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What's a few tens of trillions of dollars of debt

How is it that right-wingers only discovered this concern about debt after decades of it being rung up by Reagan and the Bushes, and how is it that they don't seen it connected with the massive tax breaks that the rich have enjoyed under these administrations? Is it massive ignorance, or willing blindness?

Yes, trillions in debt is bad. End the wars, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and restore the taxes on the richest Americans to the level they were during the Reagan -- or better, the Eisenhower -- administration, and we could start to bring it down. Also helpful would be ending the futile and expensive War on Drugs.

Folks on the left have been advocating this solution for the debt for years. If right-wingers were serious, they could get on board with it; or they could continue to whine about "entitlements", not understanding that the biggest part of that is Social Security -- a program that supports some of the "Tea Party" organizers.

The debt is a substantive issue. But the right wing's "OMG liberals want to bankrupt us!" song-and-dance, is not. A more substantive issue would be, why did the right only discover it recently? How are they so ignorant of its history? And what should we do about people like Beck, Palin, and the whole Fox News crew who are active sources of misinformation that poisons the political dialog?

people on the left clammoring for more entitlement spending?

If the government can provide a service more efficiently than massive for-profit corporations -- and in the case of health insurance, it can -- it is only rational to have the government provide it. Yes, this means raising government spending -- but decreasing spending to private interests. If my tax bill goes up by $150 a month, but I'm no longer paying $200 a month to Amalgamated Health Insurance Profits, Inc., that's a win. (Numbers pulled out of the air.)

Of course, if we ended the wars, dismantled the military-industrial complex, and restored taxes on the richest Americans to a sane level, we might not even have to raise the tax bills of most Americans to provide services that civilized nations take for granted.

So what about Dr. Robert Atkins?

You do realize that Atkins has been roundly criticized in the literature by every nutritional authority, right? The National Academy of Sciences, the AMA, the ADA, the ACS, the AHA, the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, the American Kidney Fund, the American College of Sports Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health has all criticized the Atkins plan. See the AtkinsExposed website I linked above.

You can find a handful of people with "Dr." before their name who will tell you than smoking cigarettes is fine and dandy, or with "PhD" afterward who will tell you that climate change is a hoax -- or that 9/11 was a controlled demolition, or that we never went to the moon, or whatever. This does not change the science.

How do you explain the coexistence of malnutrition and obesity within a community?

Malnutrition includes deficiency of micronutrients -- kwashiorkor, for example. Empty calories are cheap calories.

Japanese people also work far harder than most us Westeners, in addition to eating a lot of fish, shellfish, eggs and meat. Their overall sugar consumption is also faaar lower than most so-called "Americanized" societies.

None of which addresses the point that their consumption of carbs is high, putting the lie to the "high carb diets make you fat!" theory. And no, they don't eat a lot of meat -- though the consumption of meat is trending upward, along with the incidence of obesity, heart disease, and all the other fun stuff a high-protein, high-fat diet brings with it.

Yes, their sugar consumption is far lower. Large amounts of sugar are a bad idea, I think we can all agree on that shocking conclusion.

Insulin is pro-inflammatory

No, in fact insulin has an anti-inflammatory effect (see also here.)

Also, what we have done in recorded history has nothing to do with our biology or evolution. The fact is, we've been growing crops for the past ~10.000 years which in evolutionary terms is just barely a blip on the radar. Hunter/gatherers collected fruits and berries when they could and fattened up for winter, but otherwise ate what the hunters brought home. After all, wild carbohydrates aren't exactly "in stock" all year around while meat and fish is.

Ah, bad anthropology rears its head again. First, our existence as hunter-gatherers was a blip in evolutionary terms; our digestive metabolism remains mostly the same as our primarily herbivorous primate ancestors and our primarily herbivorous chimp and gorilla cousins. (Yes, chimps eat some flesh -- mostly insects; that does not change the fact that they are primarily herbivorous.) Second, carbohydrates are indeed in stock all year round in the areas where we evolved -- what do you think those animals our ancestors were hunting were eating? Not just fruits, but roots, tubers, seeds, nuts, leaves...we've been eating grains for 20,000, perhaps even 100,000, years, well before the Neolithic revolution.

The idea that our paleolithic ancestors were mostly hunters is not based on good evidence, but on "me mighty hunter!" mythology. Contemporary hunter-gathers get the bulk of their nutrition from plant foods.

But finally, the evolutionary tale tells us jack shit about what makes for a healthy diet . Evolutio

The whole 'gym' mentality is broken. The problem is that people eating less doesn't make anybody rich.

Well, neither does running the trails in a several-year-old pair of Chuck Taylor knock-offs.

You don't need to join a gym to exercise. Second-hand bikes are cheap; if you want to go running, if you shun expensive, injury-producing running shoes it's pretty cheap (and contrary to common practice, you don't actually need an iPod or other music player to go running); walking remains free, as do calisthenics; and you can usually find some sucker in your neighborhood teaching yoga or karate or something along those lines at little above cost.

It's certainly true that our massive caloric intake -- which increased 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000, and I'm sure has only gone up since then -- tends to swamp weight-loss effects from exercise for many people. You won't burn off an extra 500 calories a day with moderate exercise. But exercise has benefits apart from weight loss; and once caloric intake is down to something more sane, it will help burn off minor excesses.

We do not have a "free market" for insurance. Our current insurance industry is not an example of "capitalism". If the health insurance industry was subject to normal market forces, it would look a lot more like the renter's insurance market:

1) Please do not make the all-to-common mistake of confusing capitalism with the free market. These are orthogonal concepts, and a capitalist command economy is quite possible -- the U.S. during WWII, for examples, where more than 50% of GDP was government spending, yet bankers, landlords, stockholders, and the other parasites of the capitalist investment classes still raked it in. Or there are the models of Singapore's Temasek Holdings, or Japan's MITI, providing a high degree of government planning while maintaining private ownership.

