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OK, sure; fair enough. There are plenty of people who pretend. My point was that Martin Luther King Jr. and Tomás de Torquemada were both sincere Christians.

I agree; merely different degrees and types of regulation. Capitalism needs laws and orderly processes, or it breaks down into something very different.

'Innate', 'inevitable', 'impossible'?...

Not my call. 'Christians' have believed all sorts of wildly divergent things over the past 2000 years, and it's not for me to decide. Anyone who calls himself a 'Christian' is one, as far as I'm...

Sorry, but this is simply not true. You really appear not to understand the Establishment Clause. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or...

Right. it costs $3 to manufacture, most of their development costs were paid by the government, and they want to sell it for $130. Hooo boy. Sorry, but for all of my objections to communism, that...

Yes indeed; lots of Finns in northern Minnesota. I would translate 'sisu' more as 'stoicism', but it has elements of all of that.

Colorado's looking pretty good, too. Minnesota's not doing badly. Alabama and Mississippi OTOH . . .

My goodness, an outbreak of amity and reasonableness! Well done, gentlemen! Y> One way or another, nobody would argue that it's a good idea to spend all of one's time staring at a screen and living...

The problem is that there's not an answer to 'What do people of faith believe?' - at least not one answer, or even a hundred. And the loudest voices are, well, loudest, but not at all necessarily...

Oh, I dunno; Richard Dawkins sold a lot of copies of 'The God Delusion'. I do understand your point, though. Pretty good book, BTW.

Depends on the subject. If you want to know the date of the battle of Antietam and who won, a quick check of Wikipedia or something similar will be fine. If you want to have a fairly clear idea...

Nah. 'Research' isn't binary; it's something you can do a little of or a lot, well or badly. Looking it up in Wikipedia is 'research'. So is working for five years looking up every bit of human...

True. And there's sometimes a very fine line between that and total blithering flakiness; sometimes no line at all. As I've said before, I have a real love-hate relationship with California, but I...

:D Nicely done! :d

All history is partial. What we choose to emphasize makes a huge difference.

Ted's a good guy, but sometimes he's sooooooooo Californian.

And again, Ted, that has little to do with the initial subject of the thread. The ratio between the production cost and the sale price of insulin has almost nothing to do with the affect of...

Indeed; I agree about 95%. I expect that there's some truth to the idea that we evolved under conditions where food was often scarce, sugary stuff was available only intermittently, if at all, and...

Again, an example: much of the opposition to slavery had a large religious component (we're all children of God, that kind of thing). A plantation owner in Mississippi in 1850 says "You don't have...

If one is offended by reality, tough. Sure; if people with heritable conditions that would otherwise kill them live to reproduce because of medical treatment, the frequency of those genes in the...

Not so much you, Tom. John started the thread, and it quickly became apparent that he associates 'religion' with its loudest and most reactionary proponents, and probably doesn't know the difference...

Sorry, Tom; on this one you're just wrong. The ratio of production cost to price of insulin has little or nothing to do with the relationship of type II diabetes to behavior. Insulin has been sold...

The price vs production cost of insulin is one question. The effect of lifestyle on the prevalence of diabetes is another; entirely different, and only marginally related.

That reduces costs. This I know about; automated production machinery is what I've done for the past 40+ years. NO company will EVER spend money on it unless it reduces costs, or does something...

Because the US 'Christian right' is a part of the US cultural right wing: white, rural, largely southern, among which opposition to any laws restricting guns is almost universal. You expect it to...

Aside from the fact that it's simply false. I'm as hard on the faults of religion as anyone, and I'm reasonably familiar with them; God know there's no shortage. But that's not all there is; very,...

I'm not talking about trying to give religious observance official support, ten commandments in the courthouse and prayers in the classroom; that's obviously unconstitutional.

And I agree with...

I’m going to attempt to go back to basics; forgive me if I repeat the obvious too much.

All law is coercion, by definition; laws are not mere suggestions. They are, for better or worse,...

The rough outline of the ex-Confederacy shows up on an astounding number of maps, graphing wildly different things. By county, it's even clearer:
...

Easy; everybody just has to agree on everything. :D

Sure - I'm sure the average Presbyterian or UCC would agree with you, but there's a substantial fraction of Christians who are convinced they do. Miraculous healing is a pretty big thing among...

You do realize that's a parody, right?

Octopus is pretty tasty IMHO, squid even better. Sea urchins (erizos in Chile) are weird-tasting, bright orange squooshy things. Not bad, but very strange.

Can't really blame folks. If I were a poor Chinese farmer in the back county in previous times, I'd eat whatever I could get to stay alive.

There was a case a couple of years ago where some raccoon dogs (which I knew by the Japanese name tanuki) being raised for fur almost got loose in northern Minnesota. It would not have gone well at...

I agree that tactically it's a very bad idea.

Even ethically, I have my doubts. There has been lots and lots of injustice over the centuries. Can we correct it? Which of it should we try to...

If you knew anything about the real Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, I doubt you'd say that. He was a quite spectacularly awful fellow, even by the standards of...

OK, OK. :d:d

Oh, that's cogent. :rolleyes:

Whether the takeover was a good idea or not, the sources in the original post are NOT 'clickbait BS' but quite straight relatively-objective reporting. Stop whining and defend the state's decision...

Perhaps. Long and (as far as I can tell) not-too-biased article here. And another article here.

Thinking about starting one of those 12-step groups; powerless over books, our lives had become unmanageable and our shelves had started to collapse . . .

Bigfella resurrected?

Rat's the source of the famous 'messing about in boats' quote.

:d Stirring the pot, eh?

Got the boat right.

https://smallboatsmonthly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/IMG_1562PS.jpg

The S&P 500 started in 1923. There have been 17 presidents since then, and 26 4-year administrations. So in the top ten - as I said, OK, but unremarkable. But you're quite right that presidents...

You're a funny man, Brad. Stock market performance was OK but unremarkable during the Trump administration, (data on request), and if you believe presidents are directly responsible for that on way...

Note that Tom's original post was from 1999. He's well-settled in northern Ohio now.

Likewise. Younger, more calculating, not quite as hobbled by narcissism, but just about as ruthless. He must be stopped.