Alternative For Germany - A New Party In Germany To Reckon With

Posted: 5/29/2017

Trigger

A fairly new political party is active and quite successful with voters in Germany. The name of this party is Alternative fuer Deutschland (Alternative for Germany). Founded only a few years ago (in 2013) it has already managed to be elected into about a dozen or more parliaments of the 16 states comprising the Federal Republic of Germany. This fairly new party stands a good chance to win more than enough votes in the upcoming general election in September to gain entrance into the German parliament.

Ideology & Policies

Well, I do not claim to be an expert regarding this new party. However, I do follow Facebook postings of this party and major representatives of this party for some time now. Most of their postings are reasonable and common sense approaches to political issues.

Generally speaking, I would recommend this party as being serious about some urgently necessary reforms of democracy in Germany.

This party is widely characterised as a right wing populist party. However, this is the usual left wing spin of German and western media regarding this party. Quite often this party is even attacked in public as brown shirts or Nazi party and so on.

The Election Program

In Germany (as elsewhere, in other western democracies), the contending political parties issue election platforms or programs.

Here is the source: http://www.afd.de/wahlprogramm (in German only)

For sake of brevity, I will present here only a few items from the AfD election program for the general election of 2017 (items, in no particular order, which I think, are overdue reforms):

1. The ever progressing centralisation of the EU should be reversed to form a confederation of states
2. Term limits for politicians. E.g. like in the U.S., the chancellor should be limited to two terms in office. Elected representatives in parliament to four terms.
3. Direct election of the largely ceremonial, but important German president
4. Political parties in Germany have way too much control over who becomes a candidate for office. AfD wishes to have more free candidates to challenge incumbents etc.
5. Waste of taxpayers’ money should be a crime punishable under law (an interesting proposal)
6. Abolishment of lavish retirement benefits of elected representatives
7. Measures against corruption and lobbying of elected representatives
8. Abolishment of female quotas for politicians or businesses (how German politicians ever voted for such socialist nonsense is still beyond my comprehension)
9. Reestablishment of freedom of contract! E.g. abolishment of so called anti discrimination laws! Something, politicians in the U.S. could learn from.
10. Against the irresponsible and reckless long term European monetary policy of zero or negative interest rates and extreme buying of government and business bonds. AfD calls this the expropriation of older folks and people, who save their money
11. Germany first foreign policy
12. Demanding tax cuts in way overtaxed Germany. The value added tax should be lowered by 7 percentage points from currently 19%. Why Germans have put up with such a high, confiscatory sales tax for decades is beyond comprehension. Introduction of price adjustments into the tax code to prevent cold or hidden taxation

General Election 2017

According to recent polls it appears that this party will enter the German parliament in Berlin with around 8% of all votes cast. I would not be surprised if the results come in a few percentage points higher for this party.

If the Christian Democratic party (CDU/CSU) and the liberal party (FDP) remain clearly under 50% as a likely outcome of the election and form a coalition government, the AfD will probably gain significant influence on German politics.

There is a general, palpable, and substantial undercurrent of deep dissatisfaction of people in Germany with the way things are going and the at times chaotic, mismanagement of chancellor Merkel is long overdue to end.

  

A Caveat

This new, young party is already involved in some very serious, destructive, quite unnecessary, inner party strife. This has been exploited extensively by the left wing media on a daily basis.

Speculating About Trump's Approach To The Arab Israeli Conflict

Posted: 5/29/2017

I will be very brief! I have followed the Arab Israeli conflict for decades. This might be the time to get it finally right!

A viable approach would be:

1. First and foremost: Most Arab countries (incl. West Bank, Gaza) sign a long overdue, sincere peace treaties with Israel. All previous trade restrictions etc. imposed by Arab countries against Israel are immediately dropped
2. Negotiations about land & statehood etc. may begin
3. Perhaps an economic and military alliance between these states will emerge

Some Inconvenient Truths About The American Civil War

Posted: 5/27/2017

Trigger

Just read this excellent, but old and very long article https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/was-the-south-poor-before-the-war/

This dated article describes at length why the ante bellum southern states were very rich; had a significant, broad, affluent middle class; and enjoyed economic prosperity very comparable or even better than the northern states.

Purpose

Victors of war rewrite history to suit their purpose. This was no different with the American Civil War!

Anyone familiar with my blog posts, realizes that I am very critical of the necessity of this total American Civil War (slavery was a pretense, secession was the cause) and how very much overrated President Lincoln is, who failed to stop or quickly end this enormous, senseless bloodshed. Slavery would have disappeared anyway without this terrible war. Slavery was already doomed in most western countries at the time, even in Russia.

Even buying all slaves and grant them freedom would have been so much cheaper and more civilized!

