FDA does actually require testing of the efficacy (in phase 2) as well as safety (phase 1) so you are wrong there. Testing drugs in the US is nothing but thorough. It takes on average 12 years and $350 million dollars to test a new drug and in some cases even longer and over a billion. After the 12 years of testing, the application for final approval (100,000+ pages) takes the FDA on average another 2.5 years to process.

The reasons for this excruciating process are obvious: approve an unsafe drug and your ass is on the line. Delay a life saving drug by years and you are just ensuring safety. People die in both cases but one is a lot more career threatening to than the other.

I'm not saying that testing drugs is not necessary but you have to look at both side of equation. Excessive requirements for testing and bureaucracy involved mean:

1, more expensive drugs
2. fewer drugs brought to market as many are not worth the expense
3. more people dying while waiting 15 years or more for a life saving drug to be approved
4. drug research is cost prohibitive for smaller companies leading to less competition
etc.

The interesting part is are some people really born with the ability to "do it". There is a lot of research that disputes that. Even studies of child prodigies like Mozart show that they have actually put in their 10,000 hours, it's just that they started at a very young age and had an opportunity for a very high quality practice (Mozart father was a famous music teacher and he started from the day Mozart was born).

That's exactly what it is. Like a master level chess player plays 20% by calculation and 80% by pattern recognition while with a recreational player it is the opposite.

No, but running at full speed while controlling the ball and getting past highly skilled opponents who are trying to stop you does.

We plan to buy roughly 2,400 of them, plus our allies are buying a whole bunch, so they will hardly be outnumbered by the enemy the way Tiger and Panther were. Also, it is not about speed and maneuverability, its about combination of sensor fusion and advanced networking to maximize situation awareness, also combined with denying the enemy the same through stealth and most advanced electronic warfare ever built into a fighter.

Situational awareness is what warfare is about. Think about how US infantry in Iraq routinely routed Iraqis in ground battles and city fighting especially at night with 10-1 or better ratio. Are US soldiers 10 times faster than Iraqis or is AR-15 10 times better than AK-47? No, it's the fact that our guys from the command down to squad level knew where they were and where the enemy was and they could choose the time and place of engagement and the enemy had no clue what was going on that made all the difference. Night vision equipment made more difference than guns.

I think building this from the ground up sets us up better for the next 50 years than trying to hang more and more stuff off the existing platforms. Now, was it worth this much money. Idk, maybe not, maybe something else could have been built that wasn't quite so expensive but its kinda too late now.

I highly doubt that this would be a deliberate act by pro-Russian separatists. If it does turn out that this was done by them, this is a HUGE PR disaster for them. They have nothing to gain by it. I see three possibilities:

1 - separatists shot it down accidentally (unlikely as a crew trained to use a highly sophisticated SA-11 system would also know how to tell a civilian airliner from a military transport turboprop)

2 - false flag operation by Ukrainians in order to blame pro-Russians (unlikely as they are too incompetent to pull this off without the word leaking out)

3 - Ukrainians "tricked" the separatists into shooting down the plane. Only couple of days ago separatists shot down an An-26 military transport plane and warned Ukraine not to fly over the region anymore. Two days later a civilian airliner is sent (by the Ukraine flight-control?), 100km away from it's usual flight-path and straight over the separatist area. (Most likely in my opinion)

Either Russia has given the insurgents some very high tech MANPADS or Russia shot the plane down using an air defense system like the S300.
 
Those are not the only two possibilities. Ukraine was complaining about Russian planes intruding on it's airspace just yesterday and it possesses plenty of weapons capable of shooting down a plane at that altitude.

From the reports, the plane was flying at a cruising altitude of ~30,000ft., way too high for a MANPAD. It would have to be a radar guided missile system like SA-11 (which both sides have) but still there is a question how they would identify the plane.

Too much of a coincidence for a plane to crash in a war zone where a fighter was shot down just the other day and a transport aircraft An-26 was shot down by a missile at 25,000ft couple of days ago. And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?

And yet we strive to prevent heart attacks, despite their natural nature.

We strive to prevent heart attacks but we don't consider them a crime. Saying that a lot of natural "abortions" happen therefore it is ok to cause a few more is the same thing as saying a lot people die in accidents so its ok to kill a few more.

Logically the religious view is consistent here, and this argument is as silly as the one often made about the alleged hypocrisy of religious people caring fanatically about fetus right to life and yet supporting the death penalty - not inconsistent where you realize that "right to life" is a shorthand for right to life of innocent people, in this case the unborn ones, not an absolute in all cases.

I think the correct argument for abortion is the libertarian one of absolute property right over one's own body. Fetus may have the right to life or not, but it does not have the right to use another person's body in order to survive without that person's consent.

BS, they are not refugees. Mexico is a middle income country with per capita GDP higher than some European countries (mostly due to being close to the USA). Yes there is a lot of crime and the GDP doesn't give the full picture due to inequality but still a person is far better off there than almost any African country and a lot of countries in Asia, S. America, etc. If the purpose of immigration is to help the immigrants escape danger at home, then lets send the Mexicans back and bring a whole bunch of people from Africa.

Native Americans are a great example of the dangers of remaining a primitive civilization using stone tools, failing to invent the wheel, non-magic medicine, education, roads, bridges, decent agriculture, legal system, government, housing solutions better than primitive huts and caves etc etc.

What do you expect the world to do, leave an enormous continent full of natural resources to a few million savage who didn't know what to do with it. Of course it got taken from them, and look at it now.

Enjoy seeing more and more of your country turn into another Mexico. Gringos built the greatest country in the history of the world. Mexicans build a sewer of a country.

"Good" in this case is access to the event, not getting a piece of paper.

Banning scalping would be like banning retail. Buy goods for less, sell them for more. None of government's business except when the ticket says "not for resale" in which case it's a breach of contract.