Our health insurance system has some (largely ineffective) regulation, but is still completely in the hands of the capitalists. UnitedHealth Group's profits -- not just revenues, but profits -- are greater than the GDP of many nations; no need to weep for the stockholders.

2) Socialism refers to an economic system based on labor rather than capital, one run for the benefit of the people who do the work rather than for the minority of state-backed owners. Putting regulations on capitalism is not socialism; nor is a planned economy socialism.

3) Health care does not meet any of the three requirements for an effective free market. Buyers and sellers do not meet with equal power, since health care is often a matter of life-and-death for the buyer. They do not meet with full information, since a) diagnosis is part of the transaction, b) the seller has many years of specialized training, and c) patient education is part of the the transaction. And since disease is communicable, there are external costs when a buyer chooses to, or is forced to, delay treatment. Ergo, providing health care efficiently requires some degree of planning.

Which is yet another reason to dump the entire concept of prepaid medicine to begin with. Sure, keep true insurance around for catastrophic events, but otherwise let each person decide how to spend their own money on their own regular health care.

This is a terrible idea not just because people will damage their own health by not seeking early intervention and end up racking up greater costs later, but because in delaying they can damage the health of others. Disease is contagious. When my girlfriend's ex-boyfriend notices a funny rash, it is to my advantage that he does not have financial incentives to pinch pennies, skip seeing the doctor, and hope it goes away. There are also more subtle ways in which health is contagious.

The conditions for an effective free market are that buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full information, and no externalized costs. Health care badly misses all three of these points.

ADD and ADHD don't mesh well with medicine.

I don't know...my current doctor's about as ADD-ish as the average IT geek, and she's the best I've ever had.

medical practitioners simply cannot fit as much information into their heads...

Which is why, in the old days, doctors had big shelves of books in their offices, so they didn't have to remember map of the cat stuff. Now they use Google. (Yes, my doc actually used Google to rule out a potential diagnosis by using it to look up the incubation period of a virus.)

This is why the belief in a higher being is important to sanity and happiness. Science will fail you.

Try to make your trolls a little less obvious next time.

The hubris of Leninism-Stalinism was the mad idea that government can effectively and efficiently dictate the omni-variable complexity of an entire modern industrialized state's economy as well as all societal institutions, down to speech and even thought. Why do we always strive to replicate madness?

I hate to break it to you, because I know there an entire fake news entertainment industry built around the plot line that the U.S. is turning into a communist state (or it is fascist state? Big plot hole in the story when the writers confuse the two.), but no one with any authority or following is currently trying to do any such thing in the U.S. A couple of regulations on capitalism do not turn it into socialism or communism, any more than slowing the direction with which one is falling is the same as flying.

The economy remains in the hands of the investment classes, who continue to screw over the working classes; and, despite the complexities Barlow claims, these folks also manage to run multinational corporations with economic power similar to nation-states. UnitedHealth Group's annual revenues, for example, are about the same as the GDP of Bangladesh, a nation of 162 million people.

Suffering and possibly permanently damaging your knees and getting nothing in return. Is that maturity?

In point of fact, running is good, not bad, for your joints. Runners have fewer disabilities, a longer span of activity in their lives and are less likely to die early.

If you do run, though, skip the expensive running shoes.

Suffering and possibly permanently damaging your knees and getting nothing in return. Is that maturity?

In point of fact, running is good, not bad, for your joints. Runners have fewer disabilities, a longer span of activity in their lives and are less likely to die early.

If you do run, though, skip the expensive running shoes.

How else do you explain that I will be fined $950 because I exercised a Pro-Choice decision not to have hospital insurance

Calm down. You're not being "fined". Your taxes are going up.

Your taxes are higher if you rent rather than own your home; your taxes are higher if you don't have kids; your taxes are higher if you purchase one sort of vehicle over another; your taxes are higher if you don't sock money away in a retirement fund. You still have the choices, and these are not fines or "oppression", and it's ridiculous to label them as such.

Neither are you being fined for making the (stupid) choice to fail to carry health insurance. If you are seriously injured or fall gravely ill, you will not be able to "pay cash directly to the doctor", that's the whole point of insurance. Tax policy is giving you an incentive to behave more intelligently, and is making you pay your share of the costs for a public good, but you still have the choice.

Schools hold a monopoly much like Comcast has a monopoly in my home town.

No, public schools don't have a monopoly, as there are plenty of options outside of them.

Public schools are tax funded for the same reason as public fire departments, public roads, public police forces, public libraries, and so on -- they are public goods whose existence benefits everyone.

(You are, of course, free to believe and to argue that we'd be better off leaving kids whose parents can't afford good private schools, to remain ignorant; but that is not the assumption on which our current policy is predicated.)

You don't get to hire private security and then say, "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for police", because you still benefit when the cops take a burglar off the streets. You don't get to install your own fire suppression system and say "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for the fire department", because you still benefit when the FD shows up to put your neighbor's blazing house out before the fire spreads to yours. And you don't get to send your kids to private school (where they may, in fact, get a worse education than in public schools) and say "I shouldn't have to pay into the tax fund that pays for public schools", because you benefit from living in a society with a higher base rate of education.

I don't have kids; my tax dollars still go to educate the neighbor's brats. And the community is better off for it.

It is not expensive to teach most children who want to learn, through high school level. A teacher, a schoolroom, books. Yet this, which ought not to cost more than $2500 per student-year in the US, now costs about $8000.

