Phantom reviews Star Wars! (no spoilers!)

Went to Star Wars The Force Awakens last night, Christmas Eve.

It did not suck! Amazing! Worth the ticket price.

That said, there have been better movies. There were a few clunky bits, and poor old Harrison Ford was on-screen way more than he should have been. The guy just looked tired and sore, particularly compared to the bouncing ball of energy that is Daisy Ridley. That girl was on freaking fire in this flick.

My movie companion was moved to tears when Carrie Fisher came on the screen. It's really sad how old and busted that woman appeared. I hope it was all movie magic, because damn. She moves like it hurts. A lot. Worse than watching Arnold Schwarzenegger try to run. Don't get me wrong, it works for the movie. But it'll make you cry if you're a Princess Leia fan.

Mark Hamill finally looks like a f-ing ancient Jedi ass-kicker ought to look. Age is better to some than others.

 Finally, Canadians will laugh when the bad guy takes off his helmet. No spoilers, but you're going to say "Don't I know that guy?"

All things considered, it was everything one expects from a Star Wars movie, without the lameness of George Lucas directing. JJ Abrams got a good performance out of all of them. Well done!

Merry Christmas!

This is the next Lefty scam: water scarcity.

USA Today: Oh Noes! We are running out of WATERZ!!!!

Time is running out for portions of the High Plains Aquifer, which lies beneath eight states from South Dakota to Texas and is the lifeblood of one of the world's most productive farming economies. The aquifer, also known as the Ogallala, makes possible about one-fifth of the country's output of corn, wheat and cattle. But its levels have been rapidly declining, and with each passing year more wells are going dry.
As less water pours from wells, some farmers are adapting by switching to different crops. Others are shutting down their drained wells and trying to scratch out a living as dryland farmers, relying only on the rains.
In parts of western Kansas, the groundwater has already been exhausted and very little can be extracted for irrigation. In other areas, the remaining water could be mostly used up within a decade.

Cue the Greenies, with their hair tearing and garment rending, their sack cloth and ashes, to blame Consumerism for this Crisis.

One question, what group thinks it's a good idea to burn corn as ethanol?

That's right kids, Greenies!

Look for this one to start getting pushed good and hard, as Glowball Warmening begins to falter after the 2016 election.

The Phantom Forecaster

Obama "Is my face red?" dept.

Yesterday, Obama gave a speech saying that Americans should not be able to buy gun if they are on the "No-Fly" list.

Today, we discover 72 Department of Homeland Security employees are on the "No-Fly" list.

Really. I couldn't make something like that up.

The Phantom

My comment on the San Bernadino attack.

1) I'm very sorry that people died and were badly hurt because California liberals are afraid of guns. Perhaps if gun-free zones were outlawed this kind of atrocity would be a thing of the past.

2) From Market Watch:

"Shares of the two publicly traded gun makers rallied on Monday, a day after President Barack Obama gave a prime-time address calling for a modest reduction in the availability of firearms."

That is about all there is to say, I do believe.

The Phantom

Told you: FBI reveals depth of information requests.

Further to the SHUT UP!!! they explained post , the FBI 'requests' for information amount to the complete internet history of any named individual, no warrant required.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual's complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing released Monday shows.

The documents are believed to be the first time the government has provided details of its so-called national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval.

The filing made public Monday was the result of an 11-year-old legal battle waged by Nicholas Merrill, founder of Calyx Internet Access, a hosted service provider, who refused to comply with a national security letter (NSL) he received in 2004.

Merrill told Reuters the release was significant "because the public deserves to know how the government is gathering information without warrants on Americans who are not even suspected of a crime."

What's bullshit about this is not that the FBI can get all that without a warrant. No, the true bullshit, the real lie, is that they need to ask. ALL that data plus a lot more is already in NSA databases, and they do share it with the FBI.

The FBI sends these letters to provide a fig-leaf for use in court, not because they require the cooperation of the ISPs and the phone company. They already have your complete web history on call, on a whim. The letters are so they can admit in court to knowing things they are not supposed to be able to know.

Anyone not wondering how big the FBI porn stash of sexy selfies has grown is an idiot. I will bet dollars against donuts that any good-looking woman who thinks her 'secret' photos remain secret is dreaming in technicolor. My advice, if you want to take sexy selfies, use a Polaroid camera.

The Phantom

SHUT UP!!! they explained.

The process -is- the punishment. Government appealed a court decision to lift a gag order for 11 years, lost every single time. Kept it up anyway. No particular reason, just because they could.

For years after receiving a national security letter from the FBI, he was an anonymous litigant and unnamed op-ed writer, barred by a gag order from revealing that he had received a warrantless demand for customer information. Now, Nicholas Merrill's gag order has been lifted in full, and – apparently for the first time – an NSL recipient can speak openly without fear of punishment.

Merrill, owner of now-defunct Calyx Internet Access, provided Internet service to about 200 customers when he received the order in February 2004. He refused to turn over the records of the targeted customer and went to court with American Civil Liberties Union representation. 

Merrill won the right to identify himself in 2010, but could not say what the ultimately withdrawn letter said. In August, a federal judge ordered the associated gag order lifted, with a 90-day pause to allow the Justice Department time to appeal, which it chose not to do.

I'd be fascinated to know how much that cost, and exactly who thought that expenditure was reasonable. Like, with names and faces.

The Phantom

This is where 'eat me last' gets you.

The remarkably socialist, one might even say pinko-led Church of England has received an extraordinary rebuke. From the Left!

They can't run a PAID advertisement featuring the Lord's Prayer in English movie theaters the week before Christmas. No, really.

The advert, produced by JustPray.uk, shows the Lord's Prayer being recited by a members of the public ranging from bodybuilders to children, and also features the Most Rev Justin Welby.
A CoE spokesman said it was initially believed that their minute-long advert had been approved and would be played before showings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens from December 18.
They were later informed that, due to a DCM policy not to run adverts which could potentially cause offence, the video would not be shown.
When asked for a copy of that policy, CoE was told there is no formal policy document but that it had been agreed with the DCM's members.
There is now a formal policy on the DCM's website, which states: "To be approved, an advertisement must ... not in the reasonable opinion of DCM constitute political or religious advertising."

