Pangloss

Sure, because the US does most of the international heavy-lifting. Or as you put it, "neo-colonialist, imperialist venturing". They don't need much, and that's why they're not buying much. Given their size, 65 aircraft is hardly a large number. But that wasn't the question I asked you. The question I asked you was, do you think the days of nation-versus-nation war are behind us, Marat? Since divagreen asked for substantiation, here is why I ask: You don't have to answer, of course, but I think it's a reasonable question. I'm curious if you think that war of that kind is behind us.

I think this thread is odd in the context of the constant pressure from the left for the US to reduce its defense spending. "Please reduce your awful defense spending, Americans, and by the way, we're going to rely on you to defend us and we're not going to spend any money on defense ourselves." A "domestic constabulary"? Seriously? Given that there are countries like Iran and North Korea out there, and not too long ago Iraq, not to mention Somalia, Darfur, recent events in Bosnia, etc, is there anything actually wrong with point #2? In fact, there's another example of contrary reasoning right there. You're saying that America should do all the international heavy lifting, but of course only at the direction of international agreement -- goodness, we wouldn't want Americans do decide for themselves how their military hardware is used! But more to the point, you're absolutely not going to help Americans do this heavy lifting because that would just be "bullying!" Apparently Canada disagrees with you, and still sees value in international military participation. Good for them. Okay, setting aside for a moment the obvious conundrum of an anti-war post including a detailed analysis of the merits of a defense program, let's take a look at this criticism. Actually the US purchase of the F-35 is the most expensive military procurement contract in history. It is the ONLY airplane even under development anywhere in the world that meets all of these stunning criteria: - (Real) Stealth - Supersonic - V/STOL - Carrier-capable - Air superiority role - Ground attack role All that for only $96 million. Quite a bargain, actually. In comparison, the F-22 Raptor costs something like $340 million a pop. Factoring development cost into the Lightning raises that unit cost to something like $200 million, but that cost has been shared by some of the international partners. So impressive is the technology that China keeps trying to steal it. In comparison, the F-16 Falcon unit cost was about $17 million. But that plane is already outmatched by a number of aircraft already deployed and many more under development. And it had no stealth, no V/STOL capability, and no carrier capability. The F-35 will also partially replace roles currently held by the F-15 (since the F-22 was too expensive to buy in bulk). The F-15 had a unit cost double that of the F-16, and more recent models ranged as high as $100 million a pop. Aircraft built or under development in Europe, Russia and China meet some of those criteria, but not all of them. Now personally I don't agree with this approach, I think those other countries went a smarter direction, splitting those roles amongst various types. It's added cost and complexity to the design. But I don't know that we would have spent less money overall had we split those roles amongst an F-36, an F-37 and an F-38. There are many variables at work here. But the reason the procurement is so large isn't only because the plane is expensive, it's also because it's A HUGE CONTRACT. The US is purchasing only a couple hundred F-22 Raptors, but it is buying more than 2,400 F-35 Lightning IIs. The Netherlands may not want it, and that's certainly their right. But the United Kingdom wants it. They plan to deploy them as the main air component of the two new super-carriers they're building. And they're not alone. International sales of the F-35 are quite large. Including the US purchase, something like 3,100 units are on order, and aside from Canada and the Netherlands, other purchasers include Italy, Turkey, Australia, Norway and Denmark. If you're looking for sources, by the way, all of this information is available in the well-sourced Wikipedia article on the F-35. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35_Lightning_II Sure, I suppose that's true. We appreciate your business, thank you for coming and please shop with us again. IMO the project is under no real threat of elimination, though. Cutbacks, perhaps, but as the reasoning of this thread has shown, the US military has to fly something, and they can't keep flying their aging F-15, F-16 and F/A-18 airframes forever.

Such discussions are interesting, but on the whole I think we're more hampered by party protectionism, gerrymandering, and party-voter registration.

So you think the days of nation-versus-nation war are behind us, Marat?

