He was an employee of the United States government. Working for a foreign government in the United States subjects you to a lot of restrictions also.

Would you rather be a random Chinese citizen or a random Cuban citizen?

Except that drugs are not created to treat "problem children". And what do you mean by "problem children"? Are we talking about children who want to go to school but happen to be Afghan girls? Children who, due to lack of regular attention and interest by parents act out to get their attention? Children who are shunted from relative to relative when their parents can't pay the rent or feed all of them, and so suffer from attachment issues? Psychological disorders have causes which are known. The way to control problem children is to avoid making children problems.

So how on earth would eliminating medicare improve the quality of mental health services given to the poor?

No it would not. At least Medicare covers psychotherapy. If the insurer only covers drugs, well, that's what gets used.

So you are saying that if the US healthcare system kicked the poor out onto the streets if they had mental illness, it would be better? Ignoring that this usually happens anyways in the case of schizophrenics...

I'm sorry, but medication does nothing for mental illness. The idea that using a drug like Alprazolam to control the symptoms of a phobia is better then using therapy to permanently eliminate the phobia with no chemical dependency is simply wrong. Xanax has a place: controlling an occasional phobia that probably isn't worth the cost of psychotherapy to eliminate. But use it regularly and you are physically dependent on it. The whole idea of mental disease processes is in many cases also fundamentally questionable, given the way that mental diseases are by definition deviations from accepted behavior. Psychologists should be solving what the patient thinks are problems, not what the people around them are thinking are problems. (within boundaries: clearly a suicidal individual should be helped, and if that takes Prozac to accomplish as a bridge, then that's fine) The difficult case is schizophrenia: easy to find, but the patient doesn't think they have a problem. Solution: deal with the issues that they have, like being unable to work. But then you look at things like bogus diagnoses of bipolar disorder in normal teenagers and wonder who the hell forgot that unless the patient says they have a problem, they probably don't.

If everyone had the same environment then all variation would be genetic. I would argue the psychological effects of growing up in a dangerous neighborhood with barely enough food, moving from relative to relative, and being viewed as a failure by the rest of society would have a rather large negative effect.

Congratulations! You just discovered that the sphere is a PITA to smooth over with data in Lat-Long format.

Science will never deliver answers on the meaning of life, how man should live morally, what justice is, etc. But it will tell you how to make machines that can destroy tumors with beams of radiation, reach the moon, determine the composition of the core of the Earth, destroy diseases with literally nothing more then the root cause slightly modified. Mold society? Only because they see a threat which, if left unchecked, could launch a tide of refugees numbering in the millions, destroy the remaining coral reefs. It doesn't matter if deindustrialization, carbon taxes, or cap and trade prevent this from happening. Scientists are indifferent to the details, but want only to see this threat addressed.

That's not been true for at least 70 years. Read Lakatos to see that math is an experimental science where the theories are always tautological!

The longer you wait, the steeper the maximum decline that is required. Have you filled a bathtub lately?

Wouldn't a carbon tax be the preferred capitalist alternative as it takes advantage of market forces? I thought conservatives were against subsidies of specific industries.

What is not specific about the IPCC projections?

So what if they just imposed a market based carbon tax?