Please note this is not a PSA or some other free donated-time thing. This is a bought-and-paid-for advertisement. A one minute spot of people reciting the Lord's Prayer. Can't show it. Too offensive. Running with scissors.

The delicious irony for me is that this kind of thing is exactly what the Lefty minions of the Church of England have been working toward since World War Two ended. The notion that secular theaters SHOULD NOT feature religion in any way, shape or form is one that CoE upper management embraces wholeheartedly.

We have a similar situation in Canada with the United Church of Canada. If you go to certain UCC churches in Toronto, you may be able to go through an entire service and not hear anything overtly Christian the whole time. The gay minister may not even mention Jesus. Because it wouldn't do to OFFEND anyone, y'know. It's all about Social Justice and doing Good Works and all that great lefty stuff.

All of which boils down to a corporation that defines itself as a church but acts like a retail store, changing it's wares to appeal to new customers and begging the ever-more-rapaciaous taxman regulators to eat them last.

The trouble with eat-me-last as a strategy is that eventually, if you wait long enough, you get eaten.

The other thing is that the movie chains are not banning the ad out of some SJW yearning to make everything fair for everyone and Kumbaya. Nuh uh. They're banning it because they are terrified of having their theaters burnt down by hordes of militant Mooselimbs being offended at the very existence of the Church of England in... England.

The movie chain guys are not wrong of course. Their know their audience. If that ad gets shown, theaters in some parts of England will probably get burnt down. At the very least there will be "unrest", as Monty Python says.

More delicious irony, which denomination is number one for "outreach" these days? Church of England! They just love that multi-cultural exchange stuff, makes 'em feel all warm and fuzzy, and keeps the government grants flowing through their coffers. Gotta keep the roofs patched on all those ancient church buildings y'know.

This is why I don't like churches as a general thing. They behave a lot more like a retail real estate investment trust (REIT) than a religious organization that believes in stuff. If I want to see wishy-washy salesmanship I'll go to the mall, thanks.

The Retail Religion Phantom.

Instant update! Superblogger and fabulous short person Kathy Shaidle sent this in a minute ago: Famous Atheist (and all-round dick, IMHO) Richard Dawkins comes out in support of the Church of England.

“My immediate response was to tweet that it was a violation of freedom of speech,” Dawkins told the Guardian. “But I deleted it when respondents convinced me that it was a matter of commercial judgment on the part of the cinemas, not so much a free speech issue.”

“I still strongly object to suppressing the ads on the grounds that they might ‘offend’ people,” he said. “If anybody is ‘offended’ by something so trivial as a prayer, they deserve to be offended.”

Yeah, the "commercial judgement" was that they didn't want their theaters burnt down, and between the lines Dawkins knows it.

Mr. Dawkins, dick though he may be, realizes that an Islamic England is going to be one where he gets hanged, or possibly stoned to death, drawn, quartered, burnt at the stake or suffers some other medieval atrocity simply for being an atheist. He, unlike the CoE, realizes eat-me-last is not a winning strategy. 

Even a blind pig finds the odd acorn.

Paris

I suppose I have to comment on this, it isn't like if we all ignore it it'll go away.

First, my condolences to everybody who lost someone on Friday night, or who got wounded.

Second, this is all down to policy decisions made back in the 1950s or even earlier. Disarm the average citizen, propagandize them to be passive in the face of violence, make them believe that only police have the moral right to use force.

That mindset is what got us where we are today. The official policy of Western governments is that citizens shall wait for the police, and the police will do the shooting. Any citizen who does not wait for the police will be subjected to The Process, which will be long, arduous and ultimately pointless.

It's credentialism, basically. The idea that if you want the best job, you get the experts who have been trained and tested. Like a doctor or a plumber. The industrial model of social justice.

Now, this model has it's advantages. It makes everything very convenient for police forces and governments, it creates very large budgets for police forces and justice bureaucracies, and it gives politicians something to campaign on. Lefties run on Compassion, righties run on Law and Order. Two sides of the same coin, credentialism. No one questions the model, because the model is their iron rice bowl.

In Western societies where there basically is no crime to speak of, it works well enough to get by. Meaning it doesn't work at all for the victims of crime, but they are few and don't have a platform to make a fuss. The wealthy and powerful get a special deal from police forces, and the rest of us get by ok. Mostly.

Places where crime is high of course it doesn't work at all, but again nobody cares about non-white ghettos or the poor. Those People don't matter, what can you expect from them anyway. Liberals like to -say- they care, but when you turn the sound off, they act like they don't care.

Now we add one more variable, the politically motivated Mass Migration.

In America back when cotton was king, they imported slaves. In their hundreds of thousands, Africans were purchased from Arab slavers and brought to North America. The one reason this was done, they wanted Cheap Labor.

Fast forward to 2015, South Americans and Mooselimbs from the Middle East are being imported in their millions. Same reason, Cheap Labor. And gee whiz, it's working about the same as slavery did. As in, not well.

Suddenly, the credentialist model isn't working and it can't be swept under the carpet anymore. Cops aren't there when the trouble happens, nobody can do anything about it except run away. People die.

This Paris attack was inevitable. The French imported people from a region where they are having a religious war. Surprise, they continued the war, except now it's in France. Inevitably terrorists are going to attack anyplace where more than three people are gathered and unarmed. It's like magnetism, they'll always go there. In a disarmed population, five shooters can kill a lot of people.

In an armed population, they may not manage to kill anyone. That's why the Palestinians switched to suicide bombs in Israel, their rifle squads were getting eliminated by the intended victims before they could get a round off. Mohamed pulls out an AK-47 at the grocery store, and before he's finished yelling Allah Akbar some old lady shoots him in the  head. That's how it goes in an armed population.

Of two things we can be certain, therefore. There will be terror attacks. They will grow in number and intensity, because it's like a popular movement. All the cool kids are doing it. The official response will be to rearrange the deck chairs on their ship of fools. More cops,bigger guns, security checks, the whole Police State trip. That's what they're going to do. For sure. And more gun control, because police states like gun control, it makes everything more neat and tidy for the police.

The other thing is, people will ignore the police state and arm themselves when it starts to get bad. Already there are no guns available in European stores and ammo is on back order because it has all been bought up. Europeans are arming themselves, the same Europeans that vote for more-bigger-better gun control every year. Right now they are buying shotguns and keeping them in the closet. After a few more Paris attacks they will be carrying shotguns, and the cops will be looking the other way.