Some Salient Quotes

Quotes & Comments (emphasis added):

1. “... Numerous books on Southern history speak of such terms as “the slaveholding dynasty,” the “proud Southern ‘barons,'” and others.[34]  Cairnes titled his polemic The Slave Power. Northerners resented the perceived Southern political domi­nance of the country.[35] Southern wealth undoubtedly produced jealously and resentment on the part of many Northern people. Coupled with the political power of the South and the arguments of the Republican Party, there was ample incentive for Northerners to want to clip the wings of the slaveholders, to reduce their power and even their affluence. ...”
2. “Cairnes quotes Lord Sterling in Letters from the Slave States as saying “for all practical purposes we may still regard Southern society as consisting of aristocratic planters and ‘white trash’””
   [If you ever wondered where the expression “white trash” comes from and how far it dates back and that is was e.g. a British nobleman who used it. John E. Cairnes was a widely respected British economist of the classical kind.]
3. “On the other “hand, Southern wealth and prosperity helps explain-why the Southern states were so bold as to secede and so confident that they could successfully establish an Independent nation. The depth of that wealth, its extension throughout society on a close par with the North, helps explain why the masses of Southerners supported secession and the Confederacy.”
4. “Per capita wealth in Southern States ranged from over $2,000 in Mississippi and South Carolina to under $600 in only one.  The per capita wealth of only Connecticut and New Jersey in the North and Oregon on the Pacific rose above $700 and one state, Kansas, fell below $300. Twelve Southern states had per capita wealth above $800 while there were no Northern states so wealthy.
   Even should all the slaves be counted as potential wealth-holders, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina would remain as the nation’s wealthiest states. Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas would join them as more affluent than any Northern state except Connecticut. Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware would be wealthier than New York, and North Carolina, Florida, and Missouri would be richer than New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.”

Cotton Was King

During the ongoing industrial revolution, most of British cotton imports came from the southern states. This was big business in its time. To prevent it, Lincoln quickly imposed the naval blockade on southern ports etc.

That the UK and other countries quickly declared the Confederates as belligerent. “Great Britain declared belligerent status on May 13, 1861, followed by Spain on June 17 and Brazil on August 1. This was the first glimpse of failure for the Confederate South” (source)

Previous, Related Blog Posts

American Civil War

Please find more, related blog posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here,

Abraham Lincoln

Please find more, related blog posts here, here, here, here, here

Trump Needs To Do A Whole Lot More Firings And Indictments

Posted: 5/25/2017

It seems President Trump appears to be blissfully unaware of all the damage that is done by the incessant leaks coming out of administration. Every time he meets or is on the phone with some foreign leader shortly after there is a high probability some ‘delicate’ detail is supposedly leaked to the mainstream media by some anonymous official.

This certainly cannot go on! This deliberate and ongoing sabotage of the president has to stop! Do something about it Mr. President! Get tough! Finally, and first of all fire all Obama holdovers be they appointed or not!

Very Affordable U.S. Health Care Insurance By The Grace Of God

Posted: 5/24/2017

Voluntary Mutual Private Health Insurance

As of yesterday, I have signed up for Christian HealthCare Ministries. This is a non profit organisation that offers mutual voluntary health cost sharing among its members. The terms and conditions are absolutely marvellous. I have never before in my life signed up for this kind of health insurance. I am looking forward to being a member of this ministry! Amen!

I am so grateful to have found this form of health insurance!

The Perverse Socialism Of Healthcare In The U.S.

It was also annual enrollment period at my employer. I have happily waived this option to be insured by my employer. Since World War II have our politicians in Washington allowed this travesty of employer sponsored health insurance to go on! How much longer! If anything qualifies as socialism, this certainly is!

E.g. Medicare should have never happened in this so called land of the free!

Flagrant Discrimination In The Tax Code

Any tax deductibility of extended to employers etc. should also be available to employees who choose their own health insurance.

Proclaim Liberty

Unfortunately, for several decades the federal government as well as state governments have thoroughly screwed up health care in the U.S. It’s a monumental disgrace of our elected representatives! It’s absolutely unconstitutional!

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (35)

