Tag: law

The EU’s Fake Democracy

If the people vote wrong, just make them vote again until they vote correctly:

Romania’s Constitutional Court has annulled the results of the first round of the national presidential election after independent candidate Calin Georgescu clinched a surprise win last month. The decision comes amid accusations that Russia had allegedly assisted Georgescu’s campaign, claims Moscow has dismissed as “absolutely groundless.”

Georgescu, a religious nationalist, is critical of both NATO and the EU, and has criticized Romania’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He has also promised to end all military and political assistance to Kiev if elected into office.

During the first round of voting in November, Georgescu secured 22.94% of the ballots, beating out the liberal leftist candidate Elena Lasconi, who received 19.18%. The two were scheduled for a runoff on Sunday. However, on Friday, the country’s constitutional court issued a ruling annulling “the entire electoral process regarding the election of the President of Romania” and announced that the whole process will be resumed in its entirety at a later date.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the only thing worse than mob rule is rule by constitutional courts. The separation of powers doctrine is just the latest Enlightenment concept to prove a complete failure, in this case due to the combination of legislative cowardice, executive corruption, and judicial tyranny.

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The Media-Corporate Censorship Complex

Mike Benz explains the development of the insidious surveillance and censorship regime inside the United States that has resulted from the wicked alliance of federal government, private corporations, and non-profit organizations coming together to exert control over the American people:

1. Government and Tech Collaboration: Benz described how the U.S. government has increasingly leaned on tech companies like Google and Twitter to censor content deemed as misinformation or disinformation. He traced the origins of this collaboration back to when tech companies were part of national security strategies, especially post-2016 election combined with the Russian Collusion hoax. to “combat foreign interference”, which has since morphed into broader domestic censorship efforts.

2. Military-Industrial Complex Influence: The military-industrial complex has mechanisms used for foreign influence operations; these have turned inward to control domestic narratives. This has included funding and influence from defense-related entities to shape information environments, both abroad and at home.

3. NGOs as Government Proxies: Numerous NGOs act as government proxies in executing censorship policies. These organizations, often funded by the government or large foundations, help shape the narrative by influencing social media platforms to censor content under the guise of combating disinformation. Examples include the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Institute, which have been implicated in influencing digital content moderation.

4. Universities and Academic Institutions: Dozens of U.S. universities have established taxpayer-funded centers focused on disinformation studies, which he claims are essentially censorship hubs. These include major universities where departments like sociology, communications, or even applied physics are involved in developing AI and other tools for censorship. This academic involvement is seen as part of a broader civil society effort to legitimize and carry out censorship initiatives.

5. Media’s Role: The media plays a significant role in this complex by often promoting narratives that align with government interests or by directly participating in the censorship by flagging content or influencing public opinion against certain discourses. Media outlets work in tandem with government agencies to push for the censorship of certain viewpoints.

6. The Role of the Intelligence Community: Benz detailed how intelligence agencies have covertly influenced online narratives. He cited instances where the NSA and other intelligence bodies have allegedly collaborated with media to target political opponents or narratives not favorable to the establishment’s views, using leaks and other clandestine methods.

7. Election Integrity and Censorship: He argued that the censorship apparatus was significantly ramped up around elections, with the intention of controlling political discourse. Events like Russiagate were used as justifications to expand these operations, which Benz claims are aimed at suppressing populist movements that threaten the status quo of the foreign policy establishment.

8. EU’s Influence on Censorship: Benz also touched on how European Union policies, particularly the Digital Services Act, have implications for global internet freedom. He suggested these laws are designed to curb the rise of populist parties by controlling what can be said online, which indirectly pressures U.S. platforms due to their international operations.

9. The Whole of Society Approach: Benz explained the concept of a “whole of society” approach to disinformation, where the government funds and coordinates with various societal sectors to enforce censorship. This includes not just tech companies but also think tanks, university programs, and media outlets, creating a seemingly democratic push for censorship that’s actually orchestrated from the top.

10. Legal and Policy Frameworks: He critiqued how laws and policies have been shaped to justify this censorship under the guise of protecting democracy or national security. Benz suggested that this framing inverts democratic principles by allowing government control over speech to preserve the power of certain institutions, like legacy media, which he claims are seen as assets to be protected through censorship.

This complex is an essential tool of what some describe as the Deep State, as well as the neo-satanic construct that, for lack of any better term, we call Clown World. If President Trump is serious about fulfilling his duty to the American people, he will have to begin dismantling it as soon as he takes office rather than trying to work with it.

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Alan Greenspan on Trial

There are two reasons China’s global primacy is inevitable. First, China remains China, not a subverted, invaded, demoralized shell of a nation. Second, the government refuses to let the financial sector run amok and pillage the rest of its economy:

The former head of a top Chinese bank has received a suspended death sentence for corruption, Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday. The verdict comes as part of a widespread anti-corruption crackdown by the authorities in Beijing.

Liu Liange, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for accepting bribes worth an equivalent of nearly $17 million and illegally issuing loans, according to Xinhua. Liu served as chairman of the Bank of China for four years until his resignation in March 2023, several weeks before the authorities revealed that he was facing corruption charges. He was arrested in October of last year. According to Tuesday’s ruling, all of Liu’s personal property will be confiscated, and all his illegal gains must be recovered and turned over to the state treasury.

