must rant

Ratification of The Lisbon Treaty is Undemocratic

2009-10-18T13:18:00.005+01:00

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

2009-10-01T16:59:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-14T02:34:00.001Z

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

Movie Mathematics

2009-01-14T02:28:00.004Z

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?

A Message to the Movie Industry

2008-11-29T23:20:00.005Z

OK, I'm not a movie expert or junkie but I like to rent a DVD or go the cinema every now and then. In last month I saw several movies that made me believe that there is something seriously wrong with the industry. So, what were they?

The new James Bond. I understand that everybody wants to make money but blatantly shoot a movie just to prepare for the sequel is insulting and dumb. I mean, nobody I have spoken had any idea what the plot was about or simply assumed there was none.

Blood Diamond. What kind of a movie were they trying to make? Most of the time there's these two guys running around while somebody else is shooting and throwing hand grenades at them. These parts are quite boring by the way. Then there are poor villagers oppressed by bad guys; a lost son (found later on); a brave American reportress with perfect makeup and hairdo in the middle of the bush; a tough guy whose good side that gradually emerges. Finally, a moral message that our society is buying blood diamonds while it shouldn't is stapled to all this, not all that convincingly. Seriously, the audience wants to watch only one movie at a time.

The Last Kind of Scotland. This movie could have been really good. Unfortunately, somebody decided that the story should be made preposterous. Such was achieved by various means. The most disturbing was having the main character (a white skinny teenage doctor) sleeping with a president's wife (the hottest one).

There's little story behind the affair, she just humps him in the middle of a party (only he seems to be hammered). Obviously, they just needed to get the main character out of Uganda so the movie could end.

Just for the record, the real Amin's wife (Kay Amin) did have a love affair and died during a botched up abortion. But the guy definitely wasn't some pubescent tourist.

So what's the message for the film industry? Don't try to cram all possible, or impossible, things in one movie. There is something called a movie genre, look it up in the dictionary!

If, by any chance, you want to make an action movie. Please do watch Die Hard I and II (several times) first.