EU: the unstoppable train to someplace not good

1. Czech president Klaus signs Lisbon treaty

PRAGUE, Nov. 3 (Xinhua) -- Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Tuesday signed the Lisbon Treaty shortly after the country's top court approved the pact, removing the last obstacle to full ratification of the treaty.
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Klaus, who likened the treaty and the EU reform to "an unstoppable train," said he would sign it after an EU summit allowed an opt-out for the Czech Republic from the treaty's Charter of Fundamental Rights.

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2. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU is a reincarnation of the former Soviet Union

By Hans Vogel

Now that the Czech Republic has announced it will ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the EU will be even closer yet to becoming a unified monster state, with more than half a billion inhabitants. Inhabitants is the correct term, since “citizens” would indicate a set of political rights. The people living in the EU should rather be called “subjects,” since they have no influence whatsoever on the constitution of the centralized European government, the “European Commission.” The Europeans are allowed to vote for members of the European Parliament, but this body has about as much political power as the ineffectual German parliament meeting at Frankfurt in 1848. Political power in the EU is firmly in the hands of the European Commission, which is set to obtain even more power under the Lisbon Treaty. This infamous treaty does not hold the peoples of Europe in high regard. As a matter of fact, it is only halfway through the treaty (originally presented as a “Constitution”) that one finds the first references to the people.

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3. Swedish relief, let's get started dishing out the perks

The Swedish EU presidency can begin its hunt for a new EU Council president after Czech President Vaclav Klaus put pen to paper on Tuesday to make his country the last in the union to sign the Lisbon Treaty.

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The Swedish PM, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, added that he would call an EU summit shortly and would "now begin name consultations" among the 27 member states on who to choose as the first EU Council president and the foreign policy high representative which the treaty creates.

read more @ the local

4. Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder, by R.J. Rummel

This is my fourth book in a series on genocide and government mass murder, what I call democide. The previous works concentrated on the four regimes that have committed the most democide, specifically the Soviet Union, Nationalist China under Chiang Kai-shek, communist China, and Nazi Germany.¹ This study includes the core results of those works in addition to all other cases of democide in this century up to 1987.²

Given the extent and detail of these books, the reader may be surprised that the primary purpose was not to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and amount in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent. They should have no wars between them, the least foreign violence and government related or directed domestic violence (revolutions, coups, guerrilla war, and the like), and relatively little domestic democide. I have substantiated the war, foreign, and domestic violence parts of this theory in previous works³ and took up the research associated with this book and its three predecessors in order to test the democide component. As will be seen, the results here clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. These results also well illustrate the principle underlying all my findings on war, collective violence, and democide, which is that the less freedom people have the more violence, the more freedom the less violence. I put this here as the Power Principle: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

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