Not in the least, since I'm not out to prove the philosophical truth or not of their proposition. What I'm suggesting is more like a rule of thumb.

Jet engine temperature is not the same thing as open air burning temperature. Looking at the specs page, I think I might have gotten my Celsius and Fahrenheit confused. (I was writing the above paragraph from memory) According to the specs, the open air burning temperature of JET A-1 jet fuel is 260-315C (500-599F)

"I assume businesses act in their self interest, and if they don't they should get bankruptcy (not in their interest). I have no problem with stupid people/businesses doing stupid things as long as I'm not paying for it." - It's easy to say that business that don't act rationally should go bankrupt. But what do you do when you have ordinary people - people without a complex understanding of the mortgage market - who were pressured into purchasing dangerous financial instruments (adjustable rate mortgages) when fixed rate mortgages would have been much better (and not knowledgeable enough to know better)? Or to lenders that were outright defrauded by mortgage brokers who lied to them about the counterparty's ability to pay it back? The government absolutely has a responsibility to prevent these kinds of abuses.

"No one company's bankruptcy would cause the entire economy to crater." - That is provably false. One insolvent bank can trigger a run on all banks, even solvent ones. That's what caused the panic of 1837, the panic of 1893, and especially the panic of 1907. The situation today, when financial institutions touch basically every other sector of the economy, is even more prone to collapse. You said "Lehman went through it" as if that somehow makes it OK. You forgot what came next. After Lehman Bros. imploded, it caused Bear Sterns to implode, and would have caused Bank of America and AIG to go down next had the government not stepped in. (And Lehman, the biggest bankruptcy in history, was dwarfed by both, by the way. Lehman's market cap was $50 billion market versus $69 [2012] for AIG and $102 [2012] for BoA)

"Other businesses buy up the pieces and life goes on." - We've seen what happens when you let everything implode and trust the market sort it out. It was called the Great Depression. Yup, I couldn't imagine why anyone would object to letting that happen again.

"I would never ascribe to the government the role of "ultimate arbiter of systemic risk". They can arbitrate contract disputes and punish fraudulent activity but they are not the overlords of the whole market." - What planet are you from? The US Government has been doing just that since - at the very least - the creation of the Fed in 1913, and arguably since the creation of the Second Bank of the United States in 1816. If you took a poll of 100 ordinary people on the street "Should the government intervene in the market to prevent depressions from happening?" you'd probably get nearly 100% of people agreeing to the idea, because it's common sense.

""too big to fail" was a lie told to congressmen (and their constituents) to give taxpayer money to companies in trouble as opposed to them taking responsibility for bad decisions." - maybe that congressman realized that, as politically unpalatable as bailing out the bad actors was, letting another great depression happen was even less politically palatable.

"What gives you confidence in that assertion? Whether or not the lender brokered the mortgage itself, they would not own a mortgage with excessive risk if they didn't think the government was their backstop. (unless they were irrational and/or made bad decisions, in which case, let them go bankrupt!)" -- If the people brokering the mortgages had to own them and eat any losses caused by them, they would never have made those bad loans in the first place.

The problem is that most people, skeptical or not, most people are not competent to assess such claims on their merits. Where big tobacco is concerned, it usually requires an advanced degree in biology or chemistry.

You're a fucking idiot. The housing downturn was small (relative to the rest of the economy) and probably inevitable. The economic meltdown that followed was big and entirely preventable. Go read a book. Idiot.

"If government bailouts weren't the assumed outcome, no one would take the risk to buy such crappy mortgages, and then brokers wouldn't try to get people into loans they can't afford. ' - In order to make that conclusion, you're assuming that all the players in the mortgage market acted rationally and with a full and complete understanding of what was going on and what was going to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even Alan Greenspan (the biggest proponent of this line of thinking) has said he got it wrong.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with repealing Glass-Steagal (and relish anytime part of the New Deal is repealed). If you were a curtain maker who wanted to start making blinds too, and then maybe got into stained glass - who is the government to say "no, you can only do x"?" -- if your company's failure would cause the entire economy to crater, then as the ultimate arbiter of systemic risk, it's most definitely the government's job to stop you. Just as it is their job to say 'no, you can't get any bigger" when companies want to merge or expand, or "you need to be broken up" when they are too large.

"The only problem is when there's a true monopoly/oligopoly-collusion to set prices or start bullying other businesses around that you have a problem." - So you don't find "too big to fail" to be a problem in-and-of-itself (even if there is no predatory monopolism)? If that's the case, then frankly you have not learned the key lesson of the current recession.

"Ironically it is the government's heaps of regulations that bully around small banks, because only the big banks can afford the teams of lawyers needed to wade through the red tape." -- I can't speak to all banking regulations, but I can say with confidence that if the same company had to broker and lend the mortgage (if the government had prohibited decoupling them) then the housing market downturn would have been much less severe.

Yes, I admit that I'm clearly making an ad hominem argument. It's entirely possible that tobacco scientists do, occasionally, publish a real paper about tobacco safety - one which has no intentionally biased sampling or methodology. But I'm not an expert in tobacco safety, and I'm not qualified to play 'spot the trick' on their methodology. It's not realistic to expect that of the general public. That's what unbiased experts are for. (And yes, this is an argument from authority)

I'm not an expert on cigarette safety, global warming, or hydraulic fracturing. With each of these industries, there's an obvious conflict of interest between the people employed in those industries putting out data related to those industries. And, I should add, each of those industries have long histories of putting out scientific misinformation that is nigh impossible for a non-expert to spot.

Here's a little case study to prove my point. It's a classic 9/11 trutherism argument. Can you spot the fallacy? (Without looking it up, that is)
Fact #1 - Steel melts at 1300 degrees C.
Fact #2: Jet fuel burns at roughly 650 degrees C.
Conclusion - The Twin Towers could not have been brought down by jet planes because airplane fuel does not burn hot enough to melt steel.

