Tesoro To Buy Western Refining -- November 17, 2016

Data points from The Wall Street Journal:

• $4.1 billion
• Western has refineries in: TX, NM, MN (St Paul, see below)
• Tesoro has refineries in: CA, WA, AK, UT, ND
• $37.30/share in cash; a 22% premium over Western's closing price Wednesday

Also here, in bizjournals:

• Tesoro will have a much larger presence in Minnesota
• St Paul Park oil refinery and affiliated chain of SuperAmerica gas station stores

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Firefox Will Allow iPhone Users to Block "Ad-Trackers"

Huge. Over at The Wall Street Journal.

Firefox Focus: a no-tracking browser.

Personally, I enjoy "ad-tracking" browsers. What I would like:

• ads that take up little bandwidth (load quickly)
• don't slow down the "parent site" being accessed
• more targeted ads
• no audio without permission
• more free stuff through ads that find me

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The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

Susan Faludi

c. 2007

DDS: 306.2

From pages 271 - 272:

In part to counteract such troubling reality (frontier white women willingly marrying native Americans), rape in Indian captivity would become a fixation by the mid-nineteenth century in newspapers and periodicals, literature, and art. 

The fear was not a response to a clear and present danger: Indian rape of captives was actually fairly uncommon, as it had been since the earliest abductions. 

Rowlandson was one of many captives to remark on its absence: "Not one of them ever offered the least abuse of unchastity to me, in word or action." She attributed the restraint to God, but numerous North American tribes subscribed to an ethic of strict chastity while on the warpath and an incest taboo afterward. While this was particularly true of the eastern tribes (some of whom regarded rape as a capital offense), North American Indians in general took captives, particularly younger ones, to adopt them, not to turn them into love slaves; the point was to replace family members lost in battle. (The Europeans introduced, of course, a second motive: money. Taking captives to collect a ransom was the byproduct of the colonial era.)

When historian Susan Armitage searched first-person accounts by nineteenth-century pioneer women in the Far West, she found no reports of rape, or even expressions of fear of rape. Nor have frontier scholars found evidence of coerced marriage.

"Not only were younger captives and consenting adults under no compulsion, either actual or perceived, to marry, but they enjoyed as wide a latitude of choice as any Indian," James Axtell wrote in The European and the Indian. In fact, "so free from compulsio were the captives that several married fellow white prisoners."