And the government uses other excuses, such as the War on Drugs, to control everything and anything which could even conceivably be illegal drug connected, or child porn to control everything and anything which could be internet connected, or the War on Terror, to control everything and anything that could be travel or free speech connected...
The courts have done a much better job of reigning in activities based on 'the environment', or 'health effects' or other "liberal' concerns than they have on reigning in anything using one of these excuses.

1. The Affordable Care Act is supposed to take the burden off of emergency rooms - you're arguing for it, whether you mean to or not. In the USA, the situation you're describing is mostly past tense, except in states that have refused the expansion.
2. Treating the consequences of excess sugar consumption is not a huge burden fiscally. Diabetic care, even with insulin and multiple blood sugar tests per day. is fairly cheap (around $100 per month for the average patient - typically cheaper than non-generic antidepressants, and much cheaper than the average course of antipsychotics. The cost of treating marginal diabetic symptoms is usually 1 or 2 four dollar a month generic drugs and around 18 to 25 dollars in testing supplies, and probably $200 in lab tests and office visits a year. (That describes me, and the costs I might personally be passing on to the society if I was poorer). Those lab tests will usually also test for such things as prostate hormone levels and hypertension related cholestoral levels which may be at least vaguely connected to type 2 diabetes, but are not all that corollated. Doctors would still advise those tests for every male in my age range, and they have other tests they recommend for women in the same range, so all poor people above about age 40 would be passing a good share of such costs on regardless of their lifestyle choices.
3. Many diabetics do manage on these for over 20 years without further costs, and roughly 30% of diagnosed individuals manage to control their disease entirely through diet and exercise. (However, Type 2 often develops in elderly persons of normal weight - I assume we aren't counting them in the bad eating habits group). You probably are count ing me there - I first developed symptoms in my early 40's. Right now, I'm 57, stand 6' 1", weight 195 lbs, and hit the gym at least 3 times a week, usually 5. I can run a half marathon, bench 255 lbs. and leg press over 600, My resting heart rate is about 68 bpm, my blood pressure 110 over 72, and yet I still have to use Metformin and test 1x/day.But when I was first diagnosed, yes I had a bit of a gut, and yes I drank too many sodas. Sometimes what you're calling bad eating habits is one soda a week, and 15 lbs of excess fat. I'm making the choice to stay in better shape than 90% of the people my age, and that doesn't 'fix' my condition, only makes it much cheaper to treat and hopefully holds off any of the more severe consequences such as peripheral neuropathy.
          So yes,their choices do have an effect on the people around them. So does just about everything. Do we require people to eat more cruciferous vegetables and less red meat? Treating colon cancer can be much more of a burden to society than diabetes. Or what about the social costs of a Down's syndrome child? These vary a lot, but particularly for single mothers and poorer class persons,can be devastating. If we just forcibly sterilized the at risk classes of mothers at about age 38, we could save a bundle. And the costs for a single violent schizophrenic can be in the 10's of millions when the disease leads to a school shootout. Talk about effect on the people around them! We can stop this by just putting all schizophrenics in institutions, and never mind that ones prone to major violence are very uncommon and we see the same type of violence from 'norma'l people.
4. I don't know who you are, but I guarantee you have some habit or practice that is your choice, and could, in the past, result in a tremendous cost to treat you. In the USA, unless you were making at least half a million a year, there were diseases that you couldn't possibly afford, and your insuror would stop covering when you hit your lifetime cap, often within the first year of a lifetime illness. This would still be true except for the Affordable Care Act's having stopped lifetime caps. You're protected there whether you like it or not, and so are the diabetics, choices or not.

The early memos where the national socialists discussed putting the word socialist into the party name so they could lure workers away from German left wing parties are on open record. The NAZIs knew from the start they fell on the right and had a natural aliance with the ownership classes, and were very cynical about getting enough votes to gain power. In Hitler's own words, his National Socialism had nothing to do with Marx, Communism, or conventional Socialism, and was totally opposed to all of those things, but workers had to be weaned away from flirting with those philosophies.

To verify what I just claimed, look for George Sylvester Viereck's interview with Hitler (1923), or for more on this idea, read
R. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (1982) There's citations, and not just internet wiki ones, if that last matters.

