simply means that all cultural differences between men and women over the world will be erased when the proletarian revolution takes effect globally. They thought once a critical mass of workers got together, the proletarian revolution would suddenly take the world by storm and bring equality/liberty/autonomy, hence the metaphor here of cultures going down the drain in favor of the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

>> ^hpqp:
Yeah, the double cherry on top incest finale is sorely missing from this epic tale of morality!

Yeah, I mean wtf is he going to do with a pile of salt for a wife?!!!11 Good thing he had daughters, I guess? But really, he's the only guy in town who's not gay and god can't even give him a son. What's is up with that?

>> ^EndAll:
Uhh.. what proof is there that he did that?


Glenn Beck himself would reply: "But what proof is there that I did not do that?".

Licenses and insurance is required for lots of things you have the right to, like property. Are they illegal? No. It's just that this guy is a dimwit and doesn't understand the law. State roads = state law. More generally: your property = your rules of access. The state's property = the state's rules of access. If he doesn't like it, he should go change his state's laws. Of course, they'll lose federal funding for roadway construction if they drop the license requirements, but hey, you can't have your cake and eat it too (cause then the cake becomes a lie).

Without the rhetoric, the whole argument goes like this:
-The question to Hitchens: Isn't the jihad fueled by the Western powers' action in Islamic land over the whole history of colonization (i.e. 1000+ years if we count the crusades)?
-Response by Hitchens: No, it is fueled by the religious content of these actions, i.e. the things jihadists are most upset about are not related to colonization per se but to the perceived desecration/irrespect of their religion's rightful place as the OTR (Only True Religion). Jihadists don't care about the atrocities committed in the name of Islam, only of those that are committed against Islam (and their definition of "atrocity" is very broad). That's why the establishment of an independent country in East Timor with a christian majority is to them worse than the genocide that islamists committed with the help of their former western allies.

Let's remember that Al-Qaeda was formed just as the Cold War stopped and the U.S. started to take action against their former Islamic allies. What the U.S. did to Iran doesn't count since they are Shi'ites, not Sunni like Al-Qaeda. Also, Al-Qaeda doesn't care about the Turkish government massacring Kurds, they care that it is a secular government in a Islamic land. Same with Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraqi insurgency is another matter. An insurgency is inevitable in any invaded country. This one is used by Al-Qaeda as a testing ground and as a continuation of their war against the U.S.A. They don't care about the freedom of the Iraqis since they also are Shia Muslims in majority. They only care that the Sunni minority be free to be as Islamic as they want. They also want to destroy the U.S.A. and a war of attrition is always a good way when you're overwhelmed in terms of raw power. So in brief: the Iraqi insurgency is fueled by Al-Qaeda, not by the occupation (though the invasion/occupation was the spark, so to speak).

The real adaption here would be for the cat to stop lapping and turn his head upside-down so that he can gulp the water. Of course, it wouldn't help him drink from a puddle. Then he'd have to make a straw with his mouth like we do or revert to old school low-fi lapping.

Historically, meat was a shortcut to a fuller diet for proto-humans. Not every human population had access to a full array of vegetables that could procure all amino acids, fat (e.g. better bioavailabilty of omega-3-6-9) and proteins necessary for the development of a higher metabolism. In fact, some think that cooked meat was the greatest accelerator, both because of the changes made to the meat by heating it and for the conservation properties of the heat treatment (basically proto-pasteurization).

Of course, using meat nowadays can be considered wasteful, but what we should do is think how to better exploit the available resources (i.e. the domesticated animals) rather than how to stop using them. For example, we could harvest the methane produced by cows, etc. Instead, vegans want to "liberate" the domesticated animals thus letting them take up valuable real estate with no benefit to us. I mean, where do the vegans think all these animals will live when liberated? At the bottom of the sea? Plus, domesticated animals can only live in the ecosystem that they have been engineered for, meaning they can only live in a human-centered environment. If we would let them go, we would have to re-engineer them for wild life... talk about waste!

I hate it when they speak with a Chinese English accent and think they're mocking the Japanese... it literally grinds my ear.

>> ^Yogi:
I consider myself Agnostic I suppose, and I really think most religious nutcases are morons and shouldn't be taken seriously. However, he's picking a target that I just can't approve of, these confused teenage girls. It's not cool to me, makes him sound like a douche, and I love this guy on Bill Maher.
I don't know I just don't see how mocking Christians helps atheism in anyway, seems like just a childish thing to do. Kinda tired of hearing Christians being hated on everywhere, and I certainly don't like their stupid antics. It's just, some shit gets old.

