Kagemusha comments

@randomnator Webbe clearly needs more attention; as in he is seeking more attention from the audience by talking over the award winners. And targetting a typo is simply childish. Just saying.

I wish more places would take this on.

Was flabbergasted to see that ad. In this day and age, to have such blatant racism in an advert was rather surprising. And from the company's responses they are still missing the point. Typical business apology of : "we're sorry you got offended, but we didn't do anything wrong".

Does it have added sugar? Strike it off the healthy list. Is it actually nutritionally healthy? Put it on the healthy list.

Any system that denotes avocados as unhealthy is a flawed system to start with.

Good

“Only I get to decide if I’m humiliated or not – why would people assume I am humiliated by my own breast, nipple or body?” she told the paper.

This is such an important line. Yes Madonna did a silly thing but to assume that nudity is something to be ashamed of is a societal problem in general. Maybe it was a little embarrassing for the fan but for others to jump on the band wagon and declare her humiliated is presumptuous.

Unfortunately since it is Africa the African Union has more say than NATO or the UN in what is getting done in many of the states experiencing Civil War. There are charters that respect sovereignty of African States and only allow AU peace keeping forces to be deployed if the state requests them.

AU (and UN I believe) peace keeping forces are in Nigeria but it's not the kind of 'war' that a military force can fight and win; The enemy is amorphous. The targets too spread out and indefensible.

Nevermind adding to that fire the extra fuel that is UN/AU peace keeping forces being accused of multiple problematic behaviours.

The West expresses heart ache and disbelief but unfortunately in Africa this is just another day for many of us.

I think the main benefit is that the space is not usable for anything else. The panels are not occupying space that can be used for other things like farming or forestry.

The secondary benefit is that they reduce the evaporation from the reservoirs and conserve the water used for agriculture in the area.

I don't think any cooling benefit is gained.

Somebody else said it already but it deserves being said again. When a country refuses you entry and requests you leave and you refuse, then they order you to leave and you appeal the court order, then they seek to deport you and you resist...you are not a prisoner. You are illegally and obstinately over-staying your welcome.

No matter how worthwhile your message might be you are coming across as a bit of a tool when you consider your own refusal to leave a country as imprisonment.

Publishing the study is worthwhile so long as all the caveats are in place. It is mostly inconclusive for anything other than saying that on the short term of 4 nights of sleep deprivation followed by 2 nights of sleeping in negated the negative effects of the 4 nights.

It states that long term benefits are not conclusive. That getting consistent sleep is always better. All in all a bit of a nothing study but certainly not problematic.

For the Trump comments : There is a wide gap between placing visa restrictions on people who have traveled to an area in contention and placing broad-stroke restrictions on a religious group. Just saying.

"Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!" ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Unfortunately the masses might proclaim you to be a very convincing chicken that makes them feel less guilty about eating their fast-food.

@Vernie It is rather common for relationships to "start" after a student graduates. Sometimes it means that a relationship developed whilst the student was a student but usually it just means that the relationship became more serious after graduation.

Teachers are a huge part in students lives in Japan and especially a homeroom teacher or PE teacher would spend a lot of time with their students and get to know them very well. In this case I wouldn't care if the relationship started before she graduated so long as there was no problematic behaviour whilst she was in school.

Then again, he is being accused of revenge porn. So maybe not an upstanding citizen. This kind of behaviour is despicable.

“Because of a potential distributed denial of service attack, we are temporarily suspending service on our websites to prevent further risks.”

The purpose of a DDoS attack is to make a website inaccessible...so suspending your service seems a little redundant.

It would be like saying that because I had a punctured tire I decided to deflate the tire. Same end result but one maybe makes you feel like you did something.

Nothing to be alarmed about. As stated by at least one sane comment above, this is a simple matter of one nation trespassing into the territorial waters of another and being detained temporarily for investigation.

Not even newsworthy. What would be newsworthy is why these vessels "drifted" into Iranian waters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Confirmation bias much? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the perpetrators of any of these crimes were migrants. But because everybody wants to blame the migrants, they will.

Cologne’s police chief Wolfgang Albers said no arrests have been made yet. “We don’t currently have any suspects, so we don’t know who the perpetrators were. All we know is that the police at the scene perceived that it was mostly young men aged 18 to 35 from the Arab or North African region.”

Integrating such a large number of migrants is no easy task. Equally difficult is trying to integrate into a society that appears to actively not want you there in the first place. I think many of us in Japan have experience a small manifestation of this kind of societal non-acceptance.

