Skipjack wrote:I think he wanted "the big version".
Sagan is the man who campaigned against the terror of the nuclear winter that WW3 would cause. I have severe trouble seeing him being in favor of Orion ground launches.
OTOH, the NASA 10m Orion and HUGE interstellar designs are perfect for exploration, colonization, and even get rid of all those evil weapons grade fissionables.
Skipjack wrote:Way OT:
Austria has had the worst inflation in 60 years. The big parties kept nice talking it. Gasoline costs 50% more than it does in the US, the big parties kept nice talking it. Foodprices climbed by up to 50% in the last 6 years, the big parties kept nice talking and ignoring it. And with all that, we are wasting money on people that are not ours.
All this did not go well with the general public here.
Much the same in the States. Every time I hear a pol or presscritter say "we have a strong economy" I try not to grind my teeth. Even if correct in the abstract, that is not the reality people are living in, and simply saying it is an insult.
Skipjack wrote:Yet the big parties together still make more than 50% of the votes. So to put this into relation.
Also, the big parties here are ideoligally handicapped to no avail. It is a tragedy. BZO and FPO also have ideological problems though. They are just not always quite as unscientific as the others.
Borderline neofascist, yes? Haider is back with BZO, and together FPO & BZO took 30% of the election.
I'm seeing good indicators that intense anger is boiling just under the surface in the entire Piedmont-Wien corridor.
You in Wien?
Skipjack wrote:Also to put this into relation: G.W. Bush makes Joerg Haider look like Oliver Twist. Even Joe Biden would be considered a right wing radical here. I mean death penalty is something that none of our politicians would ever consider and even the hardest immigration laws that any member of any of these two parties ever considered are ridiculously mild compared to the ones the US currently has and has always had. Proposing laws like these in todays Austria would be unthinkable.
Yup. Reactionary Euro rightwingers who move to the US are odd if they manage to end up in the middle of our Left. Tho there are certain bloody minded people I like who want to see the Somali pirates lined up against a wall and shot.
Downside for Europe is no tradition of assimilation. Makes integrating any significant number of newcomers much more difficult.
Duane