If the Liberal Party of Canada does what they're saying they will right now, that's what our future in Canada will be as well. I'm not looking forward to it.

Those two things are 100% lead-pipe certain. Likely but not guaranteed, a civil war and ethnic cleansing of Europe. Every two or three generations Europe has one of these events throughout history. They're about due. Maybe they'll manage to skip it this time, so far it's not looking good.

The Phantom

November 11th, 2015.

We do not forget.

Wait, I thought casting didn't matter!

This is confusing.

The casting of a white actor as Martin Luther King in an Ohio university production of Katori Hall's acclaimed play The Mountaintop was "a disservice to not just Dr King but an entire community", the playwright has said.

Hall wrote an essay for the African American cultural website the Root on Monday about Kent State University's production of her play, which dramatizes the night before King was assassinated in 1968.

Hall told the Guardian that director Michael Oatman's decision to double-cast the six-show production with a black actor and a white actor as King went "deeper than just casting a white man in the role of MLK".

"I just really feel as though it echoes this pervasive erasure of the black body and the silencing of a black community – theatrically and also, literally, in the world," she said.

Oatman, who like Hall is black, said in a statement in August promoting the play that he chose a white actor for the production "to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity".

So casting a historical character who is black with a white actor is racism? But wait! Don't I recall that merely objecting to the casting of a white character with a black actor was racism?

Yes I do recall that. That post is one of the most-read things I've ever written. Every week it gets hits. Objecting that they cast Johnny Storm with a black actor is nerd racism my friends. Lots of people say so.

And you know, they cast a black guy in the movie to play the white character, then amazingly enough, Stan Lee did NOT write an essay for some white culture website complaining that the switch was "a disservice to not just the Fantastic Four but an entire community!"

You know what happened instead? All us comic fans got told to shut up.

I decided shutting up would be boring, so I went out on a limb and said any movie that casts a white character with a black actor to get PC points is going to suck. Behold, it did suck. The FF movie came out and dropped off the face of the Earth two weeks later. Because, of course, it sucked hard.

Casting does matter. Duh. Casting Martin Luther King with a white actor is stupid. The play will suck. It will suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

I'm waiting for J.F. Sargent to call Katori Hall a racist, in keeping with his thesis that objections to race switching in movies is racism. Got my popcorn right here.

The Phantom.

Death marches in Europe. Toldja.

No one. Ever. Listens.

But having encouraged people to move, the Europeans are now pulling up the drawbridge because they have found dealing with the influx overwhelming. Where were the preparations? Why were fleets of buses and trains and boats not laid on at the borders of the EU to bring people safely to Germany, which is, after all, where most people are headed?

Why were arrangements not made? Two reasons, the first being practicality. It is politically and economically unfeasible to do what is currently being done in Europe. If anyone saw their government making arrangements to do it gracefully, they would find out how much it is going to cost, and they would stop it. The cost of trucking that many migrants to Germany is, on the grand scale of government spending, not high. The cost of feeding and housing them, reachable.

The cost of funding their welfare payments in perpetuity? It's not going to happen, is how high that is. Because it will cost more money than there is in Europe. They aren't going to get jobs in Germany and become productive German citizens, because THERE AREN'T THAT MANY JOBS available. And there never, ever will be. And everybody knows it.

But that's not the real reason there are no buses or trains. The real reason is that this is a -spectacle-. This is a circus act! The Great and the Good of the German intelligentsia are putting on a show featuring other people's pain, paid for with other people's money, for political gain. They are happy to have thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of itinerant Mooselimbs DIE this winter, so that they can run pictures of the corpses in all the newspapers. Then presumably they get the thing that they want, which probably boils down to money.

How many guys had heart attacks so the EU could take this picture?

They are doing this deliberately, because they want that picture. The picture is the reason.

Somebody please tell me again how the socialists are the friends of the Little Guy. And remind me when the socialists INEVITABLY start machine-gunning columns of people in front of hastily dug trenches.

They do it because they care, right?

The Phantom

Tiny House sales job: making poverty cool.

The Cognoscenti have decided you shall live in a refrigerator box on wheels, and you shall be grateful for the opportunity. If you really do well, they will give you a shipping container. You filthy peasant.

Looks like Architectural Digest, don't it?

For San Franciscans, the rent refuge is here in Oakland, where the rates are increasing as well — so much so that young professionals are living in repurposed shipping containers while the homeless are lugging around coffinlike sleeping boxes on wheels.

These two improvised housing arrangements have emerged in an industrial pocket of Oakland where the median rent has gone up by 20 percent over the past year. One, in a warehouse, is called Containertopia, a community of young people who have set up a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers like ones used in the Port of Oakland. Each resident pays $600 a month to live in a container, which can be modified with things like insulation, glass doors, electrical outlets, solar panels and a self-contained shower and toilet.

Container "which can be modified" sounds pretty crappy. Could it be worse? Yes it could!

The artist, with one of his "tiny houses". Note the bucket. It's not for champagne.

Just outside the warehouse doors is another community, residing, too, in containers of a sort. Here, the homeless live in dwellings made by a local artist named Gregory Kloehn, set on wheels and made for the streets. Each is about eight feet long and tall enough for a person to sit up in.

"It doesn't fit our mind-set of what a home is," said Mr. Kloehn, 44, who began creating and giving away the portable homes, which are made of recycled material, in 2011.

Imagine yourself walking out the door of your lovely container, with it's "self contained" toilet that you have to empty by hand. Because no plumbing, my friends! So here you are, walking out the door of your container with a bucket of toilet leavings (don't spill it!!!) and you hump this fifty pound thing down the FIVE FLIGHTS of stairs to chuck it in the communal poo disposal (which you pay for, don't forget, because no plumbing!)

And on the curb, in front of the beautiful, multicolored container stack you call home, is some bum with a brightly painted hand cart. He's setting up camp on the sidewalk and emptying his own poo bucket into the gutter. Where it will stink for all eternity, because this is California and it never rains, therefore the poo will never be washed away.

Sounds like an awesome place to raise your kids, doesn't it?

