They never tire of telling us that we live in a democracy.
This means that that dreaded mass known as “the people” are permitted – with however much groaning and reluctance – to present themselves every four years to choose their representatives. These representatives then betake themselves to the parliament, where they form some manner of government, which proceeds to rule us in highly democratic ways. This is is literally the best thing ever, except for the fact that ‘the people’, in their profound stupidity, cannot always be relied upon to vote for the right parties. Sometimes they vote for the wrong ones, and in these cases democratic solutions must be found to rein in the rabble’s undemocratic exercise of democracy.
The people of Thüringen have proven themselves particularly inconvenient to democracy, in that they have exercised their democratic rights to vote overwhelmingly for the evil, fascist and antidemocratic party known as Alternative für Deutschland. What makes the AfD so evil and fascist is never quite explained, but we hear all the time that it is very bad so the point must be beyond question. The people of Thüringen transgressed against democracy so powerfully, that they gave the AfD 32 seats of their 88-seat state Parliament – far more than they granted to any of the upstanding, democratic parties. These parties include such paragons of democratic virtue as Die Linke (the Left Party), which somehow manages to be both officially democratic and also the direct successor to the DDR-era Socialist Unity Party (it got a mere 12 seats); the Linke-offshoot party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wageknecht (it got 15 seats); the Christian Democrats (they got 23 seats); and the Social Democrats (they got six seats, lol).
Now, a naïve person might think that the AfD, being the party most favoured by the people of Thüringen, should enjoy certain parliamentary prerogatives. Existing procedures, for example, grant the strongest party the right to propose candidates for the office of Parliamentary President. The President is the person who presides over the meetings of the parliament; he is like a glorified committee chair and his powers are not all that great. The very idea that the AfD might have the right to suggest its own candidates for President, however, strikes enormous fear into the hearts of the ‘democratic’ parties, who are determined to save Thüringian democracy by all the antidemocratic means at their disposal. If necessary, we must destroy democracy itself, to save the Thüringian parliament from the spectre of a democratically elected AfD President.
This brings us to the absolute unprecedented clown show that unfolded yesterday at the Thüringian parliament in Erfurt. It was set to be a day of boring, routine procedure, when the newly elected parliament would constitute itself and elect a President. Thüringen is anomalous, in that this state – alone of all the federal states of Germany – has a specific law mandating adherence to parliamentary procedures. New parliaments cannot just change these procedures on the fly; they have to be officially constituted as a legislative body first. These legally mandated procedures require that an acting “Senior President” preside over the first meeting of the new parliament. This Senior President is simply the oldest member of the dominant party – in this case an affable rotund AfD politician named Jürgen Treutler.
According to custom, the Senior President opens the first meeting with a speech. Then he appoints provisional secretaries, determines that there is a parliamentary quorum and presides over the election of the Parliamentary President who will replace him. When this President is elected, the state parliament has been officially constituted, and it can act in its parliamentary capacity – for example, by changing the procedural rules that have governed it down to this point.
All of this should have happened yesterday, but it did not, because our brave, upstanding democratic parties were determined to take a stand for democracy by anti-democratically denying the AfD its parliamentary prerogatives. Specifically, they wanted to force an early change of parliamentary rules, to specify that all parties – and not just the AfD – may propose candidates for President. Thus Treutler had hardly begun his customary speech when the heckling and shouting from the ranks of the CDU began. They insisted that Treutler recognise a quorum and take up proposals to chance the nomination procedure. Treutler insisted that he had to follow the legally mandated procedure and that this was out of order. The hecklers in the CDU kept shouting; Treutler and the other AfD members kept pointing out that the new parliament had to be constituted before it could change its own legally binding procedures. The democratic parties did not care about this, because they had just discovered a few days ago that the Thüringian law mandating parliamentary procedures is unconstitutional, although it dates from 1994 and nobody had thought to question its constitutionality before. At one particularly embarrassing point, Andreas Bühl, from the CDU, shouted at Treutler that “what you’re doing here amounts to a seizure of power!” The word he used – “Machtergreifung” – alludes directly to the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, because nothing smells quite so powerfully of Nazism as rigorously adhering to stuffy decades-old rules that are, again, legally mandated and that no court has yet overturned.