Interesting analogy. I used to live near Kennesaw, and I remember when they enacted the gun law, back in 1982. It's a bedroom community for Atlanta, and chock full o' BMW-driving yuppies, so it's probably one of the most ignored laws in the country. There is a down side here for Obamacare fans: Evidence that the gun law reduced crime in Kennesaw is equivocal at best. But the reasoning differs tremendously, so the analogy kinda fails at that point. I don't know why this particular judicial decision is making such a fuss, though. I heard on the news that 14 previous cases over the exact same argument were thrown out. It doesn't really sound like a strong case. Jon Stewart's argument the other night that it turns the tables on conservative ideologues was interesting/amusing. Usually they're the ones complaining about "activist judges". Kind of a "Bottom rail on top, massa!" moment. I'm not a big fan of Obamacare, but I don't think this is the battleground. IMO this'll continue to be a congressional fight. I don't think they'll throw the whole thing out, I think they'll find a compromise, but this provision will fall and others as well. And health care will become more expensive for no more reason than additional layers of lawyers and bureaucracies, and voters will be outraged.

If that's true then we can indeed use that data to state that one country's health care system is better than another's, but it seems to me that we cannot state, based on that data, that the difference is serious enough to warrant a significant change in approach. In other words, the differences are statistically signifant, but not socio-politically significant. They don't suggest a need for dramatic change. Of course that's just my opinion. What constitutes great change is a matter of opinion, and what constitutes great cost is a matter of opinion as well. In order to make a factual determination you'd need a cost-benefit analysis -- something that weighs all the expenses of the desired change against the potential progress that could be gained. We haven't been able to agree on a way to determine that yet.

Unless "something" happens to him and he pulls the trigger on the password bomb.

I agree with the two posts above. The primary system has combined with the 24-hour media and pundit system to produce a very acidic and discordant environment -- much more so than we've been used to in modern times. It's not that we agreed more in the past, it's just that we were more polite about it (most of the time, anyway -- some of that early-America political rhetoric is pretty nasty!). This has lead to the rise in power of independent voters -- people who are willing to vote for the candidate, and don't care about the party. These "swing" voters, if grouped together, are not more numerous than loyal Democrats or loyal Republicans. It was these swing voters who put President Obama in office, and they swung back the other way in the 2010 mid-term election. It's not an ideological shift -- they're not proclaiming a sudden awakening to socially conservative causes. It's more an expression of their frustration and ire at the way things are currently done, especially with regard to the economy. And even then it's not so much a demand for a specific economic ideology, as it is a demand for jobs and general improvement. The two parties can never quite seem to figure that out.

How do we know there's not a flying saucer in Area 51? That's a serious question, btw, I'm not trying to make fun of you. Wouldn't you agree that the answer is that we would probably know by now if there had been one? The same rule applies in politics, if not doubly so (or Gerald Ford would never have been President). We have this Wikileaks stuff, and IMO there's nothing there that reveals any great travesties of justice (though Julian Assange would like us to think otherwise). And there have been plenty of tell-all books about the Bush administration. Nothing there substantiates, for example, those frequent impeachment calls during his administration, IMO. (BTW, see Bob Woodward's four books on the Bush administration for an example of how the job can be done right. Incredible insight, more than sufficient information to base an intelligent, informed decision on as a voter, and not one secret disclosed. And that from the man who made Watergate a household word!) But you're right, we can't know for sure. Way it goes. That's not the full story, though. They initially released the documents with those names in full view. When it blew up in their faces they THEN decided to change their policy. They spent months pouring over those documents, but it took one day for the press to notice the problem. So they knew the problem was there, and they (first) made a decision NOT to redact those names. I'm not saying they intended to hurt people, I think they did that because that was their policy -- full disclosure, full stop. (And again we come back to the difference between an ideological special interest group and the press.)

