Saturday, October 7, 2017

On this day in 1871,

Peshtigo Fire Worst in U.S. History

Kills 1,200 people, burns 1.2 million acres and 2 billion trees



On October 8, 1871, the most devastating forest fire in American history swept through northeast Wisconsin, claiming 1200 lives. [For more about the Peshtigo fire, click here.]
The anniversary of the Peshtigo Fire usually receives little note outside the region because another horrific fire the same night -- the great Chicago Fire -- still seems to hog the headlines.
"Part of it is that myth of the cow -- Mrs. O'Leary's cow tipping over the lantern," said Debra Anderson, an archivist for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Area Research Center, referring to the way the Chicago fire allegedly started. "And, Chicago was and still is a bigger city."
While Chicago's story may be more colorful, researchers still find the Peshtigo Fire worth studying, Anderson said.
The Area Research Center, the state historical society's depository for records for 11 counties in Northeast Wisconsin, has papers and manuscripts of all kinds, she said.
The story of the Peshtigo Fire, gleaned from survivor accounts and conjecture, is that railroad workers clearing land for tracks that Sunday evening started a brush fire which, somehow, became an inferno.
It had been an unusually dry summer, and the fire moved fast. Some survivors said it moved so fast it was "like a tornado."
The sudden, convulsive speed of the flames consumed available oxygen. Some trying to flee burst into flames.
It scorched 1.2 million acres, although it skipped over the waters of Green Bay to burn parts of Door and Kewaunee counties. The damage estimate was at $169 million, about the same as for the Chicago Fire.
The fire also burned 16 other towns, but the damage in Peshtigo was the worst. The city was gone in an hour. In Peshtigo alone, 800 lives were lost.
"What most researchers find so fascinating is the effect it (the Peshtigo Fire) had on people's lives. It was so horrific," Anderson said. "Some people thought it was the end of the world."
The fire produced countless stories of heroics and tragedy, which are collected at the research center, as well as the Peshtigo Fire Museum in downtown Peshtigo.
There's the story of a man carrying a woman to safety he thought was his wife. When he found out it wasn't her, he went crazy. People said the Peshtigo River was the only haven from the fire, and one 13 year-old German immigrant girl said she held onto the horn of a cow all night in the river to survive.
The Peshtigo Fire Museum, located in a former church building, is located at the corner of Oconto Street and Ellis Avenue in Peshtigo.

NFL now least liked, most disliked of pro/college sports

Coastie Peggy Noonan gets it

Why do Americans own so many guns? Because they don’t trust the protected elites to protect them.

And there is no reason they should.

Excerpt:

But: Why do so many Americans have guns? I don’t mean those who like to hunt and shoot or live far out and need protection. I don’t mean those who’ve been handed down the guns of their grandfather or father. Why do a significant number of Americans have so many guns?
Wouldn’t it help if we thought about that?

I think a lot of Americans have guns because they’re fearful—and for damn good reason. They fear a coming chaos, and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer coheres. They think it’s all collapsing—our society, our culture, the baseline competence of our leadership class. They see the cultural infrastructure giving way—illegitimacy, abused children, neglect, racial tensions, kids on opioids staring at screens—and, unlike their cultural superiors, they understand the implications.

Nuts with nukes, terrorists bent on a mission. The grid will go down. One of our foes will hit us, suddenly and hard. In the end it could be hand to hand, door to door. I said some of this six years ago to a famously liberal journalist, who blinked in surprise. If that’s true, he said, they won’t have a chance! But they are Americans, I said. They won’t go down without a fight.

Americans have so many guns because drug gangs roam the streets, because they have less trust in their neighbors, because they read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Because all of their personal and financial information got hacked in the latest breach, because our country’s real overlords are in Silicon Valley and appear to be moral Martians who operate on some weird new postmodern ethical wavelength. And they’ll be the ones programming the robots that’ll soon take all the jobs! Maybe the robots will all look like Mark Zuckerberg, like those eyeless busts of Roman Emperors. Our leaders don’t even think about this technological revolution. They’re too busy with transgender rights.
Americans have so many guns because they know the water their children swim in hasn’t gotten cleaner since Columbine, but more polluted and lethal.

The establishments and elites that create our political and entertainment culture have no idea how fragile it all is—how fragile it seems to people living normal, less privileged lives. That is because nothing is fragile for them. They’re barricaded behind the things the influential have, from good neighborhoods to security alarms, doormen and gates. They’re not dark in their imagining of the future because history has never been dark for them; it’s been sunshine, which they expect to continue. They sail on, oblivious to the legitimate anxieties of their countrymen who live near the edge.

Those who create our culture feel free to lecture normal Americans—on news shows, on late night comedy shows. Why do they have such a propensity for violence? What is their love for guns? Why do they join the National Rifle Association? The influential grind away with their disdain for their fellow Americans, whom they seem less to want to help than to dominate: Give up your gun, bake my cake, free speech isn’t free if what you’re saying triggers us.

Would it help if we tried less censure and more cultural affiliation? Might it help if we started working on problems that are real? Sure. But why lower the temperature when there’s such easy pleasure to be had in ridiculing your mindless and benighted countrymen?

WSJ Full article here

Go figure.

