WheelsRCool

One can still be an American while remaining a member of their original culture, but they need to integrate. The Russian, the Chinese, the Mexican, the African, etc...all when at the office and/or out and about, speak English and also identify themselves ultimately as Americans. But if when they go home, the Russian speaks Russian, the Chinese speaks Chinese, etc...that is their business. The different cultures add cultural richness to our nation. The problem is if they do not identify as Americans but rather just as people of different cultures who happen to live in America. Basically we need to be a melting pot, not a salad bowl.

Not saying it is the case as I have no idea, but given the budget limitations of the EU militaries from what I've read, I wouldn't be surprised if upon threat of an attack, it came out that their nuclear arsenals were not capable of actually firing. EU might well not be able to do anything in such a scenario, because they might not want to launch a nuke back at NK so as not to hurt South Korea and China, but then their conventional military capability is extremely limited.

Are there people claiming they are developing a ballistic missile for non-nuclear purposes?

So not debating you Roman, just curious about this; so with all that, would there be a way to attack NK before they could mobilize all of those resources? I would imagine it would take some time to get everything ready to go...? Also the missiles they have aimed at SK, are those fueled up, or would they require time to fuel up before firing?

I am more ambivalent on the supposed benefits of illegal immigration (it would depend on how many of them actually want to work and integrate versus just keep speaking Spanish and ride the system, which the Democrats are plenty happy to expand for them). Also how many of them are very far-left. We do not want to be letting in millions of people who would vote for a Hugo Chavez or a Fidel Castro if given the opportunity (the Democratic party sees them as having pretty left-wing politics, hence their having no problem letting them all in). Legal immigration is an entirely different matter, for the reasons you stated. Regarding Japan, do we know for sure that their falling birthrates are due to their being a homogenous population? I do wish Trump would be more overtly pro-Eastern Europe. Obama pulled the missile defense rug out from Poland sixty years to the day of the Soviet invasion of Poland at the time. Now we have Trump, who unfortunately is wishy-washy-seeming on this. I do think Putin has a lot more respect for Trump than Obama though, due to Trump's being so overtly pro-U.S.

I wonder if the appropriate response to a North Korean nuclear launch at the U.S. would be a counter-nuclear launch. The thing is, then we end up probably spreading a bunch of radiation into China and all the people there suffering when they had nothing to do with it. I DO think the appropriate response would be to destroy the regime, but I'm thinking maybe multiple MOAB bombs or something.

True, but then again, do you really think that this million-man army is actually fully-trained and able to fight? Or that their 10,000 tanks are fully prepped and ready? We used to think that about the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union, and after the collapse, learned that much of their military was woefully undertrained and not even battle-ready. That said, I think any invasion attempt of North Korea would be nuts.

past*

So when exactly is shit about to go down, tomorrow, a day or so...? Is the U.S. going to engage in some pre-emptive military strike against NK?

So Scaramucci missed his child's birth, has had his wife file for divorce, and then lost his job all in one week.

Why all the work being done on missile defense then? And why any concern about such from the defense establishment globally?

How would we stop it? (don't mean that critically, just curious).

Do hope you are right, but the impression I got was that the government is surprised by how far this missile traveled.

North Korea launches missile that seems to have ability to reach entire U.S. mainland: LINK

There are certain ways to help lower the cost though. Healthcare is not and cannot ever be a right. It is and always will be a privilege, as it is a combination of various goods and services, which require the labor of others to produce. To claim it is a right would be claiming one has a right to the labor of others, which no one does. Nationalization would be one of the worst things one could do to the healthcare system. Also what makes you think that you're not going to be economically excluding people and considering healthcare a privilege with a nationalized system? With a nationalized system, or a system that functions as such, you end up with rationing and wait times, for example the Canadian and the UK system. If you need to see a doctor and they say, "No charge or paperwork, but we'll see you in four months," that is treating healthcare as a privilege and excluding people. In addition, such systems have to make decisions about who ultimately gets any care and who does not due to the limitations of the funding available. This is one of the problems the UK NHS is currently having. The UK recently has refused to treat multiple patients for sicknesses: LINK1 LINK2 Also, not all universal healthcare systems are nationalized systems. For example, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands all have universal healthcare systems that are not single-payer or totally government-managed. Drugs cost what they cost. The price will be absorbed somehow, either through fewer drugs, or much longer waiting times, or higher prices, or some combination. A great deal of the global pharmaceutical research is done here in the United States.

