radioacti...@gmail.com <radioactiveseattle@gmail.com> wrote:
> Referencing the massive Pestego forest fire up in Wisconsin on
> Sunday, October 8, 1871 whilst a blameless cow was supposedly (AND fictively)
> knocking over that lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn on Chicago's North Side:
>
> Quite right you are, Louis (as you almost invariably are factually), about
> how while EVERYONE knows about the Chicago fire, just about no one talks
> about Pestigo.
>
> Though it's hard to quantify these things from the perspective of succeeding
> centuries--both the famed Chicago fire and the still-obscure Pestigo one
> started were in 1871, for Heaven's sake--by SOME historians' metrics, the
> disaster up in Wisconsin was actually MORE costly than the Chicago blaze!
> (Of course, the Wisconsin catastrophe was rural--even TODAY that area is
> still sparsely populated--so the toll in human lives was dwarfed by the
> Chi-town blaze, of course.)

By what odd mathematics do the 250 deaths in Chicago "dwarf"
the 1,182 deaths resulting from the Peshtigo fire?

I said worst in life OR property,and I meant it.
(These figures are from the World Almanac)

> By the way--one late 20th Century theory, FAR from ever proven but
> fascinating nontheless, is that a streaking meteor--not sure if it was going
> from over Illinois up to Wisconsin, or vice versa--dropped smouldering
> remnants over Chicago AND the Wisconsin forest, thus sparking BOTH fires!
>
> Now while I first heard about the Chicago fire prior even to
> kindergarten--my older brother AND parents talked about such things from time
> to time, and I was a good listener even before I turned 6 in 1960--I didn't
> first learn about the Pestego blaze until an odd headline caught my eye as I
> paged though a book while in 3rd Grade. The headline: "The Night of the
> Great Fires". My desk was at the rear of Mrs. Bibee's 3rd grade class at

In my case,it was an Old Farmer's Almanac article in the 1970s.

> Kennerly Elementary in late February 1964--while I was still mentally
> processing what I had witnessed on CBS Television on Sunday night, February
> 9th and then also the two following Sunday nights, to wit, that fortnight of
> the three Beatles initial Sullivan show appearances. But teacher Bibee was
> talking to the class about something else, and I was tuning her out with my
> nose in the book.
>
> Even 60 years later, I remember being STARTLED that I'd never heard of this
> second, SAME-NIGHT fire only a couple hundred miles north of the Chicago
> fire, which as I said above, had for years been part of my own body of
> collected knowledge, if only fragmentary. I distinctly recall thinking to
> myself, "Why oh why isn't this mentioned EVERY TIME people cite the Great
> Chicago fire?!?" (Mrs. Bibee never noticed I was tuning out whatever she was
> saying to the rest of the class.)

I also had heard of the Chicago fire years before.

> As you might imagine, that day after school when I got home, I went straight
> to the World Book Encyclopedia entry on the Chicago fire, and found only
> fleeting mention of the Pestigo blaze.
>
> BUT: this remarkable incident in my young life taught me a VITAL lesson:
> EVEN IF it's a reliable source (big "if" THERE, even back then), you simply
> can't count on what you're reading to always tell you the complete story.
> (I'm NOT saying that the numerous previous times I'd heard about the Chicago
> fire from other sources--print, TV or just some talkative adult--that they
> were SUPPRESSING the vital Pestigo fire story; they were probably ignorant
> about it THEMSELVES, but SOMEBODY I'd previously heard about the Chicago fire
> from probably DID know about it, but just assumed a 1st or 2nd grade kid
> didn't NEED or even WANT to know about it, so it never came up.
>
> Well, THIS kid ever since late 1957 or so at age 3 ALWAYS had a thirst for factual knowledge (even if I didn't know the word "factual" yet), even if I couldn't understand the nuances of it. Everyone I encountered in those days seems to have sold me intellectually short, and I'm STILL annoyed by that in 2024. Of course, I WAS short then --about 4'6" in those days, far from my 5'11" topping out height (long before old age shrunk me to my current 5"9")--but they still for some inexcusable reason always underestimated my even-in-childhood ability to grasp AND retain supposedly "adult" information.
>
> NOW, and in answer, Louis, to your French Revolution question:
>
> That week when Captain Bligh was mutinied and Washington was inaugurated at the end of April 1789 was ALSO the week the so-called Estates General legislature was closing in on Paris, from the hinterlands all over France, after having been called (for the first time in well over a century, if memory serves) QUITE reluctantly by Louis XVI, on the persistent advice of his advisors. By the time Washington raised his hand on Wall Street across the Atlantic, they were already mostly in town, many even already at the Versailles palace about 15 miles to the southwest of Notre Dame.
>
> Then on Tuesday, May 5th (exactly a week after the mayhem aboard The Bounty in the South Pacific), the Estates General officially convened. Again, there was much starting and stopping over these weeks, but on Saturday, June 20th the die was finally cast and there was no turning back...for that's the day the commoners locked out the nobles inside the Royal tennis [indoor] tennis court and declared themselves to be the REAL power in France. And of course on the first Bastille Day (Tuesday, July 14, 1789), after several days of low-level rioting through and beyond the weekend, they stormed prison of The Bastille (only to learn to their dismay that all but six prisoners had already been spirited out during the preceding weeks!).
>
> And it must always be emphasized: when the tennis court was commandeered by
> "the people", EVEN THE MOST RADICAL, revolution-minded participants were NOT
> just then intending to overthrow Louis XVI, much less ever execute
> him--rather, there were all about just reforming everything about the
> monarchy. (The dismissal of detested Finance Minister Necker would ease
> things a bit on Saturday, July 11th, but not for long.) For sure, most of
> them despised pocket-watch-tinkerer hobbiest [!] King Louis and all he and
> his numerous Court cronies so royally stood for, yet NO one was just then
> even dreaming that by Monday, January 21, 1793, they'd be chopping off his
> head. (Meanwhile, cake-eating-recommender-NOT [her most infamous quote is
> one of history's greatest myths]) Queen Marie Antoinette wouldn't lose HER
> head until Wednesday, October 16, 1793. (And after many months in an 18th
> Century prison cell, she hardly looked very regal by that bloody day, as
> contemporary witnesses confirm.)
>
> Yep, the French Revolution--WHATEVER modern folk think of it now--happened
> in FITS and STARTS, and not AT ALL in a non-stop, straight-line steamrolling
> sort of fashion. JUST LIKE (by zero coincidence in my increasingly-cynical
> view), the neo-Maoist revolution we're CURRENTLY witnessing in our OWN
> crumbling republic-not-democracy here in the good ol' USA has been happening.