The real question is, when Hitler claimed to be pro something or other, why does anyone living now say, in effect, "And you can trust that because it's straight from Hitler's own public speeches?" Don't people have to start out pro-Hitler to take anything he claimed that uncritically? And why does the American Right keep complaining about people playing the Race Card, and then quoting Hitler like they uncritically believe him?

Saying just a theory is sort of like saying "that legal opinion is just a judge's". In some cases, it's like saying "just the supreme court's opinion.". Sure, it might still be wrong, so let's get an auto mechanic's opinion on what the law is - let's stop having juries and just ask a random plumber to decide who's guilty of what - maybe we could flip a Bible and if it lands face up the accused is innocent... .

He would have, but the margins on his screen were too small to jot them down.

God, as a hypothesis, is not falsifiable, for largely the reasons you point out. Some people pretty well versed in the history of science hold both that Science is, by definition, committed to natural explanations, and can't include supernatural ones, and that God MUST be a supernatural entity. That, though, is a slightly different argument from the one you're presenting. The thing is, we can imagine purely natural aliens, with nothing at all supernatural involved, but they could be impossible in practice to use as a scientific hypothesis to explain anything else.
        They could, for example, be individually much smarter than humans. In a simplistic sense, what could we really conclude about what aliens with say, 10 times or 50 times the neurons, or equivalent structures, in their brains (or equivalent structures, again). If they wanted us to believe something was a fact, the overwhelming probability would be they could manipulate us into believing it whether it was true or not. Maybe we could trip up some types of aliens that were somewhat smarter than us in a contradiction, but postulate ones that are smarter by enough, and that chance becomes vanishingly small. There's not any sharp line between unfalsifiable in practice and unfalsifiable in theory, and no real need for infinite knowledge (omnescience) to even be possible, just intelligence somewhat better than human levels. .
    Alternately, wouldn't the same apply about aliens that were not all that much, if any, smarter than us, but had millions of years of civilised history, and had been through first contact situations with hundreds of other species before meeting us? Just their having been inventing space travel when we were still working on fire might mean they had enough of an advantage we could never detect what they didn't want us to detect. Or what about aliens who were no smarter than us, and had not been through many first contact situations, but had discovered some new principle that somehow worked better than any form of logic we know. Science can't prove that there is nothing possibly better than the scientific method itself (or it it somehow does, we still can't trust the proof is right). This problem starts kicking in at very low levels of knowing, not just as we consider something omniscent, or nearly so (whatever that last means - isn't any finite amount of knowledge infinitely less than infinite knowledge?). If we encounter aliens that appear to be not much more advanced than we are, or even if we get to them first and they appear backwards, how could we really prove they were? Those simple peasants that aren't resisting being rounded up and executed could conceivably be Organians, after all. How do we prove they aren't?
            You've presented a respectable argument for God not being part of the scientific method. I just want to point out that, since it applies to a lot of things we wouldn't call 'God' by any normal standard as well, it's an argument about the limitations of the scientific method itself, not just about whether that 'God' exists.

Thaank goodness for the Eternal August.

The very way the request is phrased assumes the guilt of the persons being investigated. When a trial starts with guilty until proven innocent, that IS what 'witch hunt' means. If the Republicans were asking for all relevant evidence, to see IF the IRS violated the first amendment, that would be different. In America, we don't ask for the Trtuth, that part of the Truth that proves what we want it to, and nothing but the part we like.

I came to this thread with one mod point left, and here you are, practically begging for it - so no, you can't have it, i'm gonna save it and come back to mod myself -1 off topic instead. And Steven Zoltan Brust is fantastic.

Security through Obscurity works, just as camoflage works for soldiers. And relying just on Security through Obscurity works just as well as camoflaging your soldiers and then sending them out without weapons, ammo, food, water or training into a hostile environment.

Why am I not surprised that the first post to this thread is from someone who doesn't know where babies come from?

Cause now everyone knows what Positrons are, Asimov's positronic brain sounds dated.