And you pull this number of what it "ought" to cost from where, exactly?

If it "ought" to cost only $2,500 per student-year to educate a student, how is it that independent private schools spend $15,000, Hebrew schools spend $12,000, and Catholic schools (which slightly under-perform public schools, and provide fewer services) spend $7,743.. Even conservative Christian schools, which perform much worse than public schools, spend $5,727 -- more than twice your $2,500.

People point to public schools and say "See, they spend more money and don't get better results" than private schools.

People do indeed say that. They are wrong.

In general, adjusted for region, private schools that out-perform public schools, spend more money, while private schools that underspend public schools, perform worse than public schools.

(Note that we're talking about spending, not tuition: private school tuition doesn't measure per-student spending because private schools usually get grants or subsidies from other sources.)

You want people to fight for their freedoms but when someone does, all of a sudden they're a bunch of idiots.

Actually, they're idiots because they're stupid, not because they're fighting for their freedoms.

As one person put it, the teabag movement is like the French Revolution in reverse - a bunch of people running around demanding *more* power for the aristocracy.

But no-one actually forces you to make that tithe.

They used to, you know. If the church is no longer demanding a tax from you, you have the rise of secular governance to thank.

Of course, that secular government imposes taxes of its own. If you want to play the game of living in an industrialized civilization that creates and defends "property", you've got to pay the ante. TANSTAAFL.

Note that I just did my taxes, so I'm feeling a bit annoyed on the subject of taxes right at this moment.

Some perspective might reduce the annoyance: American tax rates are near historically low levels, and are lower than those in comparable nations.

I wonder how the Founding Father's interpreted that?

Irrelevant. As Madison said, "As a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution, the debates and incidental decisions of the Convention can have no authoritative character...the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it recd. all the authority which it possesses."

The doctrine that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the "original intent" of the framers is nonsense, since the "original intent" of the framers was that their intent not be used to interpret the Constitution.

I suspect Thomas Jefferson may have had a better idea of what the Constitution meant than the libertarian fanatics who suggest breaking the law

Like the other Founders, Jefferson was a criminal, a terrorist insurgent who fought the lawful rule of the British crown. He was also a slave rapist, but that was legal at the time. Law ain't no guide to the right thing to do.

The feds are authorized to conduct an enumeration, not an interrogation. I will be filling in the number of people who live here, and crossing out all other questions; I'd like to see everyone else do the same. If the feds want other data, they can get it by anonymous surveys that give much more privacy protection than their assurances to "trust us."

When government or big business wants your info, it's always best to ask what's it's being collected for, and give only that which is needed to accomplish the legitimate goal. The checkout clerk at the market doesn't need my zipcode to complete our "I give you cash, you give me stuff" transaction, and so he doesn't get it. The feds don't need my family information or home ownership status to do the headcount to divy up Congresscritters, and so they don't get it.

Its an affront to liberty. What right do you have to force a free individual to pay for the health care of another?

What right do you have to force a free individual to pay for the military protection of another? For the police and fire protection of another? For roads used by another?

Health care is a public good, just like roads and armies and fire and police protection.

Taxes are not an affront to liberty. Money is a creation of the state. "Render on to Caesar what is Caesar's," as one Jewish philosopher put it. If you want to play the game of money-and-property, your ante is seeing that the basic human needs of everyone are met.

Government needs to do less, not more

Government needs to either do more to regulate big business, or less to enable big business to exist. I can think of one great way to reduce government power and also do a lot to fix healthcare: revoke all government-issued corporate charters for for-profit insurance companies.

But, since there's fsck-all chance of that happening, then so long as insurance companies have the wealth and power that they do, I'm all for having government do more to regulate them. The idea that consumers can get an organization with the economic power of a midsize country to behave by the mechanisms of the market is nothing but a fairy tale.

(minimum wage = minimum productivity for obvious reasons) will cause staggering numbers of layoffs. Raising minimum productivity by 5% would certainly kill over 20%-30% of jobs, nationwide.

Bullshit. The minimum wage has been raised many times, and such massive job losses never occured. The impact on employment is small and diminishes to insignificance over time.

Needless to say, [taxes are] seriously above that level for the moment, and Obama's done nothing but raise them.

In fact, our taxes are near historically low levels, and are low compared to other industrialized nations.

So. Any other ahistorical claims you'd like to make?

If the CRU letters are any indication, I guess this is how "science" is done these days, now, anyway.

Contrary to right-wing spin, the CRU letters do not indicate falsification or fabrication of data. The only thing they reveal is that scientists can get pissy about shills and wackos who try to disrupt their work. I suspect that's no more the case "these days" than is was in days gone by.

Well, we all know that Nature, NASA, and the U.N. are prime players in the conspiracy. As are NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, and the science academies of Brazil, China and India.

I mean, either there's a massive conspiracy by climatologists all around the world, or a handful of corporate shills and religious true believers (including both fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist propertarians) have the media's ear and are quoting stuff out of context and flat-out inventing shit. And that's impossible, right?

That could very well be true. Several years ago I heard stories about how estrogen-like chemicals could theoretically leach out of plastic bottled water containers under certain conditions.

Not any plastics, but polycarbonate is a polymer of Bisphenol A -- and Bisphenol A was investigated as a synthetic estrogen before it was used in plastics. We've know that it had serious biological effects since the 1930s, but I suppose that was just another inconvenient, profit-reducing fact.

Polycarbonate is everywhere, not just in water bottles but metal cans (to prevent the metal from contact with food contents),refrigerator shelves, baby bottles, microwave cookware, and eating utensils. And it's used industrially in a wide variety of applications. It's even used to coat children's teeth as an anti-cavity measure.

