Apparently Guinan still has some work to do to get you to understand humor.

Seeing it on DVD won't make you like Sandra Bullock better but it will greatly diminish the amazing immersive experience of this particular movie. Seriously, see it on the largest screen you can find and see it in 3-D (and I'm usually a 3-D hater). You won't be sorry.

You're asking that about a movie based on a comic book full of sci-fi and fantasy elements? Seriously?

I wasn't necessarily agreeing with you, but at least I was listening to you, until this.

Somalia is not a libertarian society, and equating it with the libertarian ideal is an intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic meant to conceal rather than reveal. Now, you can say we libertarians are wrong that markets can provide infrastructure, and fair enough if you do, but our ideal is no better represented by the overlapping collection of theocrats, warlords, and the occasional functioning republic that makes up today's Somalia any more than the progressive ideal is represented by Cuba or North Korea.

By the way, the belief that healthcare can only be provided by government or by employers is a false dichotomy. Better than either if people simply pay out of pocket for routine expenses and maintain insurance only for catastrophic, unplanned expenses, just as they do for gas and oil changes vs. collisions.

I think it's more that (other than janitors) men have more or less disappeared from most elementary schools in the last generation. There's a strong emphasis on protecting, and not at all one on letting kids learn "the hard way" from mistakes. Everything is supposed to be cooperative, and nothing is supposed to be competitive. There's a place for that, sure, but when that's the only ethos then things are seriously out of balance.

"We humans enjoy not having knives inside of us." ...except Wolverine!

On the other hand, if we're not able to do something to survive these sorts of things by a million years from now, I doubt another 999 million will help.

In a surprise announcement, Google said they were relocating the entire company to Antigua....

Bears are scared of you, at least sort of. If you see one in the forest, conventional wisdom is to shout at it so it knows you're there, because it will usually avoid you. And yes, I have done this. (Well, I sang loudly at it, but same difference.)

Right, I meant Cantonese as opposed to Mandarin.

Except that she wasn't an anarcho-capitalist, so she'd probably have found a way to call this sort of thing "anti-life" or something.

That's true. On the other hand, there's nowhere that's shitty and stateless either, unless you count Antarctica. I say we let hardcore libertarians have a ten mile square stateless area and see what happens.

Did you seriously say Cantonese?

You don't have to be clinically depressed to believe that you'd be better off somewhere else than where you are now. For example, the small island nation of Dominica scored near the top of the world happiness index a few years ago, yet young people emigrate from there in droves in search of high paying jobs in wealthier countries.

Somalia doesn't have statelessness, it has an overlapping collection of theocracies and despotisms. The main exception is Somaliland in the north, where there's been a functional breakaway republic for years and there's a noteworthy level of prosperity. Somaliland has been completely unable to secure any kind of foreign recognition, largely because if it gets it, it ruins the claim that the vampires at the IMF have to shakedown the Somali people to repay the loans made to the Barre regime. The upside of this lack of recognition, however, is that the Somaliland government hasn't been able to get foreign aid, which, as it turns out, suppresses development rather than fostering it. But condemning foreign aid to governments of low income countries is about the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from the twenty-first century Somali experience, it doesn't speak to the efficacy of statelessness at all (either way).