First off, if you're going to reply to someone's post, reply to THAT post, not something in the same general area. Close doesn't always count. You are lucky I read this.

I'll apologize for "like a pig ignorant peasant"- let's just go with "like a fool". Please note the use of "like"- I know you aren't ignorant, nor are you a fool, but you were sounding it. Comparison, not description. Sometimes I sound like a ass, but my ears aren't long, I'm not grey, and I'm not a hoofed quadruped.

As for funding, look into it- you'd be amazed how much of the money comes indirectly from the feds. Private medical research in the US is almost as heavily underwritten as high energy physics is. Grants cover a lot of the "real medicine" (as opposed to what I call "vanity medicine" and the desperately hanging onto old age by any thread), and lot is from whatever replaced DARPA in the alphabet soup when it was renamed. And pretty much every researcher, tech, and doc had federal loans and grants for their schooling; pharmaceutical companies and research universities get tax breaks. All that adds up to tax payer dollars even if it isn't in big, bold, red letters.

Following your proposal would have condemned a lot of people to death. Your statement was a blanket statement, no funding, period, at any point in history. You didn't say self inflicted, you didn't say stupid stuff (hair loss, can't get it up-itis), your statement was all condemning. If you'd been selective... But you weren't. Instead, you damned every dollar ever spent on TB, polio, smallpox and cholera research, along with every bit of DoD/VA funded research. And the existence of the FDA. Your stated proposal is inherently unsound and short sighted.

But I will admit that I bit your head off a little lower than I intended- I was thinking the tips of your ears and got your collar bones. There has been a lot of paranoia on this thread, and the forum in general has had taken a rather anti-science, illogical feel to it on several recent occasions. I hold ETSers to a higher standard of the mind, maybe unfairly, than I do the average person. You got the brunt of my annoyance and frustration, when you only should have gotten some of it.

*holds out hand* Shake?