Hito Bito comments

"The touchdown of the unmanned lander in January was a success, but it landed at a wonky angle that left its solar panels facing the wrong way."

LOL And that deserves the title "moon sniper" because...? Oh, right. Because of the "soft wonky landing"...facing the "wrong way". LOL.

I guess if I park my car perfectly inside the lines with no trouble...but then discover I have to climb out of my window to exit because I didn't take into account the surrounding cars...I, too, am a "sniper"? LOL I'm just having fun. Keep reaching for those stars, guys...

I can't think of a more overrated band, can you? (Spice Girls comes to mind, LOL. Same era, same hysterical British corporate marketing hype).

Boring, uninspired lyrics, bland, stolen riffs and chord progressions, terrible, almost childish solos and musicianship, blatantly false packaging as "the next Beatles" when that's one of the worst insults to the extremely talented and important latter band, and with one of the lamest "frontmen" in the history of pop music. Please continue to stay "Half The World Away"! LOL

What are the inverted quotes for? China either VIOLATED Japan's sovereign airspace, or they did not.

(And they did) Just like they do everyone else's airspace and EEZ. China's disregard for the Rule of Law is all Asia's, and indeed, the entire World's, problem. China drives the World into Opposition. They need to be taught a lesson, like every bloated schoolyard bully does.

So Japan. LOL. Media screams about "MEGA-QUAKE" and (Japanese) people stock up on...(rice). Media screams about a "rice shortage" and (Japanese) hoarders stock up on rice. Media reports that (Japanese) companies have jacked up their prices by a fifth(!) from normal prices...and Japanese blame....*foreigners"!

Passive Aggressive Japan to the extreme. They crow how much money they're making off foreigners, but then slap them in the face with backhanded insults at every turn once they arrive, and seek to blame them for every (Japanese-sourced) ill known to man. Smh.

So, according to Nielsen's viewership ratings, there's been a 25% drop in viewership on Day 1 through 3 compared to Biden's snoozefest back in 2020.

Everything's fine. The new "standard bearer", a sitting incumbent VP who pretends to be running against the incumbent? who only last month half the Democrats themselves wanted to see dumped from the ticket (you remember, surely? LOL), today is the "Second Coming of the Messiah". LOL.

Worst Democrat ticket since Mondale-Ferraro. By far. Let the exposing of the long history of radical voting and Left-of-Left statements begin!

WoodyLeeToday 07:29 am JST   Isn't 7/11 a U.S. company to start with so what it is wrong with bringing it back home in north America ?

Peter NeilToday 08:17 am JSTlol, no woody.

You might want to check your facts, Peter. Operative phrase of the initial post is "to start with". And yes, Peter, 7-11 started as an American company, in 1927, becoming 7-11 in name in the US in 1946 to "reflect the new extended business hours".

It's owned by a Japanese firm now, but "to start with", as Woody rightfully stated, it, and the convenience store concept itself, started as an American creation back when Japan was still a nation in ashes post-war.

So...after screaming in the press about the legitimate and legally-required scrutiny of a Japanese firm's acquisition of a corporation, US Steel in America, suddenly the Japanese mis-apply a national security clause related to "technologies that could be diverted for military purposes" as a way of halting an acquisition...of a convenience store chain by a "foreign corporation"? LOL

Which products in convenience stores can be converted for "military purposes", pray tell? Maybe those sneaky foreigners can slip some yogurt onto the enemy's tank tracks to hinder mobility? Or perhaps the open-air stewing of day-old, sodium-bomb oden might cause tummy trouble if consumed by the unwitting opponent?!

Do as I say, never as I do. - Japan, probably

"Ex-main opposition CDPJ chief Edano eyes comeback..." Meet the New Boss....Same as the Old Boss...

After the CDP's Renho was humiliated (there's no other word) in the Tokyo Elections? And with most of politically crucial Osaka are having flipped from CDP support to the right-wing "Isshin Party"? And with support for this party at half, I repeat, half the support of "scandal-ridden" outgoing Kishida? LOL. There is no electoral math that gets the Opposition close to control of anything in 2024. (And notice I made no mention of Komeito and its 32 seats sticking with the LDP!)

