>> ^Crosswords:
I'm convinced the people who are still convinced Obama isn't a natural citizen are equivalent to Flat Earthers.


Not surprisingly they are many of the same people.

Good Stuff! NO. Great Stuff!!

The deer is going to cough up a hairball.

Original on the sift:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Controversial-Israeli-Cell-Phone-Commercial

*findthumb

>> ^ponceleon:
Hehe, pretty good, but they need the Burger King collector's cup tie-in!


It's brilliance like this that make me wish I could up-vote a comment more than once!

I can't stand the Sea Shepherd Society/Paul Watson and I hate Whale Wars. Why? Because the Sea Shepherd Society is actually hurting their own cause and Whale Wars is glorifying it.

Let me explain. I lived in Japan for eight years and I saw that every time the Japanese whaling fleet was attacked by the Paul Watson's group sales of whale meat went up in Japan and the resolve to continue hunting strengthened. The sales of whale meat has been falling for years in Japan, to the point now where there is over 1000 tons of frozen whale meat, some of it going back 12 years, in government freezers. The government can't give it away, but they try. If this trend continues it just won't be financially viable for Japan to continue whaling.

I taught at a university in Japan and I would ask my students if they eat and/or like whale meat. The vast majority of my students (90%+) said they didn't eat whale meat (however almost all of them had eaten whale meat at some point, usually served to them in their elementary school lunches, of course provided by the government). Almost the same number said they didn't like whale meat. Then I would usually give them the above statistic and ask if Japan should continue whaling, again a big majority would say "No". However, when stories about the Sea Shepherd Society attacking Japanese whalers hit the news (and it hit BIG TIME), attitudes would change. Then most of my students would say Japan should continue whaling. This was not just found in a university setting either. Editorials and opinion letters to newspapers would echo the same feelings.

In direct response to the Sea Shepherd's attacks on Japanese whaling ships supermarkets, restaurants, street vendors, etc. would suddenly begin carrying whale meat. More schools would serve it in their lunches (kids don't get a choice of what they can eat at school, one meal for everyone), and a restaurant in Osaka made headline news when they began to sell 'whale burgers'. There was a line around the block for those burgers and many of the people in the line made it clear that they were there as a giant 'fuck you' to the Sea Shepherd Society for attacking the Japanese whaling fleet.

As I said above Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society are hurting their own cause. What they need to do is put more effort into better information campaigns within Japan. Record and photograph what's going on then use Japanese bloggers and YouTube to get the info out there. This worked very well when the Sea Shepherd Society and others documented the Taiji Dolphin Hunt:
http://www.seashepherd.org.uk/taiji/taiji_sscs_in_taiji.html
http://www.savejapandolphins.org/

Many people in Japan were shocked to find out that Dolphins were being hunted by Japanese, and the hunt now gets regular news coverage in Japan which has led to Japanese themselves protesting.

Pacifism has been so ingrained in the Japanese people since the end of WWII that using even mild violence to get what you want will assuredly turn the average Japanese person against you and whatever cause you are promoting, even if the cause is a 'good' one.

This fight will be won only if the Japanese people can be turned against whaling and make it too expensive for the Japanese government to continue to fund the whaling fleets, it won't be won by using the tactics of the Sea Shepherd Society.

Sorry for the long rant, but you can probably tell that I feel strongly about it.

It's funny, but it's just not shallow and mindlessly hyped enough to reflect today's media.

And what's with Hannity's comment that 37 million people still won't be covered, I've heard that before from the right wing. Where is the info to back that claim up? I seriously doubt it exists.

For a long time I've been wondering why many of the proponents of health care reform aren't using one of the tactics that Tom Arnold is employing in this clip. When Hannity claims there will be nightmare 'problems' with government run health care, Tom Arnold simply points out that those problems already exist and are actually worse under the present system.

When I saw the original comment about 'purity' by Kilmeade I thought, "OK, that's pretty stupid and totally inappropriate, but he's just had one of those moments when he opened his mouth but his brain wasn't engaged, he shouldn't be smeared as a racist on the basis of this one comment" (I'm not sure if he's made other questionable comments). All he needed to do was to say 'I'm sorry'.

However, the fact that it took him 12 days to apologize really pisses me off, and makes me think that my first reaction was probably wrong. So, fuck him and his apology!

As far as the kitten is concerned it's a fight to the death!

*discard

>> ^NadaGeek:
how did this not make it?


Exactly! It's friggin' Iggy Pop, people!!!

Sock it to me!