1) Fidel Castro leaving the country for treatment actually happened, which is very obviously an option not available to the vast majority of Cubans, hence my quote from Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Really, that actually happened? Or does famous izquierdista Doctor Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido just work in Cuba? That's certainly where he treated Chavez. I honestly don't know; google isn't helping.

2) They could have the best healthcare system in the World and I still wouldn't want to live there. Nor would most people who value freedom and liberty...

I completely agree with you.

So what your saying is that if we took all the illegal -- uh "undocumented" immigrants from third-world countries that Obama lets in and dump them into the socialist paradise of Cuba that America's healthcare statistics will look massively better than Cuba's.

No, that must be the voices in your head. Try increasing (or decreasing) your dosage.

Oh, and that infant mortality statistic is complete B.S. In Cuba, they just let the premature babies die and it never counts as a live birth to mess up the statistics. In the U.S. they bend over backwards to save babies but since they aren't always successful, the statistics get skewed.

OK. So they let premature babies die in Switzerland, France, Sweden etc. Right.

Here's a list of countries with even better infant mortality rates that don't control the media or oppress free speech:

So what? Non-sequitur of the thread. Bet those countries rate higher on Maseratis per head too.

Cuba sucks, but their healthcare doesn't suck as bad as it ought to and that's not "Michael Moore fapping".

There's exactly one fact that actually counts about Cuba's "universal healthcare": When Comrade Fidel gets a cold, the doctors that treat him are flown in from Spain via charter jet.

Here are some other facts that actually count:

CIA World Factbook Infant mortality rates:

Cuba: 4.76 / 1000 live births
USA: 5.2 / 1000 live births

The rest is a bunch of empty Michael Moore fapping.

CIA being a well-known source of Michael Moore types.

How about life expectancy?

Life expectancy at birth (years), UN World Population Prospects 2010:

Cuba: 78.50 (rank 37)
USA: 77.97 (rank 40)

World Health Organization has USA ranked 34 and Cuba 36, FWIW. Close in any case.

I never put salt in my food because it contains a dangerously reactive metal and a poisonous gas.

Yeah, but on the autobahn there is no speed limit.

Raising it to 80 would only bring it inline with autoroutes in France: 130km/h (80mph) and 110km/h (69mph) in rain.

The French are (statistically) terrible drivers, but the autoroutes are the places you're least likely to see accidents (in my experience anyway).

Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago, and agriculture about 12,000 years ago.

Society didn't appear with the development of agriculture; humans lived in social groups from their first appearance. Humans evolved for immediate-return foraging (like our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos), not for agriculture.

Many? I thought it was only Holland and Finland.

And 1 and 2 cent coins are still legal tender in those two countries, they just don't issue them (or have prices which are not divisible by 5 cents).

Yes, Britain should be more like the US, where there is no mass snooping of email and call data.

Phew! I can now relax, knowing that AGW is not real, and that they vast, vast majority of climatologists are just lying for some unknown reason.

And all thanks to an anonymous person on the internet who makes a bunch of assertions without citations.

The problem here is the separation of content and style.

Sometimes images are style (replace an H1 with an image), sometimes they're content ('Granny feeding the ducks at the park').

The first example should be in the CSS, the second in the HTML.

Putting content in the stylesheet is as bad as putting styles in the markup.

The thing is that that's not the most effective way to learn the basics of a second or third language.

Second-language acquisition is a well-studied field, and at least some teaching in the learner's own language (or a language that they know well) is more effective than immersion.

As an example, I can quickly teach you that almost all words that end in 'tion' in English are the same in French (pronunciation differs, of course), and they are all feminine, with the notable exception of 'translation'. And now you have hundreds of French words. Similarly for Spanish, except the endings are spelt 'ción' and there are a few more exceptions. Repeat with the suffix 'able'. It's the power of language transfer.

information -> information -> información
administration -> administration -> administración
education -> éducation -> educación
masturbation -> masturbation -> masturbación
etc.

The reason language schools promote teaching solely in the target language is because it's easier for them: they can teach students with many native languages in the same class.

And what's really odd is that this domain is blocked in the UK by the big ISPs anyway. It was blocked along with a bunch of others back in October 2013.

If I try to access it on my current ISP, I get redirected here: http://assets.virginmedia.com/site-blocked.html.

So the City Police are trying to take down a domain that you can't even access directly in the UK.

I'm just aware that the teacher's union really doesn't know much about teaching. They protect teachers and they do that regardless of what a teacher might have done. At the same time they spend the majority of their high dues on nice salaries for far too many administrators. This is a statement to try to support teachers, done badly, as I would expect from them.

Really? You know all this about the ATL, a small teachers' union in the UK? Impressive.

Do you have personal experience of the ATL, or are you just speculating wildly?

Photography has become illegal in Europe due to misguided "privacy" laws. It's just ridiculous that I cannot do street photography in Europe because the European governments have decided that we photographers should ask people before we take their photo or publish it!

While this is true in certain countries in certain circumstances (France and Spain come to mind) it is certainly not true in the UK.

So this isn't a Europe-wide problem, and definitely isn't the fault of the EU.