Here's the other side of the coin... Corn farmers can produce corn cheaper and more efficiently than sugar beets or cane. That means that HFCS is going to be cheaper than other forms of sugar.

At the risk of offending the diety challenged, I'll go ahead and say "Amen". The formula is simple. Exercise more + Eat less = Skinny, healthy person.

I generally agree. The basic premise of most of these "Food Nazi" health scares we see so often is less about health and more about scaring the pants off people to get attention and funding. After all - whose going to pay all the research centers millions of dollars just to tell us, "No problem. Everything's…

I didn't say parks were bad. They're fine. Just don't let the government within a million miles of them because they terribly mis-manage them. And the central planners WERE the ones that pushed out wolves and bears. Before they came along, ranchers would control them their own way. Wolves and bears are smart…

Part of the problem is the Eco-Fanaticism. Some environmentalists strike the extreme position that any development of any kind by man in a natural setting 'destroys' habitat. This is true on a localized level (IE building a mall on a specific spot replaced THAT specific habitat), but not on a broad level. Cutting…

Centrally controlled management of nature always was, currently is, and always will be a disastrous failure. The sad story of Yellowstone is a textbook example. Teddy Roosevelt liked Yellowstone, so he made it a national park to 'preserve' it. Brilliant central managers were brought in. They decided to kill the…

"No, people are far too likely to practice Religion, with it's laws and rituals, without following it's philosophies"

I did not mean that it was not possible to have morality without religion. What I said was that religion "inspired, fomented, encouraged, and cultivated" and indeed reinforces obedience to such morality. I also went on to say that 'religion' (as a generic term) was often falsely blamed for too many negatives (which…

I don't think I missed that particular thrust. I was merely focusing on the isolated quotation. If that one sentence did not encapsulate your position properly, then don't feel too picked on. I was just using it as an example of a larger problem (and to be blunt it was a VERY good example)... :)

Hear hear. Too many people blame far too much on religion, far too glibly, and with far too little evidence. I think it is very fair to say that there are a lot of butt-hurt people on the internet that blame religion in general for things that are the actions of individuals who in no way shape or form represent…

"Consider, instead, that religion is more frequently used as an excuse for evil, than for a reason to do the right thing."

"you cannot separate the actions of the organizational bureaucracy from that of the religion"

Ah - far from it. Far more people have died for politics than have ever died for religion. The whole "religion is the cause of more death than..." argument is a canard.

I know that on the internet it is fashionable for athiests to proselytize thier religion by pounding on strawmen - but I need to inject a bit of sanity into the dialog. :)

Wow - what a tempest in a teapot. :)

Eeeeeh... Not 'entirely' true. The CRA did establish a political environment where it was both acceptable and expected for a person who didn't qualify for a loan to appeal to the US government. Banks rarely ever redlined race. They redlined geographies of a town that had low income - a very neutral approach. …

"Yes it is..."

That is a good point. In actuality my original post somewhat mischaracterizes Glass-Steagall. It didn't make derivative trading illegal. As you say, what G-S did was make it so that the two types of financial institutions could not operate under the same umbrella... I.E. It was illegal for AIG to both deal in…

This blurb ignores the reasons WHY the banks were doing derivative trading. Back in the 1990s, the US government was engaged in a two-party, two-fisted sucker-punch on the financial industry. Big insurance companies (primarily AIG) wanted to engage in this kind of trading, but a law (Glass-Steagall) set up after the…

[wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com] argument is not that they are all in the middle of parking lots. The argument is that 90% of all the audited stations did not meet NWA, NASA, or NOAA standards for temperature stations. All scientific measurements to be reliable must follow GCP practices, and the temperature…