MaxRedline

Cal Fire

The biggest fire in California history was started by a man trying to plug the entrance of a wasp nest with a hammer and stake in Mendocino County, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said Thursday.

On July 27 of last year, while firefighters were spread across the state battling fires in the north and south, a Potter Valley rancher working on a hot day in a bed of waist-high cured grassland drove a stake into the ground and created a spark that grew into the 410,000-acre Ranch fire.

“This one was purely accidental,” Cal Fire spokesman Michael Mohler said Thursday, adding that no criminal charges were expected against the man.

That fire destroyed 280 structures, killed one firefighter, and injured three others.

Of course, everybody's going to die sometime....

 

I'm Giving You All She's Got, Captain!

In his iconic role on Star Trek as “Scotty,” James Doohan inspired a whole generation of real-life aeronautical engineers. But many of those who idolize him don’t even know about his real-world heroic exploits as one of the 14,000 Canadian soldiers who landed on the shores of Normandy during World War II.In his iconic role on Star Trek as “Scotty,” James Doohan inspired a whole generation of real-life aeronautical engineers. But many of those who idolize him don’t even know about his real-world heroic exploits as one of the 14,000 Canadian soldiers who landed on the shores of Normandy during World War II.

Indeed, the sci-fi actor has a war story almost stranger than fiction, and one that lands him the title of “craziest pilot in the Canadian Air Forces.”

For Trekkies, this is a convoluted story that you won't want to miss.

 

Revisionism

If you know the history of the 19^th Amendment, you will notice a peculiar omission from the statements issued by various Democrats celebrating the 100^th anniversary of its passage by Congress. Elizabeth Warren, for example, tweeted: “People always say that big change is impossible. That’s what they told the suffragettes — but they got organized, persisted, & 100 years ago today, the Senate passed the 19th Amendment to give women the right to vote.” What Warren conveniently forgets is that the people who said it was “impossible” were Democrats. Her party blocked passage of the amendment from 1878, when it was introduced by the Republicans, until the latter won such huge majorities in the 1918 midterms that the Democrats were no longer able to deny women justice.

In 1864 Northern Democrats ran General George B. McClellan (D), former governor of New Jersey, against the Republican's Lincoln.
The Democratic Party Presidential Platform for 1864, called the "Chicago Platform", was the election document for running against Lincoln and Anti-Slavery Republicans. It called for a negotiated settlement of the Civil War which would bring the South back into the Union by recognizing the Mason - Dixon Line (Slave states south of the line, Free states north of the line), its slogan said:
"Elect McClellan and the whole Democratic Ticket.
You will defeat N[Black] equality, restore Prosperity, re-establish the Union!"

And don't forget the Jim Crow laws, the KKK, and all of the other repressive tools implemented by Democrats.

They live for projection.

 

 

Old-Fashioned Healthcare

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy....

Healthcare procedures that have fallen out of favor:

Trepanation (drilling or scraping a hole in the skull) is the oldest form of surgery we know of. Humans have been performing it since neolithic times. We don’t know why people did it, but some experts believe it could have been to release demons from the skull.

It’s hard to believe that a procedure more brutal than trepanation was widely performed in the 20th century. Lobotomy involved severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal lobe with an implement resembling an icepick (a leucotome). Thankfully, advances in psychiatric drugs saw the procedure fall from favour in the 1960s. Freeman performed his last two icepick lobotomies in 1967.

Bloodletting in the West continued up until the 19th century.

Hard as it may be to believe, rather brutal procedures were routinely performed in America until quite recently. In the early 1960s I had ingrown toenails, and the "doctor's" solution was to have me held down on an exam table while he took a pair of round scissors, cut up the middle of the afflicted nail (without anesthesia or any pain-killers) and then used pliers to rip the ingrown parts from my feet. Naturally, this was ineffective, though it did instill a profound reluctance to have anything to do with doctors for the next several decades.

 

Washington Weirdness

Snohomish County detectives are searching for a person of interest in a suspected homicide, after the bones of a missing man were unearthed in a backyard near Bothell.Who kills a guy and then buries him in the backyard?

That's just nuts. Especially when there's so much water up there. A chain and a couple of cinder-blocks would have worked.

