Oaths of office

If you want to be a socialist dictator for life, aren't you supposed to have the military in your pocket?  Bolivian president Evo Morales has stepped down after a friendly chat with the nation's "army chief," in which it was suggested that some aspects of the recent election tally didn't look entirely kosher.  And also that Mr. Morales's allies' homes were being burnt down, but mostly that the homes were being burnt down.  Morales took the well-meant advice and resigned.

I admit that this part gave me pause:

However, the Cuban and Venezuelan leaders - who had previously voiced their support for Mr Morales - condemned the events as a "coup".

I guess they'd know one when they see it.  It wasn't a coup earlier, though, when Morales got a friendly court to throw out term limits.

I'd sure rather see political change happen without the intervention of the military.  I'll be watching nervously to see whether Bolivia can get its civil act together.  It will be good to see the military refuse to support a sham election, but this is playing with fire:  undermining faith in elections to the point where violent uprisings seem like the only answer.  Note to future tyrants:  if you can't get the real consent of the people, at least remember to corrupt the military.

Blessings of the day to our own uncorrupted military.  Too often we take their honor for granted.

In other news, progressives cheer as more Americans are taught to cower at the sound of gunfire.  Way to keep those tyrants in check, unarmed protesters!

Happy Birthday, Marines

I was just last night at a charity ball for a MARSOC-focused charity. It was part of what took me to the DC Metroplex. Thankfully it is now over; it was a black-tie event that went from 1700 until nearly midnight. Indeed, Marines present were openly plotting to transition right into Birthday celebrations at the stroke of midnight. The Birthday, though technically almost over, will likely be a going concern well into the AM for many Marines.

Have a happy one.

One of the best mistakes ever

Did Gorbachev really believe people would stay in East Germany after the wall came down, and he told the soldiers not to shoot?

Shouldn’t we have understood the hollowness of the Soviet system from the moment the wall went up in 1961? If the Soviet Empire had been founded on an ideology, a belief, a hope for a better society, it would not have been necessary to build a wall, surrounded by barbed wire and explosive mines, to prevent East Germans from leaving. The wall had no other significance than to evoke and reinforce fear in the subjects of the empire and among Communist leaders themselves; if they had once believed their Marxist vulgate, the wall proved, starting in 1961, that they no longer believed it. Neither did Stalin in the 1930s, since his essential contribution to the Soviet system (and later, by contagion, the Chinese and the Cuban experiments in inhumanity) was to institutionalize fear, with prison camps, phony trials, arbitrary arrests, and the denunciation of everyone by everyone.

* * *

Communism has been an actual belief primarily in free countries.... Communism only works, it seems, where it is not applied.

Thirty years after the wall came down, some believe that the event has not lived up to its promise. Well—explain that to the Poles, the Baltic peoples, and the Ukrainians! Another quarrel also divides historians: did the wall fall, or was it destroyed—and if destroyed, by whom? By heroes seeking freedom, by brave people seeking bananas, by the preaching of Pope John Paul II, by the prescient 1987 speech of Ronald Reagan in Berlin—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? As often happens in history, major events grow out of multiple influences. But of all these factors, the most improbable was Gorbachev’s instructing his troops, “Don’t shoot.” He thought that he was reinventing socialism with a human face. The Soviet Empire was destroyed by the only one of its leaders who believed that real socialism could exist without fear—a fatal, fortunate error.

Stay Alert, Trust No One, Keep Your Weapon Handy

H/t Raven, we are reminded that this can be an axe.

Cold Mountain

Since Tex posted that trailer, with its atrocious Hollywood attempts at Southern accents, I thought I should point out that I was at Cold Mountain just the other day. Here it is:

North Carolina sent more people to the war than any other state, and on both sides. Important raids and battles happened there, but not near Cold Mountain. It was too remote to fight over.

I don't even know where to start

If your community can't rise to the challenge of some turkeys, maybe it's time to turn the town over to them.

Review: “One Child Nation”

A truly horrifying film, it seems.

The Crazy Years

On outsourcing our brain functions a little more than is strictly necessary:

Independent and dependent variables are not tools for a cloistered elite. The scientific method is not secret knowledge for the clergy. Measurements of temperatures and trace gases, of sunspots and glacial accretion are not mysteries understood only by the privileged. We used to know that education and knowledge were more valuable than gold because any person with either could exploit those who lacked them both. It has never been easier to use an elementary education to understand the world around us, yet never have more people clamored for an intellectual aristocracy to do our thinking for us.

