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When the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban had a parliamentary majority, he pushed through dramatic changes to the Fundamental Law of Hungary in 2011. In Poland, Orbans autocratic counterpart, Jarosaw Kaczyski, does not have the same majority to change the constitution. However, this does not stop him from remodeling the political system according to his wishes.

Since the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) swept into power during the Polish general and presidential elections of 2015, it has gained considerable means to change the country according to the illiberal vision of Jarosaw Kaczyski, the party chairman. Mr. Kaczyski, officially only an MP, is in fact the most influential person in Poland and effectively orders both PM Beata Szydo and President Andrzej Duda, whom he anointed for their respective positions.

Mr. Kaczyski controls the legislative and the executive, but he has feared that the strong, independent judicial branch especially the Constitutional Tribunal would once again oppose his planned reforms as it did during PiSs previous short term governing from 2005 to 2007. For that reason, the offensive against the rule of law started with a total political overhaul of the Constitutional Tribunal, which is now helmed by justice appointed by his party. This move, unprecedented in the history of democratic Poland after 1989, was heavily criticized by academic and professional legal communities and has sparked large civic protests in the streets. It was also the reason for the European Commission to trigger the rule of law procedure against Poland.

After taking over the Constitutional Tribunal, it appears to be now time for increasing political control over the rest of the judiciary. The three new laws include:

1) already adopted amendments to law on the National Council of the Judiciary of Poland, an institution that appoints judges. According to the new bill all sitting members of the Council are dismissed and new ones will be appointed by the parliament,

2) already adopted changes to law on judges, giving the Minster of Justice powers to personally replace and fine the chief judges of common courts,

3) currently discussed law on the Supreme Court.

According to a draft law on the Supreme Court currently discussed in the Polish Parliament, the term of sitting SC judges would be ended and those who remain would be personally selected by the Minister of Justice who is also Persecutor General. In this new system, the separation and balance of power is greatly diminished. The highest court becomes dependent on one politician with extremely wide catalogue of competences. As of today, this person is Mr. Zbigniew Ziobro, a trusted ally to Mr. Kaczyski. What sparks public fears and a wave of street protests is not only this extraordinary concentration of powers, but also the fact that Supreme Court validates election results. The next general election takes place in 2019.

Mr. Kaczyskis own sympathies and deep-rooted convictions are part of official justification for recent and planned highly controversial changes in the system of appointment of judges and in personal makeup of the Supreme Court. The Law and Justice chairman claims that after Polands transition to democracy, the judiciary was never properly vetted and that judicial elites of the Third Polish Republic are the same people or progenies (!) of judges who worked for and benefitted from the oppressive regime before 1989. Irrespective of facts, Kaczyski seems to have a twisted morality where children should bear the responsibility for the actions of their parents. Interestingly, Kaczyskis anti-communist sentiment is highly selective and does not apply to such figures as Law and Justices MP Stanisaw Piotrowicz, an infamous communist-era persecutor.

Speaking of facts, not opinions, all judges of the Supreme Court were vetted after 1989 following the lustration law introduced in 1996, which was amended in 2006 for all sitting judges and judicial candidates of common courts wherein they are screened to ascertain whether they worked for or collaborated with the communist services. With an inevitable passage of time, lustration laws no longer apply to younger public servants, who entered professional life after 1989 and during democratic Poland. A prime example of this generational change in Polish public life is President Andrzej Duda, PhD in law, himself 45 years old.

However, according to Kaczyskis logic, most of the judiciary is irreversibly tainted and by default compromised and should be replaced by new elites, chosen not on merit, but on political allegiance to Kaczyskis vision. Law and Justice won 2015 elections, among others, on fueling this anti-elitist populist and ant-communist sentiment. The latter is strong in Poland almost 28 years after the regime change, especially among the generation of people born after 1989, thanks to a decade of historical propaganda efforts of Law and Justice.

In addition, Mr. Kaczyskis party skillfully took advantage of the widespread dissatisfaction with the judiciary among Poles. While scholars of law and democracy have been proud of many achievements of the Polish judicial branch during the last quarter century, the average Poles experiences with judiciary are often negative. Lengthy proceedings, corruption scandals and perceived arrogance of the judiciary made it an easy target. Nevertheless, the value of rule of law and the appreciation for liberal democracy has not been forgotten in Poland overnight. The most recent wave of bottom-up protests in many Polish cities, organized by civil society groups, is a reminder to that.

What does the reform of the Supreme Court hold for the future of Polish democracy?

The Supreme Court examines electoral complaints, validates general and presidential elections as well as national and constitutional referenda. Moreover, it considers complaints of political parties who were refused public subsidies. The First President of the Supreme Court is by default the head of the Tribunal of State, an institution, which holds public officials accountable for breaching the Constitution.