 

 

Don't Swim In The Sewage

It probably shouldn't be necessary to mention it, but then again, it's Arkansas. I had to spend some time in the area of Conway, and can verify that a lot of folks down there are nuts. Could be a Midwestern thing, I suppose. Of course, maybe the only time they can take a bath is during the spring flood season.

As a kid, I wasn't a big fan of the daily trips out to the pump to fill the water buckets and haul them back to the farmhouse. There was no indoor plumbing back then. There was an outhouse, which was really fun in summer. So was the henhouse, where my chores were collecting eggs and scooping poop. Great times.

ARKANSAS (KFSM) — As you see waters rise around the state you may be tempted to go for a swim, but the Arkansas Department of Health is reminding residents that swimming in flood waters is not a good idea.

And I never quite understood why Kansas is called Kansas, while Arkansas is called "Ark-and saw".

 

Histories Mysteries

Around 900,000 years ago in what is now Spain, Homo antecessor, an ancient relative of humans, practiced cannibalism likely out of practicality, according to a study published in June 2019 in the Journal of Human Evolution. Fellow hominins were moderately nutritious and easy to catch, making them an excellent prey option.

Our closer and more recent relatives, the Neanderthals, were also cannibals on occasion. Archaeologists have discovered evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in a few different spots around the world, including a cave in El Sidrón, Spain, another cave at Moula-Guercy, France, and most recently at a cave in Belgium. Beyond cannibalism, it appears that Neaderthals also made tools out of their comrades' remains.

The Wari' people of Brazil practiced cannibalism of their war enemies and their own dead. Eating their enemies was their way of expressing hatred and anger. But the group also consumed the vast majority of their dead up until the 1960s. For them, it was their way of mourning, honoring and respecting the deceased members of their tribe. Beth A. Conklin, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, lived with the Wari' for more than a year and published her description of the Wari' tribe's history of cannibalism in the journal American Ethnologist in 1995.

Until the end of the 18th century, it was not uncommon for Europeans to seek the flesh of a dead human for medicinal consumption, Smithsonian reported. For example, Paracelsus, the 16th-century physician, believed blood was healthy to drink. Although drinking fresh blood was uncommon, people unable to afford apothecary products would stand by at executions and pay a small fee for a cup of fresh blood from the condemned.

Well, they didn't have refrigerators back then.

 

 

Back To The Future

In Julian's case, the future involves bars and guards.

Thursday’s revelation of the additional 18 charges, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, means Assange could face significantly more prison time if found guilty.

The alleged Espionage Act violations relate to Assange’s complicity with Chelsea Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violating the Espionage Act after she shuttled troves of classified government information to WikiLeaks. Officials said Assange solicited the information from and then brazenly published details that put the government's human sources at risk, disregarding explicit warnings from the government.

Julian's looking at as much as 180 years, which seems like a bit of overkill as he certainly won't live that long. But better safe than sorry.

 

American Tailban Loose

John Walker Lindh, known as the "American Taliban" after his capture in Afghanistan in 2001, was released from prison on Thursday after serving 17 years of a 20-year sentence, the Bureau of Prisons said.

Lindh received three years off for good behavior, though his probation terms include a host of restrictions: He needs permission to go on the Internet; he'll be closely monitored; he's required to receive counseling; and he's not allowed to travel.

Somehow, I don't think the restrictions are going to matter to him; he's a Tailban.

 

As Noted Here Previously

The Imam of the Islamic Center of Portland, Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye, has been stripped of his citizenship and booted from the United States. Kariye has been on the Department of Homeland Security “no fly list” since after 9/11. 

I was unaware, however, that the Islamic Center is referred to as Masjed As-Saber, which means "Mosque of the Sword".

And a lot of bad things and bad people have come out of the place over the years as Kariye promoted jihad.

Victoria Taft has the back-story on this guy:

Kariye presided over the radical Islamist teachings at the Masjed As-Saber mosque and, according to court documents and first hand accounts, he encouraged violent jihad, financially helped people who wanted to join the mujahideen and sent them to Afghanistan and elsewhere for weapons and tactical training.

Kariye was shown to have fraudulently applied for citizenship. His citizenship was stripped and he was ordered out of the country. He’s in “Somaliland” as we speak.