http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm

Oh that's right..."The Union" (those who profit from keeping marijuana illegal) doesn't want us touching their big business, which is being paid for by tax dollars.

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).

This was a lie, period.  The F-22 is so expensive because they cut production.  The per unit cost they gave us is over half development costs, it was 138 million a piece to keep producing them.  The bullshit price tag they were giving is because we were originally going to build 600 of the things.  The F-35 is a cheaper jet, but it's no where near as expensive to build either of them as they claimed.  We've already paid for the research and development.  If it weren't a multi-role fighter with inferior air combat capabilities, they'd still have a good idea in shutting it down, but they are not interchangeable air craft.  This isn't to say it's not a badass jet, it's just  a lot more likely to be surpassed before it's life span is over.

The F-22 is the ultimate air superiority fighter, having less than 200 of them will look really fucking stupid if we end up at war with China or Russia in the next ten years and they have an air superiority fighter of their own that can take down the F-35's in reasonable ratios.  Claiming it's useless because they aren't using it against two piddly shit countries that didn't have a real air force to begin with is fucking stupid.  Only an utter moron would use a top of the line, stealth air superiority fighter to bomb caves in Afghanistan, or provide air support to a convoy in Iraq.  You can do that with a B-52 for a fraction of the cost, and they're actually good at it.

Yeah, I know, world peace, all that bullshit.  We couldn't possibly end up at war with those countries, it's just unimaginable!  Just like it was unimaginable Hitler would be taking over half of Europe, to be replaced by Stalin occupying half of Europe after he lost the gamble...

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.

Betting the future of your country on someone else's rationality is not really sane. In 1939 Germany's biggest trading partner was France. The fact of the matter is that we may not have the option of not going to war, unless we simply ignore treaty obligations, vital national interests, or other major concerns.

Besides, do you have any idea what goes into making modern aircraft? Especially stealth aircraft - radar absorbent composite materials are not something you can build an assembly line to put together. You can't really ramp up production of something like that in a few months, certainly not after you've mothballed or retooled the factory you were making them in in the first place.

No, the real reason they stopped the F-22 is that, while they *are* the top of the line air superiority fighters, they are a bitch to maintain. It costs something like 25 man-hours of maintenance per hour of flight time, several times what the less sophisticated F-35. Hell, in the event of a war against anyone but another NATO country, the F-35 is sufficiently superior to anything else available to do the job, even if it might cost a few more casualties.

Couple that with using drones for pinpoint deep strike (hell, even we have a hard time tracking the damn things) and we might not even need to establish air superiority over an enemy's own territory to crush them.

"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'.

the government can only print as much as it destroys... other wise the market would be flooded and the value of the dollar would drop dramatically.

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.

Right. 3% of a 6.6 billion dollar budget to cover only 45 to 60,000 people is extraordinary.

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.

If North Korea decided it were time to go to war it would be a major problem with massive casualties. Just because NK couldn't win doesn't mean they're not a threat, and the economic damage they would deal would be devestating. The real question is what China would do if that happened. More and more it seems like they would side against NK which would help, but if they stayed neutral it would take a massive troop commitment to resolve.

Regardless though, we'd have annihilated their airfields and the vast majority of their aircraft in the first week, I guarantee it, and our F-15s and current fleet of F-22s would absolutey decimate anything they threw at us. If they waited until we get F-35s in the air (which I think is beginning next summer?) their air force would really be a non-issue and we'd find ourselves fighting a conventional war where we need the body armor, and armored troop vehicles we were short on in Iraq.

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.

We're devaluing our currency, this pisses China off.  We protect Taiwan, this pisses China off.  We challenge them on domestic issues from working conditions to pollution, all of this pisses China off.  China has cause.  It wouldn't take a terribly irrational Chinese government to take us on and do whatever the hell they want to with our regional allies.  They could march right into their neighbors and there's a damn good chance we wouldn't even interfere.  The less capable we are of spanking the shit out of them with few casualties, the more appetizing such an action would look.

No one is going to use nukes, it defeats the purpose of having them.

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.

Slippery slope that led to delaying Allied involvement specifically US involvement until Pearl...