While the Constitutional Tribunal is a guardian to our values and rights enshrined in the constitution, the Supreme Court assures that liberal democratic checks-and-balances work properly and that there is room for political pluralism and party competition. A political overhaul of two key oversight institutions enormously imbalances the Polish system.

Anna Wjcik is assistant editor at Visegrad Insight and researcher at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Twitter: @annawojcik

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Populist anti-communism in Poland - Visegrad Insight

Vietnam.

The name carries with it a revulsion because of the calamity that struck the people who lived there, and the 58,000 American soldiers who died there.

Now, a book has been created by DK Publishing in association with the Smithsonian that provides timelines with a pictorial and text overview of Vietnams tortured existence from colonial days to its final fall into communism.

The elaborate, coffee table-size book titled, The Vietnam War: the Definitive Illustrated History, recently became available at Barnes and Noble Book Sellers.

It deals in a general way with American soldiers, though without individual names, such as Jim Allison of Lubbock who died fighting for what once was the possible liberty of South Vietnam.

And with men like Robert Bernero of Lubbock, who survived while serving faithfully in the military, but came home to no parades.

The United States had been in Vietnam in an attempt to keep communism from engulfing the world in the 1960s and 1970s. The ideology already had Russia and China firmly in its grip. Communism found propaganda more effective than nuclear weapons with which to defeat liberty.

Vietnam conquered

France had conquered Vietnam in the 19th century and continued its colonial rule until World War II, when Japan occupied the country.

Then, at the end of World War II, France became active in the country again, while communists became intent on seizing it. When Vietnam was divided into north and south by the Geneva Accords of 1954, war and suffering ensued for a quarter of a century.

The South had been proclaimed to be the Republic of Vietnam in 1955, and the last French soldier left a year later.

Vietnamese people who were Catholics and living in North Vietnam began fleeing communism by moving in massive numbers into South Vietnam, where they were housed in huge tent cities.

According to The Vietnam War, Catholics in the tent cities survived on emergency aid from the United States.

And the stage was set:

American military advisers began providing assistance and training for the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam.

The Vietnam War includes a quote by Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of North Vietnam, that must be one of the most ironic statements of all time: Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.

Conventional weapons

North Vietnam also used conventional weapons, those suggested by Chinas Mao Zedong in his Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun philosophy, and began working through guerrillas inside South Vietnam.

The first American soldier was killed near Saigon on July 8, 1959, by guerrillas.

Nine years later, 495,000 American troops were in-country, and in a single year nearly 17,000 had been killed.

Although enemy forces lost 45,000 men in its Tet offensive in 1968, it was considered a military defeat. At the time, national media coverage in the United States was keeping up a barrage of opposition to the war.

The Vietnam War, in a section on the media and the war, noted that Vietnam was the first war covered extensively on television: The conversion of (Walter) Cronkite and other media gatekeepers from ambivalent onlookers to antiwar advocates was a major blow to the American effort in Vietnam, the book states.

Eventually, a buildup of American troops over the years was reversed in the wake of changed public opinion, and by March 1973, the last combat troops had been removed. By April 30, 1975, the communists tanks rolled into the center of Saigon, and the war was lost.

Suffering continued

Suffering didnt end, though. Vietnam was formally united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under hard-line communist rule.

Hundreds of thousands of Boat People left their country over the following two years, with an estimated 50 to 70 percent dying at sea.

According to The Vietnam War, more than two million South Vietnamese that included former military officers, civil servants, capitalists, priests, teachers, intellectuals and others identified with the former regime were sent to re-education or thought reform camps:

An estimated 165,000 people died in the camps from starvation, disease, exhaustion, suicide, and by execution.

Also, the research found, Religious people, especially Christians, were persecuted, as were ethnic minorities, including the significant Chinese population. Many of the Montagnards, the mountain people who resisted the communists, were slaughtered.

Peace now reigns in Vietnam, but not liberty. President Bill Clinton reached out to the new Vietnam for a normalization of relations.

Lubbock soldiers

Jim Allison wasnt able to visit the new Vietnam:

At age five, he would wear a cowboy hat and strap on a holstered toy six-gun. He was a replica of a genuine West Texas cowboy. As an adult, he graduated from Monterey High School and attended Texas Tech before entering the Army as an infantry soldier.

According to a report in the Avalanche-Journal on Sunday, Nov. 3, 1968, he had been killed at age 21, on Oct. 31, 1968, in Vietnam. Genealogical research shows he was the son of Douglas and Marie Allison. Army records indicate he died by small arms fire while serving as a private first class.

He was a member of a Church of Christ congregation.

It was a lifetime that might have been. Still, he did his part in his moment to keep liberty alive in the United States and for the world.

