I have a good friend who is a licensed Chiropractor, and also licensed as a family-practice M.D. He fully understands the limitations of Chiropractic techniques and won't hesitate to advise patients go to a medical specialist for any condition he might detect. Additionally, he would never make any claims he knows to be false, for example, that chiropractic adjustments can help conditions like ulcers, or whatever other ridiculous things fraud Chiropractors claim. He advises companies on ergonomics, and frequently attends health fairs.

Are there fraud Chiropractors? Yes. Are all Chiropractors frauds? Of course not.

Guess what? There are also fraud M.D.s. And fraud lawyers, and fraud plumbers and...

Great post, and exactly right. These anti-alternative-therapy people keep claiming alternative therapies "aren't scientific", but neither is traditional medicine. Doctors are just trained to compare symptoms with available pharmaceuticals and prescribe something and see if it works. It's totally shooting in the dark, and there's very little work in the medical industry that I see to understand how the body really works and develop safe and effective therapies for problems. Worse, all the pharmaceuticals have loads of negative side-effects.

There's a lot of people with various problems (like chronic fatigue syndrome) that traditional medicine has done absolutely nothing to find relief for, so they're forced to turn to anything that might help. You can cry all you want that it's bogus, but trying nearly anything beats sitting on your ass and suffering.

Which is as it should be - if I write "Darkness404 molests goats" then unless it is true why should I not compensate you for the resulting harm to your reputation? Whereas if it is true, then I have done nothing but convey the truth of the situation to the audience.

It does look like guilty until proven innocent, and that's what confuses a lot of people. But if you think about it, the defendant has accused the plaintiff of something, so yes, it's up to the defendant to prove it.

An old journalists' proverb is "if in doubt, leave it out".

Expecting the plaintiff to prove the statements aren't true is ridiculous. Unless Darkness404 has been shadowed by numerous independent witnesses for his entire life he can't prove that he never ever indulged in a little caprine frolicking.

If you can convince the court is true, then that's good enough.

You may remember the cases that Fat Bob Maxwell won against Private Eye; at least some of the accusations were factually true, but the magazine couldn't prove it at the time. So legally, they were false.

And what is that makes military and political advancements possible, if not science and technology?

The police use them extensively in the downtown area where I live. I actually saw one pull over a car once. But, apart from being terribly expensive, one of my friends bought one. He'd ride it to work when the weather wasn't horrid, as well as around town on the weekends. He had a blast with it for about four months, until he hit that patch of mislaid pavers....

Double compound fracture. Ow. Thousands of dollars in medical bills, even after insurance. My curiosity completely evaporated. Much like my desire to buy a motorcycle dies every few months when I see one that's wiped out on the interstate.

Good luck with the insurance policy. As AIG shows, what makes anybody think the insurance company will have the money - or even be around - in 60 years to cover the cost of dismantling a reactor?

The only way you can get nuclear power to pan out financially is if you have the government own and run all the reactors on what amounts to a non-profit basis (as in France, with EDF, which is something like 80% government-owned). You can't even get private insurance for the things (and I wouldn't trust private insurers to pay out in the event of a major incident, anyhow).

Even in France, EDF isn't in great financial shape. They don't have enough money to support their pension obligations and all decommissioning expenses, although presumably the French government has made enough money off EDF over the years they could pick up some of that tab and still ultimately leave taxpayers in the black.

The reality is, fission power never has and never will make much financial sense. When France went nuclear in the post WWII era there weren't any viable alternatives for them, but clearly that's no longer the case today for many nations, the United States included.

it may take juries a bit to warm up to the idea of placing blame where it really belongs

You mean the dumbass who walked into moving traffic???

Situations certainly exist where the driver bears responsibility for hitting a pedestrian (running a red light,
taking a blind corner as fast as the car can handle), but let's not turn this into one of those joke arguments
about poor defenseless pedestrians vs the nasty aggressive drivers.

I'll skip the stories of idiot bimbos on cellphones randomly walking out from between two parked SUVs to cross
four-lane roads, and skip right to a real gem that blew me away. Two winters ago, coming home from work, the
roads had a nasty layer of ice on them. I crested a hill doing easily 10mph under, and saw a guy talking to
his neighbor across the road, from the MIDDLE of my lane. Now, I had a good 600-800ft to him, and he had
perhaps a full 30 seconds to get out of the way. I applied the breaks, no effect. So I honked (three
brief taps, not blaring the horn at him) to warn him, and the stupid bastard flipped me off and kept
standing there chatting!

I kept honking and eventually nudged my car into the other lane (thank god for no oncoming traffic) to avoid
hitting him, and succeeded. But seriously - I swear if I could have stopped, I would have gotten out to beat
the shit out of him.

And yet, had my car hit him, any court in the country would have called it "my" fault for failure to control my
car.

So yeah, not a lot of sympathy when you tell me we where the blame "belongs" for these Darwin-award candidates.