The fallacy in the above case lies in the assumption that steel has to melt in order to bring down the trade towers. At 650 degrees C, steel loses 90% of its strength. But how many ordinarily non-engineers know this off the top of their head?

As far as your claims about climate scientists, I'll be more skeptical of their conclusions when I'm shown that they have a horse in the race.

"simply claiming scientific fraud because you happen to disagree with the results is not a valid argument, sorry." - while this is true a philosophy class, in the real world it falls down. In the real world, there are plenty of scientists whose results can be discounted a priori. I automatically discount anything a "scientist" employed by a tobacco company has to say about cigarette safety, or that an oil company scientist has to say about global warming or the safety of fracking. It's too easy for them to cause bias in their results in ways that are nearly impossible for a non-expert to figure out.

In this case, the results were from NOAA, which doesn't have a horse in the race, as far as I'm aware.

Nice strawman argument. I never said the government didn't bear some responsibility for the housing downturn. The point, which seems to have gone completely over your head, is that housing market is cyclical, and downturns happen fairly regularly. What made this one different is that policies - put in place by Republicans - turned the economy into a tinderbox and all that was needed to cause a meltdown was one spark.

"Where did the minority lending come into the discussion at all? People who couldn't pay the loans back were not only minorities, not by a long shot!" - For a while now, it's been standard Conservatives rhetoric that the recession was caused by the FHA and other minority-friendly lending programs. By extension, Conservatives can blame the democratic sponsors of these bills and deflect the blame from themselves.

It's even worse than that.

Not only had he paid the fine, and not only did he show the officer a sealed letter from the state saying he had paid it, but having an unpaid fine is not an arrestable offense (in New Jersey, where this all happened)

I will argue exactly that: what happened in 2009 was a result of government social engineering forcing quasi-businesses Fannie+Freddie to give loans to people who couldn't pay them back.

Then you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. You didn't even get the date of the recession right. It started in September 2008 with the bankruptcy of Lehman brothers.

Although it's popular among Fox news viewers to blame the recession on the Fair House Act and political pressure to lend to minorities as you just did, the facts don't back up this argument at all. Minority lending in the pre-recession economy was something like 5% of the total mortgages. Even if every single one of those loans was made because of the FHA (they weren't), and even if every single one of those loans was bad (again, not true), it still wouldn't even come close to explaining why the housing market tanked or why the economy exploded. The housing market collapsed because (a) home prices were vastly overinflated, twice their inflationary-adjusted historical levels (b) credit was too easy to come by, allowing people to purchase overly expensive houses with no down payment, (c) The people taking out mortgages were unaware of how dangerous an adjustable-rate mortgage is, particularly those where the rates automatically increase after a year or two. (d) There was - thanks in large part to republican deregulation - a decoupling of mortgage brokering from mortgage lending. So the people brokering the mortgage had an incentive to find unqualified borrowers, inflate (read: lie) about their ability to pay the loan back, and quickly sell off that mortgage to someone else, who has to eat the loss when the person defaults on the loan. Meanwhile, (e) republicans in the Fed and Congress prevented the government from doing anything to regulate this. The net result of all of this was a bubble that, when the downturn happened, burst.

But that still doesn't explain why the economy tanked. A bad housing market drags the economy down, but a housing downturn is not sufficient to explain why the entire economy imploded. Why was this particular housing downturn different from all the rest? The answer is that for the first time in history, we started treating the housing market like the stock market. With credit default swaps ('financial weapons of mass destruction' is how Warren Buffet refers to them), hundreds or thousands of mortgages are packed together into an investment vehicle. The problem is that if even handful of people in that mortgage pool go bankrupt, the CDO starts losing money. If lots of them go bankrupt, it becomes worthless. This risk was not well understood and CDOs were rated AAA grade. So all of Wall Street suddenly began chasing CDOs like they were the end-all-be-all of investment, not realizing that a downturn would render them worthless.

Worse, thanks to the Republicans in congress (and Phil Graham in particular) an important piece of New Deal era legislation was gone. The Glass-Steagal Act prohibited limited all companies to doing either commercial banking, investment banking, or insurance. Under Glass-Steagal, a company cannot, for example, be both an insurance company and a commercial bank. In essence, Glass-Steagal acted as a firewall between important sections of the economy, preventing a downturn in one from spreading like poison to the others. In 1999, Republicans passed (admittedly with Bill Clinton's help) the Graham-Leach-Bliley bill, which repealed Glass-Steagal. With Glass-Steagal gone, every segment of the financial world was prone to a downturn in any one area of the market.

Worst still, the failure of the Federal Government to enforce anti-trust regulations - again, thanks to Republicans - meant that companies could get so large that their bankruptcy would endanger the whole economy. Thus "too big to fail" was born. If you ask me - and most people would agree - too big to fail means to big to exist.

At every every along the way to the great recession, the Republicans pushed for the things that caused the meltdown.

"Do they also refute the existence of non-beneficial mutations?" - No, they claim that mutations are always detrimental.

"Surely even the staunchest of Creationists must acknowledge the so called "short-term" evolution that gives us the ability to manipulate plants or breed wolves into dogs. " - the standard creationist reply to this would be that they accept "micro evolution" (natural selection and adaption) but that they don't accept "macro evolution" (the ability for one species to evolve into another). Scientifically, there's no meaningful distinction between the two - it's only a difference of degree, not kind.

Most creationists do not accept the existence of beneficial mutations. (They argue that adaption only brings out attributes that already have some preexisting genetic basis, and that no new beneficial alleles can be created)