Learning from failure

I'm looking forward to reading a new Powerline-recommended book by John Tamny, "They're Both Wrong," which promises to poke holes in conventional wisdom on both sides of the political aisle.  I had to stop while still in the Foreword to quote from John Tierney, who argues that what distinguishes capitalists from bureaucrats is that they're punished for failure and therefore learn from it:

As Tamny explains, the populist revolts in the United States and other countries are not driven by a disdain for science or learning. The populists don't object to expertise in itself, but rather to the mistakes that conceited experts keep foisting on the public.... Tamny keenly appreciates the original definition of "conventional wisdom," John Kenneth Galbraith's term for beliefs that are popular not because they're correct, but because they're comfortable--and comfortable for the right people in power.

"Cuba without the sun"

Conrad Black is confident that British voters don't really want to make their political and economic life even drearier.

Unless the British voters plumb a new depth in perversity, Mr. Johnson should win a sizable majority, little of the London financial industry will depart, and there will be a thunderous in-rush of capital investment to celebrate Britain’s increasing proximity to the United States and reconfirmation as a low-tax country, especially the rejection of the Labor Party’s outright advocacy of widespread nationalization of industry, sharply higher taxes in upper personal income brackets, increased powers to organized labour, and wild fiscal incontinence.

Welcome Back, Cassandra

I was amused to see her getting away with just slipping back into the comments here, but it's a sufficiently momentous event that it deserves recognition. Our old friend has decided to spend some time with us, much to my great happiness. Give her an appropriate welcome.

The hits keep on coming

Ace of Spades HQ notes that Christopher Steele has a new hoax out.

Pssh... Okay, Boomer.

Just read what this hateful, racist, transphobic jerk dared to say about woke culture!

Honoring Rick Rescorla

I was pleased to see this.

If only

You Owe Us Eight Bucks. We'll Take Your Home Instead.

The state government of Michigan commits a tremendous moral wrong, but not a crime.

The Worst Mistake

If the American Revolution devastated the globe, as per the book reviewed a few days ago, it wasn't the first time: civilization itself was the first, and worst, mistake.

All this cave painting, migrating, and repainting of newly found caves came to an end roughly twelve thousand years ago, with what has been applauded as the “Neolithic Revolution.” Lacking pack animals and perhaps tired of walking, humans began to settle down in villages and eventually walled cities; they invented agriculture and domesticated many of the wild animals whose ancestors had figured so prominently in cave art. They learned to weave, brew beer, smelt ore, and craft ever-sharper blades.

But whatever comforts sedentism brought came at a terrible price: property, in the form of stored grain and edible herds, segmented societies into classes—a process anthropologists prudently term “social stratification”—and seduced humans into warfare. War led to the institution of slavery, especially for the women of the defeated side (defeated males were usually slaughtered) and stamped the entire female gender with the stigma attached to concubines and domestic servants. Men did better, at least a few of them, with the most outstanding commanders rising to the status of kings and eventually emperors. Wherever sedentism and agriculture took hold, from China to South and Central America, coercion by the powerful replaced cooperation among equals. In Jared Diamond’s blunt assessment, the Neolithic Revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

Her thesis about the cave paintings, by the way, is that they were admirations of beings much more powerful than humans were at that time. Humans posed no threats to bison and lions, so they adored them from afar, effacing themselves but drawing the megafauna with loving attention. It was the attitude of 'meat that knows it is meat,' a kind of humility to which she would like humanity to return.

Ranger Up: "If Not Us, Who?"

Good boy

The Sonoran murders were unspeakable, but this story deserves our attention.

The Life Of An Agent (Az ügynök élete)

Grim's post with a link to a piece about a KGB training manual reminded me to share with you all something I came across in Budapest this past Summer at Memento Park, where many of the Soviet era statues and monuments were moved for display.  They also have a recreated barrack from an internment camp (which was in August, appropriately unbearably hot), within which they have exhibited a brief history of the Communist era in Hungary, along with the history of the park itself, and a small theater room running the movie "The Life of an Agent" on a loop.  It's an interesting film.  It seems to be a compilation of training film clips from various periods in the communist era, for the AVH (Pre 1956) and the Interior Ministry (After the '56 revolution).  It's kind of a fun, yet sobering reminder of how a totalitarian society operates.  Of course, today there's no need for such an apparatus. We have social media and digital traces for governments to surveil us, if they like.  Enjoy.