Exposure to Bisphenol A has been linked to breast cancer, insulin resistance, miscarriage, obesity, prostate enlargement, early onset of sexual maturation, hyperactivity, and increased aggressiveness, as well as increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

The chemical industry, of course, assures use that BPA can never leach from polycarbonate in appreciable amounts. There is, however, a very interesting correlation between who funds the research and what results are found.

That could very well be true. Several years ago I heard stories about how estrogen-like chemicals could theoretically leach out of plastic bottled water containers under certain conditions.

Not any plastics, but polycarbonate is a polymer of Bisphenol A -- and Bisphenol A was investigated as a synthetic estrogen before it was used in plastics. We've know that it had serious biological effects since the 1930s, but I suppose that was just another inconvenient, profit-reducing fact.

Polycarbonate is everywhere, not just in water bottles but metal cans (to prevent the metal from contact with food contents),refrigerator shelves, baby bottles, microwave cookware, and eating utensils. And it's used industrially in a wide variety of applications. It's even used to coat children's teeth as an anti-cavity measure.

Exposure to Bisphenol A has been linked to breast cancer, insulin resistance, miscarriage, obesity, prostate enlargement, early onset of sexual maturation, hyperactivity, and increased aggressiveness, as well as increased risk of heart disease and diabetes.

The chemical industry, of course, assures use that BPA can never leach from polycarbonate in appreciable amounts. There is, however, a very interesting correlation between who funds the research and what results are found.

And let me direct you to Thomas Jefferson's quote on standing armies.

While I'm not inclined to take the opinions of a slave rapist as gospel, I do think that centralized power -- including both standing armies and capitalism -- is a problem.

Of course now that we have big government we have the corporate aristocracy as well.

You seem to be insinuating that somehow "big government" gave birth to the corporate aristocracy. No. Most of what laissez-faire types call "big government" is just an attempt to put some control on the aristocracy.

(Generally a feeble attempt, given the relative size of big business to the government agencies that supposedly reguate them. ExxonMobil's profits, for example, are about four times the entire budget for the EPA -- so if the EPA devoted itself entirely to policing this one oil company, ExxonMobil could outspend it three to one and still remain profitable.)

I'd love a smaller government -- one with less ability and authority to issue corporate charters, land deeds, patents and copyrights, and basically do all the things that empower the capitalist class, concentrating control of property into the hands of a few. But I don't want a government made smaller by taking away its ability to leash the monsters it's creating with it's other hand.

Government is a vector quantity, having not only size but direction. More important than it's size is whether it points toward a system of aristocrats and serfs, or towards justice and equality.

I could start a pornography stuio right now, with ads and everything and not worry about armed people busting into my office and killing me, and then my family.

Killing you? Not immediately. But you do have to worry about armed people busting in and forcing you into cages; a California couple were recently jailed for the "crime" of conspiracy to distribute "obscene" material through the mail and over the Internet.

I call bullshit. Here's one: http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT00042081 Prevention of Autogenous Vein Graft Failure in Coronary Artery Bypass Procedures

This study -- which was actually of a drug used to treat tissue before transplantation, rather than of a surgical technique -- found that "Failure of at least 1 vein graft is quite common within 12 to 18 months after CABG surgery. Edifoligide is no more effective than placebo in preventing these events. Longer-term follow-up and additional research are needed to determine whether edifoligide has delayed beneficial effects, to understand the mechanisms and clinical consequences of vein graft failure, and to improve the durability of CABG surgery."

I was excited that you might have found a surgical technique that meets the placebo-controlled blinded test standard, now I'm disappointed. You really ought to read a study's findings before you cite it.

Try Googling randomized controlled trial surgery

Following your link I find studies where the "control" is drug therapy or another medical intervention. If you have one where surgery is compared versus a sham procedure, please, point it out to me -- perhaps there's one mentioned in a study behind a paywall.

It's no good to have a study find that "surgery X is better than drug Y" -- maybe the benefits were due to a few days of enforced rest, skilled nursing care, and hospital food, not to mention that nebulous "placebo effect", or even a side-effect of general anesthesia, rather than due to the actual cutting and sewing of flesh.

The term surgeons use is not "placebo" but "sham surgery".

Sham surgery is a form of placebo.

It may be OK to thread a catheter into somebody's coronary arteries and squirt saline, but nobody is going to ask a patient to undergo abdominal or chest surgery, with a mortality of 1% or even 0.1%, just to satisfy somebody's idea of a perfect scientific design.

But sham thoracic and cranial surgery has been performed. The first, and most famous, use of a placebo surgical technique as a control was to investigate mammary artery ligation for relief of angina pectoris. And tests of transplantation of human embryonic dopamine neurons and of fetal pig cells into the brains Parkinson's patients, were also compared to sham techniques. In all three of these cases, the "real" operation was no more effective than the placebo.

We can add to that a test of arthroscopic surgery for knee arthritis which failed to show any benefit of a real surgery over a fake cut.

So again, I ask: if anyone has an example of a placebo-controlled trail of a surgical technique where the real technique proved more effective that the placebo, please post it.

1-sentence course in medical ethics: A doctor can't do anything to a patient that wouldn't benefit the patient.

The fact that it's difficult to te

I thought obscenity laws were to protect someone like me, walking down the street, from seeing obscenity.

You thought wrong. As U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said after putting a California couple in a cage for selling dirty pictures, "These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us." Obscenity laws are based on the insane notion that the mere existence of dirty pictures is harmful.

people don't want to be offended by someone telling them they are wrong to do this or that

I don't much care if you merely tell me I'm wrong to do this or that. I care when you start waving guns around to enforce your idea of what's right or wrong.

on the other hand, they have no problem offending people that don't want to see, for example, obscenity.