But the Revolution in the USA began with the Battle of Lexington,
not the Boston Massacre or the Boston Tea Party.

> The corresponding timeline for us stateside in the 21st Century:
>
> (1) neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman dispatched aspiring rapper punk
> Travon Martin over in Orlando in February 2012, on the rainy night the NBA
> All-Star Game was being contested downtown in the O-Rena stadium; then
> (2) policeman's-gun-grabber Michael Brown caused his own well-earned death,
> putting hardscrabble St. Louis suburb Ferguson forever on the national map;
> and
> (3) St. George of Floyd's final vigorous arrest-resistance on Memorial Day
> 2020 (after a career of criminality and an abortive porn video career) made
> Minneapolis more nationally famous at the outset of this decadent decade than
> Dylan ever did back in the early '60s.
>
> Point is, these revolutions don't happen all at once--Lenin, Trotsky and
> Stalin took SEVERAL years to fully accomplish their revolution, after all.
> Nor is it a straight-line toward "Hello, New Order!" (Remember Alexander
> Karinsky's brief regime in the middle of the decade or so it took the Russian
> revolution to solidify? Few people do, because it didn't last long--though
> Karinsky himself DID, not dying until 1970, believe it or not,

I know (it's usually rendered "Kerensky" in our alphabet,
but "correct" spellings of things natively written in
different alphabets are a myth).

> decades after Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were at tomb temperature.)

Stalin had died less than 2 decades before (March 1953).

> Yep, these horrific sequences TAKE TIME, but all serious Marxists UNDERSTAND
> that, as of course did Marx himself...IF you read him, which few non-Marxists
> I talk to about these things to ever get around to doing, it seems.

See Marx below...

> Now, those Black Lies Matter clowns (and all their various Marxist allies)
> calling the Democrat Party shots nowadays--ALWAYS behind the scenes, and
> seldom in front of TV cameras--still have a long way to go, thank Heavens.
> But ALSO understand they're in it for the long haul, perhaps having to
> ultimately wait for all us Baby Boomers to die off.

Don't forget the hijackers who wanted to focus the Oppression Olympics
and altered slogans to "Black Trans Lives Matter",though the fact is
that "trans" lies (transgender identities being a subcategory of lies)
CAN'T matter.

> But by now, it's frighteningly clear they WILL ultimately succeed in
> following how Antonio Gramsci--the imprisoned Italian Marxist--so famously
> charted this all out in his "Prison Notebooks" tome, quite astutely advising
> all Marxists in his wake here in The West to (1) relentlessly engineer all
> this Marxist agitating via the CULTURE rather than the governmental structure
> as the Bolsheviks did in St. Petersburg-then-Leningrad; and (2) apply the
> greatest pressure on the young, doing so via their schools and universities.
>
> I'd imagine by the early 2030s (or certainly by the latter part of that
> decade), this slow-motion neo-Maoist transformation shall be solidly (and
> probably permanently) in place. For my own inconsequential part, over the
> last year or so, I've abandoned my herein-stated quite-quixotic goal of
> seeing 100 in 2054; but if still alive, I'll be in my 80s to sadly witness
> this new Orwellian America then sometime in the 2030s, should my predicted
> timeline end up being more or less on the mark.)

The one way to lose is to convince oneself that one has
already lost.
So never do!

> SO: that's my "future history" rumination, Louis...unasked for by you or
> anyone else herein, granted...but I hope worth your reading time nonetheless.
> (I realize as a good-hearted liberal and loyal Democrat vote, you'll dismiss
> a lot of the above as overheated rhetoric, or perhaps just simply nonsense,
> but I hope not...as I'm HARDLY the only guy out there saying all this.)

Here of course is MARX HIMSELF laying out the Republican Party's
basic strategy for Congress (either house) when confronted with
any legislation supported by President Biden,even though he made
this speech before Biden was even born:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHash5takWU&t=8

> Meanwhile, sure hope your winter is going well, Louis, as all us
> alt-obits-posting folk slowly but surely transition to that RockSolid guy's
> obituaries website.

Never heard of it,certainly won't leave here for it.

> And I sure hope you never end up like that OTHER Louis [the XVI] did. But
> you (and especially little ol' ME) each just MAY, because WHITE lives sure
> don't matter much at all anymore in 2024 America, and these modern Marxist
> types I'm discussing here sound just as shrill and rabid as Lenin did in
> 1917, don't they? I mean, when was the last time you saw anything but a
> clueless white-guy buffoon in a TV commercial? And anything but a wise,
> condescending black guy showing that dumb white guy how to properly use the
> product/service being advertised on NBC or CNN?
>
> So sorry to get all political on you here...but you DID ask about the French
> Revolution, and that's 2024 America for you, Louis; as the New Left used to
> say in during the late '60s: The Personal is Now Political.
>
> BRYAN STYBLE/Florida

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.