It isn't recycled material. It's junk. You're living in a makeshift pile of junk that other people threw out.

It's not a tiny house. Its a shack, or possibly a hand-cart.

You're not a hipster. You're a bum.

It isn't an alternative lifestyle. It's SQUALOR, and it isn't good for you.

Oh, and by the way. Mr. Kloehn isn't an artist. He's a would-be aristo with no visible means of support. I'd be fascinated to find out where his money comes from.

The Phantom

Shipping Containers the New Hotness in Architecture

Architecture is yet another field of endeavor hopelessly ruined by Marxism and the shadow of Central Planning. Evidence for today, they would very much like to replace proper apartment buildings with stacks of shipping containers.

Advocates for shipping container homes say speed of installation, cost savings on materials and the capacity to re-use units in new locations make it a serious option for urban housing. The latest exhibition at The Building Centre in central London captures the trend. Designers are offering lunchtime tours of a model shipping container home, asking whether these "highly adaptable and move-able" objects might play a much bigger role in easing the housing crisis.

Instant slums, designed to hide away the excess unemployed and unwanted "migrants" as cheaply as possible. They aren't even pretending otherwise, a somewhat refreshing change from the usual housing project bullroar. They're attempting to hitch on to the tail of the "Tiny House" hipster thing, but that seems to be burning out as more and more hipsters realize "Tiny House" = shack.

I want you to imagine a stack of shipping containers, five high. Each one filled with combustible rug, furniture, bedding. Inhabited by drunks and drug addicts... and you. Because Big Brother said this is where you get to live.

Drug addict Bob is making hash oil out of "medical marijuana"  in his "kitchen" using butane. He lives on the ground floor. Oops, Bob lights his container on fire because he is a brain damaged dumb-ass.

A fire in a stack of shipping containers. Be a hell of a thing, wouldn't it?

The Phantom.

The new war on biceps.

Yes, apparently having muscles is now bad. Who knew?

Political correctness has value, Katz said. Supporters of presidential candidate Donald Trump say like they him for "not being politically correct," but what they really mean is they like him "for saying racist and sexist comments," Katz added.

Pop culture also has an insidious effect on masculinity, Katz continued, imploring the audience not to "check your brain and moral conscience when you go to the movies."

He showed clips from his film Tough Guise, in which Katz claims "there has been a ratcheting up of what it takes to be considered menacing in the 1980s and 90s."

As evidence, Katz noted that G.I. Joe's biceps have gotten larger over the years and that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone use bigger guns for their iconic roles as the Terminator and Rambo than did Humphrey Bogart in his 1930s and 1940s film roles.

I want to ask this guy, if biceps and and six-pack abs are bad, how about beard stubble and a beer gut?

The Phantom

The problem with back doors in computers.

My previous post dealt with the possibility that your hard drive my not be deleting things when you tell it to. This is not to your benefit, it is to someone else's. Probably the FBI/DHS/ABCDEFG branch of the US government. They can do things like that, and we know they have been.

Now, there is a problem with this kind of thing, and it is that doors open for whoever has the key. They can also be kicked open.

There's still "only" 21.5-million federal employees whose personnel data have been stolen, but the Office of Personnel Management now admits that they've found that the number of individuals whose fingerprints were swiped is up to 5.6 million.

This is of course the much under-publicized hack of the United States government Office of Personnel Management. Criminals and/or enemy foreign governments have the complete, searchable, exhaustive list of US government employees. With pictures and all sorts of personal info that people are not supposed to know about.

Its a disaster. I don't mean a disaster like a house burnt down, or a storm. I mean a disaster like the Great Chicago Fire, or the San Francisco Earthquake. Foreign governments know -exactly- who works for the US government. It's literally the largest breach of confidentiality in human history. No government has ever fucked up this badly anywhere else, ever.

Question arises, how can something like this happen? How can the government keep their Crown Jewel of digital information on something so crappy that people can steal it?

Well, if hard drives keep secret copies of things that can only be accessed by people with the proper codes, and if iPhones keep track of your movements whether you like it or not and transmit that data to Apple, and if the government has built back doors into popular processors so that they can defeat an air gap if they want, what if somebody else got hold of those codes?

What if somebody reverse engineered those government mandated back doors? Somebody like the manufacturer for example, who resides in China?

The US government runs on computers made in China. Because that's where computers are made these days.

Gee, I wonder how they hacked the OPM? Well, no, actually I wonder wheat else they hacked that nobody told us about.

The Phantom

On the subject of wiping hard drives.

Most of us have a box of old hard drives kicking around. Here's something rather alarming pointed out at Small Dead Animals today by Lance.

From the article on the WIPE utility:

NOTE ABOUT JOURNALING FILESYSTEMS AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS (JUNE 2004)

Journaling filesystems (such as Ext3 or ReiserFS) are now being used by default by most Linux distributions. No secure deletion program that does filesystem-level calls can sanitize files on such filesystems, because sensitive data and metadata can be written to the journal, which cannot be readily accessed. Per-file secure deletion is better implemented in the operating system.

Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partition.

Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your disk). Wiping size issues have been hopefully fixed (I apologize for the long delay).

Be aware that harddisks are quite intelligent beasts those days. They transparently remap defective blocks. This means that the disk can keep an albeit corrupted (maybe slightly) but inaccessible and unerasable copy of some of your data. Modern disks are said to have about 100% transparent remapping capacity. You can have a look at recent discussions on Slashdot.

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.

Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU, and so on. I guess there are also "traps" in the CPU and, in fact, in every sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip. Wealthy nations can find those. Therefore these are mainly used for criminal investigation and "control of public dissent".

People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS.

Emphasis mine. Please note, this is a very informed opinion, but still only speculation.

For no particular reason, I will now link to an article on how to build a forge. Please note, this article has you building something quite permanent and complicated. I've seen good results with a used brake drum, a length of flexible ducting and a hair dryer.

Interesting random science note, did you know that striking a piece of metal with a hammer changes the crystal structure of the metal, and moves its magnetic properties around as well?

Interesting random link to an old article of mine.

Toldja. Templehof airport = new refugee camp.

Even a cursory reading of history, plus the most passing acquaintance with almost any German, tells you that the one thing Germans can't stand is things being untidy. Drives them nuts. They see something out of place, and they go fix it.

