God, this thread....It's rather mind-numbing-

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird (and Wolf)." Rev: 18:12, choggiphrased

Let this 134rth comment go down on record as another reiteration of the fact that CNN is nothing more than a programming organization, with so-called "news" as a facade for an agenda to render it' s viewers cognitively sterile through stultifyingly, surfeited horseshit.

More please Blitzor, on that mother who held her daughter like a kite by the hair to keep her in the bathtub??

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Babylon 5, my second favorite thing in the universe..

Why stop there? Add these journalistic abortions to your short list of similar schlock-proctors, it's the same bag of shit with a more palatable label for those so programatically-defined:

MSNBC
ABC
CBS
NBC
CNN
Too many newspapers to name as complicit shit-rags, but try these time-honored, not-worth-wiping-with, pulp-poopaganda pages:
Newsweek
TIME
U.S. News & World Report

All designed to do one thing;
Guide peeps with no need-to-know into becoming much more ineffectual and idiocratic citizens.

They're all the fucking same beast, Babylon.

No sir, empathy and tolerance go hand-in-hand, I'm not a fucking out-of-touch dinosaur- I ALSO recognize that racism is an issue that garners that gut-reaction simply from seeing the word typed or written on a page with certain types of peeps too distracted by ancillary clap-trap (pretentious, insincere, or empty verbiage) to have any effect whatsoever on the world of the "real", whatever one perceives that to be.

I see Colin Powell's talk of racism in the republican party as a complete non-issue as in, "Why should I give a fuck about this Uncle Tom, proverbial, "house-nigger" who acted anything like a general or statesman when he addressed the U.N. in a rambling justification for bankrupting the country into the Gulf War(s)-He should regret his actions under Bush and go fuck himself into obscurity and stay the fuck out of politics forever, kinna like Nixon when he bellied-up and bailed-out before impeachment, and was subsequently pardoned by that OTHER ineffectual tool, Gerald Ford.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/13/colin-powell-regrets-u-n-speech-justifying-the-iraq-invasion/

The fantasy world I speak of you refuse to consider though under your nose where it rests and obfuscates world view.

The New World Order is happening, it's the mechanism of disinformation, obfuscation, world economic manipulation, etc, that has you right where you don't want to be, a willing slave, complicit in the breakdown of human societies worldwide. Welcome to the Matrix Wendy, enjoy your preoccupation with guns, racism, and voting booths


Oh, and for the record once again, I am apolitical and believe the parties democrat and republican interchangeable, and the equally meaningless terminology of political discourse in light of the fistfuck being perpetrated on all nations of the world, a complete and pathetic distraction.
The goddamn whore of Babylon wants your mind, money, and muscle and you're standing in line to be first on the train, in my , "fantastic" world of illusion.

If you must choose, Star Trek is more cerebral and more adult oriented.

I think it was in Trekkies that it was said "Star Trek is for adults, but kids can see it, while Star Wars is for kids, but adults can see it".

I love both in their own way and I don't think they're mutually exclusive at all, just like Babylon 5 is fucking awesome too, Farscape is also good. Sci-fi is where it's at, muthafucka!

Stargate can suck a dick though.

@GeeSussFreeK

I tried to stay way from issues specific to the use of nuclear technology for a reason. There's very little in your reply that I can respond to, simply for a lack of expertise. So bear with me if I once again attempt to generalize and abstract some points. And I'll try to keep it shorter this time.

You mentioned how construction times and costs are pushed up by the constant evolution of compliance codes. A problem not exclusive to the construction of power plants, but maybe more pronounced in these cases. No matter.

What buggers me, however, is what you can currently observe in real time at the EPR construction sites in Olkiluoto and Flamanville.
For instance, the former is reported to have more than 4000 workers from over 60 nations, involving more than 1500 sub-contractors. It's basically the Tower of Babylon, and the quality of work might be similar as well. Workers say, they were ordered to just pour concrete over inadequate weld seams to get things done in time, just to name an example. They are three years over plan as of now, and it'll be at least 2-3 more before completion.
And Flamanville... here's some of what the French Nuclear Safety Authority had to say about the construction site: "concrete supports look like Swiss cheese", "walls with gaping holes", "brittle spots without a trace of cement".

Again, this is not exclusive to the construction of NPPs. Almost every large scale construction site in Europe these days looks like this, except for whatever the Swiss are doing: kudos to them, wonderful work indeed. But if they mess up the construction of a train station, they don't run a risk of ruining the ground water and irradiating what little living space we have in Europe as it is.

Then you explain the advantages of small scale, modular reactors. Again, no argument from my side on the feasability of this, I have to take your word on it. But looking at how the Russians dispose of their old nuclear reactors (bottom of the Barents Sea) and how Germany disposes of its nuclear waste (dropped down a hole), I don't fancy the idea of having even more reactors around.

As for prices, I have to raise my hands in surrender once again. Not my area of expertise, my knowledge is limited to whatever analysis hits the mainstream press every now and then. Here's my take on it, regarding just the German market: the development, construction, tax exemption, insurance exemption, fuel transport and waste disposal of the nuclear industry was paid for primarly by taxes. Conservative government estimates were in the neighbourhood of €300B since the sixties, in addition to the costs of waste disposal and plant deconstruction that the companies can't pay for. And that's if nothing happens to any of the plants, no flood, no fire, nothing.

