Where They Burn…

by

“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” wrote the 19th century German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine. Or in English, “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn men.” I’d update the line to say “Where they burn cities, they’ll burn the countryside, too.”

And since Antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators have been busily setting fires in urban protests, attempting to set fire to police stations, throwing Molotov cocktails and fireworks, and incinerating whole city blocks, businesses, pawnshops and bookstores alike, can one really blame residents of rural and small-town Oregon for assuming the worst and suspecting that the catastrophic fires scorching the west coast have a man-made origin? It’s a logical assumption to make, after six months of threats, violence, and deliberate urban arson. It’s not a great leap of imagination on the part of rural residents to assume that Antifa/BLM would move on after having comprehensively fouled their urban strongholds, especially if it meant striking hard at generally more conservative rural and small-town Americans in a way which would hurt, and hurt badly. My parents lost a house and everything in it, in the Paradise Mountain fire in 2003, a fire which was widely suspected to have been started as an illicit bonfire on reservation land. My parents were able to rebuild and counted themselves lucky that all they lost were things; they escaped with their lives and pets, didn’t lose a business or anything that couldn’t be replaced, unlike some of their neighbors.

So I can hardly blame rural residents in fire areas for being suspicious of strangers; if not outright arsonists, there are always looters. Stopping strangers at gunpoint and demanding to see an ID and a reason for being there is a perfectly sensible precaution, and if the local police won’t do it, then civilian vigilantes will, especially of it’s a matter of life and death. And believe me, there are enough people dead and missing in this latest round of brush and forest fires for local people to take it all very seriously indeed. In looking over the stories posted in the major media outlets about all this, quite a lot is made, in a huffy and indignant fashion, condemning irresponsible rumor-mongering and wasting law-enforcement time, and insisting there is no credible evidence for Antifa/BLM activists going out and setting fires. It must be very nice to be so certain sure of that, but it remains that both the establishment national news media and certain law-enforcement bodies have repeatedly stretched the truth or lied outright of late in regard to Antifa/BLM (among other items of national concern) that their credibility among the wider public is seriously compromised. Comment as you wish.

43 thoughts on “Where They Burn…”

  1. As far as fires go, from living in CA for a decade, my impression was that nearly all wildfires are man-caused, whether “accidental” or deliberate. That’s basically ignored in the media.

    I’ve seen it often stated that there were a vast number of domestic terror bombings in the late 60s and 70s, as a way to downplay any current violence. But I’m not aware that there were any areas where the terrorists had any official, overt support, which makes things radically different now from back then. There were no local DAs like those in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc., that allowed them to operate with impunity, or elected officials who openly supported them.

  2. There were a number of random lightning strikes in northern California two weeks ago but the lack of forest management is a catastrophe waiting to happen. That has gone on since Clinton.

  3. We’ve had several major fires here in Colorado the last couple of months. Some were lightning caused, but the others are still under investigation. The one closest to here is leaning towards “Suspicious Origins”, but no official word yet.

    Most of the “peaceful protests” have been in the Denver/Aurora area, but we’re definitely on-the-watch here up North.

  4. And … stuff just seems to go on happening: another round of suspicious fires.
    I grew up in fire country, in Southern California – in the fall, when the Santa Anna’s blow, everything dries out to the point where practically anything can start a fire, and like Brian said, quite often man-caused, but accidental. Light through a piece of glass, a discarded cigarette butt, a shorted string of Christmas lights, a steel bulldozer blade hitting a flint rock.
    The lack of proper land management over the last thirty years or so has just made conditions so much more dangerous. Antifa/BLM or ordinary firebug arsonist – I don’t blame local people for being on edge, but I do blame law enforcement authorities for being so cavalier about the public’s concerns.

  5. Since you mention Black Lives Matter, I have to say, and there hasn’t been a good thread to say this recently, that the Dems literally could not have found a worse slogan to appeal to Hispanic voters even if they had tried, and the hilarious thing is their activists and the media (but I repeat myself lol) are too ignorant about the world to even realize it.

  6. We live now in a largely Hispanic city – my daughter went to a Catholic high school on the South Side which was about 99% Hispanic. (In her graduating class of fifty, there was one other Anglo girl, a black girl and an Indian.Dot, not feather Indian. Every other girl – Hispanic and proud.) My daughter says – “Hey, Black people – if you think that Whites treated you bad, wait until you get a load of what Hispanics intend…”
    Interesting that the two deputies nearly assassinated in Compton in the last few days were Hispanic, and the assassin looks to be Black and a kid…
    If there’s going to be a race war out of all this, it will be Black and Brown, and White sitting on the sideline, mostly avoiding the blood splatters.