The fact that these "confused teenage girls" do have anal sex despite their sex educators telling them not to, and rationalizing it by saying anal sex preserves your virginity, shows that they are in fact very lucid about the whole thing. It's simply a loophole in their religious upbringing (read: brainwashing) that they exploit. Children are not stupid, adolescents even less. It's not their fault if society continue to infantilize them. They are simply doing what they can with what they have in order to respond to their growing and often sudden sexual impulses.

I've had their concept knee pads for a while now. This really is the best thing since sliced bread, after the transistor of course.

Impressive, but does it run Linux?

>> ^peggedbea:
>> ^brain:
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Following all of the same logic, should we have socialized car insurance?

No!

We should. Private car insurance gives scenarios like this (in Quebec at least): when you have an accident, your insurance company pays for the damage you have done to the other car, not your own. So far so good. However, if you bump into a passerby, the SAAQ (public government insurance) pays for personal "damages" which are in addition to healthcare costs already covered by the public healtcare system. It pays them both to you if you were injured in the collision and to the passerby. OK. But the weird thing is, that if your car is damaged by your hitting the passerby, HIS CAR INSURANCE will have to pay for the repairs on your car, because the SAAQ only ever covers personal injuries : property damage is covered by (mandatory if you own a car) private insurance! This is in spite of the fact that he was on foot and notwithstanding which party is responsible for the accident : you could have been drunk driving and it wouldn't make a difference. If the passerby doesn't have property insurance (i.e. if he doesn't own a car or doesn't own a house with blanket property insurance, etc.), he pays out of his own pocket. This has been tested in court (with a drunk driver claiming thousands of dollars of damages to the family of his dead victim) and found perfectly logical and true to the letter of the law on property insurance policies. If the SAAQ covered both personal injuries and property damage on cars this scenario couldn't happen.

Of course you can modify the laws to cover this scenario, but more laws equals more potential loopholes and generally testify to how rotten a system has become. It also empowers the judiciary and unduly enrich the lawyers. The moral is : the SAAQ should cover property insurance insurance on cars since it is mandatory. The same logic should be applied to all types of insurance found to be mandatory. I do not like top-down representative governments, but between them and the mini-tyrannies called corporations, I prefer the former.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:
2. Better health care? Who says? Not people in the UK...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1209034/The-babies-born-hospital-corridors-Bed-shortage-forces-4-000-mothers-birth-lifts-offic
es-hospital-toilets.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new
s/article-1208970/Man-collapses-ruptured-appendix--weeks-NHS-doctors-took-out.html

Let's see what wikipedia has to say about this tabloid trash that is the Daily Mail : "The Mail takes an anti-EU, anti-abortion view, based upon "traditional values", and is pro-capitalism and pro-monarchy, as well as, in some cases, advocating stricter punishments for crime. It also often calls for lower levels of taxation."

Wow... That's like using Fox News as a "non-biased" source to show that every American thinks healthcare is fine as it is in the U.S. Of course the British, like everyone else, call for better everything. After all, the government is FOR THE FUCKING PEOPLE. Do you not get that? It is your right to be critical of the government. And given the choice, people will complain more than they will send flowers. After all, when all goes well "they're just doing their jobs".

What imstellar28 describes is simply a way to leech off : he's proposing a way in which only those who have money (like him, presumably) can leech and game the system. Why is that? Because by having the option of not paying insurance, he can still count on the chronically sick/fearful/socially minded/provident to maintain healthcare facilities and services, drug manufacturing, R&D, etc. for him. So he only pays if he needs to, but in the meantime he doesn't contribute to the establishment of the future services he will inevitably need at some time.

What I'd like to see for those who don't want to pay insurance, is the whole bunch of them building their own hospitals, making their own drugs, forming their own medical staff, etc when they finally need it. That is to say, they couldn't use the facilities already in place. After all, they didn't want to shell out for them! And if you look at it that's the real "american way" : when a community was in need, everyone in the same predicament pitched in to build what was needed (provided remuneration of course). But I bet they'd sooner let each other die than do this though, because they've lost their ways : the rhetoric of the individual communities fending for themselves has now become the excuse of selfish individuals trying to run off with their neighbors' money. "E pluribus unum" my ass!