I respect your reasoning generally, but I disagree with every single point you made. I think the facts you cited are also wrong, though I'd be happy to stand corrected if you can back them up... The same reasoning could be applied to anything. How much do you know about internal combustion engines? Airline maintenance? Food purity? Architecture and civil engineering? All those markets are regulated for safety, just like medicine. But no body or expert tells you how much an engine rebuild costs, or how much an airline ticket costs, the price of a loaf of bread, etc. And it works just fine. The free market works because of the decisions in the aggregate. The more important the cause, the more important it is to preserve the freedom of the individual to choose. I hate the use of the passive voice here. Who has estimated it? From what I've read, only 2-3% of all health costs go to insurance companies. This doesn't make sense. The current system is a stifled free market, to be sure. However, it's not because people can choose where to work based on benefits -- that's the definition of freedom. The real question is, why is health care tied to jobs at all? We could have such a body to suggest prices right now, without abrogating freedom. In fact, what you propose is simply central planning, which never works precisely because it destroys the information that a free market expresses in prices (see Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics", chapter 5). What you describe is what Medicare is, and Medicare is a mess. Its costs have been rising faster than the private sector. Furthermore, Medicare keeps reducing reimbursements which cause doctors to make up their expenses by charging more to private insurers. To put it plainly: Medicare is what is ruining health care in the country, and more of it won't solve the problem. Please back some of this up. Yes, prices have gone up, but why? A great deal of the cost increase has to do with improving technology that provides better care than in the past. If you want to eliminate CT and MRI scans, chemotherapy, etc. I guarantee you can bring costs down. Bankruptcies due to health emergencies are a favorite anecdote for those who favor so-called "universal" health care, but it's a myth. That's not slippery slope, that's socialism straight up. What you describe is central planning, is socialism. But the insurance company can't take your money away by force. And to be frank, most decisions in congress are being made right now behind closed doors. At least with a market, you can turn to somewhere else. Not so with the government. This is just handwaving. Government is designed for waste and fraud. Medicare fraud is estimated at $60 Billion / year in this story. Because decisions in government are made based on politics (favors, bribes, etc.) instead of results, it can only get worse when people can't choose anything else. More handwaving. Basic economics shows how a scarce resource priced too low results in shortage. if something is free (or perceived as free), people will demand more of it. Without exception. You're abusing the word "rationing" here, as well as overstating your case. The exchange of money for goods and services is the market, based on the principles of property and freedom. Rationing is done by government, to arbitrarily apportion goods and services. It is the opposite of freedom, favors the political and powerful classes, and destroys property. Furthermore, there are many programs (S-CHIP, Medicaid & Medicare, Shriners hospitals, etc.) that provide free healthcare for those who have none. Then read the statistics. The most comprehensive studies on Canada waiting times is called "Waiting Your Turn", done every year by the Frasier Institute. I've never seen criticism of their methodology. Here's a summary of one of the studies from a few years ago: I work in health care, and have seen the damage Medicare does. I write software for medical imaging and radiation oncology, and it costs money. However, Medicare reimbursements explicitly discourage innovation and cost-cutting in favor of the status quo (there's your body of experts at work). I was horrified when oncologists and medical physicists choose procedures based on what Medicare will pay for over what works best. Lastly, we have seen from Massachussetts that it simply doesn't work. Their costs have increased out of control, so much so that only three years after enacting it, they've decided to drop 30,000 legal immigrants from coverage. That's not what I call progress, cutting costs, or in fact anything good.

And that makes perfect sense. It's reasonable for you to ask for guns to be locked up when your kids are visiting. You set the rules for your own family. When I carry a gun on me, I don't take it into anyone's house unless they know about it and give me permission. I make sure to lock my gun if I'm leaving it at home rather than taking it with me. At night it's not locked so I could get to it if necessary (though we have a very safe neighborhood and I would be very surprised if I ever had to use it).