Ultimately, in the depths of his fascism, Treutler adjourned the parliament so that the CDU might consult the state constitutional court on the procedural legalities in question. The court is expected to decide any moment now. I can imagine few things that are more distinctly fascistic than this, and I shudder to think how our democracy will ever survive it.
Because Germany has spent the past decade transforming itself into an open-air insane asylum, all of this has naturally led to renewed calls for banning the AfD. The CDU politician Marco Wanderwitz, who has become especially deranged on all matters relating to the AfD since he lost an election to an AfD candidate some years ago, said that: “The AfD’s actions in the Thüringian state parliament followed its usual script of contempt for parliamentary democracy and its institutions.” The acting Interior Minister of Thüringen Georg Maier tweeted that yesterday’s “events… have shown that the AfD is aggressively combating parliamentarism [and] I think that this fulfils the conditions for a ban”. Had the Senior President Treutler violated existing law and procedures by granting the out-of-order requests of CDU representatives, he would have doubtless avoided these accusations, because democracy is not at all adherence to democratic laws and procedures, but unquestioning deference to a cadre of self-anointed “democratic” elite who get to do whatever the hell they want, regardless of what votes have been cast and what any laws or procedures say.
The Spiegel journalist Ann-Katrin Müller – a truly horrible woman – explained all of this to her audience of democracy enthusiasts this morning. Yesterday, she writes, “the far-Right AfD… pulled out all the stops”. Its rigorous adherence to rules that others devised years ago and a law that predates the existence of the AfD by 11 years was nothing but a ploy “to sow seeds of doubt about [parliamentary democracy] and ridicule its institutions to further its authoritarian aims”. Adjourning the session to allow the CDU to consult the constitutional court was likewise a devious fascistic strategy:
If the court rules in favour of the AfD, that’s a victory for the AfD. If the court rules against it, it will also be a victory for the AfD in the medium term. The party can once again claim that the courts are not independent, that there is a ‘cartel’ of parties and institutions working against the AfD, and that there is also a ‘political-media establishment’ that supports the whole thing.
Perhaps Ann-Katrin Müller, the courts and the “democratic parties” should not behave in unreasonable and transparently anti-democratic ways and say ridiculous anti-democratic things if they don’t want the AfD to point out that they are unreasonable and transparently anti-democratic. Perhaps they could deny the AfD the opportunity to score points on this front by behaving better and saying smarter things. Just throwing out ideas, here.
There is one final, farcical point to note: if our reigning paragons of all that is proper, upstanding and democratic wanted to strip the AfD of the right to propose presidential candidates, they could’ve just changed the procedures or the law mandating them in the last legislative period. This is precisely what the ridiculous taxpayer-funded legal bloggers of the “Thüringen Project” (I wrote about them here) suggested they do back in April. The Greens in the Thüringian Landtag even proposed such a change all the way back in December 2023. The CDU, however, refused to take up the matter, either because “it was of the opinion that it would be the strongest party” after the 2024 elections (according to Green Party representative Madeleine Henfling), or because it “did not see any urgent need for action at the time” (according to CDU Parliamentary Secretary Andreas “Machtergreifung” Bühl). Let us dispense with much bullshit and say plainly what everybody knows to be true: Henfling is right. The CDU elected to keep the present rules in 2023 because its leaders thought they would come out on top in September and they wanted the exclusive right to nominate a Parliamentary President from their own ranks. They overestimated their popularity and now they have decided that the very rule from which they hoped to benefit is unconstitutional and should be denied to the AfD. It is the same with the preeminent legal minds of the “Thüringen Project”, who have likewise discovered just this week the unconstitutionality of the Thüringian procedural law, after spending all of 2024 pleading that the procedures it mandated should be revised to the disadvantage of the AfD (thereby implicitly accepting its constitutionality).
