"Asics, Adidas and New Balance are manufactured in the same horrible places.

New Balance makes shoes in the USA. Not ALL of their shoes, but some of them.

Frankly, there are plenty of corporations out there that would happily toss babies into a wood chipper if there was any profit in it.

And for every one of those corporations, 10 million conservatives and libertarians who would take to the web to explain in great detail why them doing so was moral, beneficial to us all, and would only be opposed by statist, collectivist fools who would rush us headlong to the Soviet model. In the libertarian world, if it's profitable then it's moral. In the conservative one, the same formula applies, except for drugs and sex.

I'd only call it mildly successful when it can run at least 50% without government subsidies. and fully successful when it is >99%

Considering how much we spend on building and maintenance of roads, not to mention military intervention to protect cheap oil, can we consider automobiles viable yet? What a boondoggle that's been!

You're missing the point that the IPCC's data was just one of the sources. There have been thousands of studies, papers, etc, and the entire field of AGW does not hinge on the IPCC. All science, and all human activity for that matter, will have bad data points. The ~97% of climatologists who accept AGW did not do so solely because the IPCC said so. The field is huge, with dozens of organizations and universities, thousands of scientists, etc. Aside from that, exactly what percentage of the IPCC's data is suspect? Or are you assuming that we have to ignore everything they ever published or concluded, based on a couple of errors? Is that the plan?

Medical science has been wrong before. No question. Does that mean we reject all medicine, until we have absolute certitude? Science does not offer theological certitude. The finding and correcting of error is PART of science. I'm very accustomed to conservative attempts to use any and all errors in science to discredit evolution, stem cell research, medical marijuana, the HPV vaccine, and AGW. I'm also very familiar with conservative attempts to portray themselves as the defenders of "real" science, independent thought, etc, meaning only that they have implicit trust in anyone in any field who rejects AGW, evolution, the efficacy of sex ed, etc. I will continue to get my info on AGW from climatologists, not from right-wing pundits like Glen Beck or whoever.

This is simple, IPCC was married with politics, like much of the entire debate. Everyone back to the lab, the field, the research. Stop pandering to politicians and environmentalists, and come up with some science!

Unfortunately, the science has been done, by climatologists. However, they said a bunch of stuff that some of us didn't want to hear, which by definition makes it controversial, so we pretend that the science is still murky. Throwing out Gore's movie or the entire IPCC doesn't change the bare fact that about 97 out of a hundred climatologists will tell you that humans are exacerbating global warming.

Well, you see, we don't trust our government. We never have. We might have national pride, but we don't trust Bush, Obama, or whomever.

Who's we? I knew plenty of people who trusted Bush regarding Iraq, indefinite detention, waterboarding, warrantless wiretaps, the Valerie Plame leak, and many other things. The issue with conservatives isn't distrust of government, but distrust of non-Republicans. Most conservatives I know had zero problem trusting Pres Bush to decide which human beings deserved habeas corpus, trial by jury, etc. Most conservatives I know have zero problems with "big government" when it comes to marijuana (medical or otherwise), pornography, prostitution, gay marriage, etc. I don't know any conservatives railing against farm subsidies, no-bid Haliburton contracts, or Blackwater mercs making tons of cash.

Anyone who is a-okay with indefinite detention without trial or waterboarding but thinks that government paying for surgery is totalitarian isn't conservative--they're just stupid, liars, or stupid liars. You have to see through the BS conservative myths about conservatism. Neither neoconservatives nor social conservatives are small-government conservatives, though both will lie through their teeth about it. Conservatives didn't bat an eyelash at Bush's spending spree, nor Reagan's back in the day. They're lying. No one who supports indefinite detention without trial, waterboarding, or for that matter even capital punishment is actually a "small-government" anything.

My problem with conservatives is not that they're conservatives, but that they're liars. The same goes for their BS about character and morality. They get apoplectic over Clinton's BJ, but Gingrich, who is still feted and admired, had an affair even as he participated in Clinton's impeachment. If the issue was morality, and not politics, they'd have ostracized Delay and Gingrich. Their moral outrage is faked, and ultimately nothing but cheap opportunism.

I respect actual conservatives, but truth be told I know less than a handful. Plenty pretend to be when the Dems are in office, but it's easy to smoke them out. Just murmur "medical marijuana" or "legalize prostitution" and all talk of government getting off our backs sort of goes by the wayside. I can't begin to express the intensity of my contempt for these people.

who is to actually say that God is not waiting for us beyond the last theorem? Physics is not complete yet so isn't it hubris to proclaim that there is no God without a complete understanding of where our Universe came from?

You are getting the issue sort of backwards. You are asking for evidence of a negative--evidence that God does NOT exist, and since proving a negative is impossible (disregarding logical impossibilities, like square circles), it's no wonder that you're coming up short. The issue is whether or not there is any reason TO believe.

I am finding it more difficult to remain an atheist

Have you found it more difficult to continue not believing in Zeus, Thor, Quetzalcoatl, etc? It's not in dispute that there are many things about the universe that we do not understand. I just don't see how "I don't know" maps to "God did it." Ignorance is not a theological argument.