Different people have different levels of comfort around guns. It's a mistake for anyone to tell someone else how to properly store guns. HOWEVER, once someone else's kids come to the house, there should be a higher degree of safety consideration. Now that you know that there's a gun in the house, you should be able to say what minimum level of safety you want as a condition for the kids coming over. Having a gun under a pillow is a terrible idea IMO in any case. Knowing that kids were coming over, the gun should have been placed out of reach. The description of the situation is a little vague. The statement that the gun was loaded is less than clear. The two common types of handguns are 1) revolvers and 2) automatic handguns. A revolver has a rotating cylinder and looks like what they carry in old westerns, and older police dramas. An automatic handgun has ammunition that is fed through a magazine in the handgrip. Safeties are rare on revolvers, so I'm assuming the gun in question is an automatic. "Loaded" can mean that a bullet (or "round") is in the chamber. If that's the case, that means that if the safety is off, pulling the trigger will fire a bullet. It can also mean that there is no round in the chamber, and that firing the gun would require pulling the slide back all the way ("racking" the slide) to load a round, and also releasing the safety. A safety exists to prevent accidental discharge by someone who is holding a gun or who has it holstered. It is not sufficient to prevent a child from discharging a gun. When I carry my gun, there is a round in the chamber and the safety is on. If there is no round in the chamber, it takes significant arm strength to pull the slide back. At our house (if I'm home), my gun is stored with a round NOT in the chamber, safety on, up high. If I'm not home, the gun is stored with a cable lock through the handgrip and action, so that it cannot be fired until the cable is removed. The idea of this is to have it accessible in an emergency, but safe if it I can't be fully aware of its location and condition at all times. It's easy for an adult to rack the slide, but not easy for a child. As my kids get older, I'll have to store the gun with a cable lock at all times, because they'll be able to get access to it. However, I also show them the gun whenever they like, and when I clean it, and they know that they don't have to sneak behind my back to see it. They are also reminded at all times how dangerous it is.

I would strongly suggest "no unsupervised" internet time. Indeed I'd recommend whatever computer they use to have a physical connection that can be stored away from the computer when you don't want him using it. I've been recommending a USB wireless dongle for parents of teens for a while now. Add on top of that a frank conversation. Including how easy it is to both track where he's been and get spyware/viruses when going to questionable sites.

A serious question here (and I will not challenge anything you say): what did you learn?

Of course it depends on what literal means. I believe that God created the Earth, but that the Genesis account is not meant to be taken as a literal 7 24-hour days. I believe that the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of fire consuming Elijah's offering, Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water and his resurrection happened as described. More and more I see the Noachian Flood to be a local rather than universal flood.

I was being peaceful. After reading Behe's 700 pages of testimony in the Dover trial I have no respect for him. From my perspective, I see him "lying for the Lord" and the problem with teaching this is that as soon as our children grow up and see the massive evidence that they've not been exposed to, they'll doubt all that we teach them. We teach our kids that they're children of God, that the Christ's Atonement is what frees us from sin, and that what we learn from studying the world around us may be surprising but it doesn't disprove God. I'm amazed that any Christians ever agreed (essentially) that if evolution were proven, God would be disproved.

Intelligent Design is an intentionally deceptive and insulting pseudoscience. It's an attempt to "prove" God without mentioning him (referring to him as simply the "designer" -- who might not be God, wink wink). Frankly, I find every attempt to explain creationism by using scientific evidence to be deceptive or just plain bad reasoning. If you believe that God created the Earth in a short time, or didn't use evolution, you have to ignore the scientific evidence or claim that God "faked it". I believe that God created the Earth and us humans, but the evidence is that he took a long time to do it, and that evolution was involved.

He ruined his first marriage with the alcoholism, etc. Before his second wife would marry him she said they had to have a religion. So they went on a church-visit tour. His long-time best friend Pat Gray (they were on the radio together, and Pat is now a talk-show host in Houston) is Mormon and told Glenn that he owed him to check out the LDS church. They did, and it's where their family stayed. He finally told his full story to an audience in Utah and the DVD of his presentation is called "An Unlikely Mormon".

