I strongly believe that the refined carbohydrates in foods that we think of as relatively healthy or at least not junk food do more to harm our health than junk food does (because we eat a lot of the former and think of it as healthy, not because it is worse per gram than junk food). And I think the systematic distortion of the food and farming industries by corporations, governments, farmers, lobbyists, and other groups in the U.S. and across the world has made refined, processed foods—not junk food but rather bread, pasta, juices, starchy foods, and most of the interior of the grocery store—more abundant and more profitable. Additionally, the U.S. government's war on fat and promotion of bread, pasta, and cereals made hundreds of millions of people think they were eating healthily when in fact they were probably consuming more of the processed dietary components that were making them fat and diabetic.

All of that is more of a systematic, if not nefarious or intentional, reason metabolic syndrome is becoming epidemic than processed food corporations' short-sighted pursuit of profit or exploitation of our weak will.

I wouldn't have too big a problem with a focus on what "works" or what research shows if the proponents of policies would be more objective and not find excuses to continue believing in things that clearly don't work. In fact, when I do have time to read and research and blag, I try to direct at least some of my posts to non-libertarians by citing statistics, results, and concrete events so that I can convince the occasional person that less government here or there would work better, rather than trying to convince them their entire moral-political belief system is wrong.

And not surprisingly, I do have a post about voters who decide whom to vote for based on ads and debates and the candidate who appeals to them the most at election time: http://www.blagnet.net/2008/11/03/undecided-voters-are-the-biggest-idiots-on-the-planet/

Finally, sorry for not seeing your comment until three days later; too much work and football-watching and unpacking, as well as a still-not-internet-connected computer with the email client that receives this site's emails, have kept me from this site too often this fall.

Most baby boomers have a contemporary understanding of the brutal realities and efficiencies of totalitarian states embodied in the Soviet Gulags, Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Cambodia’s killing fields, Rwanda’s tribal massacres, and the terrorism of dictators such as Uganda’s Idi Amin or Augusto Pinochet in Chile. The terrorism embodied in the intentional cruelty and oppression of the Capital District is not a fantastical abstraction of something left to the stuff of science fiction.

Most of his post is about a different issue: the movie's watering-down and near omission of the book's prominent theme of liberty and individualist resistance to State oppression. He hopes that the financial, popular, and critical success of the first movie will give the screenwriters more liberty to focus on liberty in the movie sequels.

Yet if you said the existing US government was going to do that, but have the contestents be "terrorists" you'd have a large majority saying yea let's do it!