The case you bring up is interesting, because as far as I can tell, it's one of the cases that JREF shouldn't have been at all concerned about losing. Putting myself in their position:

Would I bet $1M that a dowser would fail? I'd have to think about it. It's extremely unlikely that he'd succeed, but I suppose it's vaguely possible that there's something in physics that we don't understand that could cause me to lose the bet.

In this case, would I bet $1M that the guy needs food and water to survive? In a heartbeat. I can't imagine JREF feeling threatened by the possibility of success and having to weasel out of it. That's especially true given the fact that they do run all sorts of tests on other far more likely phenomena (like dowsing and psychics). The notion that they're not afraid of a dowser but they're terrified that this nutbar is a perpetual motion machine who just might beat them seems ludicrous to me.

It's also pretty easy to see that Randi (and probably lots of the JREF staff) are abrasive people who may heap scorn on you before the test is done. I don't think that's how I would run things, but it's hardly evidence that they're rigging the game. So, given the choice between the notion that they're just arrogant and sometimes rude and the possibility that they're genuinely afraid that one particular nutcase has an ace in the hole, I know which one seems more likely.

I suppose the third possibility is that they were afraid that the guy would go into testing and die on their watch. That would make me a little bit nervous in their position. If the guy is sufficiently crazy, they have a choice between getting flak for ending the test "early" or getting flack for letting a crazy person die.

I think the main point is that there are other places in the world that have genocide, torture, slavery, and all sorts of terrible things going on. The place we invaded happened to be the one that was strategically important, and I didn't see any evidence that they were just the first in line before we solved all of those other problems.

Of course, I don't buy into the notion that we wanted to go in and "steal" the oil. It's perfectly reasonable to have a strong interest in the stability of the unstable region that produces your energy supply. In fact, if our leadership wasn't interested in the Middle East for the oil, they'd be ignoring their duties. When people from certain countries bitch that we're only interested in their oil, I often can't help but think, "Yeah, it's a real shame that we don't hang out with repressive backward thugocracies more often... just for the company."

Depending on how you look at it, stopping a monstrous regime is either icing on the cake or a good excuse for doing what you wanted to do anyway. Still, I don't think that we should make any mistake about whether or not energy security was the major reason we went in. Without oil, it's pretty easy just to add Iraq to the list of countries we don't bother with because they're murderous dictatorships, unstable hellholes with constant tribal warfare and genocide, or whatever else.

Of course, it also doesn't hurt that dowsing using rods for drugs in schools amounts to essentially a random search, increasing the probability that you'll get caught with contraband even though there is zero correlation between the rod's response and actual contraband. Administrators could say, "We roll the dice, and if they come up snake eyes, you get searched," and end up with a pretty good drop in drug activity. Then again, people would be up in arms about that.

If you complain they call you "unreasonable" and close the claim.

Do you have some actual examples of unreasonable changes they've demanded? Every time somebody points me toward historical examples, it usually ends up with the claimant demanding that JREF front a bunch of money to pay for something. I'm interested in which case you're thinking of.

In the last few years they have made it really hard to apply for the challenge requiring that you have media exposure before they even consider your application.

There's a simpler explanation for that, and it doesn't require malice: When you offer a million dollars to any kook who thinks he has magic powers, you're going to have to invest a LOT of resources in figuring out which ones are legitimate and which ones are people who just need medical help.

I think that Doug Stanhope made kind of the same observation when he said something like, "You can't keep weapons off of planes. You can't even keep weapons out of prison, and in prison they're allowed to check for weapons in your ass."

The government's reaction, in 1999 was to change the federal regulations — instead of making it easier for the banks to fight off the undue pressures.

Imagine you're a lender. The government tells you that you have to make a certain number of loans that you know will be unprofitable. Do you:

a) Make the bare minimum number of those loans.
b) Lever up and make as many of those loans as you possibly can, looking under every rock and behind every tree to find somebody who will borrow?

When it became possible to off-load the bad securities to Fannie Mae, the banks did make tons of money.

You do realize that during the exact time frame you're talking about, the GSEs lost market share to "non-bank lenders," right? The hallmark of the better part of the last decade was traditional institutions losing market share with the rise of nontraditional issuers (who, of course, were also not subject to the CRA).

And a little stimulus money for a bank gives the government the ability to set payment levels. Why does NPR get a pass?

Yes, I'm sure that the leadership at NPR are living in opulent splendor.

I don't think you understand logic. The only purely rational stance to take in the total absence of proof or disproof of God is agnosticism. Taking a stance in any direction is a leap of faith which requires an assumption not grounded in logic.

I'm not so sure about that. Is the only rational stance in the absence of proof or disproof of unicorns to withold judgment? Is, "Invisible aliens that shave my beard every 10 seconds but grow it back so quickly that it's undetectible don't exist," such an irrational thing to say? At what point to you step over the boundary between wisely reserving judgement due to lack of evidence and believing that it's not possible to know anything at all?

Bertrand Russell had it nailed: When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

But doesn't this imply that a _religion_ should not be given tax exempt status? I could understand a charitable branch of a religion being given a tax exemption, but not the whole organisation. So, how does that work?

The theory is that even if the state can't support a particular church, it could cleverly structure tax policies to strangle churches it didn't like. The only foolproof way of closing the loophole would be to disallow taxing churches.

Of course, that opens the door to the question, what the heck is a legitimate church?

"Common sense" would dictate that if your goal is to lower the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, "CO2 in the atmosphere" is the variable to optimize for, no? If the total CO2 emissions drop by 50%, it really doesn't matter if one guy pays everybody else to stop emitting and he emits the entire worldwide quota himself. It's still a more efficient system.

You seem to be optimizing for some sort of emotional "feel good" variable that doesn't actually change the reality of emissions. You're welcome to it, but I don't see the benefit in going along with it.