Thanks. Okay, so the data is valid -- it's statistically significant. We know that the difference between the United States and countries higher on the list is measurable, and that the difference is outside of the margin of error. As you say the study doesn't tell us why there's a difference, but that's understandable. But there is something that the study should be able to tell us that could be quite informative: Does the difference in infant mortality rate between an above-average American hospital and a below-average American hospital tend to be greater than the difference between the overall average American hospital and the overall average hospital in a country near the top of that list? If the answer to that question is "yes", then we may be able to generalize that if you're in one of those countries near the top of the list the infant mortality rate has more to do with which specific hospital you're in than what country you're in. You could even generalize a margin of safety -- a specific number for how far down you'd have to go on that list before you reached a country where you should think about leaving it for another country, as opposed to simply choosing a better hospital within that country. Am I right or wrong here? What do you all think?

What I believe is that the media's structure and motivation essentially guarantees that it will tend not to place any specific socio-political cause above the legal system or the common good. Certainly that doesn't mean that it operates correctly all the time, but there's benefit in structuring our exposure to information in that manner, as previously discussed. Yes. Yes, sometimes it does. Not really, I don't think "opening up" to an extent that will prevent abuse is either practical or necessary. I don't think abuse of power is a significant (or at least not top-shelf) problem in American politics at the present time. (By present time I mean since ~Nixon.) I've seen no evidence that there's a significant amount of misuse of censorship powers taking place. By significant I mean such that would outweigh the importance of the secrets they keep for valid reasons. And I don't believe we're qualified to make that call. (I'm well aware of the Catch-22 nature of this paragraph, but IMO we don't resolve that by exposing the information, we resolve it by putting good people in charge at election time.) IMO most of this Wikileaks business is driven by values-based judgments. Outrage over the war in Iraq, and to a lesser extent, certain actions during the war on terror. Making decisions on that kind of basis -- over ideological outrage -- is a particularly bad idea. Yup. It's not an absolute, I agree, but until I see evidence that they need to be taken away, I don't support taking them away. Put it this way: What has Wikileaks shown us that we needed to see? And if the answer is "nothing", then why did we need to see it? It's solved democratically every two years. But sure, I'd be fine with some public referendums on various issues surrounding the Wikileaks business. I don't think Wikileaks supporters would be real happy with the outcome. Recent polling data shows that 75% of Americans do not believe that they have the right to know everything. 60% of those poll responders also said that they were concerned that such dumps might hurt the country. Even the majority of Democrats felt that way.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll out Monday shows almost 70% public support for the tax plan. The poll also shows majority support for extending the tax cuts to wealthy Americans as well as the middle class, though it follows partisan lines: It also illustrates the give-and-take nature of bipartisan politics. I thought this quote was interesting: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/13/AR2010121302373.html?hpid=topnews

Missing link. Here's another view: That's a well-sourced summary from the Wikipedia's article comparing the two systems, which may be found (along with all of its citations) here. -------- Getting back to the question, I want to know if that chart listing all those health factors with such a tight tolerance has any data indicating statistical significance. Telling me that there's a difference between two data sets of 3 doesn't mean anything. What's the standard deviation? Is there ANOVA data? What is the confidence interval? Is there a t-test? In short, how do I know that a difference of 3 (or 300, or 3 million) is significant? I'm not statistics expert by any stretch of the imagination (as my mangling of terms probably suggests), but even I know that this is important. Without it all I can guess is that there are a bunch of countries in the same general ballpark. I would imagine that such indicators exist -- it's not a correlative study without significance. But we always seem to get this data without these indicators included. Blame the press, I suppose. I'll keep an open mind about it, but I'm not drawing any conclusions about why there's a difference until I really know that there is one. Isn't that fair? ------------- Source, please.