I fully expect the Constitutional Court to rule against the AfD in the coming hours. This whole thing was a carefully staged drama for the benefit of an anxious, ageing and easily manipulated public. The truth is that DeMocRAcY, the popular will and parliamentary procedures do not matter at all if establishment parties decide to ignore them, the press lies to the public about them and the judiciary goes along with it all.
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“In conclusion, Clauser argues that the negative feedback mechanisms in the Earth’s climate system stabilise temperatures against warming due to increases in radiative forcing.”
Yet one more amazing example among so many of intelligent design – that makes us literally unique in the universe we experience in our lives, in time and space. Our fine tuning is so fine that an infintesemal change in gravity or weak force that holds matter together and we don’t exist.
It’s called the Anthropic Principle – things are the way they are because it they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to notice them. Strictly speaking, this is the Weak Anthropic Principle. Read ‘Just Six Numbers’ by Sir Martin Rees (Astronomer Royal) for an interesting discussion on just how ‘finely balanced’ six fundamental constants have to be for us to be here.
For some people, this provides evidence of a Divinity that arranged the Universe for us. For other (perhaps more humble) people it is not evidence that we are so special as to deserve the attention of the Divinity.
Consider the puddle which observes “Isn’t it amazing! This dip in the ground is EXACTLY the right shape to accommodate me”
So do you think all the incredible fine tuning that enables us to exist just happened by accident for no purpose?
I’m fascinated by the way Earth-colliding asteroids always manage to land in a crater. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220403-an-icy-mystery-deep-in-arctic-canada
Yes, it did. Because if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t exist. There is no old man with a beard hiding out of sight, or even behind the curtain.
Rolling the dice a lot of times got us to where we are, with advantageous conditions leading to things persisting and disadvantageous ones destroying them.
Well I’m inclined to agree because if there were a ‘God’, not only would he not allow kids to suffer and die from terminal cancer but he wouldn’t have invented wasps. They’re not even very effective pollinators, compared with all the lovely, benign bees and flutterbies. No, wasps are the jihadis of the insect world, they lurk in litter bins and wait for an unsuspecting victim to pass by then chase them down the street, completely ignoring all other people, and I think they get a smug satisfaction out of making people behave like Mr Bean doing a demented windmill impersonation, basically humiliating themselves in public. They’re really hard to kill and i once squirted one with WD40 and it didn’t even die. It was like a bloody terminator! One stung me below my eye last year ( a wheelie bin ambush ) and it hurt like a f***er, so when one landed next to me I squashed it with my sandal and thought that was payback at least.
, but I find staying consistently keto and those plug-ins you use overnight very helpful. No amount of garlic consumption works, alas.
Creatures are only meant to attack you if they feel threatened or you’re on their menu, therefore there can’t be a god because such a benevolent being would never create such evil little b’stards.
Speaking of being on critters’ menus, I’m an ‘all you can eat’ buffet for
Yes, it is difficult to understand why God allows suffering. You need to know that you would not exist to comment on the Internet if not for cancer, heart attacks etc. If nobody dies from disease then you have no chance at life at all because the planet could not support life at those levels. Suffering, ie Pain, is necessary to stay alive in our world so we know when things are harmful, when we become sick and that we shouldn’t put our hands in fire. If you have an alternative that is more sustainavle for the big picture,
love to hear it.
Bees mind their own business and are pretty polite. But wasps are nasty pieces of work sticking their nose into everything. “The jihadi’s of the insect world” is a pretty good analogy. A bee would never pass Net Zero, but wasps are a combination of Jim Dale, Ed Miliband and Antonio Guterres.
But wasn’t Jim Dale on Neighbours? Then he seemed to pop up all over the place after that, a bit like Guy Pierce..
Something that I’ve often wondered about bees though is why is it only the fluffy bumble bees i regularly rescue from getting squished on the ground during summer? I’ve never ever needed to come to the rescue of a honey bee.
Answers on a postcard please….