This is not a problem with migrants being terrible people. This is simply a problem with migrants being regular people and people vilifying them for it; People in desperate situations lie, they manipulate the rules to better their situation.

It is outmoded. Very definitely.

Women are not delicate flowers who are incapable of opening doors, or enduring standing, or pulling in their own chairs.

The simple courtesy of doing these things for any person will never be outmoded but the patriarchal superiority inherent in the idea of performing these tasks specifically for women as a man should no longer be a thing.

I hold doors for anybody. I cede my seat to anybody I feel would benefit from it (essentially the priority seat list, but sometimes if I see two friends enter a train and there is only one space beside me I may give them my seat to share together if I am getting off soon.

The law aims to change the standards of the industry so with any luck nobody will be getting fined.

In fact we shouldn't even be concerned with a fine when the result of the current industry trends is both damaging to the models and damaging to the public.

The situation arises that even if other cases prove that he did do these things to other women, it can still be true that he didn't do them to other women. Which legally fits the defamation label.

But to the common sense layman it is incredibly problematic when the crux of the defamation case lies with his status and his reputation being tarnished by the defamation when in fact it is tarnished by the other cases simultaneously.

I will admit not really following the case closely so I do not know if any cases have actually reached solid verdicts but if individuals had jumped on the bandwagon with malicious intent to simply squeeze money out of him they should be outed. Knowing how the law works in general I suspect that some legitimate cases will be shutdown by the party with the bigger wallet.

A little late to the bandwagon but thought I'd throw in my 2 yens worth.

Firstly I feel it is worthwhile to mention that I am South African, my family is non-religious, and I am non-religious, in general I have never had any issue with any religious groups. I feel that our upbringing and our social contexts are heavily influential with regards to our views and opinions so I feel it is worth mentioning.

In no particular order and directed at nobody in particular I just wanted to throw in a few things I thought of as I read through comments.

1 - 'holiday' comes from 'holy day' (haligdæg in Old English to be more precise. of course that means very little since words alter and change over time and even though the etymological root of 'holiday' may have connotated a sacred or religious day that was observed by refraining from labour, the current connotation of the word no longer holds that meaning.

2 - Somebody had a rant about Christmas and Easter...one being a co-opted Pagan festival and the other religious. Correction: Both Christmas and Easter are co-opted Pagan festivals. For the same reasons really. Christian rulers needed to bring Northern pagans into the fold and it was easier to co-opt their festivals than to make them stop practicing their rites and rituals. The Gods changed but the festivals didn't.

3 - We don't call a Menorah a 'holiday candelabrum' so there is absolutely no reason to call a Christmas tree a 'holiday tree'. It borders on the absurd to even consider insisting that linguistic change.

Just wanted to get those three points out of the way.

The simple fact is that somebody wishing me Merry Christmas is no more invasive than somebody wishing me a Happy Chanuka, Happy Diwali, or Ramadan Mubarak. Although I would be a little confused if I was not observing Ramadan but I would happily extend the sentiment back to that person.

The problem arises when it becomes a externally forced. When a committee gets together and says that one thing should be said or that another thing should not be said. So long as no harm is done to anybody in saying a thing then that thing should be allowed to be said. To each their own.

The emergence of calls for 'Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" is due to an awareness that the dominant culture should not necessitate the cultural practices of a society. It is an attempt at inclusivity that I feel falls flat when it is aggressively pursued. It is similar to the move towards gender neutral terms that attempt to reduce assumptions and expectations in society. If we ask a new male friend if he has a girlfriend we are placing the assumption that he is heterosexual upon him. This subtly oppresses on that person if they do not conform to the dominant norm of society; they may have a boyfriend, a husband, a girlfriend and a boyfriend, they may be asexual. That seemingly innocent question that can so easily be replaced with 'do you have a partner?' or 'are you seeing someone?'.

Similarly there is a subtle perception of expectation when somebody wishes somebody else Merry Christmas. The person saying Merry Christmas may be as innocent of oppression as the person asking 'do you have a boyfriend?' but the person on the receiving end may perceive the normative pressure of a Christian-centric society. A subtle push that being non-Christian is abnormal or even ignoring the Religious aspect completely, that they should in some way be performing Christmas related cheer.

When we have the option of saying one phrase that is exclusive and one that is neutral I do feel that we have a social obligation to prefer to use the neutral term whenever possible.