I'm not sure why you're now asking me so many questions that I've already answered. I don't chase bait. I know you didn't mean it that way, but I also see who gets plus-reps around here and who does not. I don't wish to be a punching bag for liberal entertainment. I didn't say that it was. I don't agree. And I have no reason to think that that's the case. Hollywood is not a scientific study. Here's the problem with that reasoning: Let's say for the sake of argument that Wikileaks is 100% on our side and 100% perfect in doing its job of protecting the names of informants. That's a problem because no matter how many documents they have, they don't have the whole story. The entire picture. And they don't know -- can't know -- everything that they don't have. Which means that they could release information without knowing that it puts people's lives in danger. But we do have people responsible for knowing that -- they work for the government. It's their job to know this. Now, they could be bad at it, and people might die. Or they could be pretty good at it but people might still die because of some other factor. (They could also be corrupt, but that's true of leakers as well.) But the point is that these people are tasked with the specific responsibility of having no other agenda than making sure that this is done correctly. And if they do their jobs poorly or incorrectly, there are consequences. That's what the word "responsibility" means. Corruption, political agenda, special interest, all of these things can corrupt that process, sure. But why in the world would anybody think it's a good way to fix a problem by circumventing it? It isn't. The way you fix that is you have checks and balances, and you make the people who are in charge of those checks and balances responsible TOO. You don't scream about it on CNN and then wonder why good people don't want to work for government anymore.

It is when it's actually only a three tenths of a percentage point higher chance to die. Notice that the same data cannot be interpreted to mean that Japanese hospitals are "twice as good as American hospitals" in handling infant care. I wouldn't be surprised if a child would have a higher chance to live in an above-average American hospital versus a below-average Japanese hospital. That doesn't mean we can't draw from this and improve, but it should stop us short of drawing sweeping generalizations in the political realm. (Statistical significance measurements might be helpful here.)

Stolen documents are useless without a point of delivery.

The almost trivial differences in numbers between the top countries on those lists is meaningless if you can't tell me why some countries are higher and other countries lower. Implying that it's due to socialized medicine is meaningless -- you must show causation. IMO the problem is cost, not care.

Anti-war, anti-corporation, anti-free trade. Assange talks like a libertarian who believes in competitive capitalism, which may even be true to some extent, but I think his organization has fallen in with (and been adopted by) the radical left. I'm sure others see it differently, of course. What power? are we talking about espoinage and/or uncensored media presence? The power to circumvent laws that have practical value. That's why the accusation of terrorism keeps coming up, though perhaps vigilantiism might be more applicable. They're taking matters into their own hands because they disagree with a decision that was made. Like environmentalists spiking trees, or picketers hindering customers at an abortion clinic, they have taken their right to protest a step too far. They're not going to back off, so society will have to dial them back a notch through direct action. This is the justification for intervention against Wikileaks, and I believe it is a correct justification. (Which is not to say I support all of the actions being taken.) I can't support blanket statements like this. The example of the names of informants is just too obvious and unavoidable, and it's not the only example. IMO security can and should be able to trump transparency. The problem is the people in charge abusing that power, not the power itself. Who then? Not the government, surely? Wouldn't a 4th Estate by necessity be a special interest group? The press is a special interest group, but normally, by definition, its interest has nothing to do with any specific item(s) on society's political agenda. Individual members of the press may have motivations like anti-war or anti-corporation, but the overall organization forces them to adhere to a practice of standards that enforces objectivity. As broken as that practice often is, it's a very bad idea to supplant it with special interest groups with political agendas. Specifically, I disagree with this statement: That road leads to ruin. In my opinion. No, but clearly they are part of an instrument that circumvents one.

Well I certainly agree with that bit at the end there, and I think in general. I think (if I read you right) at one point you were trying to make the point that we need the example of Wikileaks to essentially highlight the importance of government responsibility, and in general you may be right on this. My problem has been that Wikileaks seems to have an agenda that isn't about fairness and doesn't make objective determinations. Wikileaks is no different from any other special interest group. They're like the National Rifle Association, identifying and promoting evidence of their mantra that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" (or however they phrase it). Or PETA, identifying and promoting evidence of animal abuse (with an anthropomorphic agenda). We can use their "data" and even their advocacy to some extent, but we have to remember that there's another side to their narrative that we also have to take into consideration. That's why Wikileaks should not have the power to do what they've done here -- it's too much power for a special interest group to have. That's why it's against the law. We can't pawn off our Fourth Estate to special interest groups. We still need an objective, fair source to make the big calls.

