Shannon Love

This article in the NY Times on the Ukrainian revote highlights one of the ugly truths about politics and political change. As Mao said, all political power flows from the barrel of a gun. When political power shifts, it does so because the power to kill shifts before hand.

Peaceful protest are not the true revolutions. The true revolution occurs when the people with guns decide whether to back or to oppose the revolution. The peaceful protest can only occur in a security bubble created by Orwell’s “rough men” who stand quietly off camera threatening to due violence to those who attack the protesters. Without that protection, the Kiev protesters would have faced the same fate as those of Tiananmen Square.

In the Ukrainian revolution, the protest and legal maneuverings were in the end just the capstone of the true revolution that occurred when the military and intelligence services chose the rule of law and the consent of the people.

Too many people believe that revolutions can and do occur without somebody making a decision to use force if necessary. It is a dangerous delusion.

No offense to Instapundit, but this post is just silly. He points to this article about some museum guys driving around with a plywood and metal replica of “Little Boy”, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, as evidence that Homeland Security isn’t up to snuff.

But there is nothing about the replica that anyone should expect would activate any anti-nuke security sensors. The replica is shaped like the original Little Boy but that is as far as it goes. It contains no radioactive substances or any high-density substances that would set off detectors.

Nor would its mere appearance trigger human suspicions. Why would a member of homeland security or law enforcement freak out about a bunch of elderly white guys driving around with what is obviously an antique bomb casing? There’s thousands of these things laying around scrap yards. People collect them and transport them around all the time. You can buy them off the Internet.

Building any kind of detection system means trading off sensitivity for false positives. A security system that gives too many false positives (think car alarms) renders itself useless in short order. In this case, it looks like our system worked fine. It ignored a harmless replica instead of raising a false positive.

Of course, if Homeland Security had swooped down on the harmless replica, that would have been taken as evidence they were incompetent boobs as well.

Via kausfiles via Instapundit comes a story about the Democrats’ trying to revive their political fortunes by coming up with new names for old concepts.

“He has suggested that same-sex marriage should be referred to as “the right to marry.” Trial lawyers like vice presidential nominee John Edwards should instead be called “public protection attorneys,” and the term environmental protection, which brings to mind big government and reams of regulations, should instead be termed “poison-free communities.”

Stop laughing, they’re serious.

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