RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/the_european_union_would_love_to_control_your_internet_use.html

Imagine an internet in which users can’t freely blog, parody, share material, or remix content – an online experience in which linking, code-sharing, and the unfettered use of art and images would be nearly impossible due to legal limitations. Unfortunately, this scenario – a restrictive internet culture – may soon be a reality in the European Union with the recent passage of the European Unions Copyright Directive. This new E.U. decree, which includes provisions for filtering and surveillance, could have a chilling effect on internet creativity and innovation, potentially increase censorship, and impose new market barriers for businesses worldwide.

The new regulations were originally proposed two years ago as part of the E.U.’s Digital Single Market policy that applies to 28 E.U. member-states and the four non-E.U. states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland. Essentially, it could have a global impact on non-E.U. countries across the world similar to the effect of the E.U.’s 2016 E.U.-wide data protection rules created under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR took effect in May this year and standardized data protection laws and set guidelines on controlling personally identifiable data. The Copyright Directive imposes requirements that will change the way netizens interface with online content by imposing mandatory upload filtering, a link tax, and certain prohibitions on user-generated content in public spaces. It requires online platforms to implement privacy-killing filtering systems that will ban content usage under the justification of copyright protections. Platforms will be held liable for copyright infringement and fines that could threaten their economic viability. To add to the confusion, the directive is just that, a suggestion, so each E.U. and non-E.U. party must create its own interpretation of the laws. The result could be that all 28 E.U. member-states have their own separate definition of what part of a link can be used and copyrighted.

As part of the proposed Copyright Directive, bots, applications that run automated tasks, will act as censors and arbitrarily decide what content can be accessed and shared or even deleted without the consent of the intended user. No technology will exist to distinguish between the outright copying of material and various forms of commentary. Under the E.U. directive, revenue streams could be claimed by publishers for small amounts of information, even tables, headlines, or images. Uploading of research articles from online repositories will be forbidden, and non-profit education services and universities will have to obtain copyright licenses and install filters. All data, research papers, and articles will exist behind a virtual paywall. Articles for submission will need to be scanned for potential copyright violations. Exemptions are proposed for research carried out “in the public interest,” but how that will be defined and who will be making those decisions are uncertain. Exemptions could easily be decided along political lines, amounting to a form of point-of-view censorship.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/trump_pulls_back_the_shroud_on_south_africa.html

Loathe or admire the apprentice who became the president, all owe a debt to Donald Trump. Upon telling his secretary of state to home in on fears that Mandela’s legatees had declared open season on white farmers and farmland, the habituated tweeter provoked his opposite number to defend what, to many, seems gutter politics.

If a road to Hell is paved with good intentions, another road going to the same venue is paved with bad intentions. It’s the road South Africa is on. Manipulators of a penniless mass may drum into them having been dealt a derisory thin edge of the wedge. Do the poor want to go on being pushed around and exploited? Are they content with being homeless and landless? Do they want the white Boers to harvest their lavish gift, the farmlands God meant indigenous people to have and to hold? Do they like being knocked over with a sneeze, or do they want to command respect? Victims may take back what is theirs by right.

The rabble-rousers are half-correct, which is a problem. Under colonial Britain and then Apartheid, South African blacks were displaced; whites did fill the gap. Agriculture thrived, and the Boer farmer lived off the lap of the land. The constitution of 1996 allowed for restitution. Land taken, unjustly by the whites, would be returned. There’d be a more equitable distribution of it in the future. Promises failed to happen, or nowhere near fast enough for a foot-stomping black majority. The Boer villain took the blame; so did black leaders (e.g., the godly Mandela on his plinth) for wanting to reconcile with the privileged whites. Again the instigators of violence make half a case. Land reform was sold to blacks as reward for voting the ANC and allies into the seats of power. Politics what it is, the lining of pockets came first, keeping promises a distant third or fourth or fifth.

But the instigators of trouble and strife are also half-wrong, and that makes another problem. A poll by the South African Institute of Race Relations found that a snippet, a mere 1% of black people see “speeding up land reform” as a top priority. The other 99% don’t want to be farmers. Even the rural poor prefer to live and work and own some real estate in the cities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12960/greece-people-smuggling

Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI) describes itself as a “Greek nonprofit organization that provides emergency response and humanitarian aid in times of crisis….” It has reportedly abetted the illegal entry into Greece of 70,000 immigrants since 2015, providing the “nonprofit” with half a billion euros per year.
ECRI evidently received 2,000 euros from each illegal immigrant it helped to enter Greece. In addition, its members created a business for “integrating refugees” into Greek society, granting it 5,000 euros per immigrant per year from various government programs (in education, housing and nutrition).
With the government of Greece seemingly at a loss as to how to handle its refugee crisis and safeguard the security of its citizens, it is particularly dismaying to discover that the major NGO whose mandate is to provide humanitarian aid to immigrants is instead profiting from smuggling them.

On August 28, thirty members of the Greek NGO Emergency Response Centre International (ERCI) were arrested for their involvement in a people-smuggling network that has been operating on the island of Lesbos since 2015. According to a statement released by Greek police, as a result of the investigation that led to the arrests, “The activities of an organised criminal network that systematically facilitated the illegal entry of foreigners were fully exposed.”

