The end of the war and resumption of the Third Indochina War would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the larger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw millions of refugees leave Indochina (mainly southern Vietnam), an estimated 250,000 of whom perished at sea.
The war exacted an enormous human cost: estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 966,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action. -wiki

So, millions fleeing as refugees, hundreds of thousands died in their attempts to escape, tens of thousands of allies killed by the VC, far more weapons, vehicles, and equipment left abandoned (and less of it decommissioned) to the enemy and a similar abandonment of the government we had been supporting. The scale of Vietnam was exponentially larger, so were the losses when we retreated. How is Kabul worse than that?

Please explain in detail how Kabul is worse. My guess....you've got nothing.

I'm not saying that everyone would react the same way, but it's very difficult to predict how people will react. I don't think their reaction was jubilant, merely that they were distracted away from the possible human cost by the sheer spectacle of what they were witnessing. YMMV. ; )

In a perfect world, perhaps. This world is not perfect, and many people don't have the ability to 'plan', either financially or sexually. Your plan leaves anyone who does not plan perfectly for an unknown future on the streets and destitute. That's not the country we have decided we want to live in. If you do, there's always Somalia.
Your plan leaves us with millions of destitute elderly on the streets. Bad plan, that would NEVER work. Again, you expect people to plan for their future perfectly, and if they don't, fuck em. That's terrible, uncaring, non-thinking planning. They don't just disappear if they planned badly and are homeless, foodless, and hopeless, they show up on your driveway with a knife.
How about we just remove all corporate welfare, cut our military by 5%, and actually extend benefits for PEOPLE? The reduced costs in your plan would not even be noticed in the federal budget, not a single percent change, mine would be noticed. I think you believe that 'welfare' (social programs) is a major cost to the fed, it's simply NOT. On the other hand, it does save us billions by not having to deal with sick desperate homeless people by the millions. It's proven time and time again that taking care of them humanely costs far less than ignoring them until you can no longer ignore them.

Is the fucking news to anyone? Do you guys read or even just watch the videos that are posted ON THIS SITE?!

http://videosift.com/video/Last-Week-Tonight-with-John-Oliver-FIFA-and-the-World-Cup

Or how about you look something up about this particular World Cup and the events surrounding it.

http://revolution-news.com/brazil-fifa-forces-evictions-for-world-cup-police-brutality-rages/

http://guardianlv.com/2014/06/fifa-world-cup-forces-homelessness-on-thousands-of-children/

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-human-cost-of-the-fifa-world-cup/5390001

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-22992410

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/08/us-worldcup-brazil-idUSBREA3715H20140408

And it's all...ALL of it is for this. http://www.espnfc.com/story/1830732

So, this is a major misconception by the public about where the money actually goes when drugs are developed. Read the link you have there, but with a more realistic eye about where the money is going. Drugs are SUPER expensive, but only because they're super expensive to discover. 'Drug discovery' is a tremendously difficult thing, to the point where it is the wetdream of a professional drug discoverer in the pharma world to discover 1 drug in their 30+ year career. During that time, the team of pharma researchers all have to be paid for their PhD level of expertise, and the human cost in developed countries is quite expensive! If there are 1000 people in one pharma company, and each person makes ~70+ thousand, and benefits cost another 100+ thousand per person each year, then the human cost alone in that rough exercise accounts for 170 million yearly for just 1000 people, and can touch the billion dollar figure per year for very large companies. That is where the money is going in that 1.3 billion dollar figure.

The major problem lies in developing a substance that actually does something, and you know exactly what that something is, including all side effects. To get a statistically valid clinical trial is actually a rather hard thing to do; a poorly designed clinical trial can prove whatever you want it to. Considering your St. John's wort example, the most costly 'drug discovery' component is already finished, it would just need to go through clinical trials as a drug for antidepression. The body of evidence in place may already serve for early phase clinical trials, and it may just need to go through a couple of more trials to prove its efficacy (and determine side effects). It would cost some money, but it would NOT be so prohibitively expensive as starting from complete scratch.