But Edano, if I could offer some advice? This time, don't align your party with the Communists? Their 10 seats are not worth tainting your supposedly "moderate" party with radicalism. You already brought the quite hard-Left SDP into your fold. This move absolutely destroyed your chances the last time around, gifted Osaka to the Right, and if polls are anything to go by, August 5th saw an NHK poll where fully 64% felt "unfavourable" or "no opinion" on your party's tying-up with other opposition parties. Care to guess why??

LOL When the best thing supporters of this disastrous "games" can say is...insults for the next games not four years in the future? LOL Well...sorta says everything you need to know about the Parisian Nightmare of 2024, now, doesn't it?

Epic Fail. As overrated at the City of Lights itself. But hey, I just found more lipstick for your pig project! Keep spinning the "dream", LOL.

"Puff Piece" Personified! LOL

"Dazzling". "Enchanted". LOL Rubbish.

It was "amazing" that the best "stars" they could find for the opening were foreign imports 40 and 60 year olds who haven't had a hit in over 10 years. (Not really)

It was "astonishing" that the drag queen show "shocked" the world by mean-spiritedly mocking Christianity while steering well clear of the "religion of peace" for obvious low-hanging fruit reasons. (Not really)

It was "unbelievable" that no one at all were made ill by forcing athletes to compete in the industrially polluted and totally unsafe-to-swim Seine out of Parisian "pride". (Except many were, and some still are, sick because of it)

And it was "surprising" that a "female" boxer, disqualified by the actual sports authority in boxing from competing in their sport because, well..."she" is a MAN, with male chromosomes and filled with male testosterone, yes it was "surprising" that this person ended up pummeling every true biological female "she" matched up against, sending "feminism" ten steps back so that a patently fake "trangender" could destroy the real ladies' dreams and crushingly prove once again, that physically, a biological male IS superior to a woman. (Except is was a surprise to no one with even half a brain)

Worst Olympics Ever. Good riddance to the horrid, degenerate rubbish masquerading as "games".

"Talks tough" LOL. Meanwhile, she runs from her "Czar" label (though it's been in every major news outlet for the world to see that her campaign is, once again, lying), as she runs from her lack of interest in her border responsibilities Biden gave this inept incompetent, just as she runs from her disastrous former interview with Lester Holt (as she now runs, for the fourth week running, from ALL press interviews, though "nominated" by her party to be president) when she flippantly defended her refusal to even visit the border, smugly saying "And I haven't been to Europe, either!"

All we need now is for Harris to put aside her phony, suddenly-appearing, African-American "y'alls" and start babbling with an "authentic" Mexican accent to highlight for all her chameleon-like inauthenticity and slipperiness. LOL.

Incompetence and gaslighting defined: "Border Czar" Kamala Harris "talks" tough about an issue she didn't bother to lift a finger to do anything about for these four long years! You can "talk", but you cannot hide from your record of abject failure.

This is HUGE, HUGE news. For many reasons. The actual leader of Hamas, who celebrated the October 7th massacre from his exile, has been taken out...in Iran's capital city?? How safe do you feel, Ayatollahs, knowing that one of the most wily terrorists under your protection, inside Iran and out, has just been eliminated right under your noses?

This guy purportedly had stolen hundreds of millions, some say billions, of dollars off the "poor" Palestinian people he was supposedly "helping" through his terror and his tunnels. In the end, all that stolen money couldn't buy you a good enough hiding place, now, could it?

Israel IS dismantling Hamas, terrorist by terrorist, day after day, one by one. The "resistance" has lost, by their lights, a "giant" (even if he did spend over half his life cowering in terrorist-harboring capitals like Doha and Tehran. But hey...that's what terrorist "leaders" usually do!

"....offerings at steak-and-lobster prices"

LOL. Hyperbole much? Come on, get real. "Steak and lobster prices". LOL. Yeah, 200 yen for a cheeseburger can get you how much lobster again? Smh.

Is my math correct? At the above listed "street price", a single kilogram of coke successfully smuggled into Japan would earn (at 155 JPN/1USD) over 160,000 USD?? That would be, on average, over FIVE TIMES more lucrative than a kilo of coke smuggled into Europe or North America.

If true, one should expect many, many, MANY more attempts to cash in on this particularly lucrative, er..."yen carry trade". Demand creates supply, and the uber high prices people here are willing to pay will drive even more to try their luck.

