Venezuela Heads for Civil War (VIDEO)

From Mary Anastasia O'Grady, at WSJ, "The regime has rifles and armored vehicles, but the people have numbers and anger":

Forget all you’ve heard about dialogue in Venezuela between the regime and the opposition. Hungry, hurting Venezuelans are done talking. The country is in the early stages of civil war. Sunday’s Cuban-managed electoral power play was the latest provocation.

In my column two weeks ago, “How Cuba Runs Venezuela,” I failed to mention Havana’s 2005 takeover of the Venezuelan office that issues national identity cards and passports. It was a Castro-intelligence coup, carried out with then-President Hugo Chávez’s permission. The move handed Havana the national Rolodex necessary to spy on Venezuelans and surreptitiously colonize the country. Islamic extremists received Venezuelan passports to give them false cover when crossing borders. Regime supporters got the papers they need to vote under more than one identity.

This is something to keep in mind when Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro reports the results of Sunday’s election for representatives to draft a new constitution. In polls, some 80% of Venezuelans oppose Mr. Maduro’s “constituent assembly.” But the opposition boycotted Sunday’s election because they know Cuba is running things, that voter rolls are corrupted, and that there is no transparency in the operation of electronic voting machines.

Opposition leaders in Caracas are still trying to use peaceful means to unseat Mr. Maduro. Last week they orchestrated an effective 48-hour national strike and on Friday another day of demonstrations.

But grass-roots faith and hope in a peaceful solution has been lost. One symptom of this desperation is the mass exodus under way. On Tuesday the Panam Post reported that “more than 26,000 people crossed the border into Colombia Monday, July 26, according to the National Director of Migration in [the Colombian city of] Cúcuta.”

Venezuelan applications for asylum in the U.S. were up 160% last year, making Venezuelans No. 1 among asylum seekers to the U.S. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were 27,000 Venezuelan asylum seekers world-wide in 2016. By mid-July this year there were already 50,000.

Last week the National Guard arrested and badly beat violinist Wuilly Arteaga, who has become a national symbol of peace. Many of those fleeing say they fear that after Sunday the regime crackdown will intensify. Some of those staying behind have already begun to launch counteroffensives. This provides the regime an excuse for increasing repression, yet there is a growing sense that violence is the only remaining option.

The regime has the armored vehicles, the high-powered rifles, and the SWAT gear. But the population has the numbers and the anger. It also may increasingly have support from dissident government forces.

Consider what happened in the municipality of Mario Briceño Iragorry in the state of Aragua earlier this month, when the pro-government mayor and the regime’s paramilitary, known as colectivos, began looting shops that were closed during a one-day national strike.

Eyewitness testimonies sent to me by a source in Caracas describe how townspeople tried to defend the shops. The mayor brought in paramilitary reinforcements. But the town was saved when the judicial police arrived from the state capital of Maracay. According to the Venezuelan daily El Nacional, they arrested the mayor, who was armed, and “many” colectivos.

More.

Bruce Levine, Fall of the House of Dixie

I wrote about this two summers ago, during my Civil War jag, "House of Dixie."

At Amazon, Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg

I'll post links to the Civil War history, considering Allen C. Guelzo's essay this morning at USA Today, "What if the South Had Won the Civil War?"

Here's his magnum opus, at Amazon, Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion.

I have this one by my bedside, but it's been two years since my big Civil War jag. I love the history, but I'm currently reading around in different eras and genres. Maybe soon? I'll post today on some hot prospects, in any case. I'm always keeping my eye out for great reads.

What if the South Had Won the Civil War?

I'm sure Stogie at Saberpoint would have been stoked, lol.

From Allen C. Guelzo, at USA Today, "What if the South had won the Civil War? 4 sci-fi scenarios for HBO's ‘Confederate’":

The new project from the 'Game of Thrones' creators could shock us by exposing how little of the Confederate future we avoided.

“What if” has always been the favorite game of Civil War historians. Now, thanks to David Benioff and D.B. Weiss — the team that created HBO’s insanely popular Game of Thrones — it looks as though we’ll get a chance to see that “what if” on screen. Their new project, Confederate, proposes an alternate America in which the secession of the Southern Confederacy in 1861 actually succeeds. It is a place where slavery is legal and pervasive, and where a new civil war is brewing between the divided sections.

