90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, August 21, 2017

Mask of Sorrow

The Back:

Somehow Wikipedia fails to mention that The Gulags are a product of Communism.

I am pretty sure ANTIFA would approve.

Coordinates:

59°35′30.62″N 150°48′43.65″E

The Mask of Sorrow

The Mask of Sorrow (Russian: Маска скорби, Maska skorbi) is a monument perched on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. It consists of a large concrete statue of a face, with tears coming from the left eye in the form of small masks. The right eye is in the form of a barred window. The back side portrays a weeping young woman and a headless man on a cross. Inside is a replication of a typical Stalin-era prison cell. Below the Mask of Sorrow are stone markers bearing the names of many of the forced-labor camps of the Kolyma, as well as others designating the various religions and political systems of those who suffered there.

The statue was unveiled on June 12, 1996 with the help of the Russian government and financial contributions from seven Russian cities, including Magadan. The design was created by the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, whose parents fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s; the monument was constructed by Kamil Kazaev. The mask stands 15 metres high and takes up 56 cubic metres of space.

Quit Glorifying Communism. There Is Nothing Romantic About Life In A Police State

The ghost of Walter Duranty still lives at The New York Times, and it has a perverse sense of timing. Last week, on the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Times continued its bizarre nostalgia series about communist dictatorships with a piece titled “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” The author, Kristen Ghodsee, points to a single, post-reunification study to allege that women under the iron fist of East Germany had “twice as many orgasms” as women in capitalist West Germany.

Highlighting a single “bright spot” of communist life while mostly ignoring its many dangers, indignities, and rights violations would be bad enough. Ghodsee takes it a step further, however, by speculating that the totalitarianism she euphemistically refers to as a “top-down campaign” was actually the secret sauce in the communist’s successful female liberation.

Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.

The leftist ideologue is forever being disappointed. Just as Vladimir Lenin was frustrated with the less-than-revolutionary Russian peasantry, the “oppressed” whom the modern left tries to liberate never seem to quite live up to expectations. Concerned with such frivolities as putting food on the table and spending time with their families, people always fall short of someone else’s vision of liberation.

Even today, women’s choices about work-life balance and the wage “gap” those choices create cause many furrowed feminist brows. Actual women—who in surveys still indicate that their ideal work-family balance is part-time work, despite all the social pressure nowadays against this view—simply aren’t as radical as they “ought” to be when left free to choose their own paths. Ghodsee’s solution, like the GDR’s, is simple: women must be forcibly “liberated” for their own good.

Life Under Communism Was No Love Fest

There is just enough truth in The New York Times article to bolster its radical message. Just as the Roaring Twenties in the United States swept in many changes in women’s social roles, so too the 1920s in the Soviet Union brought a period of genuine sexual libertinism and experimentation, encouraged by the vanguard of communist intellectuals that populated Russian cafes. In the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution, people—especially those far away from the bloody revolution itself—could be more easily forgiven for thinking that communism was going to lead to a happier, more prosperous future, given that most of the twentieth-century examples of its barbarism had yet to occur.

But the reality of life in the Warsaw Pact was decidedly different than the picture Ghodsee paints in her column. My father, who grew up in Communist Poland, describes the women he recalls, married in their 20s and 30s, as “exhausted,” spending most of their time outside of working hours standing in lines and feverishly combing contacts to scrape together the bare necessities for...

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FBI reportedly accepts new evidence with possible link to DB Cooper

The FBI has reportedly accepted new evidence that could be linked to the famous D.B. Cooper case that has stumped investigators for decades.

The New York Daily News reported Sunday that unnamed private investigators described the evidence as “an odd piece of buried foam,” which may have been used in Cooper’s parachute. The evidence was found in a mound of dirt in the deep Pacific Northwest mountains nearly two weeks ago.

The evidence was turned in Friday to the FBI’s Ventura County office by acclaimed Cooper sleuth Tom Colbert, a Los Angeles TV and film producer.

“Well, after six years of gathering information with a 40-member cold case team, I’m ecstatic that they are considering this,” Colbert told Fox News during an interview last week, referring to the FBI.

In 2016, the FBI announced that it was no longer investigating the enduring mystery of the skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper, nearly 45 years after he vanished out the back of a Boeing 727 into a freezing Northwest rain wearing a business suit, a parachute and a pack with $200,000 in cash.

Calling the investigation one of the longest and most exhaustive in the agency’s history, the FBI Seattle field office said at the time that it was time to focus on other cases.

The agency said it would preserve evidence from the case at its Washington, D.C., headquarters, but it doesn’t want further tips unless people find parachutes or Cooper’s money.

In 1971 — the night before Thanksgiving -- a man calling himself Dan Cooper, wearing a black tie and a suit, boarded a Seattle-bound Boeing 727 in Oregon and told a flight attendant he had a bomb in a briefcase. He gave her a note demanding ransom.

After the plane landed he released the 36 passengers in exchange for $200,000 in ransom money and parachutes. The ransom was paid in $20 bills.

The hijacker then ordered the plane to fly to Mexico, but near the Washington-Oregon border he jumped and was never seen or heard from again.

Nine years later a boy found a rotting package full of $20 bills near the Columbia River on the same border. The $5,800 matched the ransom money serial numbers.

The FBI has never ruled out the possibility that the hijacker was killed in the jump -- which took place in a rainstorm at night, in rough wooded terrain. The hijacker's clothing and footwear were also unsuitable for a rough landing.

Over the years the most lasting image of Cooper, who became somewhat of a legend, may be the...

The coup against President Trump has been developing for months and can be seen on the nightly news. Yet few talk about what it really means for the country and what can be done to avert this fate. Fortunately, we have the bulwark of the Constitution and protracted process inherent in the rule of law. But the urgency and clarity of mind to prevail and prevent the ouster of the President can certainly be heightened by grasping the goals and temperament of the power brokers who seek his destruction and the subsequent reordering of the country.

Suffice it to say that removal of Trump without sufficient cause would likely have dramatic and lasting repercussions. At a minimum, the power brokers involved in a successful coup would feel entitled to a big role in reordering the nation. At the other end of the spectrum, a more dramatic maximum type response could come in the form of a civil uprising of armed constituencies that voted for Trump, who might well feel there is no other recourse from the fundamental betrayal of the ballot box and disenfranchisement by their government.

Among the power brokers, first there are the globalists and open borders advocates that understandably fear President Trump, who is serious about the integrity of U.S. borders, limitations on immigration, the strengthening of national sovereignty. This is a disparate group that includes the sanctuary city movement operating in most major cities nationwide; George Soros and his Open Society Institute and his Soros Foundation network of more than two dozen organizations that include MoveOn.org and Democracy Alliance; radical nativist and Latin American immigration activist groups like La Raza; and establishment corporate business executives such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his open borders organization FWD.us, Disney CEO Bob Iger, who, in late 2014 fired and replaced 250 American IT engineers with lower-paid IT workers from India, and many other corporate executives, like Iger, who are affiliated with the immigration-expansionist group, Partnership for a New American Economy.

The second group of power brokers in the coup attempt are those in the political establishment -- liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and deep state operatives in Washington, as well as media professionals who carry the former’s water and promote their views. Because these are the people who are in essence “the swamp in Washington," they are directly threatened by Donald Trump. People in this second group are largely corrupted by power, access to power and...