Just because most of what the world pushes on you as the concept of "God" is complete crap does not mean that "God" does not exist.

Isn't that just as true of all the other gods? I'm an atheist because I see no reason to believe in God, not because I claim to have total knowledge of the universe and can definitively tell you that there is no God. Please stop acting as if atheists are the one making untenable knowledge-claims. Theism is the claim that God exists, and atheism is just skepticism towards that claim. The burden of evidence still rests on the theists, just as it always does for the person making the claim.

I agree, but it's not so much that power corrupts, but that unaccountability corrupts

But I think that accountability automatically scales down as power goes up. When powerful people do bad things, usually there are many other people around them who are complicit in some way, or who should've known better, or who should have spoken up, or who just went along because everyone else did so. Eventually you get to a point where people will give you a pass just because the alternative--admitting that everyone around you facilitated what you were doing--is just too unpalatable. When admitting your guilt involves admitting their own guilt, most people around you will insist on your innocence, to a degree they never would have if they weren't tangentially complicit.

That's why committees and "consensus" are so popular. If one decision can be tracked to one person, they might actually have to deal with personal responsibility. Very few people want that for themselves, and for that they'll collude to muddy the waters for everyone else, too.

"Wow, somebody else is pointing out other things that got left out when people talk about the Saint of Science."

The issue isn't that Galileo was a saint, but that he had to recant under threat of torture. He's become a symbol of a time when religious powers told people what they could say, under threat of torture, prison, or death. When people exaggerate how great Galileo really was, what they're really saying is that they're thankful that part of history is behind us. Whether you love James Dobson or cringe at his name, I don't know anyone who would want to empower him with the authority to have someone tortured and killed because they published a scientific paper, right or wrong, that went against his religious views. We should all be thankful that our culture has moved beyond that.

I didn't say that diet wasn't involved, and I didn't quote any sports trainer. Also, I *do* see fat people at the gym--walking leisurely on the treadmill while the fit people run their butts off at the other treadmill right next to them. The fat people who put forth more (sustained) effort at exercise *and* modify their diet can and do lose weight and get more fit. It takes time and committment.

"If you're fat it's because you're lazy!"

I agree it isn't all that simple. But after you continue to meet fat people who don't work out at all (or barely) that conclusion isn't all that astounding. I know men and women who have lost 50+ pounds by changing their diet and working out. I myself have lost 30ish. The people who want to get healthier eat better and work out. The ones with the most significant effects are the ones who are most committed--intense, frequent workouts, etc. Then I see way overweight people walking slowly on the treadmill or track, and I hear them at work saying "I work out all the time, but can't lose any of this." They grasp at these "exercise doesn't work" or "it's all genetics" arguments as an excuse to not work out more, or more intensely.

No, it's not going to be fair. I know muscular, well-defined men, who can run a 7 minute mile, who work out (and run) far less than I do. And that means nothing as far as *my* health goes. I have very little sympathy for fat people who don't even try because they're convinced that it won't do anything anyway. Do some have metabolic disorders? No doubt. But we also look for excuses to be lazy, and futility is one of the best excuses going.

Why the heck did you post such a wonderfully insightful thing anonymously? That was one of the most interesting things I've read in some time.

I'm mostly with you on this one, but prisoners aren't random normal humans. They are generally evil.

No, they aren't. A significant percentage are there for drug crimes, prostitution, etc. You can be labelled as a sex offender and go to jail because you peed in an alley. We have moved well beyond the stage where everyone in jail can be considered evil. Are there bad people in jail? Certainly. But being convicted by a jury doesn't mean you really did it, or that it went down the way the prosecutor said. Cops lie, witnesses lie (or misremember), evidence gets planted|lost|tainted|misinterpreted, etc. Many have been released from death row after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. In short, the system is far from infallible, and even when it works flawlessly many who are far from "evil" are caught up in it. Don't fool yourself.

I'm not saying that eating pets is viable or necessary, but I find the responses interesting. When people say "we might as well eat neighbors|kids|whoever" they are pretty much putting the lives of animals on the level, value-wise, with the lives of humans. I'm a shameless speciesist (or is it species chauvinist?) and I'm always jarred by people treating animals as if they're as valuable, as humans. I know people who would rather use prisoners for medical research than animals. Seriously.

This thing goes pretty deep, and always amazes me. I used to work in an ER, and I had to sew up a child's face after she was bitten by a dog. After she was discharged , I was criticizing the family for having a 100lb carnivore that was bred for aggression living in the house with their 4 year old child. One of my co-workers got really angry at me, saying "we don't know that that child did to provoke the dog! Did you even ask that?" She blamed the kid and sided with the dog. I was dumbfounded. It fascinates me that people can work alongside one another and have profoundly divergent value systems. I'd have been less shocked to find that an otherwise amicable co-worker belonged to the Aryan Nation than to hear her side with the dog over a mauled child.