Oh drop the ad hominem. I respect you for your opinions and clear thinking, and think we can have a conversation. However, my opinion of Beck is based on listening to his show 3 hrs / day and watching his show on TV most days. If you're making your opinion without seeing his comments entirely in context, you're not making a reasonable judgement. His show more than most I've seen or heard requires you to watch / listen to full hour to get the context. He throws in a lot of sarcasm & irony, and carries subjects across multiple days. MM.org used to have commentary on its clips. The current trend of clips with only a scare headline happened since I stopped paying attention to it. If you can't support your position more than "go and see the clip", I think you should retract it. Otherwise, I'd really appreciate your explaining why you think a clip in question supports your position.

So you've "followed" Glenn Beck by mm.org? Would you like to substantiate your claim that he "plays fast and loose with the facts and skates the line of inciting violence/rage"? Surely you can find 3-4 examples of erroneous facts and 3-4 examples of inciting violence/rage? Maybe you could explain in detail what your thought of the clips are? And of all places you're citing the NY Times? Seriously? That rag? How many "journalists" there just make stuff up?

All of these are deceptive or simply wrong Another Beck conspiracy theory: Maybe Treasury is "selling black market bonds" http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200906190037 Beck's point here is that things don't add up in this story, that we deserve to get the story on this, and the Treasury should come out and tell us what's going on. Media conservatives claim Holocaust museum shooter a "leftist" http://mediamatters.org/research/200906110038 This is actually correct. Indeed the shooter loved socialism and hated Fox News hosts like Beck, etc. Beck anti-ACORN conspiracy video asks: "Is the crisis exactly what ACORN wants us to be in?" http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200905280039 The investigation into ACORN has gone on for months. They're a corrupt organization with their hands in many places. Even ACORN insiders want ACORN investigated! It's not a conspiracy when it's multi-sourced. I forgot that another thing mm.org does is correctly quote people, but then tell you it's a bad thing. (Much of what is there on MM.org in that tag are things that I agree with but lefty posters say "Oh that evil Beck".)

Mediamatters.org is a sham front for lefty hate. They intentionally edit media to present the worst possible view of anyone right of center. I've been a Glenn Beck "insider" for 6 or 7 years, and I've never seen him represented accurately. Your claim that he's fast and loose with the facts is unsupported in my experiences. While he'll flub sometimes on the radio, he's good at correcting substantive mistakes. He repeatedly calls for non-violent solutions, and has several times taken time on his show to debunk crazy conspiracy theories. If all you know about Glenn Beck is what a lefty front organization says about him, you don't know him. His new book is very much in character. If you read it, you'll get a good view of how he thinks.

"Scientific Creation" is not a coherent hypothesis as far as I've read. It's a collection of ad-hoc reasoning and anti-scientific arguments. You fail to acknowledge that the prediction about Lucy was pointing to specific rock of a certain age. That's the kind of prediction that an actual theory makes. You apparently don't know what evolution is. It's entirely separate from the origin of life. Once life exists, evolution applies. You apparently don't understand Occam's razor, which states "entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." It does not say "the simpler, the better"--rather the fewer assumptions, the better. Simply saying the "God did it" is not simpler, and it's not very helpful. The time was that people said the planets were kept in their orbits by angels. I believe that God is the author of the laws of the physical world, and I want to understand those laws. Now this I find to be childish and offensive. I have a deep belief in God, and accept Jesus Christ as my Savior. And yet as I read the evidence I've concluded that however God made me, He used evolution, and that He cannot be threatened by scientific inquiry. Wait, you're also claiming the Earth isn't billions of years old? You have to ignore tremendous physical evidence for that. As for so-called "polystrate fossils", it seems to be an argument of young-earth creationists born from a lack of understanding of geology.

The argument I was pointing to (the claim of circular reasoning) indeed was arguing from ignorance. There is plenty of evidence out there--far too much for this thread. Read about the long-term evolution experiment I posted earlier. Pick any of the books out of this list, etc. Oh, and the reason I pointed to teaching is because that's (at least originally) the topic asked for in the thread.

