Not really. Salmon, tuna, and swordfish are completely carnivorous and are eaten worldwide. Alligators and snakes are eaten in various parts of the US and are carnivorous. Indigenous Arctic peoples ate diets drawn primarily from seals (all carnivorous) and whales (many of which are carnivorous). Squids and octopi are carnivores.

Now, that said, carnivore meat does carry some risks, all in the form of bioaccumulation of toxic materials. (e.g. Mercury and other heavy metals, PCBs, etc.) But "highly toxic" is a bit over-dramatic. You can eat a serving of carnivorous fish once a week and be fine. You can also eat far more than that and survive, but you may run into health risks or, more importantly, pass on unsafe levels that will affect your child's development if you get pregnant. Adults only risk death if those kinds of fish are your primary protein source and/or you get them from an actively polluted area. (See, e.g. Minama disease.)

But the meat *itself* is fine, in absence of human-cause problems.

We don't eat carnivorous land animals. Some carnivorous fish, on the other hand, are so tasty that we're in the process of wiping them out.

Well, to be fair, that's actually accurate in the case of bread. The mold you can see belies the presence of the mold you can't see. By the time mold density is big enough to see, it's all throughout the rest of the bread already.

Of course, mold below those thresholds is *probably* safe. But it's best not to risk it if it's gotten that far in part of the bread.

Well, one big difference is that you're not generally expected to *eat the shell* on shellfish. Most insects are just way to small to peel effectively, and most are not built in a way that make it easy, like shrimp are.

Besides, I have it on good authority that most bugs have a "nuttier" flavor than a "seafood" flavor. Some are said to taste kind of bacony. Some are pretty tart, like ants with their formic acid. Some have fruit flavors, like the water bug. Crickets are supposed to be kind of metallic tasting. Insects and arthropods are a very diverse branch of the tree of life and taste different as larvae and adults. Assuming that all bugs taste similarly is kind of like saying that all mammals taste like beef or all birds/lizards taste like chicken.

Of course, I've never had any myself, so I'm just passing around internet rumors too. I'd very much like to correct that, but I'm too intimidated by the possibility of cooking it "wrong" and giving myself a false bad impression. I've been Googling places that might serve insects in the city I live in, but no successes so far (other than overwrought, negative reviews for places with bad hygiene).

Sadly, that is not how the Supreme Court always interprets things. While the general principle has been that noncitizens have the same rights as citizens, they've often been ambivalent on the specific details. Consider Hamdi v. Rumsfield (2004), in which the court held that citizens who were kept prisoners as "unlawful combatants" has the right of habeas corpus, but that non-citizens held similarly did not.

Another example is Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952), in which the Court held it legal to expel immigrants who were Communist Party members -- a discrimination based purely on political belief that would not be legal to perform against citizens.

In Demore v. Kim (2003) the Court noted that "Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens" in the realm of immigration law. There, the court upheld a statute that required aliens charged with certain crimes to be detained in prison pending a deportation hearing regardless of whether they were a danger or a flight risk (and thus normally entitled to bail). It was the first case holding that anyone can be put in preventative detention without an individualized assessment of the need for said detention.

Sounds delicious. Fried or steamed with garlic and white wine?

Nitpick: Exponential does not just mean "extremely" when you use it with actual math and numbers. A constant multiplier is still a linear reduction, no matter how large or small.

Well, you are what you eat.

Yeah, but now people are in the position of having taken indefensible positions and must defend them or have to face up to the fact that they were wrong. People will not do that.

Just look at the debate over torture in this country. As in the fact that we even have a debate over torture. Only a quarter of Americans say that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances. A little under a fifth say that it's "often" justified to gain information from terror suspects. The rest are somewhere in the middle, with a strong partisan divide over the issue, but one that has weakened since Obama has failed to take substantive action on the issue except to nail whistleblowers to the wall -- all but tacit support for torture policies.

Partisan politics is the reason for this. Once "your guy" has made a decision, you must either find a rationale to support it or admit that you voted in the wrong guy. And for far too many people, the former is the natural instinct rather than the latter. Our political landscape for at least a generation or three has been forever shaped by the action of George W. Bush and the attempts of his party to rationalize them and then his successor Barack Obama's failure to do anything substantive to improve our war on terror policies and the attempts of his party to rationalize that too.

That's why poll numbers on support for torturing terror suspects show a slim majority now, whereas there was a 60-40% split against it for 2001-2008. Are you surprised that on questions of spying on Americans that the trend is not similar? Slim majorities were opposed to MAINWAY when it was exposed in 2006. Now slim majorities support PRISM and a growing majority wants to see Snowden punished for exposing it.

That's the tragedy of partisan democracies: If both sides do something terrible, all the sheep find themselves justifying no matter how bad it is.

You need to read more Roman history then. After all the phrase "bread and circuses" was coined or popularized back in the 2nd century, 200-300 years before Rome's "fall." The circuses themselves as a means of appeasing the people go back at least to the fallout from the assassination of Julius Caesar, right at the beginning of the Empire, when Marcus Brutus attempted to defray public anger over Caesar's death. (It didn't work, because Octavius turned around an held games in honor of Caesar's memory a couple of weeks later.)

Plus, it's hotly debated whether Rome ever actually "fell" or just withered away.

I can understand the distinction. It's pretty obvious because I share similar sentiments.

I don't want advertisers to push their products on me. I don't want to be made aware of something shiny that I could be spending my money on instead of saving towards my long-term goals. I don't want them to wear down the finite reserves of willpower that we all have against temptation by better finding the things that might tempt me. I don't want all their little neuromarketing tricks designed to guide me to just keep pushing that button for a reward. The last thing I want is for them to know me better and to exploit my weaknesses by constantly bombarding me with shiny things I want. It's annoying enough when they *fail* to attract my interest.

If I want something, and I've made the decision to seek it out, I want to find answers about the range of products myself. I want to pull down the information on my choices myself and make the most informed decision I can. I don't want anyone massaging or regulating the results to guide me towards a choice someone paid for me to see. I just want the facts -- reviews, product statistics, a comparison of what the trade-offs are.

In other words, don't call me, I'll call you.

Yes, it is. Which is why we've moved beyond the days of "this site is best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800 x 600 resolution" to the days of creating sites that are intelligently designed to work on multiple browsers and obey the principles of graceful degradation if a given browser doesn't support some wizzy feature you like.

At least, that's the theory. Some sites still suck.

Actually, it's more like the skill was lost in favor of one that was considered far more useful for survival -- inflammation and scarring.

Scarring stops bleeding and infection far faster than regeneration can and is a vital advantage in quick and dirty wound recovery. Scarring comes about because of a mutation that allows collagen to cross-link and build quicker scaffolding to seal the wound, but it comes at the cost of not being able to regrow tissues in the now "paved over" area. In the wild, this gave our distant mammalian ancestors the valuable ability to just kind of "write-off" the area and get up and going as fast as possible and avoid being preyed upon in a moment of weakness.

We may dismiss scarring today as ugly and wasteful of an opportunity to be made whole again, but without it, we probably wouldn't exist today.

At first, I though you wrote "although they're p---ing it down," and I thought, "Man I heard it was a hard drinking culture, but damn..."