What's disgusting is the hypocrisy of people, who applaud the constant bombardment of Israel with missiles, and then rise up in outrage when Israel moves to defend itself.

Israel shows amazing fucking restraint for a country that had hundreds of missiles launched at it.

Hamas fired over 400 rockets at civilian population centers.

You would be singing a very different song if your home town came under constant bombardment. 50% of Israeli kids living near the Gaza Strip have post traumatic stress disorder. Fuck Hamas and the horse they rode in on.

There are plenty of studies and tests done on alt med. What makes something alt med instead of medicine is not if it is efficacious (as you falsely believe) but if it is part of the prevailing medical tradition. This is the definition used by the FDA, the NHS, the WHO, and every other major health organization in the world. So if you don't like the definition of alt med, take it up with them.

We have plenty of studies on the efficacy of St. John's Wort. It is already 'approved'. End of story. Your 'simple answer' would require some company to pony up millions to billions of dollars to get it to pass FDA approval, when it is not patentable and so they would not be able to recover the extreme costs. Your 'simple answer' would mean simply removing all of these supplements from store shelves and forcing people into taking meds that are ten times as expensive with the same efficacy.

John Oliver is wrong.

Yes, some supplements (say, the milk thistle found in Rockstar Energy Drink) are just snake oil. But other supplements have clinical effects, such as St. John's Wort (http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/st-johns-wort) for minor depression and, arguably, glucosamine and chondroitin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_on_glucosamine_and_chondroitin)

Here's the thing though - if the FDA regulates supplements in the same way they do drugs, the price of supplements would go through the roof. It costs 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS to get a new drug approved by the FDA. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/01/24/shocking-secrets-of-fda-clinical-trials-revealed/)

So the supplements market provides a very useful alternative, something that John Oliver simply doesn't understand. You can either pay ten bucks for a 300 pack of St. John's Wort, or you can pay ten times that amount for the FDA approved antidepressant, Zoloft.

The sad truth is that the FDA really does overregulate the drug market, which is one of the major reasons health care is so fucking expensive in this country. John Oliver lives in magical fairly land where regulating supplements would come with no cost, but in reality regulating it would just close down the only inexpensive drug system we have in the world.

Scientific studies do exist for supplements (I read through the studies while my wife was at UCSF Pharmacy School taking their mandatory alt med class), and if you do your research, you can distinguish the snake oil from the supplements that have real effects.

IBS, eh? Yeah, Bill Maher shitting on everything sounds about right.

Kick saves have always been legal in beach.

These highlights reminded me how much I hated the trilogy, especially the third.

Wasn't that bad a shot. Ramsey is a pussy.

She's skilled, but not the best I've seen.

My former raver best man did better, off the cuff, with fireworks this last 4th of July.

Cenk is a floating turd in a septic wastebowl.

>> ^Xaielao:

City tap water tastes like hell, and most bottled water (which more often than not IS tap water) contains salt to make you thirsty so you'll drink more. Don't believe me? Check that fancily named Dasani bottled water's ingredients. Makes me so glad I have a number of local springs that produce very high quality water that I get delivered monthly.


Uh, no. I actually have a mineral tester (Christmas present) for water. Bottled water is better than tap in terms of dissolved solids, and unless you think that bottled water companies are lying about the trace mineral contents in their water, the amounts are too small to matter. There's far more salt in Coke, or worse, V8 (http://www.livestrong.com/article/273911-sodium-levels-in-soft-drinks/).

The person making the video thinks that in "functioning democracies" the tap water is always safe to drink. Well yes, it is. On average. Unless you happen to live in a house that gets mud in the water supply, like a friend of mine, or my in-laws' house (guess who gave me the tester?) in Los Angeles where the tap water is light yellow, and fizzes. I only drink filtered or bottled water there.

Heh, I taught kids TKD for a number of years. This isn't too out of line with what normally happens.

Sometimes I'll get on my knees and tell them to punch me in the chest, and they can't do it. I'm not moving. I'm not blocking. They just can't do it.

If there's any man you don't want to give you a tongue lashing, it's Barney Frank...

Do the authors think you can get a primetime TV spot for the cost of a cheeseburger or something? Maybe a Super Bowl spot for the price of two Top Ramens and a slab of bacon?

ANY time there's scarcity you need money to regulate it, and the more scarce something is (like primetime TV minutes) and the more people value it (like primetime TV minutes) the higher the price will be.

Fucking study economics, idiots.

This is pretty similar to some of the "kung fu" demonstrations I participated in at Shaolin in China.

It looks a lot more impressive than it actually is.

I hate campus police.

That said, I'd have a lot more sympathy for the OWS folks if they weren't a bunch of hippies.