Omnibus Blog 3: Mostly Politics

Once again I am cramming several posts into one awesome Omnibus Blog! This time it's all about politics.


Karneval's Political Parade Floats

Karneval is a time for debauchery, but on Rose Monday, it becomes a time for parades. During Mardi Gras in New Orleans, people mount the floats and toss beads and doubloons to the crowds below. In the Rhineland, they take on a political bend.

Tsirpas takes aim at Cyclops Angela in 2015's Rose Monday parade.

In what is my favourite Karneval tradition, the parade floats become gigantic, 3-dimensional political cartoons. This float was applauded by the crowd (this was shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris).

Some floats make fun of topics of the day, like the one above of a cycloptic German Chancellor Angela Merkel and slingshot-wielding a Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsirpas. One of this year's floats pissed off the new Polish government, which is too angry at everything to realize that when you complain about satire about you more people pay attention to that satire.

Many floats target political extremism of Islamic terror groups like ISIS or the increasingly hateful far right-wing fringe of german politics, like the Alternative for Germany or, as shown below, the National Democratic Party of Germany. 

These are all things worth satirising and demonstrates that politics belongs to the streets just as much as the legislature.

Trump got the Karneval treatment this year.

The float that angered the new Polish government.

Canadians, please remember NDP in Germany stands
for the National Democratic Party of Germany.

Britain out? Scotland in?

Reading the news lately you would think the European Union is in a lot of trouble. This isn't new. The EU feels so precarious at times – staying together it seems with nothing but hope, a tangled bureaucracy, dental floss, and chewing gum – that it's natural to see every problem as a crisis that will tear the whole thing down.

As of this posting, a British exit from the EU is one such possible problem being blown into a crisis.

During last year's UK election, Prime Minister David Cameron promised to hold a referendum on the country's EU membership. Doing this helped him placate his increasingly anti-EU base and arguably win the election.

Using that as a bargaining chip, Cameron negotiated a settlement that allows UK exemption on stop paying welfare and child care benefits to migrant workers and special protections for City of London financial sector.

Despite the lack of political or economic sense to leave the EU, the concessions might be enough for the UK's eternally-angry Euroskeptics or for EU Parliamentarians, who vote on them as well.

Many EU member states already resent the UK's special status and take umbrage to the settlement. And Eastern European member states, where many of those migrant workers come from, are not liking this either.

Now, a referendum on joining the EU in Denmark was narrowly defeated in 1992, which put the whole EU at risk of not being formed at all. A special agreement was reached to gave Denmark exemptions for military independence and keeping its currency, the krone.

The UK's case is a little different. Denmark's referendum threatened to kill the EU before it even began. Britain's exit is an unprecedented problem, but it won't imperil the EU – it's just not so good for the continent's economy.

The tangle doesn't end there. Scotland, which held a referendum on its own independence and voted it down by 10 per cent, is mostly pro-EU. The Scottish National Party also holds the majority in its parliament.

If the UK left the EU, there'd certainly be another referendum on Scottish independence, with EU membership as a central issue in the very near future. If Scottish attitudes toward the EU remained the same, Scotland will vote for independence and likely join the EU shortly after.

This would be a double-whammy for the UK: Exit from the EU closes off a market of 300 million people to its exports and leads to the independence of the region with all the UK's oil and whisky.

In the long run, the EU comes out as the winner. It loses its loudest whiniest, grumpiest member state, which wants the economic benefits of being in the EU without the obeying its rules, while getting a new member with a healthy economy and great whisky.