Folks, it's simple: if you don't want to be offended by something you consider obscene, DON'T LOOK AT IT.

Self ownership is an endangered concept

Self-ownership is a nonsensical concept. My relationship with myself is not one of property or ownership. Self-determination, the ability to make private choices, is a fundamental human need; but confusing it with the idea of property leads to all sorts of problems.

Fast food? Too bad, government will ban it (they've already started in parts of the U.S.)

Citation needed. Where is fast food banned?

Yes, government regulations have kept toxic crap from being served in restaurants as food. Since purporting that something not fit for human consumption is "food" is a form of fraud, that's fine. But there's a world of difference between banning restaurants from putting lead, botulism, or trans fats in their dishes, and banning fast food.

Today's expanding government is not maintainable. The future of America is less government, by attrition.

There's nothing new about expanding government, indeed over the past few decades it's expanded more (measured by government spending as a fraction of GDP) under Republican administrations than under Democratic ones.

If that expanding government means further bloating the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, I'm against it. If expanding government means better funding for education, housing, and health care, I'm not opposed.

After a few decades of neglect by the magical thinking of pseudo-free market fundamentalists, we're going to incur high costs over the next few years to fix our fiscal and physical infrastructure. Relax. It worked during the New Deal, it'll work now.

As usual, you are behind the times:

No, my friend, I'm afraid that's just the way things look when you're being lapped. Taubes did indeed make a lame attempt to defend his "work", such as it is, against Fumento's criticism, which Fumento then tore to bits.

Advocates of Atkins-style diets belong in the same bin with creationists, climate change deniers, and (to bring this back on point) the folks who told us for years that making water bottles out of a polymer of a synthetic hormone was perfectly safe because BPA couldn't possibly ever ever leach from polycarbonate.

Except that Atkins-style diets are more dangerous to human health than those other ideas.

There's no such thing as a 'proven alternative treatment'. Once it's proven to work it's not alternative medicine any more, it's just medicine.

If proof == "medicine" and no proof == "alternative treatment", then why is massage or acupressure or dietary changes considered alternative treatment?

I do shiatsu acupressure, and I can cite studies on its effectiveness.

And why is surgery considered "medicine"? Every placebo controlled study of a surgical technique has found it no better than a placebo operation.

Why is giving SSRIs out like candy considered "medicine", when they work no better than a placebo for most categories of patients?

Medicine is an art wherein clinicians apply their skills to relieve the suffering and promote the well-being of each individual patient. Of course a good clinician will consider all available evidence to figure out what's likely to work best, but the goal is not to do what's most effective who most people, but for this single patient. You only get evidence of that via treatment.

I know that some of what I - or any clinician, from bodyworkers to brain surgeons - do is the placebo effect. So what?

It's time to play the what-is-the-causation game again.

Do you think that ingesting a synthetic estrogen might, just, possibly, have some health effects?

Polycarbonate is made up of strings of Bisphenol A; BPA has been known since the 1930s to be estrogenic. As polycarbonate - which is everywhere - ages, wears, or is exposed to heat, acids, or bases, BPA leaches out.

BPA has been linked to breast cancer, insulin resistance, miscarriage, obesity, prostate enlargement, early onset of sexual maturation, hyperactivity, and increased aggressiveness.

The feds built it but the state took over control back when they demanded control of the interstate highway system.

The American Society of Civil Engineers faulted the Corps's levee design, and the Corps has admitted their failure. That has nothing to do with any actions taken by the state.

Nor had the state taken over flood control. The Army Corps of Engineers was still working on flood control projects in the area, though they were massively underfunded.

In 2004, USACE requested $11 million for the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project; Bush's budget requested only $3 million. Congress increased the amount to $5.5 million. In 2005, the Corps requested $22.5 million - Bush, $3.9 million, and Congress approved $5.7 million.

Investigative articles by the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of the Iraq boondoggle as a reason why funding for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project dried up in 2003. $250 million in crucial projects was left incomplete, including work right at the site of the main breach.

To add insult to the injury, 35 percent of the Louisiana National Guard had been deployed to Iraq, thus making them unavailable to, you know, Guard that part of the Nation.

The failure of the levvies, and the lack of resources at the state level to deal with it, were the results of deadly incompetence at the federal level.

But it was federalism that allowed the democrats in power in the 20 years before Katrina...

Democrats in power for 20 years? Where?

On the federal level, we had a Republican in the White House from 1980-1992 and 2000-2008. From 1994 to 2006, there was GOP control of the House. 1994-2001 and 2002-2006, Republican control of the Senate.

At the state level, Louisiana had a Republican governor 1980-1984, 1991-1992, and 1996-2004.

Do you expect the feds to show up when your house is on fire?

If you will read more closely, you will see that the poster to whom I was responding didn't specify "the federal government", just said "zero assistance from the government."

And if my house was on fire due to failure of a system built by the federal government to maintain trade routes for interstate commerce, fsck yes, I would expect federal aid. The New Orleans disaster wasn't Katrina, it was the failure of the levies that were built by the feds as part of an effort to keep the Mississippi navigable.

Federalism is no excuse for the failed federal response to Katrina.

Yes or no: Was the Rodney King case excessive force? Keep in mind he was drunk, coked out, high as fuck on PCP, and was constantly trying to get up and attack the officers even while being beaten.

What evidence do you have that he was under the influence of cocaine or PCP? Tests on him for PCP were negative.

