cmarshall

Morality and ethics have as small a role in this conflict as they had in the illegal American war on Iraq, which is to say none. Putin is going to achieve his goal of destroying Ukraine. He probably won't annex all of it, but Zelenskyy's successor's will think twice before they say the word "NATO" again.

That will change nothing. The Russian dissidents are not going to overthrow Putin. Putin will ignore the anti-war protests just as the Bush Administration ignored the massive protests against his illegal war in Iraq.

All talk of the future is speculation. You are not speculating. You are expressing your wishes, which are irrelevant.

Putin isn't likely to lose. Neither his oligarchs nor his citizens are going to rise up against him no matter what happens. His economy may take a hit, but the Russians will tolerate that. You have to separate what you wish to happen from what is likely to happen.

It doesn't matter if it is objectively "true." Russia is a great power, because it has lots of nukes. That means that you have to take seriously what they say rather than expecting that instead you can talk them out of it. When the Soviets put tactical and intermediate range nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, the US similarly regarded that "threat" as existential and intolerable to the point of making the risk of a nuclear war worth taking even though President Kennedy pointed out to his executive committee that, in fact, the balance of power had not changed since the Soviet nuclear-armed subs already had enough firepower to reduce the US to ashes. That's what great powers do: they act on their own perceptions of threat from the enemy.

You are another dreamer. Putin may not be able to annex Ukraine, even in the unlikely event that that is his goal, but he can destroy it. And the US and the EU are powerless to stop him.

It's not down to what you or I "prefer." The fact of the matter is that Ukraine's current choice comes down to acquiescing to Russian dominance as gracefully as possible or watch all of his cities turned to rubble. You might as well argue with plate tectonics.

You are experiencing a deep semantic confusion between the words "should" and "are."

Ukraine's freedom is simply not available. To arm them and encourage them to provoke the Russian bear is the height of cruel stupidity. Like a lot of people who have seen too many movies, you think this is about morality, but it's not. It's about great power politics. The great powers, the US, Russia, and China all pursue their own interests ruthlessly without reference to morality.

The October 2006 Lancet study by Gilbert Burnham (of Johns Hopkins University) and co-authors[32][33] estimated total excess deaths (civilian and non-civilian) related to the war of 654,965 excess deaths up to July 2006. The 2006 study was based on surveys conducted between May 20 and July 10, 2006. More households were surveyed than during the 2004 study, allowing for a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths. Those estimates were far higher than other available tallies at the time.[169]

Beyond ridiculous that Americans castigate Putin as a war criminal. Putin is, in fact, a war criminal, but he is a piker by comparison with Pres. George W. Bush. The only country since Pol Pot's Cambodia to kill upwards of one million innocent people is the USA in the Second Iraq War.

This is an interview with lawyer John Reed Stark, who was formerly the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Internet Enforcement. His view is that crypto of all kinds is just one huge fraud that will end in financial destruction for most of the little people involved. Over the last decade, Stark has become one of the most credentialed critics of the burgeoning industry. After studying the industry at length, he has come to believe that it will end in a “financial cataclysmic event” that will hurt the most vulnerable of investors. Stark isn’t an all-out cynic. In the lead-up to the dot-com bubble, it was clear to him that the internet would lead to incredible innovation, he said. But with the world of cryptocurrency, he sees little more than a series of frauds and “get-rich-quick schemes” of remarkable size. “There have been awful frauds from unregulated people and regulated people,” Stark said. “But nothing comes close to the level of fraud in all these Web3 applications.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7nkmg/the-secs-former-head-of-internet-enforcement-fears-how-the-crypto-story-ends

I don't know whether the KYC banking regulations require that banks know where their customers live. If there is such a requirement it must only apply when opening an account since the banks never require periodic validation of US addresses for existing customers. In any case there is no requirement of residency in the US to open or maintain a US bank account. The banks themselves, most of them, decided not to open accounts for expats and to close existing accounts for them.

All true. It is nevertheless surprising that so many people are themselves surprised at Trump's behavior. He is a textbook psychopath. It's not just that he doesn't care about anyone but himself, it's that there are no other people in his universe but himself. These people do have a tendency to rise to the top.