For my part, I hope that everybody reading this from the Northern hemisphere has a pleasant Winter Solstice and those in the Southern hemisphere have a pleasant Summer Solstice.

I want to believe that these numbers are not just made up and pulled out of a hat...and even if they are exaggerated I am glad that this task force is achieving some success.

It's telling that every time I see another story on another shooting in the U.S. my reaction is similar (if not less) than when I read about another attack in Nigeria or Afghanistan. I've become numb to it in the same way.

All of the situations are senseless losses of life mind you and are tragedies, but I don't even care to read them or get the details because inevitably it's just the same rehash of the last one.

"Faulty" translation.

'Nuff said.

They surveyed 1000 people. Out of a population of 126 million. That's about 0.00007% of the population I believe.

So 11% of the 1000 respondents would be willing to fight for their country. This would be like Japan Today using one of their polls to say that X% of people support Y.

These kinds of irresponsible survey "results" really aggravate me. Misleading and sensationalist headline. Then again this has come to be expected i suppose.

“It is, of course, more difficult with sugar because whilst people can live entirely without tobacco, they can’t live entirely without sugar - but humans can live without added sugars.”

Tax the companies for the "added sugar" in their products then.

It's a pity that both sides of the gun-control 'debate" tend to be so irrational with regards to their rhetoric. Saying that one should be able to own guns because of the Second Amendment is like saying that Louis XIV was the rightful king of France because of divine mandate. It's all just words put on paper by people. Their is nothing inherently right or wrong about it but everything should be interrogated and questioned.

The second amendment made sense at the time and it was a perfectly acceptable thing to have implemented in a fledgling frontier nation that needed the potential to raise militias at short notice. In modern society it is completely anachronistic and borders on irrational to carry firearms simply because a piece of paper is interpreted to say that you can do so. And it is most definitely an interpretation.

My personal reading of the second amendment, as a non-American, is that people were given the right to take up arms in defense of the nation. To bear arms against an aggressor. That aggressor may be the federal government or an invading army. To think it means that people can carry assault rifles on combat harnesses when they go to Walmart is borderline madness.

Guns are not inherently bad. They have a place in society. They should be regulated and it should not be simple to gain access to them. People should not be allowed to own firearms without passing gun safety courses. And carrying firearms should become a thing of the past. The current escalation of force between the police and unarmed civilians springs from the issue that in America a civilian is considered (rightfully) armed until proven otherwise.

When a system allows people to carry firearms and it is culturally acceptable to do so then every interaction becomes a potentially life or death situation.

On topic. This attack at this school has nothing to do with gun control and has everything to do with the fact that violence is a language that is used to express ourselves when we feel we have no voice. The same happens in every country that has severe inequality and gives more respect and attention to people who commit violent crime. You can be ignored your whole life but when you pull out a weapon and start attacking people suddenly everybody knows your name. The only other way to gain that kind of publicity as a pleb in America is to be gunned down by the police.

Why even use the expression "low-hanging fruit" when pineapples grow on the ground?

Being South African, and having been exposed to a culture of rampant meat eating (including the mention biltong), I have never encountered a single person with colorectal cancer. This is, of course, just an anecdotal and completely unscientific observation...but I feel that, given the red meat consumption of my people, there would be at least one person I know. Then again maybe there is but they don't know, or don't tell.

They mention an 18% increase in likelihood of developing colorectal cancer but don't mention the actual percent of the population that develop it to start with. 18% increase in 1% is irrelevant where an 18% increase in 50% is more concerning.

Likely your odds don't change that much either way in my opinion. We should be considering downsizing the meat industry for so many more reasons than the fear of cancer; The resources wasted in its production being the main aspect.

@ Black Sabbath His intention was to cause terror so, yes, this can be classified as a terrorist act.

It is quite easy to gain access to firearms in Sweden, simply requires belonging to a shooting club (or passing a hunting license test) and being over 18.

The main difference here is that there is not a culture of mass shootings. He had a specific issue with immigrants and Islam and this was a hate motivated attack. Many mass shootings (particularly in the US) are damaged people lashing out at anything and anyone.

The high profile child sex crimes likely had nothing to do with pedophilia; They were rapes plain and simple, the fact that the victims were pre-pubescent was very probably just coincidental or only influenced the level of resistance in the victims.

Pedophiles need treatment, counseling., and understanding. Child rapists (rapists in general even), on the other hand, deserve anything the government wants to throw at them.