That's not cheap. E.ON and RWE dropped out of the bid on construction permits for new NPPs in GB, simply because it's not profitable. RWE CEO Terium mentioned ~100€/MWh as the minimum base price to make new NPPs profitable, 75.80€/MWh for gas-powered plants. Right now, the base (peak) price is at 46€/MWh (54€/MWh) in Germany. France generates ~75% of its power through NPPs, while Germany is getting plastered with highly subsidized wind turbines and solar panels, yet the market price for energy is lower in Germany.

Yes, the conditions are vastly different in the US, and yes, the next generation of NPPs might be significantly cheaper and safer to construct and run. I'm all for research in these areas. But on the field of commercial energy generation, nuclear energy just doesn't seem to cut it right now.

So let's hop over to safety/dangers. Again, priorities might differ significantly and I can only argue from a central European perspective. As cold-hearted as it may sound, the number of direct casualties is not the issue. Toxicity and radiation is, as far as I'm concerned. All our NPPs are built on rivers and the entire country is rather densely populated. A crashing plane might kill 500 people, but there will be no long term damage, particularly not to the water table. The picture of an experimental waste storage site is disturbing enough as it is, and it wasn't even "by accident" that some of these chambers are now flooded by ground water.

Apologies if I ripped anything out of context. I tried to avoid the technicalities as best as I could in a desperate attempt not to make a fool of myself. Again.

And sorry for not linking any sources in many cases. Most of it was taken from German/Swiss/Austrian/French articles.

The "Mark of the Beast" may very well be an allusion to humanity's addiction to the machine, to material gain. The Whore Babylon, the system that feeds upon resources and in doing so, consumes itself. The same whore which deludes and seduces humans to blindly follow a system which may inevitably wipe out the species.

Some scholars believe the allegory refers to the Roman Empire ,or a similar one.... the NOW-

Personally, I can't wait for some bio-mods, heads-up display retinas, all of it. Plug me into Babylon, baby!!

I was going to reply to him but you guys covered it pretty well. The crazy storylines, the wild writing, characters that were up, then down.. that was the fun about it. Farscape remains one of my all-time fav shows simply because every time I watched a new episode I left it with a massive grin on my face. It was just one of the most fun shows I've ever watched.

>> ^00Scud00:

Farscape could be really over the top sometimes, but then I think that's at least part of what I liked about it, overall I thought the show was pretty well written and I enjoyed the hell out of a lot of the characters. As for why people tend to deify Firefly so much I think it could be compared to just falling in love with someone and then having them promptly die on you, they weren't around long enough to really disappoint you in any big way so your memory of them will be pretty much be eternally perfect.
>> ^Yogi:
>> ^Reefie:
Farscape is definitely a show that has to be watched from beginning to end in order to follow the threads and feel like you know where you are with it. It's a stark contrast to Firefly where episodes are an entire story unto themselves with only a couple of background story threads being maintained at any one point. IMO Farscape's complex story is second only to Babylon 5's epic-ness when considering the story-arc aspect of sci-fi TV shows.
Also helps to be a little bit crazy to fully appreciate Farscape. A love of the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky helps too

That doesn't explain the characters, they were sometimes very poorly written, by any standard.

Farscape could be really over the top sometimes, but then I think that's at least part of what I liked about it, overall I thought the show was pretty well written and I enjoyed the hell out of a lot of the characters. As for why people tend to deify Firefly so much I think it could be compared to just falling in love with someone and then having them promptly die on you, they weren't around long enough to really disappoint you in any big way so your memory of them will be pretty much be eternally perfect.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^Reefie:
Farscape is definitely a show that has to be watched from beginning to end in order to follow the threads and feel like you know where you are with it. It's a stark contrast to Firefly where episodes are an entire story unto themselves with only a couple of background story threads being maintained at any one point. IMO Farscape's complex story is second only to Babylon 5's epic-ness when considering the story-arc aspect of sci-fi TV shows.
Also helps to be a little bit crazy to fully appreciate Farscape. A love of the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky helps too

That doesn't explain the characters, they were sometimes very poorly written, by any standard.

>> ^Reefie:


Farscape is definitely a show that has to be watched from beginning to end in order to follow the threads and feel like you know where you are with it. It's a stark contrast to Firefly where episodes are an entire story unto themselves with only a couple of background story threads being maintained at any one point. IMO Farscape's complex story is second only to Babylon 5's epic-ness when considering the story-arc aspect of sci-fi TV shows.
Also helps to be a little bit crazy to fully appreciate Farscape. A love of the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky helps too


That doesn't explain the characters, they were sometimes very poorly written, by any standard.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^Xaielao:
Firefly was very good while it lasted, but I've always been more of a Farscape fan and would much rather see a reunion episode of that.
/runs for the door

I've watched a lot of Farscape. It is sometimes very good. Other times though it's just farcical. I mean I started watching it in the order that you're intended to watch it, and the Characters still had no consistency. You never knew where anyone stood at any particular time, sometimes they were mad, or happy, or friends, or enemies. It made so little fucking sense and the characters would change WAY too much over a very short period of time, and then go back like nothing was gained or learned.
I love their use of puppetry and the costumes for some of the characters, it was amazing. Some of the story lines and ideas were absolutely fun and great. The consistency and character arcs simply didn't exist though, they were chaotic at the best of times.


Farscape is definitely a show that has to be watched from beginning to end in order to follow the threads and feel like you know where you are with it. It's a stark contrast to Firefly where episodes are an entire story unto themselves with only a couple of background story threads being maintained at any one point. IMO Farscape's complex story is second only to Babylon 5's epic-ness when considering the story-arc aspect of sci-fi TV shows.

Also helps to be a little bit crazy to fully appreciate Farscape. A love of the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky helps too