Components that should be implemented as well are: De-couple health insurance from employment. No one should have to get their health insurance solely through their employer where you lose it if you lose your job. This goes back to a New Deal tax dodge that became law in 1954 that made it where employer contributions to an employee's health plan are deductible for the employer. Eliminating this would amount to a "tax increase" given how long it has been in place, but it would de-couple health insurance from employment and could be combined with a corresponding tax cut. This also is what Obama meant back in 2008 when debating John McCain when he claimed that McCain's health plan was to "tax people's healthcare." Unfortunately, McCain was too uninformed on his own plan to know how to properly defend it. Establish health savings accounts. Allow purchase of health insurance across state lines. Two problems today as well as that people live a good deal longer than they used to (for example, when Social Security was first implemented, the minimum age to receive it was 65 because most people were dead before then). In addition, there is a lot MORE health CARE today than before with all the high-tech treatments they have today. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, they didn't have MRIs, CT scans, PT scans, etc...like today, and to the extent they did, they were much more primitive. As a side note, they are talking about the ability to grow people new organs in pigs soon, I wonder how that will affect lifespan? 86 years-old and get a brand-new heart. Then kidneys starting to fail due to simple old-age? Get a brand-new pair. People might start living to the 110s and 120s!

The idea isn't to just drop the mandate (although that should be done as the mandate is unconstitutional anyway) and that's that, it is to create an alternative system. I do agree however that there has to be a form of tax levied to help pay for such a program. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Trump got elected because a lot of America wants blunt non-politician-speak, well one thing that the public needs to be made VERY aware of is that you cannot have a viable universal healthcare system without additional taxation. In Europe, they do it because they have slim defense budgets and a VAT tax and also sometimes mandate people purchase insurance. But either way, there has to be additional money paid into such a system. As for 2+2=potato, what drives me crazy is when people on the Left think that you can just magically expand Medicare to everyone and woo-hoo, everyone will have free healthcare and it will be all sunshine and rainbows and wonderful. Medicare and Medicaid have been skyrocketing in cost exponentially for decades now and are themselves close to hitting a cost ceiling soon, you expand them to everyone, even with additional funding, their being single-payer systems, by their nature, it will result in rationing and wait times for everyone. Already they are forcing elderly people to pay out-of-pocket for things that they used to not have to. Also, side question, pakisho you really never heard of cholera?

The problem is Obamacare itself screwed over millions of people by skyrocketing their premiums and thus continues to. Properly done, under a GOP plan people will see their healthcare premiums drop and healthcare will become much more affordable. One of the great ironies of the "Affordable Care Act" is how unaffordable it has made health insurance for many.

IMO, I think it also has to do with people who just come from a left-wing mindset that hates the military because it does the warfighting and has for years remained a "last bastion" of sorts against political correctness. Thus using the military for said social experiments they do not care. Interestingly, the origins of plastic surgery come from figuring out how to fix the faces of soldiers.

One thing on transgenders committing suicide in high numbers, but this is likely partially due to the societal rejection and rejection from family and friends that such people end up going through.

That would be neat to watch, he'd need to defend it strongly though because the media would start saying this is how banana republics operate and all that. Yes, one of the central problems of Trump is his lack of policy knowledge and lack of interest unfortunately in learning the specifics of policy. Saying to the GOP Congress to just write a bill for him (on healthcare) to sign is a recipe for disaster, because there is too much division between the hardline conservative types and the more moderate types. I could myself probably live with O'Care if they could engage in a policy of "tweak-and-move-on," as George Will described what might happen. Namely, get rid of the individual mandate and replace it with a different means of obtaining the money, allow insurance sales across state lines, etc...

Point is that all the outrage over Trump's statement is very selective when the Establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, have been perfectly okay with Bill over the years. Nobody has said, "That Bill Clinton is a horrible disgusting individual, and he will NEVER be invited into any of our social events or gatherings." Nope, instead everybody likes to be friends with him and he was an honored speaker at the Democratic National Committee in 2008, 2012, and 2016, and maybe before then even for Kerry's campaign (not sure).

GOP is not going to do anything that just yanks healthcare away from fifteen million people. Too many votes at stake. But Obamacare needs to be replaced because it itself has wreaked havoc with the healthcare system and is unsustainable.

Gas cars very quickly become viable range-wise though. Steamships too. Planes maybe a bit longer, but with WWII, their range was greatly increased. The problem with solar and wind power is that, from a utilities standpoint, they are neither financially viable hence requiring massive subsidies nor technologically viable. They are intermittent because the wind doesn't always blow and/or the sun doesn't shine, and for that you need batteries to back them up. The point of the article is that the amount of battery production needed, just for normal sunny days with nights, excluding the daylight when there is overcast, exponentially, by many times, exceeds what the world is capable of producing right now, and is even more restricted given the environmentalist restrictions on mining operations. Unless one can produce a battery that has thousands of times the energy storage capacity of current batteries. We see these limits also with Australia and Germany's problems as of late from alternative energy. Sure hope it is better designed than those laptops and cell phones that have randomly caught fire