She's an excellent journalist reporting on and referencing the work of virologists such as Dr. Hitoshi O-shi-tani who proposed the policies that led to the tremendous success that the Japanese government had in controlling the virus. But please feel free to stuff your ears with wax whenever you encounter an opinion that does not support your preconceptions.

There's an excellent piece in today's NY Times by the estimable Zeynep Tufecki on how the pandemic could have been managed to save millions of the lives that were lost, a number that "The Economist" now places at 20 million. How could nations have gotten around China’s smokescreen? They could have done what Taiwan did. On Dec. 31, 2019, the same day Taiwan officials sent that email to the W.H.O., they started boarding every plane that flew there directly from Wuhan, screening arriving passengers for symptoms like fever. “We were not able to get satisfactory answers either from the W.H.O. or from the Chinese C.D.C., and we got nervous and we started doing our preparation,” foreign minister Joseph Wu told Time magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/opinion/covid-health-pandemic.html The most interesting case mentioned is Japan, where the big advantage they had was better scientists.

Makes you the poster boy for cognitive dissonance.

It's always impressive to me to hear the conservatives decry government programs at the same time that they extol home ownership. Well, here's some news for you: the US has a socialized system of home ownership from which your family has benefitted. The banks make the mortgages, but then upstream the loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while the FHA standardized loan terms. The 30-year mortgage was created during WWII and is pretty much an American phenomenon along with the absence of prepayment penalties, which is unknown outside the US. Your childhood home benefitted from the GI bill with its federal mortgage guarantee even if your father was not himself a veteran since it assisted in creating the buildout of the postwar suburbs. So, let's keep the government's hands off our Medicare, eh?

Although he has had an education his "dream" is just the old-fashioned, working-class goal of sitting around drinking beer and doing nothing, rather than, say, doing something.

I pity his family having to grow up with a narcissist like this guy. He's headed for the trifecta: old, sick, and poor.

Most retirees do not come from a country of 5 millions with a sovereign wealth fund of USD 1.3 trillion.

Doesn't quite make sense to me, because Medicare is quite different in that it only covers seniors. Americans pay in during our working years, but they are accruing credits that will only provide actual health care benefits at age 65. The French Sécurité Sociale provides health care coverage to everyone. I don't think there is any concept in the French system of paying now for future health care benefits. From the taxpayer's point of view it is all pay-as-you-go. So, an American worker in France is paying into the Sécu which provides for his current health care. But none of those payments get passed on to US Medicare as far as I know. So, when he moves back to the US and signs up for Part B without a late enrollment penalty he is indeed getting a free lunch. It could be that the US French treaty permits this free lunch to Americans because of some reciprocal benefit that it provides to the French.

Yes, that's what the text says, but it could just reflect an assumption that the only acceptable alternative to Part B would have to come from an employer's health insurance. Also, the author of that text may have assumed that scope of the provision was the US, since why would an American expat even have Part B. I am just guessing here, but, after all, why would a national health plan qualify as an exemption from the Part B penalty for late enrollment only during employment abroad and not afterward. So, an expat working in France for instance would not face the Part B late enrollment penalty while employed there, but if he then remained there during retirement he would suddenly face the penalty if he were to return to the US. There doesn't seem to be a logical reason for it. But that may still be the rule. The question is is there any other provision in the POMS that would modify it?

It's true that that text references employment abroad, but that may only be because of an assumption that Americans working abroad would eventually return to live in the US during retirement. So, it employment abroad may not be an actual condition of the exemption. After all, coverage is coverage. It shouldn't matter if the foreign national coverage is provided as a condition of employment or not.

It might be possible, but I don't know if all national health coverage qualifies. Here is the quote from AARP on the subject: If you or your spouse is working while abroad: You can delay Medicare enrollment in Part B (and avoid its premiums) if you have health care coverage from: An employer for which you (or your spouse) actively work and which provides group health insurance for you (or both of you) The public national health service of the country where you live — regardless of whether you or your spouse works for an employer or are self-employed The sponsoring organization of voluntary service you provide abroad (for example, the Peace Corps) https://www.aarp.org/health/medicare-qa-tool/medicare-if-living-outside-united-states/