Posted: 5/24/2017

1. 'Smart genes' account for 20% of intelligence: study (Hope, we will be smarter soon!)
2. Fullerene nanoflask captures reactivity of atomic nitrogen (This is highly promising!)
3. Machine learning dramatically streamlines search for more efficient chemical reactions
4. Team cures diabetes [type 1] in mice without side effects (“... The pancreas has many other cell types besides beta cells, and our approach is to alter these cells so that they start to secrete insulin, but only in response to glucose [sugar]”... The therapy is accomplished by a technique called gene transfer. A virus is used as a vector, or carrier, to introduce selected genes into the pancreas. These genes become incorporated and cause digestive enzymes and other cell types to make insulin. Gene transfer using a viral vector has been approved nearly 50 times by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to treat various diseases … It is proven in treating rare childhood diseases, and Good Manufacturing Processes ensure safety.)
5. Researchers achieve direct counterfactual quantum communication
6. Seeing through fog using noisy light
7. Scientist invents way to trigger artificial photosynthesis to clean air
8. Enzyme saves us from insect dust and worm skin
9. Surprising Brain Change Appears to Drive Alcohol Dependence
10. Buried lasers will sense Earth's spin and quakes doing the twist (“.... In doing so, ROMY [the tetrahedron, Rotational Motions in Seismology] will measure minuscule changes in Earth's spin rate and spin axis. The speed and pace of those measurements promise to add an increment of precision to GPS navigation, and ROMY may even be able to detect a subtle effect predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity: the drag of the rotating planet on nearby spacetime, … ROMY also will be sensitive to the weak rotations that accompany earthquakes, long-ignored motions that contain clues to the interior structure of Earth … With its 12-meter arms, ROMY is more sensitive than previous ring lasers, capable of sensing Earth's spin to better than one part per billion. And instead of one square ring, it has four triangular ones. Three of them are required to pin down rotations in any direction, and the fourth adds redundancy. Construction began in March 2016 and finished 6 months later. Last month, engineers achieved first light in all four rings at the same time—a sign that the geometry of the tetrahedron is precise enough to keep all the lasers resonating properly.”)
11. Giant space magnet may have trapped antihelium, raising idea of lingering pools of antimatter in the cosmos (If confirmed, this could be huge! “The AMS [Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. In 2011, NASA launched the 8.5-metric-ton magnet on the penultimate space shuttle flight and attached it to the International Space Station (ISS)] … has seen a handful of candidate particles of antihelium-3, made of two antiprotons and an antineutron. In labs on Earth, physicists have made antihelium for a few fleeting instants, but no one has ever detected it in space.”)
12. Immune cells unexpectedly help the heart keep its beat (“The researchers then discovered that macrophages were common in AV [atrioventricular] nodes from mouse and human hearts ... When the researchers grew macrophages and heart muscle cells together in culture dishes, they found that the two types of cells were connected physically and synchronized electrically. Because of these interactions, macrophages made it easier for their muscular neighbors to fire … When the team began examining mice that lacked macrophages, a technician noticed that the electrical rhythms of the animals’ hearts were abnormal. … the rodents appeared to have an AV block, in which the AV node doesn’t forward the atrial signal to the ventricles. ...”)
13. Naked mole-rats turn into plants when oxygen is low (Naked mole rats are absolutely amazing animals! They live up to 30 years (about 10 times longer than other, comparable rodents); rarely have cancer; do not feel many types of pain. “But naked mole-rats have a backup: their brain cells start burning fructose, which produces energy anaerobically through a metabolic pathway that is only used by plants ... In the new study, the researchers exposed naked mole-rats to low oxygen conditions in the laboratory and found that they released large amounts of fructose into the bloodstream. The fructose, the scientists found, was transported into brain cells by molecular fructose pumps that in all other mammals are found only on cells of the intestine. … The naked mole-rat has simply rearranged some basic building-blocks of metabolism to make it super-tolerant to low oxygen conditions," … At oxygen levels low enough to kill a human within minutes, naked mole-rats can survive for at least five hours … They go into a state of suspended animation, reducing their movement and dramatically slowing their pulse and breathing rate to conserve energy. And they begin using fructose until oxygen is available again.
14. The naked mole-rat is the only known mammal to use suspended animation to survive oxygen deprivation. … an adaptation for living in their oxygen-poor burrows. Unlike other subterranean mammals, naked mole-rats live in hyper-crowded conditions, packed in with hundreds of colony mates. With so many animals living together in unventilated tunnels, oxygen supplies are quickly depleted.”)
15. First evidence for higher state of consciousness found
16. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicists-negative-mass.html
17. Atomic Spins Evade Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle New measurements revise the limits of quantum fuzziness
18. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-ancient-teeth-evidence-ice-age.html
19. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicists-hidden-aspects-electrodynamics.html
20. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-star-wars-superlaser-longer-sci-fi.html (This could be huge! But no details are provided!)
21. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-vacuum-channel-transistor-combines-semiconductors.html
22. http://www.scripps.edu/newsandviews/e_20170403/lander.html
23. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-brain-tranquility.html
24. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/millions-atoms-entangled-record-breaking-quantum-tests
25. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-reshape-basic-plasma-physics.html (Advances in nuclear fusion!
26. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-physicists-reveal-experimental-verification-key.html (More advances in nuclear fusion)

Trump's Great Speech In Riyadh

Posted: 5/21/2017

Trump On A Mission For Lasting Peace

Trump’s trip to the centers of all Abrahamic religions starting with Saudi Arabia is beginning to look like it will go down in history as a great moment of human endeavor if he can keep up this momentum. Just the fact alone that Trump started his first ever foreign trip to the custodian of the most holy sites of the Muslim world is revealing, a premonition.