Are we getting mixed up with our Jim Dales?—-The one I am talking about is the cretin always on GB news spouting junk science and running rings around Eammon Holmes and Anne Diamond etc because they don’t know anything about the issue.
Why do you assume that the only two possibilities are a man with a beard controlling everything or a universe which came into being somehow by complete accident with no purpose, and therefore as the former is implausible, it must be the latter? Those are clearly not the only two possibilities.
Quite. Given what we don’t know, the chances of what we do know explaining our reality is close to zero. Most people seem unable to grasp any other idea of an overarching force other than the one of God as depicted by religion. And, for most people, that depiction of God explaining our reality is either true or false – there are no grey areas. But it seems to me to only be a small step to consider other possibilities for our perception of reality. One possibility, for example, is that it is an old man with a beard. This old man, however, sits in a lab, in a future time, running an infinite number of simulations with subtly different inputs. That’s a possibility the ‘there is only science’ people should be able to consider.
Not sure what I believe, but I’ve had a small handful of experiences that cannot be adequately explained by our common understanding of reality. I don’t know what reality is, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t this.
Total nonsense and defies logic.
This is what I send to people that aren’t sure or, amazingly, are sure there is no God. Yet alone intelligent design.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajqH4y8G0MI
I don’t know about purpose. I don’t see how anyone can know about purpose. But we’re all different and I can only see this from my perspective.
Existence and consciousness seem utterly miraculous, mysterious and intrinsically inexplicable to me. I sometimes wonder if that’s what others call God. The whole business of existence seems utterly surreal to me. And we should keep using hydrocarbons and build more nuclear power stations.
Carbon mechanics are a useful long term storage method, but it’s also reasonable to make real time use of light from the Sun, in a similar fashion as the plants do. Alright, the plants do the medium to long term storage that we exploit, but the somewhat simplistic route of grabbing some energy to generate electrical power is still a decent idea.
Well maybe but you need a backup when the sun isn’t shining, which costs money, or affordable storage.
There is no ‘fine tuning’ – just billions of years of evolutionary trial and error, spontaneous order.
in a word: Yes.
It isn’t known, and probably can’t be known if other combinations of values for the six numbers would also result in a universe in which life could exist. If physicists ever manage to produce a grand theory of everything it could turn out that the values of the six numbers can’t be any different to what they are.
All that means is that in the entire Universe we are exceedingly, infinitely, rare; a probability with lots of zeros to the right of the decimal point, and no integers to its left. One doesn’t have to invoke ‘intelligent design’ – a concept with even even lower probability.
The point is that if some thing, some state, some combination of states, is possible (i.e. that is not prevented by physics) then in a big enough arena, of time and space, the probability of it happening is 100%. We just happen to be it; our universe has adequate temporal and spatial dimensions.
In terms of corporate capture I think the university provides a good illustration of the malaise at large generally in society. You become so dependent on sources of funding and rather used to lavish amounts of money for fancy new buildings – always soulless though regardless of how much they cost, that to go back to a purer time is both unthinkable and unworkable.. And at the point of deep capture it is impossible to relinquish them because everything has been scaled up. Just like how we are complentely dependent on existing systems of trade and global finance because huge populations means there is no credible way to scale back without catastrophe. This Ponzi scheme problem has already started to manifest in terms of falling numbers of overseas cashcow students and loans that were taken out on the assumption of ever growing numbers.
There is a real emergency which could’ve been prepared for if it hadn’t been clouded by the fake one and therein lies one of its evils. Virtually no potato crop in Britain this year because of the wetness. Any attempt to grow stuff in your garden would’ve been met by an unvanquishable number of slugs and snails. There are natural cycles and any responsible leadership would be thinking about how to maintain such high populations under current conditions given long term trends There would be no easy fix but with international collaboration it could be done but it is too late now. We, the golden billion as the Russians call us, think we can just always rely on imports because of the permanence of the petrodollar. The luxury of imports is closing down on many levels. And many other countries are experiencing weather-related difficulties. I used to buy a litre of olive oil for £3 in the supermarket. Now it is £7.50. Things are at crisis point when you can’t even grow your own tatties. Do you really have to meet up with a spiv under furtive conditions in order to buy a vegetable. We think root vegetables are as hard as nails and will be with us forever.
