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The stats http://www.huduser.org/Publications/pdf/ahar.pdf say there’s 643 thousand homeless people in America. That’s a lot.

There are services for such people. Nobody needs to starve in this country.

Then there’s the have a home poor, there’s plenty of extremely bad neighborhoods in this country that if you look at the housing the first thing you’ll think is they’d probably be better off homeless.

You might, but there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries living under sheets of metal who would gladly trade "homes" with these people.

Really poverty really still exists in thing country, and it always will. Life just doesn’t work out for some people, they don’t catch the breaks, they don’t know how to construct a good life from scratch, they’ve been in that situation so long the paper trail keeps them there (employers care a lot about your past, a long string of really bad jobs tends to make you only qualified for other really bad jobs). That’s the world I grew up in, and I still know people on that life track. Without a magic box there will always be the poor.

Once upon a time in most of the world, you were born into hunger, disease,and no prospects of anything better. It hasn't been that way in Europe for awhile. It's changing dramatically in a lot of the world right now. The curious thing about prosperity is that people stop having huge families, and they tend to maintain prosperity for those fewer children.

No they have pollution in Beijing because the government doesn’t give a crap. We have more cars than them and cleaner air. Remember the Chinese government has a doctrinal belief that there are too many Chinese, it’s why they instituted the one child policy. When your government thinks there are too many of you, they tend to not be into things like clean air and water.

China is corrupt. But China is not dirt poor any longer.

No it’s not akin to anything Obama. I liked the movie. I like many movies the reviewers hate, and many they love. My opinion is not dependent on theirs. I just pointed out a simple fact that it was popular with the reviewers AND I liked it. No religion, no Obama, simple two facts.

But somehow, you select the adoration of the (witless) masses as proof of wonderfulness.

Uh no, L Ron was a successful Golden Age pulp fiction writer, and was a fairly successful Hollywood script writer. You might not have heard of him back then, but that’s on you. I don’t like his stuff, but it was well regarded and popular. Which of course means nothing to you because you don’t care about popularity and reviews, but the facts are the facts and the facts are L Ron would still be known today without scientology, better known probably because we’d only know him for the writing not the cult.

I was there. You were not. I spent my kid-summers reading sf, and I tried lots of writers. I never came across Hubbard.

You stated it, but I don’t believe you. You parrot all the usual stuff from the Trek heads who made up their mind before the movie came out.

Just bizarre. Your ratio of ethanol to Prozac needs fine tuning. You JUST KNOW what was in the mind of a person you don't know at all--you know I schemed it all in advance. There are words describing people who entertain such fantasies about strangers.

No we DO need to drag in stuff that happened later because it informs the past. Because Coon died in 1973 we can look to TNG to see what TOS might have been like without him. We can look to things like the popularity of of stories with Klingons and Khan and see just how important Coon’s often overlooked contributions really were to the cultural phenomenon that is Trek. What happened later helps to illuminate what happened before. If my argument was that unconvincing you’d actually ADDRESS it instead of trying to poison its well.

You know what I scheme in advance and you cannot stick to the topic at hand, so you assert you can bring in anything. Lame, weak, flimsy, juvenile.

I'm done with you. You are a lazy thinker, and an emotional, irrational one. Go take some more ethanol and Prozac, and go see a plotless, character-free action movie. All will be good in your world.