Althouse: Bill Maher, a member of an L.A. sex club, did not even mention Weinstein last night. 

Althouse: Lib female media ignored Weinstein misconduct because he is a Democrat

Friday, October 6, 2017

Dan O'Donnell

Harvey Weinstein, the Fearless Girl, and Liberal 'Feminist' Hypocrisy

Thomas Chatterton Williams/NYT

Do Accusations of White Supremacy Empower White Supremacists?


Bombard Body Language

Were Jimmy Kimmel's Tears Nothing More Than Method Acting?

Ambassador Chris Stevens' Last Words Before Dying in Benghazi

“When I die, you need to pick up my gun and keep fighting." 

Daily Wire
An intellectually honest liberal,

Alan Dershowitz Derides Identity Politics and Theory of Intersectionality 

Washington Free Beacon

More Las Vegas Displays of White Male Privilege

Army Soldier Protects Woman In Wide Open Killing Field


Obama Admin Approved Bump Stocks 2010

Too Late: The NFL Plays a Protest-Free Football Game on Thursday Night

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Althouse:  BLM Shuts Down ACLU Free Speech Event Because "Liberalism is White Supremacy"

Althouse Blog
Victor Davis Hanson

The Glass House of the NFL

[T]he league has entirely forgotten the fundamental rule of business: Never ignore, insult or talk down to the loyal consumers who provide the leagues' support and income.
Town Hall Full Article 
American Thinker

There is a revolutionary movement afoot in the United States.

Let’s face facts. There is a revolutionary movement afoot in the United States. And it is organizing itself before our eyes.
Serious people believe that the constitutional republic can be overthrown. Overt Marxist and revolutionary groups never gave up the cause, but others in respectable jobs worked tacitly to shape education into political indoctrination, at all levels.
One of the principal forces that will bring about the fall of the regime is street violence that can overwhelm the forces of law and order. A cadre of youth to take control of the streets of our major cities has already been indoctrinated that “hate speech” is the same thing as violence, so it is moral and just to violently attack the “fascists” who are killing minorities. 
Full article 

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Bombard Body Language: The Las Vegas Shooting Was Politically Motivated 

Las Vegas Victim Shot in Leg Gets Out of Hospital Bed to Greet President

Coulter: Media Too Busy Pontificating About Shooting To Do Any Investigative Journalism

White Male Privilege: Men Die Protecting Women


Think about this for a minute:

Michelle Obama Says Republican Party Too White, Too Male

Daily Caller

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Here's Why One Body Language Expert Is Very Skeptical About the Truthfulness of the Brother of the Las Vegas Shooter

The man who presaged Trump

Pat Buchanan: Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World

What happens next may not be good.

Race, tribe, borders, culture, history — issues of identity — are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations. 
We Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes. 
Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT — all core constituencies of the Democratic Party — seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American life.In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, “If you’re runnin’ down my country, man, You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.” 
A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics — our cherished diversity itself — appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
Full Article  

2% of the Counties have 51% of the Murders

Because it is a good thing

Secession Is Sweeping the World, and We Should Let It

Detroit Lions' Owner Bribes Players To Stand For Anthem

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Ravens Fans Boo Their Own Team For Taking A Knee But Don't Boo Hated Steelers For Standing


Althouse: Is the Baltimore Ravens' Forced Prayer Before The Anthem The Answer?

"Fans Boo and Call B---S---"

From the fans, I heard loud booing, which I interpret as calling bullshit on the instrumental use of religion to preserve the protest gesture they don't like. Management might have thought the prayer packaging would silence the crowd, lest they sound as though they are objecting to religion. Surely, religion will be respected. They thought wrong. Public displays of religion are often the insincere use of religion as a means to an end and sometimes it works, but it didn't work this time, judging by the boos.

Althouse Blog
My 2nd favorite economist

Larry Kudlow: Trump’s Tax Cut Plan Sets Up Republicans For Hardball in Congress

I Stand For The Anthem Even Though There Have Been 60 Million Babies Aborted In The U.S. Since Roe v. Wade

Including 18 Million Black Babies


Can't imagine why

NFL Pro Football Hall of Fame Suddenly Sprouts 800 U.S. Flags



How Trump Beat The NFL

The Future of America With Identity Politics?


An Hispanic UC-Riverside ethnic studies student took the MAGA hat of a half-Nicaraguan student believing he was white, had a “shitload” of privilege, and that the hat stood for genocide, while saying she hates this country and we “need to get rid of all’y’all.”

Breitbart


American Enterprise Institute

The Marriage Divide: How and Why Working-Class Families Are More Fragile Today

Key Points
  • This research brief offers an updated portrait of the class divide in American family life, finding that less than half of poor Americans age 18 to 55 (just 26 percent) and 39 percent of working-class Americans are currently married, compared to more than half (56 percent) of middle- and upper-class Americans.
  • Adolescents in poor and working-class homes are also significantly less likely to live with their biological parents than their peers from middle- and upper-class homes (55 percent versus 77 percent).
  • The class divide would be even larger were it not for the presence of immigrants, who are disproportionately married and members of working-class or poor families.
  • After describing the current features of this divide, we explore the key economic, cultural, policy, and civic forces that help explain why marriage and family life are now more fragile for poor and working-class Americans.