You seem to not understand the predictive power of a genuine theory. Put simply, the theory said, "look there and you'll find X". People tested it by looking there and indeed finding X. This is no different from the discovery of Uranus, where gravitational perturbations in the other planets led people to say, "look there and you'll find a planet"--astronomers turned their telescopes there and indeed found a planet. General Relativity predicted that if you looked at an eclipse, you'd see gravitational lensing that would make stars near the disk of the sun appear to be slightly out of place. People looked, and that's what they found. You use circular reasoning yourself about species here. The grade-school definition of a species is being able to breed fertile offspring. However, that's a classification definition prior to the development of the theory of evolution (hence the title "The ORIGIN of species). It gets more complicated than that once we understand genetic drift, population isolation etc. Take a look at this video for instance (I've linked right to the time about genetic drift). The type of argument you're making is basically a "common-sense" argument, or argument from ignorance. Saying there is no evidence for evolution or that all the evidence can be dismissed is poor logic and unscientific reasoning. It's comparable to saying quantum mechanics or general relativity has "no evidence" and is "obviously wrong." Yet those theories also have been tested. When teaching science, evolution fits among the theories that explain what we see, and make predictions that have been tested and found to have supporting evidence. Teaching that the evidence isn't good enough, or claiming (incorrectly) that it's circular reasoning is anti-scientific. Which is fine if you don't want to teach science, but is not if you do want to.

There's no such thing as an "evolutionist". I accepted the theory of evolution based on the scientific evidence. And there's a lot of it. Say, as much as gravity. So yes, I believe in gravity. Oh, and evolution.

Expelled is one of the most slanted, agenda-driven things I've ever seen. It makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like the apex of documentaries. Blargh. I lost a lot of respect for Ben Stein on that one. Not only did they lie to interview subjects in production, but much of the movie is deceptive or simply wrong. It especially annoys me because it makes me defend Richard Dawkins, who's a terrible person IMO.

Totally, 100% completely false. A theoretical model about the past predicts where evidence can be found. If evidence that contradicts the model is found, it can be falsified. Specifically, the theory of human evolution predicted that if you looked in rock of a certain age, you should find remains of the ancestors of humans who were much more similar to other hominids of the time. People looked in the rock and found Lucy.

In addition, theories are a different class from facts. A fact is a single truth statment--a measurement, an observation, etc. A theory is a model that explains past observations and predicts future ones. The apple falling from the tree is a fact. The theory of gravity is the model that describes the rules describing the fall in detail and why everything falls based on the same rules. Facts support or disprove hypotheses. Where supported, a hypothesis move towards a theory, where disproved, the hypothesis gets thrown in the trash.

This statement is false. Read about Lenski's E. coli long-term evolution experiment. It was really well covered in podcast #152 of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. I was a 6000 year creationist when younger. The more arguments I read about evolution, the more I believe that however God made animal life, evolution was involved (and that it took millions of years). Also, after watching Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, I actually read all 700+ pages of Behe's testimony, and I don't believe him to be an honest debater. His "irriducible complexity" concept is bunk.

It also has to do with how much energy can be captured. Here in Chico, CA we have lots of sunny days, but even then the peak energy is 1 kW per square meter. Commercially available photo-voltaic panels have an efficiency of around 15% last I heard (in the lab they're above 40%). There's an automated sensor in town that I can use to calculate the whole year's insolation, and then compare against my electricity bill. Last I checked, it would take over 20 square meters to collect the energy necessary to fully power our house. But then the peaks and valleys of energy delivery would require some energy storage (which adds some inefficiency as well). And we already have very steady energy available for a low price, coming from the wall. If there were more nuclear plants, the price would go down even more and be just as reliable as burning coal. Solar remains a nice solution if you're away from transmission lines. But that's about it unless the price can come down and the efficiency can go up.

One big problem can be caffeine. Or stress. Or caffeine.

Here's the T-Mobile prepaid overview. It was the best deal for prepaid I'd seen in a while. The way it works is that you get the "gold plan" once you've spent $100 on minutes. Until then, the minutes only last a max of 90 days. So if you expect to use them, go ahead and spend the $100 on 1000 minutes.

Why won't a prepaid plan work? We got a prepaid plan with T-Mobile, and love it. For $100, you can get 1000 minutes which are good for a year.