Does not have the money? Are you daft? The US Government controls the supply of the world's reserve currency. You know, the stuff that everyone on the planet wants. If they want to create more money to pay for something they can simply promise the Fed that they will pay them back and the Fed will credit their bank account with however much they want to spend. For now at least, there's hardly a bank on Earth that wouldn't accept electronic wire from the Fed or through a US bank that will for payment or transfer.

You'll get no argument from me in favor of President Obama. The man is arrogant, insincere and naive with a marvelous ability to speak glibly while in fact saying little or nothing. This is what happens when you put a smart young Harvard lawyer in charge of actually making important decisions on important matters in a timely fashion. Right or wrong the President must decide and that is the one thing that this President refuses to do: D-E-C-I-D-E. He waits for input from everyone, dragging out the decision out for months or even years, and by the time he does make a half baked response it's too late and the consequences of inaction are already upon us. President Bush the younger, love him or hate him, was at least able to decide and that's no small part of what it means to be President. We the People elect the President to make tough decisions, not to endlessly evade them with flowery language and inaction bordering on impotence.

How about avoiding conspicuously costly and indulgent hobbies in public while the world burns?

The Chinese are known for stealing the ideas and intellectual efforts of others, not so much for creating their own. They are followers, not leaders in tech. So far they've managed to close the gap by shamelessly stealing every technology that they can get their hands on, but what have they done themselves that's innovative and wasn't done first in the US or Europe? Nothing that I can remember and that's why they're still second fiddle to the US in research and development.

Yeah, but fusion power costs too much to research and we have plenty of engineers to clean up the polluted tiles whenever they pop up.

Seriously, who gives a shit about yacht racing? It's an aristocratic hobby for east coast snobs with too much money and not enough good sense. Meanwhile the world is just a few steps away from military action in the middle east that could easily escalate into another massive war and possibly even a world war if it draws in Russia, Iran and Syria on the one side and the United States, Israel and NATO on the other. Ellison and his friends sure do have a fucked up sense of priorities racing their damned yachts in the midst of an international crisis. A pox on all their houses I say.

Not unlike those in the medical profession who have long been the target of these lawyers and people wonder why the cost of living is going up faster than their declining wages?

From the standpoint of the politicians who make the decisions, intelligence analysts are like economists. The often say on the one hand and then in the same breath say but on the other hand. Politicians hate that kind of reasoning because it doesn't provide the simple sound bite answers that they crave and can dole out to the public like so much rhetorical candy. So, the politicians pick and choose the bits that they like from their intelligence analysts (and economists) and leave the rest on the plate. Do the intelligence agencies miss things? Of course they do, nobody is omniscient after all, but more often than not it's the politicians who suffer from selective listening bias when communicating with their intelligence analysts or economists because they (the politicians) tend to shoot the messenger when they don't like the message or as President Truman once said, "give me a one armed economist".

The mission critical embedded systems use a much simpler OS than your desktop or server on a fixed hardware and software platform with certified drivers. You have to deal with crashes and uncertainty because you want unlimited choice of hardware and software with lots of servers and other arbitrarily selected apps running. The MRI machine or the Aircraft control system are purpose built for a single job which they do well, they're not general purpose computing devices or at least they're not configured to serve as such even though they might share some commodity chips with them.

Oh noes! Run and hide from the terrible military might of the UN! Maybe we'll all die laughing?

Have you considered the possibility that factions within Syrian Rebel forces did it to make it look like Assad had done it? I'm not defending Assad, but ask yourself who has the most to gain from a foreign intervention? I would say that it's very clearly the Syrian Rebels who have the most to gain from foreign involvement. They're being pounded day by day with artillery and airstrikes and they're unable to operate outside of the cities in force without risking attack from Assad's mechanized forces, including helicopters, tanks and armored personnel carriers. The rebels know that they're unlikely to dislodge Assad, at least in the near term, without European or American airstrikes to destroy Assad's air force and heavy weapons as happened in Libya with Gaddafi. It's very convenient that a small chemical attack(s) occured in the very same city where the international inspectors are looking for signs of chemical weapon use? Isn't it? The rebels aren't stupid after all and they know that Obama has identified the use of chemical weapons as a "red line" which would trigger consequences which they interpret to mean US involvement. Whether or not they're right remains to be seen, but Obama may have just been bluffing with that "red line" talk. Indeed, the Syrian Rebels may have made the same mistake that many of us Americans have, trusting that Obama will do what he says he will do. In any case, it seems likely that the Syrian Rebels will soon be reduced to an armed insurgency in an occupied country if the US or Europeans don't do something to stop Assad. Of course, US or European involvement would likely escalate the civil war and increase the chance of the conflict spilling over into a regional war, possibly involving Iran and Israel.

Plenty. The sports program ads to the prestige of the institution and attracts more paying undergrads, more alumni donations and involvement, more corporate sponsorship and a greater amount of goodwill from all of the students and their families who go on to become successful citizens and contributing alumni and the cycle repeats. People don't have the same sorts of connections to minor league sports that they do to the colleges they attended as undergrads. The taxpayers are very definitely footing the bill for sports, especially at public institutions where tuition is subsidized, but why would the NFL or the NBA spend money on a minor league when the colleges do it for them for free and are better at it? That I think is the answer to your question.