Thanks!

Similar experience here: my sister was vegetarian for a number of years (half a dozen or so), and when she came out of it, the first meat she ate was bacon.

That is so cool. It makes me feel something like a sea cucumber, which extrudes its stomach and begins processing its meal outside its body. :)

For certain: pregnant women aren't lactating. You probably meant "the next recent mother" or something similar.

Hi, I was adding those books to my Amazon wishlist, and it looks like the authors of "Good Fat, Bad Fat" are William P. Castelli and Glen C. Griffin, 1997. "Why We Get Fat" was 2010, and an earlier book by Gary Taubes was "Good Calories, Bad Calories", from 2008. Just curious which earlier book you were referring to? (Not looking for points for pointing out an error, just looking to correct it -- and read the right references. :)

The 99% is the grass under the 1% elephants' feet.

(Emphasis added.) Surely the US government isn't going after themselves?

Yeah, let's shut down the oxygen because some criminals are using it to breathe with. Let's cut off our noses, damned face!

Thanks for the memories, and new info! I knew about the Kardashev scale (but re-read it for a refresher), and following a link in that, I read up on star lifting. Neat!

Even better, a few days ago I got an overlay ad when I clicked a Google News link to NYT, which told me that this was the first of my ten free articles for the month. Yeah, like I'm going to start paying them for what Reuters and AP (ad nauseum) put out for "free" (to me).

I see what you did there. I won't take this recumbent bike lying down!

Perhaps we should start. A spanner in the gears; "vote gridlock".

Exactly! In idle America, Judges vote for the singers.

I like to think of it in terms of the brain as a planning machine: it evaluates both positive and negative plans, and chooses accordingly. Thus, thinking about suicide is not a sign that you need therapy -- the sign is the thought, "that seems like a good idea" following a thought about ending it.

Which is something every parent should teach their children. I have an ultra-religious aunt who yelled at me to "stop playing my daughter that suicide music!" when I tried to introduce my cousin, who played flute, to the beautiful melodies in Jethro Tull's "Moths", which starts with the (innocent, I thought) lyrics "Oh the leaded window opened, to move the dancing candle flame, and the first moths of summer, suicidal came." It very neatly describes a pattern in nature, that of moths seeking light and being destroyed by their quest. This aunt also destroyed property, burning an audio tape that my sister had given her daughter. To me, this is horrific; she was terrorizing her child, instead of teaching her.

We should be prepared for all eventualities, or at least as many of them as we can adequately prepare for, given time and resources. Thinking about danger, and ways to mitigate the danger, seems like a good use of our societal time left to think. (Last four words from a They Might Be Giants song, "It's not My Birthday", "As I walk I think about a new way to walk, as I think I'm using up the time left to think.")

Government is made of people. People are corruptible. I would prefer not to allow corruptible people to have access to the size and scope of the assets of the citizens, as that tends to reduce the corruption. Sibling poster is accurate, in order to pay for the additional debt for next year we will need to dismantle basically everything -- and then we can't pay for the next year. See this Tony Robbins video regarding our debt.