Among the activities uncovered were forgery, espionage and the illegal monitoring of both the Greek coastguard and the EU border agency, Frontex, for the purpose of gleaning confidential information about Turkish refugee flows. The investigation also led to the discovery of an additional six Greeks and 24 foreign nationals implicated in the case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-satirist-who-mocked-the-kremlinand-russian-character-1536962945

‘I have been instructed to inform you,” an official told Vladimir Voinovich in 1980, “that the patience of the Soviet authorities and the people has come to an end.” The official, a district boss, loomed over Voinovich, who wrote that he imagined the next step would be execution on the spot. Instead he was stripped of citizenship and forced into exile near Munich for “defaming the motherland.”

Voinovich, who died July 27 at 85, returned to the Soviet Union in 1990. Eventually he was hailed as Russia’s greatest living writer. But he never lost the qualities that wore out the Soviet regime’s patience. His singular gift was to see things as they are. In his most famous work, “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, ” he depicted the Soviet people, personified by a bumbling Red Army private, not as heroic builders of communism, but as innocents buffeted by forces they didn’t understand.

At an army lecture, the first question is: “Why is our army called a ‘people’s army’?” The answer: “Because it serves the people.” Next question: “Who do the armies of the capitalist countries serve?” “A clique of capitalists.”

Chonkin raises his hand and asks if it is true that Stalin had two wives. He is immediately assigned to guard a plane that has crashed near a collective farm where, disillusioned with politics, he spends his time talking to a horse. “If you say the wrong thing to a person you can get yourself in hot water,” he observes, “but no matter what you say to a horse, he’ll accept it.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/on-election-day-the-swedes-disappoint/

For much of this summer, and right up until September 9 — Election Day in Sweden — media around the world predicted that voters in that country would switch, in massive numbers, to the Sweden Democrats, the much-maligned and, until recently, very marginal anti-Islam party. “Swedish politics,” reported Reuters on September 5, “are set to lurch to the right in Sunday’s election.” On September 8, a Daily Mail columnist explained why “the most liberal country in Europe” was “lurching to the Far Right.”

I wanted to believe it, but it sounded too good to be true. In the end, alas, it was. The Sweden Democrats won 18% of the vote. Yes, it marked yet another increase in support for a party that’s grown steadily since the turn of the century (2002: 1.4%; 2006: 2.9%; 2010: 5.7%; 2014: 12.9%). Yes, the long — dominant Social Democrats — who are the main culprits behind Sweden’s disastrously high immigration levels and its systematic prioritization of immigrant welfare over the well-being of native Swedes — had their worst results since 1911. And yes, the Sweden Democrats, long surrounded by a cordon sanitaire, may end up being able to throw some weight around when the new government is formed.

But in the final analysis, it was a disappointment. Time is of the essence. Sweden is on the brink. Its people don’t have decades to wait before changing course. In the view of many, this was their last chance.

Hopes for a Swedish electoral revolution may have been inflated, in large part, because of the encouraging results of last year’s elections in Austria and the March 4 vote in Italy, which put into power a coalition government that pledged to control illegal immigration — and that has since turned away ships packed with migrants. (The other day, when chided by an UN official for this practice, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini suggested that the UN “look for racism elsewhere” and “investigate its member States who ignore basic rights like freedom and equality between men and women.”)

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/chutzpah-in-strasbourg/

ORBAN IS THE MOST POPULAR LEADER IN EUROPE

Chutzpah, an Aramaic word for unbridled effrontery, came to America via Yiddish. It’s the man who enters a revolving door after you and comes out first. It’s the fellow who murdered his parents and asks for clemency because he’s an orphan. And now it’s the backers of an unelected supranational European government casting a vote of censure against Hungary. The European parliament in Strasbourg said this week that it

Regrets that the developments in Hungary have led to a serious deterioration of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights over the past few years, inter alia, freedom of expression, academic freedom, the human rights of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, freedom of assembly and association, restrictions and obstructions to the activities of civil society organisations, the right to equal treatment, the rights of people belonging to minorities, including Roma, Jews and LGBTI people, social rights, the functioning of the constitutional system, the independence of the judiciary and of other institutions and many worrying allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest, which, taken together, could represent an emerging systemic threat to the rule of law in this Member State.

The notion that minorities, religious, sexual or otherwise, are under threat in Hungary is at variance with the facts; in the case of the Jews, as I reported in this space some months ago, it is diametrically opposite to the facts. Jewish life flourishes in Budapest as in no other European capital.

Prime Minister Orban’s crime in the eyes of the European Parliament may be just the opposite: He was elected for a third term last April 8 by a two-thirds majority, which makes him the most popular leader in Europe. In fact, he may be the only popular leader in Europe; I cannot think off-hand of another European head of government with a popularity rating of more than 40%. Germany’s two ruling parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, together poll at just 46%. France’s Emmanuel Macron stands at 31%. The two Italian populist parties, who have mutually incompatible agendas and entirely different constituencies, poll at around 30% each. Spain is ruled by a minority party. Britain’s Theresa May polls around 25%.