Disgusting. Degenerate. Boring. Self-Important. It exposed how little French culture and France itself actually influences anything of real value in the present day. Throw in some trans activism, outdated and imported superannuated "stars", cheap insults of Christianity, and a splash of rain and train terrorism, and voila, you have described Angry, Irrelevant Paris 2024 in a nutshell!

Celine Dion, the Canadian? Lady Gaga, the American? LOL. Wow, talk about retro "stars". How "French". Fail.

Up until a week ago, these "lovers of democracy" were gaslighting anyone who actually listened to their own ears while the "president" exposed his absolute and indisputable cogitative decline for the entire world to hear. "We beat Medicare", Biden declared, and the "lovers of democracy" said "he's perfectly fine!!!"

Today, these "lovers of democracy" rally behind a person who, when she herself ran for president in 2020, could not get even 1% of Democrat votes, to say nothing of the nation's. She dropped out of the race before losing in her home state! Yes, Vice President Trump (oh, sorry, that's what Biden just called her only last week), Harris, the standard-bearer of less than 1% of her party's support, will "save democracy", through...a palace coup, followed by an undemocratic coronation by her party's professional bigwigs without a single democratic vote! Now a person who, by every metric, voted to the Left of Socialist Bernie Sanders while in the Senate, who Biden admits was chosen not based on the "content of her character," but on her being a non-White and female, and who now runs away from her astoundingly unsuccessful role as "Immigration Czar", has become the standard-bearer of "democracy". LOL. And 2 plus 2 is 5.

Nothing matters at all to these power-hungry people anymore...except power. Power at all costs. Power for the sake of having power. And notice: the Cadaver In Chief, having exposed his cognitive inability to function, continues to "run" the country...from 10am till 4 pm at the latest on his best days, and with weekends and holidays off! LOL.

File this farce under "comedy".

You forgot to add how Biden "Beat Medicare!!"

The lowest public approval rating of ANY president in modern history. Clap. Clap. Clap.

Such a sign of "strength"! After years of warning signs that Biden was too senile to be president, and after years of his acolytes dutifully denying those claims...he just ups and quits? LOL. Whoops! Guess we were right?

Yes, Harris, whom Biden was only referring to as "Trump" not a week ago, gets the nod...after three years of irrelevance and failure. Her only "task" Biden gave her was "the Border"...how's that going, folks? Let's not talk about how she "rose" to the top of SF then CA politics! That's a rather dirty story for a later day.

Yes, the lady who polled under 1% when she ran for Prez in 2020...that's your standard-bearer? LOL. Hundreds of millions in "Biden" donations will be returned or refunded, according to the FEC chief. You think those people are going to re-write all those checks for Kamala? (I noticed neither Pelosi, nor Clinton, nor Obama have yet to endorse....)

The Convention is going to be fun!

Not saying that the basic argument is incorrect, but to compare "New York City" home taxes to "large Japanese cities" home taxes is rather disingenuous at best.

"...some residents..." Ah, yes. That amorphous group, "some" people", "some" might say...often used to personally advance a perspective YOU want advanced.

This is 80% manufactured by the media to have something to talk about on slow news days. Do you really think "tourist attractions" have never been busy before? LOL. Have Japanese never heard of a "tourist trap" or noticed that prices are much higher there due simply to supply and demand? If you can't tell that the media creates "issues" by going out and reporting exclusively only perspectives that validate their preferred conclusions, rather than fairly reporting what a fair sample of people have to say, you've been asleep for a few years at least.

Anyone who saw how the "Mt. Fuji conbini" story was morphed by the Japanese media from "tourists" being troublesome to "foreigners" being the almost sole culprits, knows what I mean. Press would ignore the 150 Japanese youths present for whom the fad was primarily important, to zero in on the dozen obvious "foreigners" as being representative of every evil deed ALL there seemed to be doing.

When it gets to the point where your price increases aren't justified by the food you're serving...you have major problems with your business "model". "Deals" are a start, but in the end, there are now much better "deals" outside Mac...for the same price or even lower.

Mac could use a few years in the economic wilderness....but we know that won't happen. Too many willing to pony up no matter how high the price hikes go.

But but but...Tourism!