Blessed are the peacemakers!

Pray for Trump!

About His Speech In Riyadh

My source is following CNN transcript of Trump’s speech in Riyadh given on 5/21/2017: Transcript of Trump's speech in Saudi Arabia

My takeaways from Trump’s speech:

1. Christians, Jews, and Arabs all worship one and the same peace loving God (he is perhaps the first U.S. president to express this so clearly thereby probably offending orthodox Christians in the U.S.)
2. Peoples of all three religions can live together in peace, prosperity, and harmony
3. Finally, a western leader has unequivocally expressed again who is the real promoter of violence in the Middle East. It is the theocratic and constantly warmongering dictatorship of Iran!
4. Trump fully recognized the many civilizational achievements of Arab and Muslim cultures and wishes to promote the mutual prosperity of Western and Occidental societies. I believe his respect for Arab/Muslim achievements is sincere
5. Trump expressed unmistakably that most victims of radical islam terrorists are Muslims, he quoted 95% of victims are Muslims
6. Trump did not miss to mention more rights for women in Arab societies
7. Trump’s call to drive out the evil doers out of your places of worship, out of your holy land, and out of this earth was very strong!
8. Trump indicated flexibility in strategy and to discard what did not work in the past. Very good! A very good start as the history of failures is long
9. A new agreement announced between the U.S. and Gulf states to deny any financing to terrorism. Long overdue!

Selected Excerpts From The Speech

List of selected quotes (emphasis added):

1. “Now, there is even more blessed news I am pleased to share with you. My meetings with King Salman, the Crown Prince, and the Deputy Crown Prince, have been filled with great warmth, good will, and tremendous cooperation. Yesterday, we signed historic agreements with the Kingdom that will invest almost $400 billion in our two countries and create many thousands of jobs in America and Saudi Arabia.”
2. [YES, bring the people of Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf states) into the 21st century as fast as possible.]
3. “Some estimates hold that more than 95 percent of the victims of terrorism are themselves Muslim.”
4. “If we do not stand in uniform condemnation of this killing—then not only will we be judged by our people, not only will we be judged by history, but we will be judged by God.”
5. “When we see the scenes of destruction in the wake of terror, we see no signs that those murdered were Jewish or Christian, Shia or Sunni. When we look upon the streams of innocent blood soaked into the ancient ground, we cannot see the faith or sect or tribe of the victims -- we see only that they were Children of God whose deaths are an insult to all that is holy.”
6. “It is a choice between two futures -- and it is a choice America CANNOT make for you.”
7. “A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out.
8. DRIVE THEM OUT of your places of worship.
9. DRIVE THEM OUT of your communities.
10. DRIVE THEM OUT of your holy land, and
11. DRIVE THEM OUT OF THIS EARTH.”
12. “Young Muslim boys and girls should be able to grow up free from fear, safe from violence, and innocent of hatred. And young Muslim men and women should have the chance to build a new era of prosperity for themselves and their peoples.”
13. “The Middle East is rich with natural beauty, vibrant cultures, and massive amounts of historic treasures. It should increasingly become one of the great global centers of commerce and opportunity. This region should not be a place from which refugees flee, but to which newcomers flock.”
14. “Every time a terrorist murders an innocent person, and falsely invokes the name of God, it should be an insult to every person of faith. Terrorists do not worship God, they worship death.”
15. “This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life, and decent people of all religions who seek to protect it. This is a battle between Good and Evil.”
16. “Terrorism has spread across the world. But the path to peace begins right here [in Saudi Arabia], on this ancient soil, in this sacred land.”
17. “But the nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their countries, and for their children.”
18. “In that spirit, after concluding my visit in Riyadh, I will travel to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and then to the Vatican -- visiting many of the holiest places in the three Abrahamic Faiths. If these three faiths can join together in cooperation, then peace in this world is possible”
19. [I agree 100%]
20. “But no discussion of stamping out this threat would be complete without mentioning the government that gives terrorists all three—safe harbor, financial backing, and the social standing needed for recruitment. It is a regime that is responsible for so much instability in the region. I am speaking of course of Iran.
21. From Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, Iran funds, arms, and trains terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region. For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror.
22. It is a government that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing the destruction of Israel, death to America, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.”
23. “The birthplace of civilization is waiting to begin a new renaissance. Just imagine what tomorrow could bring.
24. Glorious wonders of science, art, medicine and commerce to inspire humankind. Great cities built on the ruins of shattered towns. New jobs and industries that will lift up millions of people. Parents who no longer worry for their children, families who no longer mourn for their loved ones, and the faithful who finally worship without fear.”
25. “Thank you. God Bless You. God Bless Your Countries. And God Bless the United States of America.”

[Look at the order Trump said this! Kudos!]