Ratification of The Lisbon Treaty is Undemocratic

No matter what you think about the contents of the treaty, its ratification is an unprecedented violation of democratic principles. If you fail to see this, dig this.

In 2005 the French and Dutch rejected the EU Constitution which is why its ratification was canceled. This has clearly shown that there is not enough support for the United States of Europe. Which is why, right at that point, Brussels should have started working on an alternative to the superstate idea. As we all know, this was not the case. The self-proclaimed visionaries of so-called EU integration instead of following the will of their employers devised a recipe how to avoid the annoying people's opinion.

The word "constitution" was scraped; the document was bloated into unreadable proportions and is now known as the Lisbon Treaty. Dropping the word "constitution" was a purely strategic move, the Treaty still has a constitutional character but it's quite awkward to bypass a referendum if it's called a constitution. Making the document unintelligible enables the debate about the Treaty to be carried on unrelated issues. For instance the Irish "YES" campaign was in the name of "Yes to jobs." The irrelevance of this statement was demonstrated by Intel which axed 300 jobs right after the referendum despite putting 300,000 Euro into the YES-campaign.

The Treaty has been ratified without a referendum in all states (with the exception of the 2 tragicomic referenda in Ireland). Not only there were no referenda staged, but they were not staged because the politicians knew that the Treaty would not fly. The politicians are knowingly going against the will of people. If this isn't screwing with democracy then I don't know what is.

Brussels Interfering with the Czech Constitutional Court

As you might have heard, the Czech president Vaclav Klaus has not yet signed the ratification of the Lisbon treaty. He justifies this by two things: the Irish has not ratified yet and a group of Czech senators are issuing a complaint to the Czech constitutional court. Through this complaint these senators are striving for guarantees that Czech Republic remains a sovereign state; more details can be found here.

The latest development of this matter, however, has not been yet covered by the international media, which is the main reason for this post. The Czech media has reported that the German ambassador Johannes Haindl has met with the Chief Justice Pavel Rychetsky. The ambassador was interested in how long will it take before the constitutional court will rule on the treaty.

This is of course fishy enough, but it only gets worse. The weekly magazine Euro claims that it has information that Rychetsky has promised to Haindl that the complaint will be rejected in a mistrial. The original article (in Czech) is here.

We may only hope that this will be not the case. But either way, this only shows that Brussels is afraid anybody else deciding on the treaty but themselves.

Symmetry

Is antisymmetry a lack of symmetry?
Is symmetry a lack of antisymmetry?
Perhaps

Movie Mathematics

At the beginning of the famous film Once Upon a Time in the West the character Harmonica is facing a small group of bandits.

Harmonica says, "Did you bring a horse for me?" The main bandit turns around, counts the horses, turns back and, with a smirk, replies, "Looks like we're shy one horse."

All the gunmen find this remark amusing. Alas, their smiles freeze when Harmonica shakes his head and says, "You brought two too many."

Question: How many bandits is Harmonica facing?