What's more untidy than a million Syrians trying to get on German welfare all at the same time? Nothing.

Germans have to fix it. They have to, its a cultural imperative perhaps on the same level as procreation.

Therefore, we are presented with a shiny new CAMP, in Berlin.

Now, the old airport at Tempelhof is about to find yet another incarnation: sheltering some among the massive surge of the migrants and refugees flooding into Germany. Berlin's mayor, Michael Mueller, told the RBB broadcaster over the weekend that one of the airfield's former hangars will be used to provide a roof – a lofty one at that - over the heads of about 800 asylum-seekers, as early as this week.
The need is great. Since the start of the current influx, the German capital has been receiving about 1,000 newcomers a day. More than 65,000 people have arrived in Germany this month, and the yearly tally may run to 1 million or more, officials now acknowledge. With winter fast approaching, housing is a crucial concern, with venues like a disused convention center and former military barracks being pressed into service.

Also mentioned in the article, a new camp on the grounds of the former Spandau prison.

The question that remains is this: How many times can the average German see some random Syrian taking a dump in the gutter before he starts voting for the National Socialist German Workers Party again?

I give it six months.

The Phantom

Big Socialism tightening its grip on your car. You WILL be paying by the mile, and soon.

New York City announces pilot program to track your car 100% of the time.

It's a new city pilot program to track how you drive, when you drive, how fast your drive and how much gas you use.

The Department of Transportation says it will help fix street problems. Others say its like Big Brother is watching you, CBS2's Marcia Kramer reported Friday.

It's a tiny black box about the size of a pack of gum that is installed right under the steering wheel. It will allow city officials under a program called "Drive Smart" to collect and access data about how you drive — if you drive like a maniac, or if you're Mr. or Mrs. Slow Poke.

"It can tell the g-force of hard stopping or hard acceleration and a hard turn," DOT senior project manager Alex Keating said. "So the driver, as well as the service provider, are able to look at speeds, hard-breaking events, time of day and basic GPS."

City officials say they'll use to information to make the streets safer, but drivers can also allow various DOT partners to use the information. Allstate, for example, will give you insurance discounts of 10-30 percent, and Metropia will get you home faster with less congested routes — all of it hooked up to smartphone apps.

I've been over this ad nauseam. I'll spare you the histrionics this time.

What I will say is a word to all you smug idiots out there who don't have a car. You're sitting there thinking you are safe, nobody can get you. Right?

That's because you are stupid. If there is going to be a system in place capable of tracking every car in the city and assessing taxes on them for road usage:

• How long before that system gets extended to track your dog? Dog poo is an issue in NYC.
• How long before that system gets used to track your beloved bicycle? Hmm? Why should you frigging hipster dicks get a free ride?
• How long before you pay a pedestrian tax? Signals cost money, sidewalks are expensive. Water ain't free. Pay to breathe, maybe? We could live to see it.
  

If local governments are allowed to put a black box in your car, you will be wearing an ankle bracelet transmitter within twenty years at the most, all in the name of public safety. Except it will be a non-removable implant, probably stuck in your enormously fat ass so as to make it hard for you to sit down. Gotta lose that weight, citizen.

What is America's overall response to their government at this time? August gun sales hit another new record.

This is not a good thing, because if people feel strongly enough to -use- those guns, life will be hell for a really long time. Please see Syria for elucidation on the issue of what happens when an all-seeing, all controlling totalitarian regime finally comes apart.

"Migrants" now marching through Hungary.

Refugees begin marching to the border of Germany through Hungary, because there are no trains. That didn't take long.

BUDAPEST — After a day of defiance by increasingly desperate refugees, the government of Hungary metaphorically threw up its hands Friday and said it was offering to bus thousands of migrants to the Austrian border, sending the crisis spinning closer to the heart of the Continent.

An aide to Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in a statement that the buses would transport the thousands still thronging the Keleti railroad station in Budapest and the approximately 1,200 people who stormed out of the train station earlier on Friday and set off on foot toward the Austrian border.

Now we have a large number of people with zero equipment, zero supplies and zero clue what they're doing, walking from Budapest to Austria. Where they may or may not be allowed in. Let it rain or be cold for just two days, and this little stroll through the countryside will be a death march.

People will die from exposure. At first just the very old and the very young, but soon the middle aged, anyone who needs medication, anyone whose shoes are too tight, and so forth.

This is the socialism in action I've been talking about these many years. As the day follows the night, it always comes to this. You were warned. Don't come crying to me when it all comes unglued.

The Phantom

"We won't be taken to camps!" Uh, yeah you will.

With yesterday's searing picture of the poor little boy's body on the beach (which I am NOT going to post or link to!) seared firmly into the public consciousness, today we get this.

Police have stood down at Budapest's main railway station after a two-day standoff with refugees, sparking chaotic scenes.

Witnesses said people rushed platforms after the station's doors were opened, but officials said no trains would be running to western Europe.

Amid the confusion and an intial pause in which the station ran no services at all, some domestic trains were allowed to leave platforms headed for towns not far from the Austrian and Slovakian borders.

But reports from Hungary suggest refugees were hauled off those trains at the first stop west of Budapest, amid a hardening of the rhetoric surrounding the crisis from the Hungarian government.

The big tweet from this cluster fuck is the line, "We won't be taken to camps!"

But you know, they will. Camps are what is in the immediate future. Particularly in formerly Iron Curtain countries such as Hungary, but eventually there will be refugee camps in Germany and Britain. Most likely they will be official ones, with fences and guards. Less likely but still possible, they will be unofficial flops where refugees congregate because no place else will have them.

Camps, either way, are inevitable. As the day follows the night, there will be camps.

Because this is EUROPE, my friends. Camps and camp guards are a tradition in Europe. This is not their first rodeo, as the saying goes. There have been wars across the face of that continent that spanned HUNDREDS OF YEARS. There is -always- somebody on the run, some group displaced by war, some bunch of bastards on a killing spree.

What is remarkable in the Twentieth Century is not the wars, it is the really long peace in Europe. They had SEVENTY FABULOUS YEARS of peace! That never happens over there. Thirty to fifty is the most they ever get, historically. Typically it was about twenty five, just long enough to grow up a new crop of cannon fodder.