Ukraine has recently admitted that there are over 800,000 able-bodied Ukrainian males of draftable age sitting in self-imposed exile in the EU alone, and hundreds of thousands more in America, Thailand and other places. More than a million Ukrainian men simply refuse to defend their country, so much so, that Ukraine just had to introduce a ban on consular services for these expatriate draft dodgers.

According to Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba: "How it looks like now: a man of conscription age went abroad, showed his state that he does not care about its survival, and then comes and wants to receive services from this state...If anyone believes that while someone is fighting far away at the frontline and risking his or her life for this state, someone else is staying abroad but receiving services from this state, then this is not how it works. Staying abroad does not relieve a citizen of his or her duties to the Homeland. That is why yesterday I ordered measures to restore fair attitudes toward men of conscription age in Ukraine and abroad. This will be fair..."

We'll see if these million men go back once their visas and passports run out. Many have years left before they have to face such music. When push comes to shove, if an army's worth of Ukrainians will not fight while the Russians will, remind me how this turns out all sunshine and lollipops for Ukraine again?

If you haven't read this man's book, The Real Doctor Fauci, a book that was completely buried and ignored by every single major media outlet in spite of being an international best-seller for months running, you don't know 1/100th of the story of the elite orchestration of "heath" policy, fact-challenged promotion and protection of many dangerous treatments as "fully-tested" or "safe", or the abuse and political manipulation of unnecessary but coercive medical policies being regularly put into place in the US and around the world by an opportunistic, profit-hungry group of greedy grifters and corporations.

In a world where the slightest insult or factual inaccuracy is replied to with legal litigation, not a single entity has successfully challenged anything researched in his book as being false. The people like this propagandist writing this hit-piece above hate this man for pulling back their authoritarian-minded and reckless curtain for all to see. I won't vote for him because he has many other ideas which frankly are either dangerous to individual freedom or just plain dunb, but I respect him for his efforts to warn and inform whomever dares to move beyond the corporate and government sponsored narratives and seek a FACTUAL understanding of how awful Fauci and Co. truly were and are.

"Plenty of JT contributors (not me) over the years claimed that the BOJ was trapped, unable to raise its rates or otherwise tighten"

Patting yourself on the back when the Bank has moved from "Negative Rates" to "Zero Percent" rates is certainly, at the very least, premature!

ByteDance Limited (Chinese: 字节跳动; pinyin: Zìjié Tiàodòng) is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing, China.

China’s Company Law, enacted in 1993, REQUIRES companies, at Article 19, to establish a CCP Committee “to carry out the activities of the Party,” and further requires companies to “provide the necessary conditions for the Party organizations to carry out their activities."

It's not rocket science. It's right there, written into law. The CCP has a RIGHT to control all Chinese companies to do what it wants them to. BY LAW.

Well, "awards" aside, investing $250K into something that earns back 20 times that amount is a pretty decent return.

Talk. Macron is real good at...talking.

France, need anyone reminding, is, two years into the Ukraine situation like the rest of NATO, yet STILL NOT contributing 2% of GDP towards its OWN defense, as it's been BOUND by NATO Treaty to do for over a decade now. Europe as a whole now admits that, despite planning and funding for over a year, their own collective economies CANNOT provide even HALF the monthly amounts of shells that they promised to Ukraine, not even by the end of 2024!

France is already free riding on America (Mais oui, bien sur!) and Eastern Europe (all of whom, save Czechia, contribute over 2%, and with good reason next door to their East). THEY are next in line, while France is cushioned by its cordon sanitaire of buffer countries surrounding it. Yet here he is, between stuffing himself with danishes at endless talking-shop meetings, suggesting to volunteer direct human soldier intervention in a non-NATO country conflict?

Talk talk talk, mon tres petit Macaroon. Talk up your fever dreams of putting "boots on the ground", which if it turns out to be like your other Treaty Obligations, will most likely be boots NOT Made In France!

"Biden is far in the lead now - he won by 11 million votes."

"11 million votes"? LOL. Check your math...or your sources? Or...both!

By the way, pro tip. In presidential elections in the US, the popular vote is NOT how people become President. I'm surprised you're ignorant on this fact.

Still dodging those HISTORICALLY HIGH Gallup Unapproval ratings for Biden, are we? You do that at your own peril...just as you dodge those Democrat-spoiler Third Party candidates getting on state ballots nationwide even as we type!