I'm not going to help you move the goalposts. Democrats arguing that stimulus spending, a massive, broad-based weapon in macro economics, has "prevented things from being worse" is very much like Republicans arguing that tax cuts, a massive, broad-based weapon in macro economics, stimulate the economy. I'm not convinced "social justice" needs to be improved. I think that's the left's version of the "war on Christmas". Or maybe not. I bet China would love it if we did that. So would India. But I have to say I'm not a real big fan of how your answer to the need for equality is to have everyone earn less.

Former President Clinton signed on to the deal today. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40610620/ns/politics-white_house/

It's not the same argument. Government spending ≠ tax cuts You yourself have made the argument that tax cuts have a direct impact on the bottom line (spending), increasing the deficit. So absolutely it's the same argument. If you mean in terms of small businesses not wanting to let on to a reporter what their real problems are, and just picking an easy target by blaming it on taxes, I might agree with that. But small business is a fickle beast and not part of the tail-wags-dog-wags-tail political scene, so any larger sort of "smokescreen" theory is probably not valid in the 200-250k range. With that stipulation this is a valid point, IMO, but there's reality and then there's perception. If that's the perception, then raising taxes will fly directly in the fact of that perception, and then it'll be a problem whether that makes sense or not. The only thing you can really do is raise taxes and then give the small businesses people some other kind of incentive to expand. Some such are included in the current plan, I believe, such as deductions for equipment investments. Or Republicans want to make sure everyone has a chance to get rich, and Democrats just want to bash the evil wealthy and could care less about the middle class. Or maybe Democrats really do want to help the poor, and Republicans really do want to make sure everyone has a chance to get rich. And the middle class is on its own. This is what I believe. Yup, great program. Doesn't mean that a general social income redistribution is a good idea. Prove it. I disagree.

By the way, Jeremy Clarkson is the ONLY British commentator I'm aware of who regularly poo-poos global warming and nanny-state tendencies. (I'm not saying he is the only one, he's just the only one I'm aware of, in terms of the point about overseas perspective.) Interestingly, his show is probably seen by more people on a weekly basis than every American political commentator combined, possibly by an order of magnitude (according to a recent story on 60 Minutes, Top Gear has 350 million weekly viewers!). Of course, they don't tune in for his political commentary, but I think in a funny sort of way it's part of the appeal -- the regular derision of road regulations and toll fees, anyway. But that kind of "soft politics" does have an impact on overall public ideological opinions, IMO.

I'm not sure I really follow your point anymore, Dak. And I really don't understand any "censorship" or "transparency" argument along the lines of "people aren't aware of X", where X is some knowledge that intelligent people who are paying attention to know about, but the typical man on the street does not. That's not a transparency or censorship issue, that's a matter of education and motivation.

But it's not arbitrary. It's quite purposeful. And it's not purposeful as an abuse of power or corruption, either. Security is an important purpose -- it's what we put them in charge specifically for, and I like to think that most of those involved take it very seriously. I don't mean to suggest that you don't comprehend this personally, just if we in society are going to have this particular public policy debate, then we should consider the very real importance of security and not dismiss it as arbitrary. These debates aren't just undermined by security weenies screaming about terrorists, they're also undermined by freedom weenies whining about invasion of privacy. The workable reality is somewhere in between. Yes, but I don't think even you support total transparency. What about revealing the names of undercover agents and informants? And it goes a lot deeper than that -- there's a whole laundry list of stuff I don't need to know, and am better off not knowing. Which brings me to a bigger point: You're absolutely right, there's no way to know what was censored and why, and all too often we hear about stuff down the road that was censored for reasons that were more political in nature than they were about security. Which is why two things are so critical in a successful democracy: 1) Voting at least partially on character. 2) Not assaulting people's character because of an ideological preference that the candidate doesn't meet (e.g. "George Bush doesn't care about black people."). ---------------- Oh geez. Well I didn't need any more reasons to dislike Palin, but I didn't know that about Huckabee and he was on my list of Republicans whom I wanted to look at for a 2012 vote. That's disappointing, but maybe it shouldn't be surprising given that it's not the first semi-twisted thing I've heard from him since he got his own show on FNC. (sigh)