  7. Sgt. Mom:
    Stopping strangers at gunpoint and demanding to see an ID and a reason for being there is a perfectly sensible precaution, and if the local police won’t do it, then civilian vigilantes will, especially of it’s a matter of life and death. And believe me, there are enough people dead and missing in this latest round of brush and forest fires for local people to take it all very seriously indeed.

    From the link:

    Oregon residents are illegally stopping drivers at gunpoint during wildfire evacuations, sheriff says.

    For the most part, Portland police merely caught and released the many people committing illegal acts in Portland during the last 3 months. Had Portland police actually enforced the law, Oregonians would be less inclined to take policing functions into their own hands.

  9. Sergeant mom with the caveat that my German is far from fluent I would vary that translation just a bit. At least my interpretation is “ There, where one Burns books, one also burns the end of mankind“

    Good analogy made of the differences in the insurrections of the 60s and 70s and today, i.e., no tacit support from the city governments

    Was not aware of the hostility blacks have towards Hispanics. But if there is, God forbid, a race war there are far more Hispanics

    I view a lot of this as “reap what we sow“ going back to the 60s. And so many children growing up what I would call feral with no discipline or limits

  10. Yeah sure. We are socked in on Vancouver Island with smoke from your fires in California and Oregon, for the last week now. The west coast of BC and Vancouver Island are experiencing a lot of smoke.

    That’s supposed to be from a couple of your bad apples, setting fires. Its climate change in fact and it will just get worse as time goes by, and no one does anything.

    One of the reasons I don’t like guns, is that if you pull one on me, I will need to teach you not to. That could get me killed, so keep your guns, and we will get rid of ours as we see fit. Assault weapons are outlawed now in Canada.

  11. Bill, it’s a rephrase of a translation – my German is also pretty rusty. The … epic resentment betwixt Black and Brown is also pretty well marked, here and there. IIRC, Compton used to be mostly Black – and now it it is mostly Brown/Hispanic. I think Kirk made mention of this interesting phenomenon, in one of his comments a while ago.

  12. There used to be a lot of hostility between long time (many generations) resident Hispanics and illegals. Maybe not so much now but there’s more than a few that aren’t in favor of open borders. Some I knew would wax rather eloquently profane on the subject.

    I used to live in a place that had been settled from Mexico before the Mayflower.

  13. Maybe not so much now but there’s more than a few that aren’t in favor of open borders. Some I knew would wax rather eloquently profane on the subject.

    What was/were their point/points of view?

  15. Was not aware of the hostility blacks have towards Hispanics. But if there is, God forbid, a race war there are far more Hispanics

    It’s the other way round. I’m not sure how it began but I can remember when I was in college that Nat King Cole released a Spanish language album which died on the vine.

    Blacks have legitimate complaints about illegals but this BLM thing is not the way to go about it. Abortion has kept blacks at 13% of the population.

  16. pst314,
    Mostly a lack of sympathy. They knew what a corrupt mess Mexico was, most had family connections there but felt crossing illegally was jumping the line. Some was from being profiled long before that expression became current. And of course jobs.

    I’m very much in favor of controlled immigration but I have trouble getting very worked up about somebody crossing the border for a chance at a decent job.

    I know that Hispanics don’t like being taken for granted any better than the rest of us.

  17. Bill and Sarge: My German is pretty close to fluent. “verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” means (here) “one will burn, in the end, also human beings.” “verbrennt man auch das Ende der Menschheit” would have your meaning, Bill.

    I must say, I am happy to be living in a state with a robust castle doctrine.

  19. MCS:
    Not too sure of this guy’s commitment to the cause but his persistence is first rate.

    Sgt. Mom linked to an article about that, but from the dailywire website, at man-made origin. [Go up to her article for link.] Regarding which of the 2 links gives better information, I leave for others to decide.

  21. It’ll be a train wreck when it happens, but I feel nothing but a distinct sense of schadenfreude at the whole thing. The blacks who are stirring this stuff up at the behest of their masters in the various foundations and Soros-proxy organizations are going to be seriously disappointed at what happens when they cry for help after the pogroms start.