The two-year reprieve, awarded because the accused had cooperated with authorities and shown remorse, means that the sentence will only be carried out if Liu commits further crimes during the period, Reuters has reported. If reprieved, the 63-year-old will serve a life sentence.

Liu is the latest high-profile figure to be sentenced to death as part of widespread anti-corruption efforts ordered by President Xi Jinping targeting the country’s $60 trillion financial sector. Former deputy central bank governor Fan Yifei was sentenced to death for bribery in October, also with a two-year reprieve. In May, Bai Tianhui, a former executive at one of the country’s largest state-controlled asset management firms, was sentenced to death for accepting bribes worth nearly $152 million.

Can you imagine comparable anti-corruption efforts being carried out in the USA? This is the equivalent of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke being arrested and sentenced to death. But the problem in the USA is so out of hand that it would probably be far more efficient to ask the Russians to drop a few Oreshnik’s on Wall Street.

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But… But… International Law!

No doubt all the groups in the USA and Europe that are always nattering on about how one thing or another is necessary and supersedes national sovereignty because of international law will do their part and demand Benjamin Netanyahu turn himself in to face justice for his alleged crimes against international law, right?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced on Thursday that it has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to the Gaza conflict. Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif has also been named in a warrant for similar charges.

The court accuses Netanyahu and Gallant of using starvation as a method of warfare, alleging they deliberately deprived Gaza’s civilian population of essential supplies, including food, water, and medicine. Prosecutors claim there was “no obvious military necessity” for such actions, which amount to violations of international law.

Both Israeli politicians could face arrest if they travel to any of the 123 countries that are signatories to the ICC’s Rome Statute.

International law is, of course, a nullity. It’s pseudo-dialectic at best; one might as reasonably appeal to the intersolar law of the Federated Planets. Even so, it’s long past time for Israel’s leaders to recognize that neither the Holocaust nor the October 7th attacks are some sort of historical get-out-of-jail-free card. Especially when they’re actively engaged in what very much looks like ethnic cleansing.

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No Childhood Vaccine is Tested

Don’t trust the scientists, trust the HISTORY of science. Which, by the way, very few scientists actually know.

“My position on vaccines… is that vaccines should be tested, like other medicines. Of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated… for American children, none of them—not one—has ever been subject to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial. Other medicines are required to do that, and we should have to do that for vaccines. If I’m wrong, show me the test. Show me the study. You won’t be able to, because there are none. That means that we don’t know what the long-term risks are.”
– RFK Jr.

I’ve been pointing this out for years, very nearly decades now. Forget the Covid-19 vaxx. There are no vaccines, ZERO, which have been demonstrated to be either safe or effective by a proper application of the scientific method. It’s all statistics and hand-waving and blustering and hiding the adverse effects. There is more scientific and statistical evidence that vaccines cause autism, however flawed it might be, than there is providing evidence that any childhood vaccine is safe for children. RFK Jr. established this via the legal process when he sued Anthony Fauci for calling him a liar for stating that simple fact. After a year of trying to stay out of court, Fauci’s lawyers finally admitted on their client’s behalf that RFK Jr. had been telling the truth.

“There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing… and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year. What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule… because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company. So we got all of these new vaccines, 72 shots, 16 vaccines… And that year, 1989, we saw an explosion in chronic disease in American children… ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation… to one in every 34 kids today.”
– RFK Jr.

And now he’s the government official in charge of these matters. You wouldn’t want to DENY what the government is telling you about vaccines would you? You wouldn’t want to be a VACCINE SCIENCE DENIER!

UPDATE: A once-skeptical reader admits that he was unable to disprove any of the historical facts about vaccines, their irrelevance to public health, and the nonexistence of vaccine safety science despite a serious effort to do so.

Following your RFK post today, I wanted to thank you for inspiring me years ago. Long before COVID, you were talking about the issues and lack of information on vaccines; as a naive college kid, I decided to look up everything I could to prove you wrong. I found what you said I would: layers of rhetoric and misdirection on top of shockingly poor official data. It’s primed me to look deeper into things, and that has kept me and my family safe from many things. It’s also trained me to seek expertise rather than experts, which has helped sift through the clown nonsense.

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SUPER★HERO

Thanks to the U.S. Trademark Office, it may be time to consider changing the name of Alt★Hero. Or, even better, introducing a new line with our new superhero universe.

A U.S. Trademark Office tribunal has canceled a set of “Super Hero” trademarks jointly owned by comic giants Marvel and DC at the request of a London-based comic book artist, according to a Thursday order. The USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled for S.J. Richold’s Superbabies Ltd, opens new tab after DC did not file an answer to Superbabies’ request to invalidate the marks.

Spokespeople and attorneys for Marvel and DC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Superbabies attorney Adam Adler of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg said in a statement that the ruling was “not just a win for our client but a victory for creativity and innovation. By establishing SUPER HEROES’ place in the public domain, we safeguard it as a symbol of heroism available to all storytellers.”