The wild popularity of Game of Thrones has already set the anxiety bells of progressives jangling over how much a game of Confederate thrones might look like a fantasy of the alt-right. Still, if Benioff and Weiss really want to give audiences the heebie-jeebies about a Confederate victory, they ought to pay front-and-center attention to how close the real Confederacy also came to the fantasies of the alt-left, and what the Confederacy’s leaders frankly proposed as their idea of the future.

The general image of the Confederacy in most textbooks is a backwards, agricultural South that really didn’t stand a chance against the industrialized North. But it simply isn’t true that the Confederate South was merely a carpet of cotton plantations, and the North a smoke-blackened vista of factories. Both North and South in 1861 were largely agricultural regions (72% of the congressional districts in the Northern states on the eve of the Civil War were farm-dominated); the real difference was between the Southern plantation and the Northern family farm. Nor did the South lag all that seriously behind the North in industrial capacity. And far from being a Lost Cause, the Confederacy frequently came within an ace of winning its war.

So, if Benioff and Weiss want to steer their fantasy as close as they can to probable realities, they should consider a few of these scenarios as the possible worlds of Confederate:

A successful Confederacy would be an imperial Confederacy. Aggressive Southerners before 1860 made no secret of their ambitions to spread a slave-labor cotton empire into Central and South America. These schemes would begin, as they had in 1854, with the annexation of Cuba and the acquisition of colonies in South America, where slave labor was also still legal. This would bring the Confederates into conflict with France and Great Britain, since France was also plotting to rebuild a French empire in Mexico in the 1860s, and the British had substantial investments around the Caribbean rim. The First World War might have been one between Europeans and Confederates over the future of Central and South America.

A successful Confederacy would have triggered further secessions. There were already fears in 1861 that the new Pacific Coast states of California and Oregon would secede to form their own Pacific republic. A Confederate victory probably would have pushed that threat into reality — thus anticipating today’s Calexit campaign by 150 years — and in turn triggered independence movements in the Midwest and around the Great Lakes. The North (or what was left of the United States) would bear approximately the same relation to these new republics as Scandinavia to modern-day Europe.

A successful Confederacy would have found ways for slavery to evolve, from cotton-picking to cotton-manufacturing, and beyond. The Gone With the Wind image of the South as agricultural has become so fixed that it’s easy to miss how steadily black slaves were being slipped into the South’s industrial workforce in the decade before the Civil War. More than half of the workers in the iron furnaces along the Cumberland River in Tennessee were slaves; most of the ironworkers in the Richmond iron furnaces in Virginia were slaves as well. They are, argued one slave-owner, “cheaper than freemen, who are often refractory and dissipated; who waste much time by frequenting public places … which the operative slave is not permitted to frequent.”

A successful Confederacy would be a zero-sum economy. In the world of Confederate, the economy would be a hierarchy, with no social mobility, since mobility among economic classes would open the door to economic mobility across racial lines. At the top would be the elite slave-owning families, which owned not only assets but labor, and at the bottom, legally-enslaved African Americans, holding down most of the working-class jobs. There would be no middle class, apart from a thin stratum of professionals: doctors, clergy and lawyers. Beyond that would be only a vast reservoir of restless and unemployable whites, free but bribed into cooperation by Confederate government subsidies and racist propaganda.

Still more.

Nationwide 'America First' Rallies Planned for the September 11th Weekend (VIDEO)

Here's Brigitte Gabriel with the announcement, for ACT for America:

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Two paperback versions, at Amazon, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions), and Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer (Signet Classics).

Adrian Goldsworthy, Pax Romana

At Amazon, Adrian Goldsworthy, Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World.

Jackie Johnson's Increasing Humidity Forecast

I started updating my fall syllabi at the office today, and got further along on my American government classes than I expected. I'm making some significant additions to the syllabus in terms of expectations and decorum. Today's youth mobile phone/social media culture is sometimes shocking in its extreme casualness. The key word now is "messaging." Students don't see themselves as emailing professors a formal communication, addressed appropriately with the proper honorific (like "Hi Dr. Douglas"). Nope, they'll "message" you on their iPhones just as casually as if they were texting their best friends. They don't think twice about it. One student last semester, asking for the URL for the course's online digital textbook, just wrote "Link." That's it. He was asking me to send him the link to the digital book, but each class section has a different URL, since the proprietary software creates a unique roster for each class at my dashboard. And of course, you want to include a polite greeting when you're contacting your professors, or you'd think. I explain this to students, of course, and it's in the course syllabus; but they tune out in class (or they've forgotten what I've gone over) and they don't read their syllabi. I'm including much more formal instructions on email communications this semester, and I'm giving a brief quiz on the syllabus, for credit/no credit, at the beginning of the second week. (I'm also having students "pre-read" a couple of New York Times op-eds, including "U Can't Talk to Ur Professor Like This.")