There's this principle, as part of the RICO act, that says creating a lot of shell corporations, where money moves around between companies in a very complicated way and it's very hard to track it, is one of the signs of an organized crime operation. Parts of the RICO law are written to deal with this specific method. For ciriminals to use this method, they have to build enough shell corps to make tracking the money very hard - a few won't do it, twenty or 50 or 119 is better. The Idea is that the more levels of shells there are, the more time the organization has to delay a criminal investigation, as the investigators have to keep going back to a judge and getting more warrents for new records. If they don't find anything the first few times, the judge is likely to stop giving them more warrents, plus there's more time to move money into places such as offshore accounts, or for the top dogs to skip the country if they must.
          There weren't a whole bunch of new PACs and such made by the Democrats in that election cycle, but because of the very nature of the Tea Party movement, we saw a lot of Tea party this and Tea Party that, over a hundred new non-profits for states, groups of states, and particular parts of the movement. In many cases, some of the Tea party organizers put their names on multiple applications in different positions, which is another sign of potential shell corporations. That's another possible red flag under RICO, seeing the same person's name for different positions in different corporations which are being formed in multiple states, as is seeing organizations incorporated in odd states (i.e.a company doing businesss only in Arkansas, but incorporating in Florida). (Delaware is somewhat of an exception to this, as their laws make it popular for many businesses to incorporate there, but I don't think there are any real advantages to incorporating in Delaware for non-profits).
          The IRS has also long had a position that even if something is technically legal to do as the law is written, it can still be illlegal if the primary purpose of doing it appears to be not to achieve whatever goal the law endorses, but to evade taxes. That means they could have approached this as a case where some of these new organizations might not qualify as their particular type of non-profit, AND might have made a profit AND had the intent to avoid paying the taxes that would entail. Technically, if somebody screws up and didn't stay within the non-profit rules, the IRS next looks to see if they made money, and if they did, for the third step the IRS gets to assume that the mistake in claiming non-profit status isn't an innocent mistake, but a deliberate way to evade taxes on that money. If you think about it, this makes a certain amount of sense - as the plaintiff at that point is often arguing that they accidentally made a profit without trying to, and they just coincidentally filed as a non-profit by innocent mistake. The press has tended to treat this as though the new non-profits could be set up wrong quite innocently, and have made a profit under law, but not done anything really wrong unless the IRS could prove some sort of intent, but the law normally assumes people don't make profits accidentally, and don't just happen to get the paperwork wrong coincidentally.

Minor correction guy, here. That's a proportionally higher chance, not a high chance. Since the best estimates for being gay put it at less than 10% of the population, a high chance of their uncles from the mother's sides being gay as well would mean, for example, for all those mothers that have a male sibling, there's at least a 25-50% chance those siblings are gay too. Since having a brother is so common, that means that if 10% of the populace is gay, somehow, there's also a general 2.5-5% of the overall populace that needs to be added to that. As a more specific example, if it's 'the future' and everybody who is gay feels absolutely no stigma about it, reports honestly, and we come up with a number such as 8%, we should add about 25-50% to it and report that the gay percentage of the population is really 10-12% or so, even if there's no other reason in such a case to think those uncles are not being counted already.
        That's not really something that makes sense in this example - we can't have a gene that is detectable by its effect on a major behavior and argue that being someone's maternal uncle stops that behavior but the gene is still present, for example, So let me give you an example where adjusting the incidence for what we know about genetics just might make better sense, for contrast.
        The genetics of schizophrenia have the highest corollation known for a genetic illness (not that being gay should necessarily be counted as a genetic illness, let's just stick with it being an effect with a genetiic component - but I think it's safe to identify schizophrenia as a generally undesired and dehabilitating condition.). If a person is schizophrenic, and has an identical twin, that twin has about a 50% chance of also developing schizophrenia. That's the top of the charts high chance corollation. Since many schizophrenics do go undiagnosed for substantial time, and many families attempt to hide the incidence of related cases in the family tree, or are in broad denial, it makes good sense to ask patients if they have an identical twin, warn them of the high potential for the disease, and to figure that the real niumbers of people at high risk or as yet undetected, should include a factor adjusting for the presence of occasional identical twins in the population. The link between male homosexuality and maternal uncles also bing gay is a lot less statistically significant than that, even though being somone's maternal uncle is a lot more common than being someone's identical twin.

international
  In this particular context, I do not think that word means what you think it means.