Considering this, the idea that it's 'unfair' to make the supplements world actually prove their product does what it is promised to do (or at the very least, not be harmful) is a bit odd. Quackery is illegal for moral reasons, and hard to argue that what the supplements world is doing is not quackery; particularly with the Dr. Oz zeal, false promises are being sold millions of bottles at a time. It is in the public's interest to get this stuff tested and approved!

For people who have not had their hands dirty every year in a garden plot or larger operation for sustenance or other, you'd be hard-pressed to have much "imminent" fear of the future of food crops. One of the main reasons I seek to expatriate from the the U.S. has to do with availability of fresh, healthy, unadulterated foods that are not cost-prohibitive. The corporate food-barons of the planet are fucking you, and fucking you harder than you realize. They are plugging in dangerous data to your meat, and the meat of your offspring. It's an insidious form of slavery and eugenics with a human cost never before seen in earth's history one could imagine. Maybe, in some unrecorded pre-history we fucked the planet out of healthy food before but, I seriously doubt this....

Availability of the basics to life as a mammalian birthright is now being adjusted through engineering by douchebags, and we are all complicit.
Volcanic isles provide the best natural defense against humanity's inhumanity to man meaning, there is nothing that grows in that soil that is not good for you, or near a volcanic island that doesn't swim free-Factor-in chaotic-to-amazing weather, right-livelihood, and the absence of Americans, and you have my retirement plan.

I think you need to calm down before you suddenly bash out the first illogical or fallacious argument that appears before you.

Animal control is best handled by professionals and owners should be encouraged by both carrot and stick to be as responsible as possible.

Perhaps it would be more instructive to think of this on the macro scale. You certainly can't generalise from any one person be it Jim Carrey or Charlton Heston.

All I can conclude is that allowing access to guns across an entire population means a related increase in the number of injury and fatalities. If the entire population was incredibly careful, responsible and thoughtful it might not present a problem. Then again if they *were* we wouldn't have much of many of our other social problems.

All in all I like a country where guns are relatively rare. In a country like the U.S where they are common and many seem to tolerate the awful human cost, I find that extremely strange and frightening.

Hard one to vote on. I don't believe any of those and the first two aren't an answer (ie. how does a fridge work? magic. - that's not good enough to be an answer for me). Evolution is a fact - we've actually used natural selection to breed better hunting dogs etc for years. It was exploited during the slave trade too so we know natural selection works for humans too (at a terrible human cost, of course). Evolution doesn't say where life came from, only how life progressed.

An extra terrestrial source of life? Well we've been hit countless times by countless objects from space, it's not unreasonable. Or do you mean ONLY sentient beings visiting earth and causing life? Either way, we have definitely evolved.

I think the only way we'll ever get closer to answering a question like this is finding out just how abundant "life" is in the universe, or at least our local region of the galaxy. If it's abundant, then either it formed here or it was extra terrestrial. And if we reach that point i won't care which it was

Some 20 years ago a group of slaughter houses came to my university to ask us to build similar machines. Before these machines, humans did this kind of work. Next to humans costing more, a bigger problem was that people who wield chainsaws at work to cut through meat tended to stop seeing the difference between their wife and the pig and would take the chainsaw home to work off hours too. Statistics said that 1 in 10 would eventually do that, a huge increase vs the rest of us.

They couldnt find students for it though. No one had the stomach.

The argument that we should let massive faltering corporations fail so that they can be rebuilt or replaced with more effective and efficient competitors is appealing.

However, the devil is in the details, and in the case of GM and Chrysler, there would be a tremendous human cost in the short term (directly from unemployment and indirectly through the impact to the domestic economy already mired in a recession). The purist argument of letting them fail has an idealistic value but there are times where a compromise, a managed recovery, will get most of the benefit with a fraction of the cost.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. I think the bailouts were an imperfect and distasteful solution that worked without destroying the livelihood of thousands.

Pearl Harbor thrust the US into the war, though it had little to no bearing on the decision of whether or not to drop the bomb. Throughout the island-hopping Pacific campaign, it was noticed that the Japanese would never (or very rarely) surrender. Even if a soldier was the last man alive on an overrun island, he would fight. If he ran out of bullets, he would charge with a sword. In a few places, civilians threw themselves along with their children off of cliffs by the thousands because the Japanese government had told them that American troops would rape and torture them.