    I don’t know what the actual deal is with blacks in Mexico, but I do know that about every Mexican national or Mexican-derived ethnic hispanic that I’ve met has hated them with a passion I can’t even wrap my head around. You get the right stimulus going under the right conditions, and you’re going to hear things come out of Mexican mouths that would not sound out of place at a KKK rally or a Russian pogrom against the Jews. Hell, I think that some Grand Dragons of the KKK would be saying things like “Whoa, there, partner… That’s taking it a bit far… Why don’t you dial that back a bit…?”.

    One of the things that militates towards this stuff is the family structures–Black disinterest in being a father and filling that role flatly enrages the Mexicans on a deep level. This is why the Mexicans are likely to overtake the blacks and drive them out, because in a contest between family structures, the black single mother and serial father arrangements simply do not work when it comes to holding ground against Mexicans with the fully-committed fathers and various brothers acting as a group. Typical black behavior patterns in this regard generate nothing but contempt from Mexicans, and there’s a deep-level almost instinctive and automatic hatred that comes out when they see black males sniffing around “their” women. A white guy generates nothing like that sort of reaction, and while he probably won’t be welcomed with open arms, it’s not like he’s probably going to join his intended in a shallow grave somewhere, either.

    You want to know why and how Compton shifted from black to brown? That fact goes a long way towards explaining it. Black guy has an issue, he calls on his “homies”, street acquaintances. Most of whom will flake, and are not committed in the same way that the Mexican family structures are. Mexican guy has a beef, he calls on his brothers, cousins, nephews, and whatever else he has, and then they do the necessary. They don’t flake out because if they do, the family will cut them out. Don’t be that brother that doesn’t fall in on another brother’s issues–He’ll never get laid again. The women will cut him off, seeing him as a coward.

    There are very different group and family dynamics at play. The Mexicans are way more cohesive and organized about a lot of things, and they don’t play around at all. I would much rather have some group of black gang-bangers pissed off at me than a Mexican one. The blacks will likely be dead in five years, and will have forgotten I exist. Mexicans? Dude, you’ll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life, and odds are that some nephew will see your face in 20 years, remember, and then gut you like a fish.

    Long-term? Black America is done for. They’ll be erased, and any survivors will be subsumed into the general population the way blacks in Mexico itself have vanished. Most Mexicans will be calling themselves “white” in a few generations, and nobody will argue with them. The blacks will almost certainly be gone as an identifiable ethnicity that anyone will be willing to claim.

    Saddest thing about it? The final responsibility for that happening will be on them, and the people they let lead them off the cliff. The actual leaders, of course, will avoid responsibility for any of the coming disaster.

  22. Tucker just had on the guy from Climate Depot. Anyway, he noted we were having more and Canada fewer forest fires. Perhaps, that was because Canada voted “right” & “climate change” stops at the border.

    The feds, who own a huge percentage, should start fighting in earnest – esp. environmental groups that hogtie sensible forest management. Clearly Trump understands that’s a problem.

    Tucker asked when was the ideal time, temperature, etc – I told my husband that was obvious, it was perfect when we were young and healthy and the world was our oyster. It’s other people’s fault that it is no longer perfect.

  23. Sgt. Mom & Gringo,
    Whoops, sorry.

    Not a “climate change” fan but every time they mention climate change as a cause for anything. The response should be: “And how are you going to mitigate this in the future?”

    If it’s true, it’s not going away and even under the most draconian carbon restriction and will not get better in the foreseeable future. The believers and especially the politicians seem to imagine that mentioning climate change absolves them any and all responsibility for constructive action short of advocating for society to completely remake itself.

    The answer would be to do exactly what they should have been doing all along and haven’t because there were other, more exciting things to spend the money on. Like somebody living without electricity because they spent all their money on a party.

  24. The irony in this is that, if climate change is real, we should be doing the same things in forest management only with even more urgency. Thinning trees, harvesting dead trees, cutting forest roads, etc.

  25. PenGun
    That’s supposed to be from a couple of your bad apples, setting fires. Its climate change in fact and it will just get worse as time goes by, and no one does anything.

    FB “fact-checkers” say there is no evidence that the wildfires are set by arsonists.Obviously these fires start naturally, at regular intervals, right along a highway.

    Regarding PenGun’s alleged knowledge about the United States, I am reminded about the line about how to become wealthy: purchase an Argentine for what he’s worth, and sell an Argentine for what he thinks he’s worth.

    Similarly, PenGun’s knowledge about what he thinks he knows about the United States is much less than what he actually knows about the United States. And when PenGun gets called on that, his response is often, “But I’m just a furriner. I’m not expected to know much about the US.” Which has never stopped PenGun from giving us his 2 cents’ worth about the US.

