I was expecting actual warnings about hyperbolic space.

OK, when you put it like that it sounds pretty awesome. And delicious.

I'll bring the sauce, aloe vera and skin graft kit.

No, the US, a racist country, doesn't want its stuff stolen by China, another racist country. Given that the US already works with Russia, Japan, and the ESA countries, which are all racist countries, I'm sure something can be arranged. Probably what would happen is that the relatively secret stuff that the US has on the ISS like the communication system (TRDSS) will either be opened up or a few wheels will be reinvented in order to eliminate a good portion of the stuff that China would want to steal.

Moving on, I think the real problem with this concept is how badly the ISS turned out. It's an awful lot of money spent for little outcome. I suspect that the parties involved would both want a bigger and flashier space station than the ISS, would want the US to pay most of the cost, and there would be the same massive inefficiencies, vast cost overruns, and corruption as were present in ISS

I take it you don't use a charcoal barbecue

I'm not sure how you do it where you're from, but up here in the North we generally don't barbecue from 30 feet away.

Is anything legal in California these days?

Medical marijuana, gay marriage, conceal/carry.

Say you're not really pissed that fucking flamethrowers aren't legal there, are you? I don't know if you've gotten a look at your fellow man in the United States lately, but are these really people you want to be able to have flamethrowers? Geez, louise, there can't be more than maybe 1 in 100 that I think should be allowed to drive a car. Maybe 1 in 10 should be allowed to have shoelaces for chrissake.

Although I'm sure we can find someone reading this that believes "More flamethrowers = Less crime".

Well, I agree, but we all know Lizzie will never get bankers' money and so it's H's turn. It will be an interesting election.

... which will boost inflation and reduce the value of everyone's money.

which will boost inflation and reduce the value of everyone's money so little that you wouldn't even notice. FTFY. Rich people might have enough money affected that it might be a minor inconvenience to them, which is why they, their news organizations, and their useful idiots in politics think this needs to be such a worry for all of us.

Keep telling me how this is highly moral and peachy ;)

Well, moral I don't know about, but it seems just peachy for the bankers, doesn't it?

I agree, but there is a reason for it to happen. Namely, such corruption and inefficiency can get in the way of other powerful interests. My view is that there are some parties that need the Air Force to have better space capabilities and the ULA just wasn't delivering on that.

Let's not get hasty here. There's a reason I'm a fan of SpaceX, but not of the ULA. Sure, you might be right. But it also might be a way for the ULA getting to compromise SpaceX's competitiveness, at least in Air Force contracts.

Because the military industrial complex wants less subsidies.

We've had orders of magnitude more than 27,000 years of human flight, FYI. I'd say that there are probably a few tens of thousands of airplanes in the air at any given time. Meaning that we're accumulating about that much flight time every year.

If I were a betting man I would think Ted Cruz will be our next president.

Yeah. Good thing you're not a betting man. If R's run Cruz, Hillary won't need to bring out her base - fear will do that for her.

As someone to the left of the D's, I love it when the wingnuts get their man in - it means I don't have to waste my vote on some retarded D and can cast my vote with a clear conscience for the Socialist or WFP candidate.

This isn't an argument you will win. If we can't accept the past few centuries of history because it is less than a few thousand years, then we can't accept those few thousand years, because they're less than the few tens of thousands of years of cro-magnon man and so on. It's no longer the age of spear chucking empires. Something has changed.

That's the oddest way to state such things. Those mean, ole Koch brothers are getting away with spending one or two orders of magnitude less than their opposition because they're rich. We're also ignoring that a lot of their money goings into weird games which just don't get them anywhere. There's a better way to put this. Their money is spent just as terribly as their oppositions' money, but the ideas that they frequently back, such as liberty, personal responsibility, and less government meddling resonate with a lot of people these days.