There have to be some animal studies (monkeys?) out there which deal objectively with the proportion of a population likely to have severe food allergies. Similarly, there have to be some studies which deal with the presumed life-span decrease associated with such allergies. Is it large? Is it small? Is it regional? (I'm looking at you New Yorkers.)

Whenever there is an article on this topic, we get flooded by upset parents who all say that their child or someone they know is deathly allergic to an array of common items. I don't have any means of evaluating their claims. Allergies that truly are capable of causing death should be quite rare - so its likely that many of you are either exaggerating or have been misled by your doctor.

I've known enough doctors to tell you that there is a strong fear of lawyers in the profession. If you ask them if something might be fatal, many will answer yes - if only to cover themselves.

Let's make it illegal to withdraw $550 billion from the US within an hour.

How can it be that we don't have automated safeguards against this?

Maybe they shouldn't be having children, if they can't afford it?

F**king social Darwinist. You've just demonstrated your own lack of fitness to reproduce.

Andrew, don't you live in Berkeley? What's with this "they"?

You don't need to send your dad to jail, you need to make sure that he doesn't take out any more loans in your name. That's what the lawyer should be for. You need this protection.

Nuclear plants take a long time to build. While they would make a good replacement for the current baseline of coal plants, we could put a wind turbine on every building and in every cornfield in the US in the time the first new nuclear plants come online.

You should get a bike. It's fun and healthy.

"In 1929, we could say that we got blindsided. It never had happened before."

It had happened before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

Seems like it's about to happen again.

Oh well - hard times, even very hard times aren't an apocalypse.

"I would quit and borrow $100,000 from my parents, get another $200,000 from an angel investor and start an online community for unhappy workers."

Wow Cary, do you mind introducing me to some of your friends?

I find it hard to believe that "do not abort the baby" isn't part of the surrogacy contract. In other words, yes the surrogate has the right to an abortion but she has decided to waive that right. It's not such an unusual thing; you can waive your right to an attorney, jury trials, and your 5th amendment rights - and that's just in court. None of those waivers undermine the right in general nor does allowing surrogates the waive their right to abort undermine the general right to abort. I'd say that it would, in fact, strengthen the general right by putting it in a structure more similar to every other right that people have.

Don't forget the faith healer who says that all we have to do is believe in the stock market again and it will all be better.

If nothing else happens and Obama starts channeling Napoleon, we might at least finally adopt the metric system.

The most convincing part of the study allegedly shows that vegetarians and former vegetarians self-reported a slightly higher rate of binge eating (20 percent as compared to 5 percent of omnivores) and...

Is this a typo? A fifth of vegetarians versus a twentieth of omnivores sounds like more than a "slighly higher rate" to me. Also, unless the binge eating is coupled with bulimia, that fact would seem to contradict the efficacy of vegetarianism for weight loss.

I just did a quick google search and found this: http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/people/a_gender.html

I see that, out of places with 100,000 or more people, Gary IN has the lowest male to female ratio. By Clark-Flory's logic, Gary should have one of the lowest rates of rape in the country. Somehow, this seems unlikely.

Also, Salinas CA has the highest male to female ratio of 113.7 to 100. (again, out of places with 100,000 or more people) I'm fairly certain Salinas is not the rape capital of the US.

do we have any data on the number of loan requests that were denied? If so, how does it compare to previous years?

Banks can't loan you money that you didn't request and if many businesses and individuals are worried about their debt levels we could be seeing a decrease that isn't the bank's "fault".

but at least this time we could burn down Dallas instead of Atlanta.

Another religious straw man argument. It seems Eagleton sets up atheists as being against not just religion but against the entire edifice of western moral philosophy. One of the main arguments of atheism is that you can have all these moral convictions without a god.

Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Fichte have all observed in different ways that unspoken assumptions about the world around us (that is, faith) are the precondition of all knowledge in the first place.

Ok, so I have to somehow believe that I'm not a brain in a jar. So what? How do you get from there to believing in Jesus? Just because you can name drop uncommon European names that people vaguely remember from a freshman philosophy class means nothing. Some of these people were clearly fools. Wittgenstein apparently thought that contradictions were OK in Mathematics.

and join the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

just sayin'

If you only pay off one party, the other one will run against you and you'll either lose or at least be exposed. For effective corruption, you have to pay off both parties.