  26. “IIRC, Compton used to be mostly Black – and now it it is mostly Brown/Hispanic.”

    I grew up in Compton. Left there around 1965. I was the white kid. Everyone else was Mexican.

    The blacks took it from the Mexicans in the 70’s.

    The Mexicans just took it back recently.

  27. I was in Watts that August when the SHTF, and escaped back towards Canada while guys were dropping concrete blocks off overpasses. Got out from my surfing adventure in the states, with a 54 Red Ram Firedome Hemi, for my Plymouth station wagon fix, and a lot of fond memories. Not far from Compton I believe. ;)

  29. Reporting on the California fires in the U.S. is positively sedate compared to what I’m seeing in the German media. “Der Spiegel” would have its readers believe that we’re seeing nothing less than the beginning of the long predicted climate change apocalypse. According to the headline that appeared at the top of their website yesterday, “The Catastrophe is here.”

    https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/waldbraende-in-den-usa-und-klimakrise-die-katastrophe-ist-da-a-6fd2a5e2-6de6-49eb-b9d7-a9990aa59eac

    The byline was no less alarmist: “A world, parts of which are uninhabitable. That has long been dismissed as a dystopia of the distant future. In fact, the catastrophe is beginning now, visible to all on the US west coast.”

    Reading further, we learn that the fires have vindicated Greta Thunberg and her warning to world leaders at Davos. According to Spiegel, “One can’t detect the slightest concern about the crisis among the majority of world leaders – flippant acceptance of the end of the world.” (!!)

    The article continues with more of the same, informed by the “scientific” certainty that the sole cause of the fires is climate change. If you think that many Americans are now living in a world of illusions, consider fact that the “news” media in Germany are far more monolithic than in the US. Germany has nothing to compare with our conservative talk radio, influential blogs and websites, and news sites that provide an alternative to the version of “reality” portrayed on CNN. Particularly when it comes to the US, they repeat each other like so many parrots (see the Relotius affair). As a result, many Germans seriously believe that the “Spiegel” version of reality actually reflects the real world.

  32. Helian,

    Parts of the earth might be uninhabitable by humans, because Germans live there, and if Germans take this stuff seriously they ought not be considered human beings. :)

    Anyway, there very much appears to be a disinformation campaign running in Germany at Merkel’s behest. Germans are only formally allies of the Americans.

    Montreal Accord, etc., are a pretty clear justification for considering international cooperation nonsense. Banning refrigerants every decade or so has rather huge costs in reworking HVAC systems installed in buildings. To the extent that Europeans are willing to fight and die to insist on shared international environmental policy, they are enemies.

    The Germans have had two wars against the United States, without being exterminated. I do not think that a fourth war should be permitted. I see zero signs of anyone in American policy being aware of this.

    And Carthage must be erased.

  34. }}} and insisting there is no credible evidence for Antifa/BLM activists going out and setting fires.

    I have to say, that photo of those antifa-flag waving “campers” who happen to have a visible PLASTIC GAS CONTAINER strapped to one of their backs…

    I dunno… kind of a trout in the milk, to be honest.

  35. }}} We are socked in on Vancouver Island with smoke from your fires in California and Oregon, for the last week now.

    Gonna be REALLY ephing hilarious when we have two of the coldest years in decades, as all the smoke particles block the warmth of the sun enough that we fail to experience anything like “global warming”

  36. OBloodyHell,
    If you meant to put a link in your post, it didn’t work.

    I’ve already made plans to lay in a supply of deicer before it becomes impossible to get. We got several rains last winter that would have been feet of snow if it had been a little colder. Deicer wouldn’t help that, but we tend to get ice storms.

    When the Texas Hill country exploded a few years back, I don’t remember climate change being blamed.

  41. I use weasel words because I’m open to counterarguments against the validity of both the pic and the youtube vid.

  42. OBloodyHell,
    I think the weasel words are appropriate. The picture, especially the flag looks odd to me. The cropping is odd also. As far as the gas can, look in the foreground and you see a chainsaw. A completely routine tool for wild land fire fighting. If the can were yellow, it would be kerosene for the drip torches, also completely routine. They do use fire to fight fire.

    Couldn’t make it past the first ten seconds of the video, not going to try to sit through 40 minutes.

  43. I’m slow this morning. It’s fake, fakety fake fake. The cropping is to make it less obvious that a credit notice and or time stamp was removed from one corner. The flag looks so stiff because they are actually holding up a sign of some sort. Not even as good as I could make which is pretty bad.

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