He was trying to break away from men who were torturing him? What a surprise. This one seems to be a favorite of apologists for police brutality: "After we threatened him, he tried to get away, so we had to beat him. And even though we told him not to move, rather than lie there and get beat, he struggled, so we had to beat him some more."

In a situation with a person who is high as fuck on PCP, your only choice is to beat the living shit out of them

Which makes it a perfect excuse for bad cops. "Thought he was on PCP. No choice, had to beat him." Which is bullshit; while PCP causes a disassociated state that render one pretty impervious to pain, it does not cause violent behavior more than other drugs. If someone is on PCP, the best thing to do is avoid anything that might provoke violent behavior.

It's O'Bama. He's Irish.

That's truer than you think...his great-great-great-great grandfather was Irish.

Everything that Dr. Paul has ever done and all the ideals he stands for seek the end of racism. The entire accusation was constructed by professional counterintelligence personel.

What, Daily Kos is full of professional counterintelligence personel?? That's the wackiest conspiracy theory I've heard in years.

Unfortunately for them anyone who actually looks into it or even just hears his side of the story will realize it's a joke.

His "side of the story" is that he has no idea how those nasty articles got into the newsletter he published under his own name. Which would mean he's not even competent to run a 'zine, much less a country. Yes, his side of the story is a joke...

calling a respectable candidate who's served in congress for 20 years and has a respectable record a "batshit crazy racist loon" is quite possibly the worst ad hominem attack I have ever heard in my life. It shows you have no ground to stand on to debate his views without distorting them and have to focus on attacking the man.

He's not a respectable candidate; the fact that he served in Congress for 20 years proves nothing. And it's not ad hominem to attack a person's batshit crazy views on biology, medicine, religion, and government, or to point out his backdoor route to getting pork for his district.

But it's ok, the vast majority of people see through your games little cointelpro agent and we'll be knocking on your door soon demanding you pay your dues to our society.

Now I'm a COINTELPRO agent because I point out Paul's flaws? Shit, that's the wackiest conspiracy theory I've heard in my life. Yes, all these years of professing my politics on USENET, /., mailing lists, and so on, were just so I'd be in a position to denounce Ron Paul if he ever ran for President. My blog is an FBI front. Yeah. Time to refill the prescription for those anti-psychotic meds, my friend.

For example, a young idealistic student might post a comment at a site like NoJailForPot.com, and later think twice about it when applying for work after college at, say, a government agency or perhaps an investment house...

And maybe he or she should think twice before selling out their old idealism.

I've got old USENET posts on my blog dating back to the early 90s. Of course even more, and older ones, can be found via Google Groups. I like to think I'm a little wiser and better informed now, and might express myself a little more subtly these days; but I'm not ashamed of anything I said back then. Any potential employer who wouldn't want to hire me based on those, is a place I wouldn't want to work anyway.

it's because 10% of the country says he has no chance and the other 80% say, "Who's Ron Paul?"

No, it's because 10% of the country says he has no chance, 10% says he's a batshit crazy racist loon, and 70% say, "Who's Ron Paul?" If the 70% find out, most will join the "batshit crazy loon" group, which is why the "he has no chance" group is exactly right. It's long past time for people to get over the infatuation with Paul.

Naturally, the recounts also "proved" there was no fraud in Florida 2000...

Until a media consortium hired independent assessors to evaluate the ballots, and found that the Gore got more than Bush votes in Florida in 2000.

As for Ohio, people went to jail for rigging the recount.

Which demonstrates that official recounts of a limited number of ballots may not tell the whole story.

The U.S. electoral system is no more reliable than that of the Ukraine or Kenya. But Americans are much more complacent about it.

Oh well, add it to the list of things that Ron Paul will solve within 1 week. ;-)

No, he'll be too busy overturning Roe v. Wade and destroying the seperation of church and state. Ron Paul is a loon, and it's high time for people to get over their crush on him.

Will the police break into people's homes, and search their computers, mp3 players, etc? No.

What, you don't think so? They're already willing to break into your house, tear open the walls, and strip search you to make sure you're not in possession of unauthoried plant material. Or to batter down your door to check for vitamins - though that's become less fashionable lately, it shows what sort of organization we're dealing with when the federal government gets involved.

I'm sure the War on Copying will work just as well as the War on Drugs. They already have the K-9 corps set up. I'm just waiting for the violent black market to spring up.

And hey - this could provide a great opportunity for geeks to have a lucrative and exciting career in organized crime.

Yes, those practices were eliminated many decades ago. Thanks.

Officially? Yes, mostly. De facto? No, discriminatory hiring practices still exist, as do race-based blocks to voting.

Explain to me: how will banning guns remove guns from the hands of violent criminals, particularly considering that violent criminals, by definition, will not obey gun control laws? Does reality have a liberal bias on *that* issue, o great liberal avatar?

Positions on gun control correlate more strongly with urban vs. rural geography than directly with liberal or conservative views. Remember that it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who, as governor of California, signed the Mulford Act - which was targeted at gun-toting leftist Black Panthers.

I know plenty of liberals with guns - the more progressive, the more likely to have a gun, or at least support the RKBA. I'm an armed leftist myself, and I agree with noted socialist writer George Orwell that "That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."

Since you probably fancy yourself both educated and informed, tell me why single women tend to vote Democrat while married women tend to vote Republican.

Uh, do you have to ask?

People who are socially conservative, believe in traditional gender roles and are more likely to get married young and less likely to get divorce. Therefore they spend more of their lives married. People who believe they have their own value outside of a breeding couple (just joshin' ya, married friends) are more likely to delay marriage, or not marry at all, and to leave a unhappy marriage; even those who do marry are likely to spend more of their lives single than their more conservative peers.

