Note that I said "also". Your original statement seems to imply that you think it's OK for a country to abuse monopoly power, and I was wondering how far you would go with that. I don't think it's ever right to abuse monopoly power. In any case, the article isn't really about China, so I'm not sure why you're so critical of it.

So do you also think it's OK for a company to abuse its monopoly power?

Your kinder and more accurate self FTFY. ;-)

Yes, but some politicians are better than others. Giving money to the most corrupt politicians is worse than doing nothing.

That's bribery. If you've got money to spend, use it to help candidates who will do the right thing without receiving kickbacks.

Could you clarify which of my statements are "bold claims"? You are claiming that the Shroud is a forgery from the 13th century, but the origin and dating of the Shroud is still a subject of intense debate in the scientific community. This Wikipedia article has some good information on the subject, including much of the "evidence" that I mentioned earlier.

It's funny, I was reading through some of the "Skeptical sites" linked at the bottom of the Wikipedia page, and was surprised to find this summary in "the Skeptic's Dictionary":

Of course, the cloth might be 3,000 or 2,000 years old, as Rogers speculates, but the image on the cloth could date from a much later period. No matter what date is correct for either the cloth or the image, the date cannot prove to any degree of reasonable probability that the cloth is the shroud Jesus was wrapped in and that the image is somehow miraculous. To believe that will always be a matter of faith, not scientific proof.

So yes, the age of the cloth and image is still very much in question.

That's a straw man. You're forming a mental picture of how the "real thing" would look like and then disproving it. The fact is, nobody really knows how the image on the Shroud was formed.

What surprises me is that there isn't any reasonable explanation (that I know of) for how such a fake could be produced, even though the Shroud is perhaps the most studied artifact in our history. There's pretty good evidence that the image isn't painted. (For instance, the VP-8 image analysis shows a "3D" quality and the image only exists on the surface of the fibers.) So how was it made? If you know of any theories that account for everything, I'd be glad to hear them.

From what I've heard, the recreations fail in major ways, even though our technology is far, far better than what they had in the middle ages. ;-) If I'm wrong about that, please provide an example. I'd also like to point out that in the middle ages, they didn't have the types of analysis we have today, and would have had no reason, for instance, to fake aspects that can only be seen on the microscopic level.

I honestly don't know whether the Shroud is a forgery or not, but I've always been quite overwhelmed by the amount of evidence that suggests it is not.

Could you elaborate on "poorly made fake"? How was it made? Can you explain the process?