Rivals Marvel and DC jointly own four federal trademarks covering the terms “Super Hero” and “Super Heroes,” the oldest of which dates back to 1967.

Richold writes comics featuring a team of super-hero babies called the Super Babies. According to Richold, DC accused his company of infringing the “Super Hero” marks and threatened legal action after Superbabies Ltd applied for U.S. trademarks covering the “Super Babies” name. Marvel and DC have cited their marks in opposing dozens of superhero-related trademark applications at the USPTO, according to the office’s records.

Superbabies petitioned the office to cancel the marks in May. It argued that Marvel and DC cannot “claim ownership over an entire genre” with their trademarks, and that the two competitors cannot own trademarks together.

We need a name for the universe of Black Warrant, Red Hornet, and our other new heroes. That just might do…

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Reads Like Victory

Remember this any time someone tells you that it’s not possible to make a difference in this world. The Cavalry did this.

The Updated Steam Subscriber Agreement

We’d like to share some information about recent updates to the Steam Subscriber Agreement (SSA), which mainly relate to how any disputes between Valve and Steam users are resolved.

We’ve eliminated the requirement that disputes be resolved by individual arbitration. As always, we encourage you to contact Steam Support when you have any issues, as that will nearly always be the best way to reach a solution. But if that doesn’t work, the updated SSA now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration. We’ve also removed the class action waiver, as well as the cost and fee-shifting provisions, that were in prior versions of the SSA.

The whole approach was abusive and poorly conceived from the start.

Tech companies: You MUST arbitrate!
Users: Okay, let’s arbitrate.
Tech companies: NOOO! We will take you to court to avoid arbitration!
Court: You all said you wanted arbitration and you stuck them with it. So arbitrate, bitches!
Tech companies: (change terms of agreement)

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Authors Sue ChatGPT

I’m not privy to the technical details, but based upon what I understand of how AIs are trained and how they work, I suspect the authors have a very strong case against the defendants.

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

AI is a fantastic tool, but just because it allows the less creative and the less talented to better exploit their imaginations, that doesn’t give anyone the right or the permission to tread upon the legal rights of others.

I’m a strong skeptic of copyright, particularly beyond the life of the author, but the fact is that it exists and while neither a title nor a style can be protected, the characters and existing works are. There really isn’t any difference between a human writing a pastiche – like Scalzi did with Old Man’s War or I did with “The Deported” – and an AI-written text that imitates an author’s style. That is, and should be, permissible.

The problem, of course, is that most people aren’t content with that, and they want to cross the line into the theft of the author’s actual characters and storylines. And if the AI manufacturer’s aren’t preventing their tools from being used in that manner, they are clearly complicit in the violations.

Regardless, AI is going to destroy the popular book market for the vast majority of writers. Because no author can compete with an automated book factories of the sort that AI now permits. In fact, we will probably explore creating one ourselves; some incredible and innovate sagas are going to be produced with these new tools.

Amazon is also limiting authors to three new self-published books on Kindle Direct per day, an effort to restrict the proliferation of AI texts.

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Not the Worst Idea

Australia contemplates a ban on social media for children under the age of 16:

Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and ‘onto the footy fields’.

Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a ‘scourge’.

The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.

The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.

Social media can literally be as dangerous as driving for children, as they are far too immature to be dealing with some of the personal issues and challenges that social media can create for them. Also, it will be considerably harder for child predators to groom and lure children away from their homes if they have no electronic access to them.

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The Evil of Copyright Stands

The Internet Archive lost its appeal in its copyright case against Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House.

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in the copyright case against Hachette and three other publishers. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the previous decision, from March 2023, that the Internet Archive’s Open Library program qualifies as copyright infringement. Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley initially filed a lawsuit against the popular nonprofit organization in 2020.

“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors?” Wednesday’s decision reads. “Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no.”

The court rejected most of the Internet Archive’s defense, including the notion that the archive provides a public service. “While IA claims that prohibiting its practices would harm consumers and researchers, allowing its practices would―and does―harm authors,” the decision reads. “With each digital book IA disseminates, it deprives Publishers and authors of the revenues due to them as compensation for their unique creations. Though IA and its amici may lament the consolidation of editorial power and criticize Publishers for being motivated by profits, behind Publishers stand authors who are entitled to compensation for the reproduction of their works and whose ‘private motivation’ ultimately serve[s] the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts.”

This isn’t going to protect authors. This isn’t going to protect consumers. Like most “law” it does nothing but protect the financial interest of large transnational corporations at the expense of the very works that are being “protected”.

What comes of “copyright protection” is abominations like Amazon’s raping of Tolkien’s work and Disney’s destruction of Star Wars. Meanwhile, most works are lost to the ravages of history, because their “protection” combined with their unprofitability means the corporate copyright holders see no reason to produce or publish them. The fact that the “protection” extends 70 years beyond the life of the author makes it perfectly clear that this isn’t about the preserving the rights of the author to be compensated.

And yes, I have taken steps to ensure that my works, at least, will never be acquired by the usual suspects.

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