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Rescue Mission For European Space Industry
metz2000 writes "The New Scientist reports that the European Space Agency (ESA) has pledged hundreds of millions of Euros to guarantee its independent access to space. Europe also looks set to co-operate with the Russian Space Agency. Looks like the space industry is hotting up again. How will NASA react to this news after being the dominant space agency over the past three decades? A lot of money is going into rocket technology also; with this and the 'European version' of GPS are we heading towards a future conflict across the Atlantic?"
The EU *is* about everybody getting along as long as the Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc. sit down and shut up when their betters speak, it works just fine and dandy.
Jacques Chirac did more in 30 seconds to expose EU hypocricy than the entire anti-EU movement did in years. An admirable achievement, even more so as it was completely unintentional.
The EU figure is around 1% of GDP by comparison. Neither figure is adequate for wartime. I believe that the day we got hit at Pearl Harbor we were at 3% of GDP.
The EU considers it can get by with 1/3 of minimum peacetime military because it has a security subsidy from the US worth about 2% of their GDP and they get it by being nice and fuzzy and rolling over every time the US needs to do something military in the world. I wonder how long that 2% subsidy is going to last if they continue to pretend full independence like a spoiled brat teenager who wants to stay at home with his parents but without any of their rules?
It would be a useful exercise for EU voters to ask their local legislator what would have to give if their nation's defense budget had to be tripled. The social services carnage would be awesomely horrific I think but you all should check, just to get the real information from your local experts.
Nah, what'll happen is that they'll allow vouchers for education, then all the bornagains will put their kids in their own schools and there won't be any more pressure to force prayer or teaching creationism in the other schools.
Twenty years later, the US workforce will be highly stratified, with the lower portion good for nothing but ministering and manual labor.