We thought the events of 22/11/63 meant very little at that the time to us.All over Europe there was a geneartion who called themselves Kennedy’s children It was the start of a slow moving plague. Killed in broad daylight. They could’ve killed him by poison but they wanted it to be in the bright sunshine for maximum trauma. Any movement towards redemptive change acknowledges this. Dylan wrote a song about it a couple of years ago called Murder Most Foul.
It is sad for me because I love the Brits but all I see is a suicide pact or acquiesence to doom. No direction home. We are beyond the eleventh hour.
Off-T
https://thenewconservative.co.uk/sunaks-mask-slips/
Frank Haviland gives Fishy a good going over for his desertion at the D-Day ceremony. He’s a horrible weaselly little traitor.
“Unfortunately for Rishi, there is a reason beyond the general election why this D-Day storm is unlikely to blow over: it perfectly adumbrates the fault line along which all political issues are now at play in our nation– the stark divide between patriots and traitors.”
As I have posted more than once, Fishy is definitely on the side of the traitors.
True but I have been slagging them off when they are there including Charles that GBN are sycophants over. Neil Oliver alluded to similar lines in his monologue, maybe he reads the comments LOL.
I like the very simple quote from Judith Curry (Climatologist formerly of Georgia Tech) ———-“Sure, all things being equal CO2 may cause a little warming, but all things in Earth’s climate are not equal”.
How many ordinary people have head of John Clauser or other people like him, and how many will ever read an article like this or these type of studies? I suggest a tiny percentage only will do that. This means they will only be hearing the alarmist version of reality as presented on mainstream media (BBC, SKY News etc)
Here is a little story I read in a book by Stephen Einhorn called “Climate Change, What they rarely tech you in College”———-According to Jewish folklore, The Lord sent two Angels down with a sack full of foolish souls to be evenly distributed over Earth, but they tripped and fell spiling them in a little Polish town called Chelm. Soon a heated argument started in the town about what was more important, the Sun or the Moon. After careful consideration the Chief Rabbi decided the Moon was more important because it shone light at night when people needed it and not during the day when there as already plenty of light. It therefore quickly became settled that the Moon was more important. In fact there was a “consensus” and those who disagreed were classed as “Moon Deniers”.
There is something very similar happening today and many people getting their information from mainstream TV News are like the people of Chelm. They don’t look at facts and empirical science. They listen to Authority.
I don’t pretend to understand all this.
But I do know when I’m being fed bullshit and am being scammed – and the Climate Change propaganda is clearly bullshit and Net Zero is just a scam.
Put another way: what caused 12 000 years of global warming prior to Mankind burning fossil fuels, and when C02 levels were much lower, and what evidence is there that this process stopped at the end of the 20th Century or was so weak to be replaced by Man-made – and only Man-made – CO2 emissions?
Since nobody can answer that, the whole Man-made climate change crisis is a pack of lies. (Like CoVid and ‘vaccines’.)
Am I mistaken in what I seem to read here? A recently accoladed Nobel laureate, qualified in a highly relevant field, denouncing the entire climate scare as a scientifically-illiterate scam?
Why isn’t this covered by the BBC?
Since 2005, BBC policy has been to give no coverage to the climate sceptic viewpoint. And apparently never to revise or even reconsider that policy.
Prof Clauser is by no means alone. His thesis above is a condensed version of Prof Roy Spencer’s small highly readable book Global Warming Scepticism for Busy People. Prof Ian Plimer, distinguished emeritus professor of geology, would stand beside them both in a debate, if the BBC would allow one.
Add Professor William Happer, Professor Richard Lindzen, and many others.
The story of unanimous science support for AGW is simply a lie. It incenses me to think of it.
I will not pay the BBC’s wretched license fee. Let them come and put me in jail.