A lot of students aren't pleased that I'm a stickler for standards and decorum. Often I don't have the most "popular" student evaluations, because don't cave to the culture's lowest-common-denominator. Of course, I don't care about being popular. I care about imparting values and professional standards, as well as a rigorous political science curriculum and good writing. Sometimes it feels like a losing battle, but fortunately I get enough positive feedback from time to time to know I'm making difference.

In any case, here's the lovely Ms. Jackie with the forecast, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

ICYMI: Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

At Amazon, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

John Kelly's Military Approach to the Media

From Hadas Gold, at Politico, "Kelly's military approach to the media":

The new chief of staff respects the press but will defer to his superior, Donald Trump.

When it comes to the media, new White House chief of staff John Kelly is a military man at heart, according to those who know him and have dealt with him in the past.

Operating out of the Pentagon, the former Marine Corps general and head of the U.S. Southern Command learned to respect members of the press but felt burned when they didn’t cover the news of what was under his command — including Guantanamo Bay — in what he considered a fair way.

His new challenge, some of those people say, is that the political writers in the White House are a different breed than their Pentagon counterparts, who tend to have deep groundings in defense policy. And Kelly’s value system may be strained in his new job — both by the press corps and the boss he will serve.

To some extent, his brief tenure as Homeland Security secretary was a period of adjustment to dealing with a more politically oriented media, as he was on the front line defending some of President Donald Trump’s more controversial moves like the travel ban and crackdown on illegal immigration.

"In his time at DHS, he’s been a bit frustrated with the press coverage in some aspects but he doesn’t think there should be less of it,” explained David Lapan, his DHS spokesperson who has worked with Kelly for more than 10 years. “His concern was making sure it was accurate.”

Kelly’s preference for straight shooting was reflected in his first major decision as chief of staff, pushing out Trump’s newly minted communications director, Anthony Scaramucci. The Mooch, as he was nicknamed, was widely viewed as the kind of fast-talking, political-oriented communicator that Kelly distrusts. In his experience with the Marines, Kelly came from a culture in which if "we just tell the truth, that’s enough,” Lapan said.

To the extent that he’s able, Kelly will try to develop more of a transactional, two-way approach to media relations, according to those who’ve dealt with him over the years. He’ll respect them, if they respect him.

“Listen, I respect them enormously,” Kelly once told his transition “Sherpa,” Blain Rethmeier, Rethmeier recalled in an interview.

"I would characterize [Kelly’s feelings] as a deep respect for the media and understanding there is an important job for them to do, and in order for them to do it, it takes that trust,” Rethmeier said...

More.

Charles Krauthammer: Anthony Scaramucci Went Way Over the Line (VIDEO)

I was a little shocked he was fired, it seemed so abrupt.

I guess he lasted 11 days? Not even two weeks. See all the coverage at Memeorandum.

In any case, here's Dr. K., for Fox News:

Mountain House Essential Bucket

At Amazon, Mountain House Just In Case...Essential Bucket.

BONUS: Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End.

Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Martin Meredith, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa.

The Pakistani Hackers Working for the Democratic National Committee

From Roger Kimball, at American Greatness, "The Pakistani Hackers Working for the DNC":

At last, I am in a position to help the New York Times. It’s a good feeling. As anyone who has stumbled upon their website knows, our former paper of record, underscoring its insatiable appetite to provide the public with all the news that fits its agenda, prominently features a solicitation for hot tips: Got a confidential news tip? it asks. Click and amaze the world.

I have a tip, an important one, though I cannot in truth call it “confidential.” Over the last few days, in fact, it has been blazoned across the samizdat press, outlets that your typical Times reader may never have heard of, or, if he has, that he reflexively discounts.

What’s it all about, Alfie? Computer hacking. A senior political figure threatening law enforcement officials. Destruction of evidence. Collusion with foreign powers. Financial corruption. Incompetence. Maladministration. Hot stuff.

Russia? Trump, Sr., Jr., or both? Nope.

It’s U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), former head of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton groupie, and, right now, the Barbie Doll in the center of (at last!) a real scandal involving a Pakistani computer guru called Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, various other family members, and the computer servers of various Democratic congressmen, including Schultz.

