I am a HUGE believer in individual choice. If the consumer chooses to buy or use something that isn't government approved... that is their choice. Obviously make it clear to them so they don't do it by accident... but that's about it.

I don't disagree with this, but a key issue is marketing and insurance coverage, not availability. Drugs that are legally available to consumers can't be marketed for purposes other than the conditions they were approved to treat, and companies have paid billions of dollars in fines for violating these rules. That doesn't prevent doctors from prescribing the drugs off-label, but insurance companies usually won't cover this (I know, I've tried), and because these uses can't be marketed, the revenues are vastly lower. I am 100% in favor of experimentation and consumer choice, but I don't like seeing companies push drugs with potentially debilitating side effects on people without actual evidence that they work.

consider that we might do well to push a lot of these bio medical researchers at the private sector

Many of us would love to move to the private sector. There's just aren't a lot of jobs there either. In my current specialty, there are hundreds of postdoctoral fellowships (and maybe a dozen faculty openings) for every industry position. I have much broader expertise than that, but employers typically aren't interested in anyone who doesn't fit the exact list of criteria that HR prepared. I've basically spent the last 6 years working as a full-time software developer but I can't even get responses to job applications because I'm still in academia, and competing with CS graduates with the right buzzwords on their resumes.

Obviously my choice of career path was poor, but there isn't some magic solution that can retroactively fix that problem.

They say that they spend so much money complying with the FDA that they have very little for anything else.

That's because the FDA requires actual proof that a drug does what it's claimed to do before they'll let it be marketed as such - oh, and it has to not have debilitating side effects. If we got rid of the FDA, the barriers to market would be vastly lower, but we'd be flooded with a huge number of placebos with deadly side effects. Really, it's shocking how often drug candidates make it to Phase III trials only to discover that they're effectively useless. Do you really want to get rid of that filter?

The pernicious influence of this 'Federal technical complex' has led to an entire generation of scientists who believe that the only credible source of funding must be the federal government.

Actually, none of us really believe that. In fact, most of us would love to have more options than crawling back to the NIH every five years, and would also prefer not to worry about whether the hacks in DC will fuck everything up for us. The problem is that the governments really are the largest source of funding and there are limited prospects to replace that. Wealthy philanthropists are great but it's hard to find enough of those to shell out the equivalent of the NIH budget. Companies are rarely interested in spending money on anything they can't turn into a product in the shortest possible amount of time - in the life sciences, only a tiny handful of them do anything resembling "basic research".

The comparison to the "solitary inventor" of the past is irrelevant, because up until recently you didn't need much technology to make some pretty important discoveries. Unfortunately, as science advances, each incremental discovery tends to require steadily greater investments in equipment and infrastructure, which creates a huge barrier to entry. Additionally, the body of knowledge is so immense that it takes years to acquire the technical knowledge to tackle most research projects independently.

Again, lots of pointless talk about "rights" and "licensing" and "rules" to justify ambushing and robbing travelers. Why justify it? Just stop ambushing and robbing travelers.

If mobsters were setup along the road, stopping travelers and taking their money under implied threats, it would be wrong. Not just illegal, but actually morally wrong. Even if they only took $100 from each. Even if they only stopped people going fast. Even if they had "rules" for who was stopped. Even if they said they were only targeting people doing risky things. Even if they told you you "agreed" to this by coming on their turf. Fortunately, we don't have mobsters doing that. Unfortunately, we have an even more powerful organization doing essentially the same thing.

Mobsters don't care about right and wrong. They just want to get paid. How about you?

The mercury level in a dose of a vaccine is less than the amount you might get from eating a tuna steak.

It's also in a different form - fish contain methylmercury, which is extremely toxic, while thimerosol is metabolized to ethylmercury, which isn't something you want to have a lot of in your system, but isn't as awful.

There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe.

Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines. I'm pretty sure doctors check for this before sticking the needle in. These people are one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, because the only thing protecting them from certain diseases is the fact that the rest of the population can't act as carriers. Most of us won't be harmed if one of Jenny McCarthy's kids coughs on us, because we've had the shots - but the unlucky few who really can't get vaccinated are screwed.

This is the real problem. Your phone furthers your own bourgeois material individualism. It must be re-purposed to better serve the collective.

Easy. They keep redefining "intoxicated" closer and closer to perfectly sober. Even the slightest distraction is the same as being "intoxicated" when "intoxicated" is a half bottle of beer.

This is complete bullshit. Driving has been getting safer for 40 years and the trend is even longer and more obvious if you report fatalities per mile driven.

Drunk driving is down, even if you use the inflated "alcohol related" numbers.

That's not really an argument. Something is either happening or it's not, regardless of whether it sounds logical to you or anyone else.

People are skeptical because the climate change alarmists want to centralize government power over individuals. There's a never-ending list of reasons why we are told we should give governments more power over us. When one reason fails, the power-hungry always come up with a new reason. There's an equally long set of historical examples for why government power over individuals is dangerous.

Since power-hungry people have an obvious motive to lie, and since free people have obvious reasons to be suspicious of the power-hungry, why shouldn't you expect "resistance" when yet another reason to concentrate power is offered?

You seem to think "rule of law" means every action or inaction in every second of everyone's day needs to be ruled by a law. That's not what it means. A free person rules himself. "Rules of law" means the people in the government have to follow the law.

You really seem hellbent to justify ambushing travelers and taking their money -- even though everyone knows that's not the behavior of an honest person. You don't have to go crazy trying to defend robbing travelers, just stop doing it. Find something honest to do with your time. Maybe try helping people rather than taking their money.

I don't get tickets because I don't go fast. I don't get raped either, because I don't dress up like a slut and hang out in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But what kind of person sits by the side of the road waiting to ambush people and take their money? Honest people don't do things like that.

Sewer systems are paid for by water/sewer fees. It's a fee for a service, not a tax.

How about getting an honest job where you don't spend your days ambushing travelers and taking their money?