So the question was, what's going to be the human cost of a land invasion of Japan? They assumed they would have to fight not just entrenched enemy soldiers fighting for their homes, but the civilian population as well. It was also assumed this would mean the war would drag on for much longer.

Hindsight is 20/20 and we can look at this in comfy chairs from an academic setting. They didn't have such privilege.

This is exactly why some of us were protesting the war before it began. Just sitting at home in front of our televisions we could see the absurdity of it all, the impending tragedy. We wanted to stop it, but too many of us still trust our politicians to be honest, despite all the lies, year after year, over and over and over.

Of course war destroys the country where it takes place, and of course it is killing untold thousands of innocents in the crossfire, but also look at what has happened to those soldiers. They have been turned into heartless monsters. Imagine the pain of their families when they see this. Imagine the soldiers themselves, and the psychological trauma they will suffer for the rest of their lives. We are not only killing people, we are killing the souls of our own men and women in uniform every time we send them to battle.

Will we ever think of the incalculable human cost before the next war starts? Do we even really recognize what has happened and is still happening now? I weep for the stupidity and self-destruction of the human race. When will we grow up?

This is the primary reason I moved from computer vision to clinically oriented human vision research. All of the capital is flowing towards these projects. Further, the move is from remotely controlled, unmanned vehicles, to autonomous agents. What do we do when we can't even rely on the human conscience (say a merciful soldier) to mitigate atrocities? This sort of technology completely masks the human cost of war.

What safeguard against tyranny still exists in such a world? A legion of merciful programmers?

If I had my way, we'd just settle it with a bunch of knife fights at the UN.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Dr. Paul seems to believe everything happens in a vacuum, e.g. world peace awaits if only the US would withdraw all troops and close all US bases around the globe.
Still, a Congress filled with Ron Paul clones would be VASTLY superior to the sh t we have now.


No, that isn't his point at all. The point is we are bearing all the financial and human cost of something that isn't even appreciated by the world at large or our own citizens. When you hear him talk, he never even talks about this being the solution for "world" peace, just our peace. The world is the worlds problem. I still don't know his exact position of foreign affairs. I tend to think a little different than him on some issues. He has a VERY isolationist mentality at times, but as the old adage goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. To be a total recluse seems to invite certain disastrous alliances of evil.

That said, I think we can all be in agreement that Dr. Paul isn't a politician in the typical since, he is a person...the last person on capital hill.

Israel is in fact prosecuting the war in Gaza in a humanitarian way

Most liberal Westerners lack a more accurate paradigm in which to view the events in the Middle East. The modern, progressive, liberal democracy of Israel is not seeking to punish poor Arabs. Rather she is liberating 1.4 million hostages from the grip of 5,000 Hamas terrorist thugs.

Israel is fighting the Iranian proxy at its door step that also threatens the entire Middle East, Europe and North America as well. There are still more “battle grounds” in this war where the results are also tragic. But they were tragic for the good guys such as Mumbai, New York’s twin towers and Darfur, Sudan.

When idiotic dictators attack Israel, eventually she responds. The terrorist who rule Gaza invited disaster upon themselves and their captive, hostage, citizens. Their theologically inspired pathetic political philosophy is simply anti-Semitic and dangerously seasoned with immature fantasies of glory.

We in the West drink the feel good “kool-aid” of sympathy for pre-middle ages, totalitarian, apocalyptic, oppressive regimes. The drink is served by a willing liberal Western media who aid and abet our enemy in their pathological manipulation of the news.

Our challenge is to appreciate that Israel is in fact using many very benevolent means to alleviate the suffering that is going on in Gaza. Everyone knows a quicker, more efficient but unspeakable way to stop the Hamas regime. W.W. II ended with these methods.

But Israel is prosecuting a humanitarian method of warfare. The human cost of a few hundred or a few thousand deaths out of 1,400,000 Hamas hostages is the price Hamas is paying rather than simply stopping firing rockets across the border on to 1,000,0000 Arab and Jewish citizens in South Israel.

Rescuing hostages as I present here is dangerous and imperfect. But given the astoundingly stupid regime in Gaza aerial bombing and troop saturation is the better way.