Last week, Awan was nabbed by the FBI at Dulles Airport trying to flee to Pakistan. His wife had already flown the coop for Lahore in March, taking $12,400 with her. (The poor thing forgot to read the fine print you see in all those travel advisories that it is a felony to transport more than $10,000 in currency without reporting it.)

Sunday is a big day of the week for The New York Times. Were you or (per impossible) I the editor of the Gray Lady, this story would have occupied a prominent place on the front page of Sunday’s edition. And sure enough, there it was, above the fold . . . Oh, wait, I was mistaken. It was not DWS after all. Silly mistake. It was actually an African herder surrounded by a bunch of goats. Also above the fold was a rare Times story lambasting Donald Trump. About Wasserman Schultz and the Iwan scandal there was precisely . . . nothing...

More.

Also at National Review, "Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Pakistani IT Scammers."

Nigel Rodgers, Ancient Rome

At Amazon, Nigel Rodgers, Ancient Rome: A Complete History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chronicling the Story of the Most Important and Influential Civilization the World Has Ever Known.

Dodgers' Kyle Farmer Smacks Walk-Off Double in MLB Debut (VIDEO)

You rarely get a bigger "storybook" ending than this one.

What a magic moment.

At MLB on YouTube, "7/30/17: Farmer, Puig lead dramatic comeback win."

And at LAT, "Kyle Farmer delivers a walk-off, two-run double in debut to give Dodgers a sweep of Giants":

When the rookie becomes the HERO. 👌

Welcome to the 2017 #Dodgers, @kFarm17! #WALKOFF | #LetsGoDodgers pic.twitter.com/Mc4UQs1c6B

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) July 31, 2017

The text message reached Dodgers manager Dave Roberts on Thursday night, soon after word leaked about the team calling up a rookie named Kyle Farmer. When Alex Wood heard the news, he wrote to his manager to extol the virtues of Farmer, his former teammate at the University of Georgia. He raved about Farmer’s presence and his makeup.

“And,” Wood ended the message, “he’s clutch.”

He had to wait three games on the bench, but Farmer needed only one at-bat to live up to Wood’s scouting report. In the 11th inning of a 3-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants on Sunday, Farmer stepped to the plate with a pair of runners aboard and one out. It was his major league debut. He was the last position player left on the Dodgers bench. He had waited 26 years and five minor league seasons for this night. He did not waste it.

When reliever Albert Suarez fired a 3-2 fastball, Farmer was ready. He stung a double into the right-field corner. Corey Seager scored from second base. Justin Turner chugged home from first. And Farmer raised his arms with glee in the middle of Dodger Stadium, a building shaking with noise, as an avalanche engulfed him.

The first teammate Farmer saw was Wood. His old roommate tackled him near second base. Two dozen Dodgers joined the pile, a euphoric celebration of the team’s eighth victory in a row.

“Oh, gosh,” Farmer said. “It feels awesome. That was a pretty cool moment for me and the team.”

“Surreal,” Farmer called the scene. Wood said he could not recall a cooler moment in his career. Roberts could only shake his head.

“I don’t know what else I can say?” Roberts said. “How else can you describe this ballclub?”

All these Dodgers (74-31) do, it seems, is win.

On Sunday, the offense came back from a one-run deficit in the ninth and another in the 11th. Farmer received a curtain call after a game that lasted just shy of four hours. Earlier in the night, Hyun-Jin Ryu matched Giants ace Madison Bumgarner for seven scoreless innings. Both starters limited their opponents to five hits. Each man struck out seven.

Ryu benefited from stellar defense behind him. The Dodgers tied a franchise record by turning six double plays. Four occurred with Ryu on the mound, including a run-saving throw by Enrique Hernandez in the seventh inning.

Once Ryu and Bumgarner departed, the offenses showed life. Giants third baseman Conor Gillaspie punished reliever Josh Fields with a solo shot in the eighth. The Dodgers evened the score in the ninth. Chase Utley led off with an infield single, then stole second base. He scored on a single by Yasiel Puig. The Dodgers loaded the bases in the ninth but Cody Bellinger popped up to send the game into extras.

As the evening wore on, Hernandez turned to Farmer in the dugout.

“Dude,” Hernandez joked, “this game has Kyle Farmer written all over it. You’re going to win this game.”

“I know,” Farmer told his new teammate...

More.

Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell

At Amazon, Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.

Anthony Everitt, The Rise of Rome

At Amazon, Anthony Everitt, The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire.

William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome

At Amazon, William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome: 327-70 B.C.