Bob Bernero, who came to Lubbock in 1984 to work at Texas Tech and get a degree in social studies by attending classes at night, calls himself what the 17- and 18-year-olds in Vietnam called him when he was an old man of 22:

A lifer. It referred to his intention to make the Air Force a career.

He has shared his experiences in Vietnam and a bit of measured success with the protesters for next weeks A-J Remembers.

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AJ Remembers: Vietnam was a war too far - LubbockOnline.com

IsPope Francis a Catholic? Or is the Pontiff a communist?

Jacksonville City CouncilmanBill Gullifordhas a take.

I am a Catholic and he is a Communist, Gulliford said of Pope Francis on Facebook Thursday, reacting toan online publication (M2 Voice) that said the Pope asserted that world government must rule the United States for their own good.

Notable: the quote was not in the original interview the website claimed to cite, which was conducted in Italian and translated by Agence France Presse before the M2 Voice aggregation.

Gullifords comments drew sharp criticism online Thursday, and on Friday, we reached out to him for further clarification and many of his comments came back to schisms in the Church between the conservative American Catholic wing and the liberation theology school from which Pope Francis hails.

Liberation theology, said Gulliford, is a form of Christian communism, and one that Francis narratives and pronouncements still echo.

All he talks about is social justice, Gulliford added.

If he is the head of the Catholic Church, he should put salvation over social justice, Gulliford continued, adding that any friend of the United Nations is no friend of mine.

Gulliford also believes that, even if the quote he reacted to was not in the interview, there is plenty of evidence of Francis anti-American animus, reflected in his comments against the United States, which reflect a definite anti-American bent.

Gulliford alsonoted that Pope Benedict XVI condemned liberation theology as being in conflict with Catholic doctrine.

Meanwhile, several Catholics with a different take weighed in Friday also.

When right-wing politicians and conservative media pundits dont want to hear what Pope Francis has to say about inequality or the failure of trickle-down economics, they hurl the communist epithet at him, said John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, and author of The Francis Effect.

But the popes economic message is rooted in traditional Catholic teaching. The catechism of the church talks about inequality as sinful. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI strongly challenged free-market fundamentalism. Conservative Catholics have a history of conveniently wishing that part of their own church tradition away.

A local Priest offered a similar sentiment.

Pope Francis stands solidly in line with his predecessors. William F. Buckley, Jr. rejected Pope John XXIIIs Mater et Magistra, and admirers of Pope John Paul II cherry picked from his teaching on communism and capitalism, passing over his critiques of the latter while trumpeting his critiques of the former, said Jacksonville local Pastor Tim Lozier of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church.

I absolutely agree that Pope Francis is simply preaching the Gospel and we all are often more aligned with the worldly values of success and prosperity than we are with the values Jesus taught and lived.

See the article here:
Jacksonville Councilman doubles down on describing Pope Francis as a 'communist' - Florida Politics (blog)

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, with his Google Glass. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

It seems like only a few years ago that we began making wry jokes about the doofus minority of people who walked down the street while texting or otherwise manipulating their phone, bumping into lamp-posts and so forth. Now that has become the predominant mode of locomotion in the city, to the frustration of those of us who like to get anywhere fast and in a straight line. Pedestrian accidents are on the rise, and some urban authorities are even thinking of installing smart kerbside sensors that alert the phone-obsessed who are about to step into oncoming traffic. New technologies, asAdam Greenfields tremendously intelligent and stylish book repeatedly emphasises, can change social habits inunforeseen and often counterproductive ways.

The technological fixes to such technology-induced problems rarely succeed as predicted either. It was, after all, to address the issue of people staring at handheld screens all day that Google marketed its augmented-reality spectacles, Google Glass. It rapidly turned out, however, that most people didnt much like being surveilled and video-recorded by folk wearing hipster tech specs. Early adopters became known as Glassholes; the gizmo was banned in cool US bars, and it was eventually abandoned.

Early adopters became known as 'Glassholes'; the gizmo was banned in cool American bars, and it was eventually abandoned

It is a story, as Greenfield shows, repeated in many different contexts: our visionary tech masters suppose that things can be disrupted by a single new device or service, only to learn belatedly that unexpected things happen when technical novelty rubs up against established social mores, embedded structures of power and money, and sometimes even the laws of physics. There is an excellent discussion here, for example, of how the verification of bitcoin transactions works through the enormous expenditure of energy on computing deliberately useless problems: it is probably doomed asa currency, Greenfield suggests, by simple thermodynamics. Meanwhile, the emancipatory dream of 3D printers enabling everyone to make anything they want is currently economically unlikely, and besides the one thing that is very popular in 3D printing is untraceable parts for assault rifles.

Greenfield calls all these things radical technologies because they could usher in vast changes that lead to very different potential futures: either what is known sexily as fully automated luxury communism, or a dystopia of total surveillance and submission to the networks of autonomous computerised agents that might replace human governments altogether.