And again, education comes into it: women with higher education - which correlates well with more liberal views - are more likely to delay marriage, staying longer in the "single" column.

An additional factor is that single mothers also tend to rely more on the "social safety net", an issue that gives an advantage to Democrats. But I'd guess that most of the difference comes from conservatives putting more importance on mating and being more likely to believe that they need the sanction of the Church and the state to sleep together, while liberals are more willing to make their own life, or to partner up without a licence from the government.

Whats any less "Big Brother" about a Democratic administration? Just because you're not in a war doesn't mean vast sums of the tax base are not subsidizing risk in private markets.

Que? I mentioned Congress, not a "Democratic administration". And "Big Brother" is a reference to the surveilllance state of 1984, you know? I agree that the goverment we have is of, by, and for the wealthy, and that Democrats are little, if any, better than Republicans. But that wasn't the topic under discussion.

I look at the whole war thing and say, "Well, you're a democracy, he was voted in,

Except for the minor fact that he wasn't.

it seems grossly wrong to me that Americans should want to just get the hell out of the place since it didn't turn out to be as fun or noble feeling as it initially sounded. America did very well with Germany and Japan

The problem isn't that it's not "fun", the problem is that our presence is doing more harm than good.

It's a very, very, very different situation that the occupations after WWII:

1. Germany and Japan were actual nations with their own long identity - there was no civil war after WWII. Iraq is an conglomeration built by British imperialism, and has never been a stable nation.
2. Germany had been a democracy; Japan had had a form of constitutional monarchy with an elected Diet, at least a drift of a movement toward some representational government. Not so in Iraq.
3. We had a decent reason for toppling the governments of Germany and Japan. American leaders lied to get us into Iraq.
4. We didn't blow our credibility with Germans and Japanese by torturing people.
5. We had the support and respect of other nations for our work in Germany and Japan.
6. In Japan, we worked with the Emperor. In Iraq, we hanged Saddam.
7. Before our occupation of Germany and Japan, they were nations ruined by war; the whole nations were starving, and we won a lot of hearts and minds with food. Before our illegal, brutal, and stupid invasion of Iraq, Iraqis were not prosperous, but had a working nation with food production and distribution and other basic services - which we broke.

There's a lot of work to be done in raq (or as we'll start to refer to it soon, "the area that used to be Iraq"), and the U.S. has a moral responsibility to fund it. But we've fucked up so very, very badly, made so many enemies, that even if competence miraculously returned to U.S. government (ha!), we couldn't do the work. We have to turn it over to the international community.

No, I was right. They exist to serve the people. It's the only reason why they're allowed in a democracy or democratic republic. The growth purpose is a means to the end. We discovered that the best way to make a corporation serve the people effectively was to try to make them as profitable as possible

Well, no, sir, you were wrong. Originally corporations were permitted to exist only while they served the public interest, but that is no longer the case - which is why corporate charters are almost never revoked. Now corporations exist soley for their own interests.

Modern large corporations profit by controlling markets, by externalizing costs, and by exploiting labor with a rush to the bottom, not by providing quality goods and services or by serving the people.

Actually having to do good work is old-fashioned, for tiny companies, not for corporate behemoths.

Most of the money naturally goes to the people responsible for the businesses (because they're the ones who've done the work or risked their capital)

But the ones who do the work are not the ones who get the money. One rarely acquires wealth in this economy through labor; it's done through parasitic speculation and absentee ownership. Or the old fashioned way - by inheritance (which is why the U.S. has lousy inter-generational income mobility).

Risking one's money isn't, in and of itself, admirable to such a degree that public policy should reward it. Gambling on stocks is no more heroic than gambling on the ponies.

I'm still looking for an example of a piece of legislation that the people are truly unhappy with as a whole that is requested by a corporation.

The point is that by controlling the process, corporate interests are able to keep such legislation out of the spotlight. Did "the people" want to give almost three billion dollars to the coal industry? Or lend five billion dollars to Westinghouse (a British Nuclear Fuels company, at the time) to build nuclear power plants in China, strengthening the infrastructure of our chief economic rival? (And giving technology to a Chinese company that had previously given nuclear tech to Iran and Pakistan!) I'm pretty darn sure they did not.

But did "the people" have any idea this was going on? No.

Doesn't everyone here already know all about Gimp?

Sayeth TFA, "And even if you already use image editing software, the book is well worth a read -- I have been using GIMP for several years and still learned a great deal."

I'm sure most /.'ers know GIMP, and can use it for simple operations like cropping a photo or adjusting its brightness. That doesn't mean we "know all about" this complex application.

I've been messing around with photography more lately (mostly since I've been travelling more, and might pick up a copy of this book.

Gun control basically is the same thing: for a gun to really be a problem one must already be prepared to break the law. So given that a willingness to break the law is already a prerequisite for a gun crime to take place

To be fair, the idea is that gun control makes it harder for the bad guy, willing to be bad though be may be, to actually obtain a gun.

I think we agree that this idea happens to be very incorrect, and that gun control keeps guns away from bad guys about as well as drug laws keep heroin away from junkies. And I'm sure "game control" laws would keep consoles away from WoW junkies about as well, and maybe let use have a violent black market in Wiis.

Which one is "you"?...It's one of those questions that seem unanswerable.

Which is often an indication of bad assumptions.

Which is "you" after the duplication? First we ought to ask, is there a "you" before the duplication?

Look closely. What is this "you"? "Your" body? That's not the same from moment to moment, atoms entering and leaving with every breath. "Your" thoughts? Just as changing and fluid. "Your" memories? But "you" are making new ones and forgetting old ones each day.