And of course, inevitably, instead of making the most of it and getting their shit together, they pissed it away on socialism, beer and skittles. The first fifty years I believe were peaceful due to the constant threat of the Soviet Union, the last thirty have been an orgy of stupidity as ever more asinine economic and political maneuvers have taken hold of the West.

The whole reason there even ARE any refugees is down to Socialists. This is their last frantic grab at power, to dilute the pool of ever-more-conservative voters with new serfs dependent on handouts from Big Jimmy Government.

So the Independent and every goddamn paper who rant that picture of the dead kid can kiss my ass. I know who's responsible for the little boy's death, and I am not the guy.

Here endeth the rant.

P.S. You know what comes after camps, right? Death marches and mass executions. Because European socialists are the ones in charge of this freak show, and that is how they roll.

Sasquan: Leftists throwing a tantrum.

As expected, the SJW crowd decided to burn it all down. Lots of no-awards tonight. Lots of -applause- for no-awards, which I found to be in very poor taste indeed. Way to be classy.

The only Hugo-related thing anybody is talking about anywhere is Sad Puppies. The reason there's no-awards tonight is Sad Puppies. The reason there was a record number of voters is Sad Puppies.

And oh yeah, the reason the winning novel, Three Body Problem was even on the ballot was Sad Puppies.

Looking forward to next year, when Sad Puppies 4 makes life interesting for the CHORFs. I got my $40 all warmed up and ready to spend.

On a personal note I'm a little bummed that the No Award dickheads managed to win so often, but my minor disappointment with that is more than outweighed by the massive victory we Sad Puppies have won this evening.

Dickheads chose to burn it all down rather than let a Sad Puppy win something. That's what this whole thing has been about since the beginning. That's what Larry Correia said waaaaay back at Sad Puppies #1 and 2, and proven again tonight.

Enjoy your no-awards, dickheads. I'm going to see about making you do it again next year. Maybe eight or nine consecutive years of no-award winning almost everything will impart a valuable communication to you.

As I've been saying...

New York Times -finally- catches up to The Phantom.

White unarmed teenager shot to death by police, nobody gives a shit.

Regarding the level of attention given to Mr. Hammond's death, a search of the Nexis news database showed that in the three weeks after he was killed, including the night of his death, there were 145 mentions of "Zachary Hammond" and "police" or "Zach Hammond" and "police" in United States newspapers and wire services. By comparison, there were 704 mentions of "Samuel DuBose" and "police" or "Sam DuBose" and "police" in the similar period after his death, and 1,593 mentions of "Walter L. Scott" and "police" or "Walter Scott" and "police" in the similar initial period. 

The lack of publicly disclosed video of Mr. Hammond's death helps explain much of why it has not drawn more notice, said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a longtime civil-rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala.

Yet he added: "The reality is that this killing maybe doesn't get quite as much attention because it doesn't fit into the current narrative that's sweeping the country."

The guy just had to lie, and say it was about the video. But then he couldn't stand it, and spilled the truth. Media does not give a shit about anybody, they just sell newspapers.

The New York Times is so desperate to sell their newspaper they are finally resorting to reporting the actual truth, having exhausted all other avenues.

Important safety tip to all you Lefties who created this police state we now live in: police states are -bad- because the cops can kill your teenage son over nothing, and you can't do shit about it because no one will help you.

Dear Lefties, you asked for it. Now you're getting it.  Both barrels.

The Phantom

Shock, surprise, new Fantastic Four movie sucks.

I didn't see it. I'm waiting for Netflix next month. But here's someone who did see it.

"Fantastic Four," the reboot of Marvel's original superhero gang starring Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Bell, should have had a subtitle. I'd suggest "Fantastic Four: Prologue!" or perhaps "Fantastic Four: Failure to Launch." The latest entry into the superhero sweepstakes is a leaden affair that seems to exist only to set up a sequel and doesn't even do a good job at that.

I did warn y'all that it was going to suck. Yes, I did.

How is it that the people responsible for hundred million dollar movies can't tell when stuff is going to suck, but we can tell just from the way they pick the cast?

Army considers armed citizens security risk.

From the You've Got To Be Kidding file:

The Army has warned its recruiters to treat the gun-toting civilians gathering at centers across the country in the wake of the Chattanooga, Tenn., shooting as a security threat.

Soldiers should avoid anyone standing outside the recruiting centers attempting to offer protection and report them to local law enforcement and the command if they feel threatened, according to a U.S. Army Recruiting Command policy letter issued Monday.

...

"I'm sure the citizens mean well, but we cannot assume this in every case and we do not want to advocate this behavior," according to the Army Command Operations Center-Security Division letter, which was authenticated by the service.

Recruiters were ordered not to interact or acknowledge the armed civilians, who have been greeted by a mix of concern, indifference and gratitude by the public.

"If questioned by these alleged concerned citizens, be polite, professional and terminate the conversation immediately and report the incident to local law enforcement …," the command advised.

As the incidents crop up around the country, police could be asked to confront the civilians with guns on the Army's behalf.

Really, there's not much to say, is there?

The Phantom.

NY Times mocks The Right over Waco.

The NY Times headline:

Memories of Waco Siege Continue to Fuel Far-Right Groups

Apparently 1993 was ancient history and we should have all forgotten by now.

The Phantom

IBM announces 7 nanometer chips.

It is here. The sub-ten nanometer feature size chip has arrived.

IBM said on Thursday that it had made working versions of ultradense computer chips, with roughly four times the capacity of today's most powerful chips.

The announcement, made on behalf of an international consortium led by IBM, the giant computer company, is part of an effort to manufacture the most advanced computer chips in New York's Hudson Valley, where IBM is investing $3 billion in a private-public partnership with New York State, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and equipment vendors.

What does this mean in English?  The diameter of a silicon atom is roughly 0.1 nanometers. These guys are selling a commercial chip where the features of chip, like the wires and the capacitors and the transistors are seven (7) nanometers wide.

That's 70 atoms wide, kiddies.

Can they make it smaller? Probably. Can they cut it in half again, down to 35 atoms wide, in another two years? Maybe. If there's money in it.

In the mean time, I'm going to be interested to see what this new 7 nanometer fab size can do. That's some serious business.

