I remember you cut the ruinous spending of the F-22. How unbrilliant.

I wonder if there are publicly available numbers out there just screaming to be discussed. Maybe scratch some planned wars from the business schedule.

This shirt was quite popular for a time ...

The text obscured by the hair reads: "US World Domination Tour".

That's the business model of the military industrial complex.

You do know what Plato said, right?  "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

War is inevitable with humans, especially if Group A keeps trying to force its views on Group B and vice-versa.  Forcing your views on someone will just make them violent and angry.

Stay tuned, the World (yours & mine) has got the miscellaneous arsenals of nukes to deal with and they're mostly swimming tight, stockpiled and ready. Freeze frames inspired by the Cold War.

Investing in power or gambling on fear - you do the atomic clouds math.

The author STARTS with the principle that the war has "failed". It doesn't surprise me that she arrives at the conclusion that it was also too expensive.

What she didn't know (and she didn't care that she didn't know) was that the war didn't fail. Iraq is now a much safer place than it used to be under Saddam and is certainly a valuable ally to have (unless Obama really is dumb enough to withdraw troops from right between Saudi-Arabia and Iran, where all those terrorists come from).

Oil moguls got filthy rich? With oil prices falling and Iraqi oil coming back to the market? Usually prices (and profits) go down when supply levels go up.

Regards, Andrew

(Growing up in West-Berlin I am one of those alive because America wasted money on liberating Germany. Tell me again how such wars are a waste of money.)

Regardless you are alive because of a series of random events which led to your conception and birth. If you look at the displacement of families and the string of events caused by the holocaust it wouldn't be hard to find a jewish person whose parents would not have met if not for the holocaust, but one person's existence doesn't offer perspective into history (in most cases).

Fact is we've been building a bunch of aircraft for the wrong foes. The idea of building up a massive miliatry arsenal for potential wars that good policy making should prevent in the first place is at the heart of the issue with the military industrial complex.

I have a cheaper solution: Don't fucking fight China, especially when relatively trivial amounts of casualties in Vietnam and Iraq are so unpalatable.

"The government only gets as much money as it can tax."

The government can also print money - the resulting wealth transfer from private to public hands is called 'seignorage'.

I'm not saying we'll never go to war with China, but if we do there's going to be plenty of warning signs years in advance.

I shit you not, North Korea is still using mig 17s and biplanes. They have mig 29s, but they can't even afford to fly them for training. Granted they can still be dangerous, as we saw back in 2003 when they intercepted an RC-135, but whether we had a full arsenal of F-22s or were still using F-4s wouldn't have mattered since that RC-135 didn't have a fighter escort anyway.

If we go to war with North Korea it's going to be an old-fashioned ground war within a week, because that's all it's going to take to decimate their entire air force and from that point on we'll be back to carpet bombing with B-52's and digging trenches. The rest of our likely conflicts are with countries in the middle east who also won't stand a chance against our existing air fleet and the upcoming F-35s.

The Utility of Force is a good book. It basically argues that all war now is "amongst the people" where many conventional weapons are useless. For example, the author, Gen. Rupert Smith didn't use artillery when fighting in Northern Ireland. Why? The purpose was to win the support of the people, not flatten their cities.

Why would China want to go to war with us? They already have so much of our debt that they can destroy our currency practically overnight, so us declaring war on them is off the table.

Even if you think the people in China are "crazy," they're smart enough to realize that the US is in a defensive pact called NATO. Oh yeah, and we have nukes in submarines all over the world.

Seriously, there's not a huge point in having F-22s. Our principle enemy right now (Al-Quaeda) doesn't have the recources to produce jet fighters.

I saw a reference to North Korea...don't make me laugh. If they for some reason decide to invade or send a nuke towards us, they would basically get stomped to the ground, and the US would gain a lot more influence in the international community due to suffering from a disaster.

The bottom line is that the US is spending money on preparation for conventional warfare which pretty much no longer exists.

back to health care:

I agree to a certain extent. On one hand, special intrest plays less of a role, and as you said, the people have a more direct choice.

On the other hand, Healthy San Francisco is not portable, so you can only get reimbursed if you go to hospitals/clinics in san francisco. That's why their website says to stay with health insurance if you already have it.

Anyways, it's becoming clear to me the health insurance companies have a huge grip on federal policies (read Wendell Potter's testimony if you disagree) so the attempts at reform will fail or favor the insurance companies. San Francisco has some huge projects getting started now, which will pay off in around 5-10 years (high speed rail right into downtown from LA, converting an old shipyard into a UN research facility for the green industry, and a cruise ship terminal). By then, the recession will be over, health insurance companies will give themselves more of every dollar, and eventually san franciscans will just vote themselves universal health care, based off of the current system.

well the big thing is really nuclear weapons. We probably have a nuclear sub wandering around near korea, so if they start shelling Seoul, they could recieve substantial enough damage from the nukes to bust them into submission.

Just because a country CAN do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. Yeah, Kim Jong Il is pretty crazy, but he's not crazy enough to do something that will cause the country he's giving to the sun to get destroyed.

That is true for the west and the communists, i.e. people who care to some extend about their own population and other people.

If some Muslim fanatic acquired nukes, he WILL use them to rid the world of as many Jews as possible (purely for civilian purposes, obviously). And if Iran gets nukes, they will use them to threaten Israel and the Arabs if some of the saner mullahs will control the state or they will do what any Muslim fanatic would do.