I've been inside NORAD, and it was not as high-tech as portrayed in War Games (1983).

Word

the warzone is so small and densely packed with civilians that there is nowhere that Hamas can attack from that isn't near, more or less, civilian installations

Which is another very good reason why Hamas shouldn't attack Israel. (In addition to, you know, basic human decency.) Your fixation on the idea that Hamas should attack Israel, in spite of the certain misery this will bring upon its own citizens, reveals unsavory things about you.

Israel attacks anything, anytime, anywhere and doesn't care about the civilian casualties caused

You make that assertion with a straigt face even though you know Israel has dropped leaflets begging civilians to get away from military targets. Congratulations, you have just utterly ruined your credibility. (The men whom Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation" tried to maximize civilian casualties, and this leaflet campaign tries to minimize civilian casualties. A little application of logic would lead Brokaw to say the IDF is "greater than the Greatest Generation," but I won't hold my breath for that.)

You have the right to make the analogy less realistic, but I don't see how that's helpful. The reality is not a mere suspicion of rockets in a school, it's actual rockets in at least three actual schools:

(Reuters) - UNRWA said it found a rocket cache in one of its central Gaza schools on Tuesday, the third such incident.

That's a very bad analogy. It has led you to the wrong conclusion, as bad analogies often do.

A far better analogy: I live in Bellingham, Washington, and my government, the United States Government, stockpiles rockets in my child's school and starts firing them over the border into residential areas of Vancouver, British Columbia, for no good reason. To try to stop the rocket attacks, Canada launches some airstrikes on Bellingham.

In this situation, I would be completely ashamed of my government, the United States Government, and I would be rooting for the Canadians, because I'm a civilized person.

And then if the airstrikes failed to stop the rocket attacks, and Canadian troops arrived in Bellingham, you bet I'd help them find the jerks launching the rockets.

And if the Canadians dropped leaflets begging civilians to evacuate the school before they bomb the rocket-launching site, I would have even more admiration for the Canadians, because that type of concern for civilians is nearly unprecedented in warfare.

And if American leaders called those evacuation warning leaflets "psychological warfare, and urged people to stay put," my disgust for my own government would multiply.

And if my child was killed because a school administrator obeyed the duplicitous order to stay put, would I suddenly lose my grip on logic and rationality, and lash out at the Canadians? Nope. My anger would be entirely directed at the Americans who instigated this conflict.

If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. in 1952 spent 2.5x as much as Israel does today: http://i.cfr.org/content/publi...

And in 1952, the threat of the U.S. homeland being invaded was much less than the current threat of the Israeli homeland being invaded.

Oh, I didn't realize that Israel was systematically exterminating other ethnic groups, by the millions, in gas chambers. Thanks for enlightening me.

Yes, pork-barrel spending is a huge problem; see http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

But you can't say that money spent on SpaceX contracts won't go to SpaceX. By definition, it does.

they have so-far demonstrated no ability to either reliably launch on-schedule, or leaunch at any sustained rate

The amazing thing about SpaceX is that even while their costs are at least an order of magnitude lower than ULA's, their development cycle is far more rapid and the capabilities they are adding are far more advanced. Fixing the things you are complaining about, if indeed they are a genuine problem, seems trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.

The private contractor has a track record of delivering far more bang for the buck than the government agency. Yes, I do have an ideology -- because I have observed time and time again that private enterprises operate far more efficiently than the government -- but it is a true ideology with a foundation of factual, objective observations. What is the foundation of your ideology?

Sorry for using a round number. I don't know why you'd be happier if I had said "apply the other 78.57% toward deficit reduction." Nobody has done a rigorous analysis of what the optimal percentage should be, so why pretend they have?

I'm one of the biggest spaceflight enthusiasts you'll find, and I've been saying for years: kill SLS. We'll get more results by using 20% of the money to expand SpaceX contracts, and applying the other 80% toward deficit reduction.

Musk isn't in it for the money; he enjoys the engineering challenges, and bringing launch costs down by one or more orders of magnitude is one of those challenges. (Yes I realize the irony; despite not being in it for the money, he has become quite wealthy.)

Then I guess we've been extremely lucky, because SpaceX has actually made a lot of progress.

Sensitivity training teaches the insensitive exactly how to push the buttons of the sensitive. And that's about all it does.

There's an old prescription, that may still be the best available: "Do not feed the trolls."

Are you referring to VA workers who falsified patient wait-time records in order to earn bonuses?

"Trained crew" is a stretch. A well-trained crew would have made a positive identification before launching. Perhaps there was an IFF signal that would have saved MH17, if it had been paid attention to. The Russians are supplying this assistance to hotheads with little regard for human life (they shoot at anything flying over their self-proclaimed "republic").

If Noriega prevails, Trey Parker and Matt Stone wuld likely owe damanges to the estate of Kim Jong Il, for their unflattering depiction of him in Team America: World Police.