The Phantom

Big Brother watches you very cheaply now.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/us-company-gives-glimpse-into-future-of-government-surveillance/story-fnpjxnlk-1227431310819

Its very, very inexpensive.

Think about that for a minute.

The Phantom

Some things that caught my eye today.

These are some Drudge headlines that look... interesting when you put them next to each other.

Soldier causes panic going to mall in military gear for photo shoot... The guy went to the mall in his uniform, with his rifle.

UPDATE: Officials Warn of 'Lone Wolf' Attacks on July 4 Holiday... Soldiers in uniforms with rifles, at the mall.

...

First Gay Divorce Firm Opens In Philly... Nobody saw that coming.

Montana man requests right to marry two wives! Nobody saw that coming.

POLL: Support grows for states to ignore federal courts... Nobody saw that... oh, wait...

REPORT: Schools implant IUDs in 6th grade girls -- no parental notice... This is completely unrelated to anything. Yep. Uh huh.

...

Screaming Immigrants Disrupt Ann Coulter Signing...

Destroy books... Rumors that the screaming immigrants were bussed in, given lunch and paid $10/hr by the DemocRat Party were strongly denied by the White House. Or they would have been, if any reporter actually asked about it.

...

CLOUD TAX: Chicago NETFLIX Subscribers to Pay More... If it moves, tax it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.

...

BORDER BATTLE: 128 unaccompanied children apprehended per day... That seems like a lot.

Illegals discovered in shipment of onions... Were they crying?

CDC Official Blasts Obama After Influx...

'No country in world would allow'... But gee, isn't the unfettered immigration of the Third World's shoeless masses an undiluted good thing? What do you mean they have contagious untreatable diseases? Racist!!!

Fewer Californians got into UC -- while offers to foreign students rose... This is completely unrelated to anything.

Nothing to see here. Shut up and get back to work.

The Phantom

Pay by the mile road tax now a Real Thing.

I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.

Oregon's Department of Transportation has been working on it for 15 years as a way to eventually replace the gas tax, which has been flat due to an influx of high mileage vehicles and people driving less.

Right now the program is voluntary and being capped at 5,000 participants, but an ODOT official told Fox News the ultimate goal is to make it mandatory and change the way states pay for roads -- forever.

"We're trying to make up for a growing deficit, really, because inflation's eating away at our ability to buy asphalt and rebar and the things we need to maintain the roads," said Tom Fuller of the Oregon Department of Transportation.

According to a national usage fee alliance, 28 states are in various stages of following down the same road. However, there are also privacy concerns. Two of the three OReGO systems track and store a car's every move.

I did tell you. Yes indeedy doody, I certainly did.

The TOLDJA!!!!!! Phantom

Sir Tim Hunt update.

Further to this post about Sir Tim Hunt losing his job over a joke told at a dinner, we have new information. I saw this at Small Dead Animals, by way of Ace of Spades, and I think it needs to be spread as widely as possible.

From Legal Insurrection blog, the Truth about Connie St. Louis and her Tweet heard 'round the world:

New revelations about the speech and the context of the joke have surfaced. An account of a European Commission Official who took detailed minutes of the event adds key information absent from the original report:

According to the new account, Sir Tim started with: "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists," which makes clear he mocking sexism, rather than indulging in it. St. Louis reported this as Hunt simply admitting: "he has a reputation as a male chauvinist."

Immediately after the now infamous joke, according to the new evidence, he proceeded to make several very pro gender equality remarks, including: "Now seriously… Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me," which was similarly disregarded in St. Louis's twitter report.
Hunt has already protested that he added, "now seriously" to indicate the joke was over.

This new data comports with science education advocacy mission that had been part of Hunt's work until this incident.
Why, then, was this critical bit left on the cutting room floor from the original report? To answer that question, real investigative journalists at the Daily Mail began doing work reporters used to do — checking the background on the author of the original complaint about Hunt's speech.

Turns out, a lot what Connie St. Louis says ain't so. Including all that stuff she said about Sir Tim Hunt. Like, most of her CV is bullroar.

That's their caption, not mine. I just think she's your average SJW.

I hope the settlement Sir Tim wins from his former employer is large and paid quickly.

The Phantom

Government is ALWAYS the real problem.

Is it a problem when Bruce Jenner wants to use the girl's bathroom? No. Because one disordered guy isn't a problem. The girls in the bathroom at the time will take care of it.

Because there's maybe 0.01% of the population with transgender mental disorder. In the USA that a grand total of 30,000 people in the entire country. You could go your whole life and never meet one, outside of San Francisco.

But let government get involved?

The U.S. Justice Department says in a court filing that transgender students must be allowed to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity.

The department says in a statement of interest filed Monday that failure to do so amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972. The document is in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the Gloucester County School Board by a 16-year-old transgender student who wants to be allowed to use the boys' restroom.

See, that's a problem. Because what was once at most a minor altercation between a couple of individuals is now a multi-million dollar Federal case. We could -easily- see billions of dollars spent to modify every public washroom in the USA to accommodate 30,000 people who have nothing physically wrong with them. Think how many wheelchair accessible bathrooms were built on the second floor of buildings with no elevators. Billions. Of dollars.

And that's the point of the campaign in the first place. To give public money away for no reason to Friends of the regime.

Its a good time to be in the bathroom fixture business if you're a DemocRat.

I also note that nobody seems to care what the boys in the Gloucester County School Board want. I doubt they want to share the bathroom with some weird girl. But their wants and needs don't matter, because there's NO MONEY to be made catering to them.

The Phantom

The true face of our enemy.

Somebody sent me this excellent Bill Whittle piece today, which covers the massively racist history of the American DemocRat Party. Mr. Whittle lays it down and sets it on fire. Its awesome.

Problem is, IT DOESN'T MATTER. My brain works fine, I remember all this shit.

Now, here's an interesting thing. In -Canada-, nobody remembers the one major thing we did that was worse than the Americans, which was the internment of Japanese and Germans in WWII. Tens of thousands of Japanese Canadians (and German Canadians!) got chucked in camps after 1941, and they fucking well stayed there until 1949. They lost everything, property, houses, furniture, the lot. The government flat out stole it and sold it, and they never saw a dime of it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a DemocRat, did this in the USA, and the Supreme Court slapped his peepee for it.

Franky Baby.