Go down to a stream and sit on the rocks. Perhaps you'll see a spot where whirlpools form for a bit, a knot of water that under the conditions takes on a perceptible form for a few seconds, then melts away as conditions change. Then, a little later, in the same spot, another whirlpool forms.

Is it the same whirlpool?

The question isn't meaningful. "Same" here is a construction of mind, a mere question of our agreements about language, not denotative of any truth about the world.

"You" are just a character in the story being told by your brain.

One story about Zen Master Bankei says that he was very scared of death as a child. When he had his great enlightenment, he realized that "he" could never die, because "he" had never been born. Now that's liberation!

What if the deep experience you have comes from understanding science?

Perfectly fine! I've had a few of those over the years...I remember the feeling of awe when I understood Godel's Incompleteness theorem. (Briefly...I certainly can't "hold it all in my head", and I haven't had to think about it in any detail in almost 15 years. But when I took a formal logic course back in college, for one moment I could just about perceive the whole thing, from axioms on up.)

I would say that usually these are more aesthetic exeperiences than "mystical" ones; but an instense aesthetic experience can trigger a "mystical" one.

I wrote a little more about this recently here:

All of us have some sort of aesthetic sense, a sense of beauty. What triggers it may be as varied as Cantor's diagonalization argument about the infinity of the reals versus the infinity of rational numbers, or the Ramones classic punk anthem "Blitzkrieg Bop", or a folk song played in Japanese with harmonica and guitar, but every human being of sound mind possesses the ability to experience the recognition of beauty. We would hold a person without this ability to be damaged, lacking, an object of pity.

Similar to this aesthetic sense, but distinct from it, is what we might call a "mystical sense".(Credit to Raymond Smullyan for this analogy between the aesthetic and mystical senses.) The experience of the mystical is sometimes expressed as the sense of "the presence of the divine", sometimes as an experience of "Cosmic Consciousness", sometimes as "the perception of emptiness" or a "feeling of oneness with the universe", depending on the social conditioning and religious training of the experiencer. But these are all perceptions of the mystical sense, just as things are varied as the beauty of a sunset, of a Bach fugue, and a Zen garden are all perceptions of the aesthetic sense.

When you sleep around, get disease and my work pays for your treatment.

It is much more likely that you will get heart disease from bad diet and I'll have to pay for your treatment, than that someone non-monogamous but taking elementary precautions (regular testing and proper condom use) will contract and spread a serious STD. (That's a generic you, I have no idea how you specifically eat). If you're going to call my sexual behavior non-private because of the risk of STDs, the same argument about health costs applies to just about every area of human behavior, and leaves nothing in the realm of private choice.

As for sexually abusing children or animals, neither of those is a consensual choice, so is clearly outside the scope of this discussion; public sex is clearly not a private choice, again already excluded.

STDs, abusive sex, and public sexual behavior are also found among people practicing serial monogamy.

I gather from your link that you're buddhist? How does polyamoury meet with your moving towards celibacy as an upasaka

I suppose if you wanted to label me a Buddhist, I'd have a hard time refuting the charge, but I identify as a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian.

Who says I want to be an upasaka? I want to save all sentient beings, that's all. Sex can be a tool towards that end.

Buddhist teachings on sex vary widely; HH the DL hardly speaks for everyone. Google Ikkyu and red thread Zen. I discuss my own interpretation of the precept regarding sexual behavior at the link I gave before, here.

As for polyamory and Buddhism, it's interesting that polygamy was not unknown in the Buddha's time, and as far as I know he did not speak out against it for his lay followers. He was however opposed to the exploitive relationship of keeping concubines.

Incidentally I know he's a Tibetan buddhist but assume that sex is considered a route towards negative emotion (jealousy etc.) in all branches. Please correct me where appropriate.

While (just about) every Buddhist would agree that sex, like any desire, can be a source of suffering and should be handled with care, beyond that teachings vary. Many Tantric Buddhists think it's a "bad thing" but can be used to good ends in this "degraded" age. Many monastically-centered Theravedans would say that the only way to freedom is renunciation of sex. The "Red Thread" Zen tradition says sex is just as much Buddha-nature as anything; as Ikkyu put it, "The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation."

It's immoral to people that consider that you should dedicate yourself to a relationship with one person.

It is perfectly fine for you to decided that you want to dedicate yourself to a relationship with one person. If you ask my opinion about the potential pitfalls along that approach, I'll tell you want I think, but tell you, "knock yourself out - whatever works for you".

It is not ok for you to decide that I should dedicate myself to a relationship with one person; you don't get to dictate what style of relationship makes me happy, any more that you get to decide what sort of music makes me happy. You are free to report your own experiences, preferences, even speculations: but when you attempt to tell me how I "should" love, you've left the realm of useful discourse. And when attempts are made through public policy to dicate how people "should" love, a sane society would hand those poltiicans a whuppin'.

People don't outlaw breaking and entering because they are jealous that they can't crack safes, etc.

Non sequitor. B & E is a violation of the rights of others; if my girlfriends and I decide to have open relationships, that's not a violation of anyone's rights.

I have no problem with birth control myself, but I do have a problem with people being promiscuous,

What in the world does that mean, that you "have a problem" with other people's personal sexual choices? How does my choice cause you any problem?

I think it's extremely shallow, and in the end just leads to loneliness.

I hear a lot more discussion and thought from the polyamoury community about the nature of relationships than I do from most folks, so charges of "shallow" fall flat. And I see honest non-monogamous models working quite for many people - certainly much better than the dishonest non-monogamous model that condemnation like yours pushes people into.

Again: whatever works for you, fine and dandy. But your opinions about the choices of others seem based on faulty data.