During the War of 1812, American General William Hull surrenders Fort Detroit and his army to the British without a fight. Hull, a 59-year-old veteran of the American Revolution, had lost hope of defending the settlement after seeing the large English and Indian force gathering outside Detroit’s walls.
The Brits spent a year scoping out the place and apparently decided it was a dump, so it was returned to America in September of 1813.
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"The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder." -
Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley (Democrat) 1968
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Here’s one way to discourage people from indulging in a damaging habit: tax the hell out of it. Cigarettes and alcohol are already taxed. In some cities, soda is too. Is it time to embrace a meat tax?
Some politicians in Germany think so. The value-added tax (VAT) for meat is currently 7 percent, just like for most other foods in the country. But on August 7, lawmakers from across the political spectrum proposed raising the tax on meat to 19 percent. They say that’ll decrease the nation’s consumption of meat, a win for animal welfare and for the environment.
It appears that they don't tend to learn from experience - authoritarianism has never been a winner for them, but there they go again. They'll have to pry my bratwurst from my cold, dead hands.
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SAN JUAN COUNTY, Colo. — There's a ghost town high in the San Juan Mountains where people were literally living buried in snow.
In fact, during an 1884 blizzard that lasted 23 days, 25 feet of snow was dumped on the town, forcing residents to slide open a window to scoop out snow to boil water for dinner or a bath.
They also had to dig tunnels to the buildings that housed the stores, neighbors' homes — and the saloon, of course.
Much of the town is still intact today. When mining didn't pan out, the town's 500 or so residents left, so it's a ghost town. You need a high-clearance 4-wheel drive to get there now, but it seems pretty cool.
Animas Forks is located on the Alpine Loop, the 65-mile stretch of highway near Ouray, Lake City and Silverton — about a 6.5-hour drive from Denver.
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Improbable today, but common in the late 19th century, houses carved inside massive tree stumps were a staple of life in states like Oregon, Washington and California, where the lumber industry was booming and leaving a veritable sea of beheaded trees in its wake. Crafty by nature, the pioneers took to those wastelands and upcycled the stumps into homes, dancefloors, hotels – you name it. Ladies ‘n gents, meet the original tiny houses…
Stumps became sheds, huts, and houses. They became a place to store your animals, provisions, and anything else that needed the kind of security the walls of a tree that could grow over 30ft (over 9 metres) wide. They were so wide, and so solid, you could carve a tunnel through them. Most importantly? They were free.
This one's in Hazel, Washington; the next was in California.
The Porterville stump today.
The pioneers were an inventive bunch.
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After originally calling the project Information Management, Berners-Lee tried out names such as Mine of Information and Information Mesh before settling on WorldWideWeb.
and we're all better or worse for it.
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From the Victorian era:
The dildo, which is described on the auction site as an “ivory companion”, is believed to have originated in China and to have been brought back to Ireland as a gift from husband to wife. The ivory dates from the 1840s.
Ohh-kay, then.
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WORLD—Climate experts have solemnly warned that we only have twelve years left until they change the dates on global warming again.
“If we don’t take action, then in 12 years we will have to explain why the world hasn’t ended and come up with a new number,” one UN scientist warned. “This is a very serious threat, and we urge everyone to hand control of the economy to the government immediately before we have no more time left to change the timeline again.”
I've been watching this moving target for 40 years or so and it's always just out of reach. It's a lot like the slot machines at a casino – the red 7’s are only off by one line, but one more pull and they will fall into place.
In the 1970s, they tried to scare you to death over "global cooling". When that failed, they switched it to "global warming". That didn't exactly take off, either. So today they're going with climate change. Anything to keep the grant money flowing.
They'll have to revert to global warming or global cooling in the coming years.
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36 year-old Congressional gadfly Ilhan separated from her husband recently...
Last week DailyMail.com exclusively revealed that Omar, 36, has left her husband Ahmed Hirsi — the father of her three children. She has moved into a luxury penthouse apartment in the trendy Mill District of Minneapolis.
She's on her way to her third divorce at the ripe old age of 36, and is apparently already dating again, as she was spotted at an isolated restaurant near LAX with yet another guy:
'I went in pretending I was going for a take-out,' the source said. 'I looked over and said to the waiter ''Is that who I think it is?'' and he said yes. 'He told me he was upset with what she had said and kept calling her ungrateful saying she was a refugee and should be happy that the United States had taken her in.
'He told me they had been holding hands in the restaurant, although I didn't see that myself.'
She left Caffé Pinguini in Playa Del Rey, a beachside enclave in Los Angeles, with a man who took pains not to allow the couple to be photographed. And DailyMailTV has learned that an eyewitness observed Omar and her companion holding hands while dining inside the bistro.
'The bigger question is why they were at this particular restaurant,' said the man who took the video. You don't just stumble across Playa Del Rey on a chilly Sunday evening in March. 'It's so out of the way. It's the sort of place you go when you don't want anyone to know where you are.'
Omar was at the center of a firestorm on the night she dined at Pinguini. The night before, she had praised CAIR saying the group 'was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.' In fact CAIR was founded in 1994.
'There's a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother. I know nothing about it,' Trump told reporters in June.
Who goes out with another man the day after filing for divorce? In America, divorces don't happen overnight.
So let's see: the Minnesota representative has been divorced twice, and has just filed for another divorce. Yet she's out in southern California at what is described as an intimate and romantic little bistro, holding hands with still another guy over dinner. Either she moves incredibly fast, or these two have been an item for a while. Certainly, it calls her trustworthiness into question - and her mental stability as well.
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Funny things always happen to Bill and Hillary Clinton, friends have this nasty habit of turning up dead. We all gotta go sometimes, but the Clinton’s buddies seem to go under weird circumstances (and many by suicide).
47 to date - quite the track record.
Coleman reportedly had an affair with Bill Clinton when he was the Arkansas Attorney General. She died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, which was ruled a suicide. She was pregnant at the time of her death.
Like many, I remember well the Vince Foster Arkancide, but had no idea that he was but one of nearly four dozen Clinton associates somehow found dead.
These two make Putin look like a piker.
Reports that Russian opposition leader Navalny has been moved to hospital wing of prison after a “serious allergic reaction”... Sounds a bit ominous, but no detail yet.
It seems that everyone's allergic to polonium....
They really ought to institute more stringent controls over the radioactive stuff over there in Russia.
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