Greenfield, indeed, believes that some kind of machine sentience is coming down the pipeline sooner rather than later: in this, he implicitly agrees with the Singularity theorists who yearn for the coming of true artificial intelligence something that historically, like nuclear fusion, has always been 30years away. (Greenfield, though, is rightly perturbed by those thinkers haste to become post-human and shuck off the flesh.) At the end of the book he offers some detailed sci-fi sketches of such possible futures. The bad ones are dismayingly plausible, but there is also a delightful one he names Green Plenty, where material scarcity is a thing of the past, and sweet-natured machines do all the work. (I for one welcome our new robot underlords.) Its very reminiscent, in fact, of the fully automated luxury communism portrayed in Iain M Bankss classic Culture novels. But howcan we get there from here?

By paying intense and critical attention, Greenfield suggests. His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, time has been diced into the segments between notifications) with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. Its about what Greenfield calls the colonisation of everyday life by information processing, and this new colonialism, in the authors view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokmon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhones operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or theworld of increasingly networked objects, about which he waxes humanistically poetic: The overriding emotion of the internet of things is a melancholy that rolls off of it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext on which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention.

What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk. Greenfield makes this point with particular force when discussing automated smart contracts and the technology of the blockchain, a kind of distributed ledger that underlies the bitcoin currency but could be used for many more things besides. Despite the insurgent glamour that clings to it still, he points out, blockchain technology enables the realisation of some very long-standing desires on thepart of very powerful institutions. Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warnprogressives against technological utopianism. Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hypeis couched in superficially appealing language.

Critical resistance to all these different colonial battalions is based on Greenfields observation, nicely repurposing the enemys terminology, that reality is the one platform we all share. If we want to avoid the pitiless libertarianism towards which all these developments seem to lean unsurprisingly, because it is the predominant political ideology among the pathetically undereducated tech elite then we need to insist on public critique andstrategies of refusal. Radical Technologies itself is a landmark primerand spur to more informed andeffective opposition.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Lifeis published by Verso. To order a copy for 16.14 (RRP 18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

Originally posted here:
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield review luxury communism, anyone? - The Guardian

"All I know is if I don't pay, these people disappear."

Miguel Cabrera loves his homeland, and there is much to love about it. Venezuela is a wonderful nation filled with wonderful people.

But right now, its being held hostage by a dictatorial, communist regime. And while he is not the type to spout about politics, today the Detroit Tigers superstar first baseman decided hed had enough. The video is in Spanish, but were going to embed it anyway along with key passages translated below:

Cabrera splits most off his time between Detroit during the season and his home in Miami in the offseason. He only gets to Venezuela a few weeks out of every year, but he has many family members who still live there, including his mother, and apparently he is forced to pay protection money to keep his mother from being kidnapped:

I am tired of hearing that they are going to kidnap my mother, and I dont know whether it is a policeman or a bad guy, I dont know who they are. All I know is if I dont pay, those people disappear.

Cabrera also called for free elections, and while he didnt mention Nicolas Maduro by name or necessarily side with anyone, its clear from this passage what he knows needs to happen:

I am Venezuelan and I protest for the truth. Communism in Venezuela has to come to an end. I cant speak any plainer. I am not with a dictatorship, I am not with anybody. We have to fight for our country. We have to find a solution.

And: Hello to the people of the resistance. You are not alone. We continue to support you.

Cabrera apparently catches some heat for having made millions in America. There is no reason he should apologize for that. Hes in the midst of a 10-year contract with the Tigers that pays him about $29 million a year. Despite the fact that hes having an off year this year (for him), hes earned every penny of that money as one of the best players in baseball and probably the best hitter in Tigers history. If Al Kaline says so (and he does), that pretty much settles it.

But while Cabrera doesnt often set foot in Venezuela these days - and its hard to blame him for that - he has sent considerable aid there in the form of food, medicine and other supplies. Now, he says, people are asking him to send weapons.

That requests comes as the death toll from the anti-government protests has reached 92, with more than 1,500 injured. This was all entirely avoidable, of course, but the Maduro regime choose to consolidate its power and oppress dissidents rather than reverse the socialist policies that have led to widespread deprivation and misery.

And I cant remind you often enough: If the Democratic Party was able to impose whatever policies it preferred in America, it would impose the exact same socialist policies that have devastated Venezuela. Miguel Cabrera is right. Communism in Venezuela has to come to an end. And the notion that socialism or communisim would be in anyones best interests needs to come to an end throughout the world.

But especially in the United States.

Dan Calabreses column is distributed by CainTV, which can be found at caintv.com

A new edition of Dans book Powers and Principalities is now available in hard copy and e-book editions. Follow all of Dans work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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Miguel Cabrera in Instagram video: 'Communism in Venezuela has ... - Canada Free Press