William Lyon Mackenzie King, a LIBERAL, did it in Canada and nobody said jack shit about it. Nobody ever mentions the words "Liberal Party" and "Japanese Internment" in the same breath. Ever. You look at the Wikipedia page on this subject, the word "Liberal" does not appear until half way down the page, and is seen only one single time on the whole page.

Billy Mac.

Socialists are the ones who always start the death camps, Capitalists are the ones who pay to clean up the skeletons afterward. Brian Mulroney, a CONSERVATIVE, finally apologized for this purely Canadian LIBERAL atrocity and paid reparations to those internees still living.

Facts do not matter a tinker's damn. This is a smoke and mirror campaign. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

I will go further, and say that the ruling Republicans are fully on-side with the DemocRats, and they all get their money from the same pot. This last couple of months has both sides kicking the ball at the same goal as hard as they can, and the US Supreme Court is out there beside them in the black robes kicking away too.

Because, given that the NSA records every fucking thing, don't you think they've got John Boehner's phone calls to his under-age boytoys, or whatever insane shit that guy is into? See Denny Hastert for clarification, right? Turns out Billy Clinton was a paragon of virtue next to Denny "Wild Thing" Hastert.

I've got five bucks says they are ALL like that. I bet you ever single one of those ranking Republican knobs is in that job solely for the perve-perks. They've got an illegal pervy itch, and the only way they can scratch it is to own the law. Under-age brothels, bath house play time, who the fuck knows what kind of perverse shit they get up to? I'm 100% sure I do not -want- to know, it would probably be one of those things that just knowing about it makes you feel dirty for the rest of your life.

I really don't want to know, Barry. Really.

Its not Republicans vs. Democrats anymore. Not now. Now, I am of the opinion that it is Dem-Publicans vs. the American Population. Republi-Crats vs. mom and apple pie and church on Sunday. I don't even go to church on Sunday, and it pisses me off the way they attack Christianity at every turn. Christianity is the biggest thing in their way, just like Stalin and Mao.

And you know what? The Liberals and the DemocRats are going to do it again. Let the insane fucks that are ISIS light off a nuke someplace, and the Liberals will chuck every fucking Mooselimb in Canada into concentration camps in the Yukon. In a heartbeat.

Because Liberals are cowardly, corrupt, back-shooting, sexually perverted murderers of the innocent.

There's a federal election coming up in Canada. Just to make things perfectly crystal clear for y'all, a vote for the Shiny Pony Liberals is a vote for marching Mooselimbs to internment camps. Because that's what they're going to do the second it is politically expedient to do so. Which may be pretty soon.

But he has such nice hair!

I know there's lots of IDIOTS out there who like to call me a racist because I say "Mooselimbs", and because I don't kowtow to the "Religion Of Peace" multi-culti bullshit that the Ministry of Love broadcasts from its mega-manure spreader the CBC.

But let me tell you flatly, micro-aggressing  hatey hating red-neck hater though I may very well be, mocker of the Religion Of Pieces though I certainly am, I am not about to vote for marching women, kids and old people into camps for any reason, ever.

This is not a birthday party.

Deport Mooselimb immigrant criminals? Sure. Eject forever guys who sign up to fight for ISIS? Absolutely.  Kill ISIS wankers on the battlefield as hard and fast as possible? Oh yeah. BECAUSE THEY ASKED FOR IT. Stop importing more Mooselimb goat herders? Good idea, they hate it here. Its cold.

Round up and send to camps people from the wrong religion? Nuh uh. I leave that shit to Liberals . You assholes never disappoint.

The Phantom

ICE releases new guidelines for transgender illegals.

Here's an example of your government bureaucrats working hard to make the USA a better place.

The agency will start tracking data for transgender detainees, train detention staff and draft individual detention plans for transgender detainees to deal with issues ranging from hormone therapy to safety, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, ICE's deputy assistant director of custody programs.

"ICE will allow for the placement of a transgender woman consistent with their gender identity, meaning that a transgender woman could be with biological females," said Lorenzen-Strait, who was also appointed as a national coordinator for issues related to gay, lesbian and transgender detainees.

I read "The agency will start tracking data for transgender detainees..." and my first though was "What, both of them?" Then I read on to find this gem here"

ICE currently has about 60 transgender detainees. About 25 are housed in a special unit in Santa Ana, California, for transgender women and gay men. The rest are housed in different facilities across the country, mostly with the general population and consistent with their biological sex, Lorenzen-Strait said.

The agency currently houses about 31,000 detainees a day, he said.

See, this is where money goes when you pay taxes.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement department has 31,000 people in jail any given day. 60 is 0.19% of 31,000. So, for 0.19% of the JAIL population, of illegal immigrants who aren't supposed to be there in the first place, and are supposed to be corralled and then deported ASAP...

...the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department has a "national coordinator" and a whole freaking department of professional bureaucrats. They have a budget, and offices, and computers, and servers, and a Twitter account, and all sorts of super duper Federal government stuff that costs a -fortune-.

By the way, is it not hilarious that the guy who's national coordinator for issues related to gay, lesbian and transgender detainees is named "Strait"? Where do they get these people?
 

Anyway, for the price of an entire department in the Federal government, ICE could literally buy every transgender detainee a house and supply them with a cook and a gardener for the full length of their stay. Probably throw in a car and a driver.

Just remember my friends, government is where money goes to die.

The Phantom

The stupid that we face.

I could not let this one go past unremarked. In the middle of the media disinformation campaign that has morons burning the American flag in New York City, morons calling for a ban on the Battle Flag of the Confederacy, morons calling for the removal of the Jefferson monument in DC, morons generally howling and screaming because some freak shot up a church, we get this:

Macon Wal-Mart mob wanted to see how much damage it could do

Surveillance video of a wee-hours ruckus at a Macon Wal-Mart on Sunday shows a teenager race inside flashing gang signs ahead of a mob of four dozen or so people who burst in and smashed merchandise.

The commotion, which caused an estimated $2,000 in damage, appears to have been planned.

Some in the crowd also snatched a man, apparently a shopper at the Zebulon Road store, from a motorized shopping cart and dragged him to the floor, Bibb County sheriff's officials said Monday.

The vandals, said to number between 40 and 50, sprinted down the store's main aisle about 1:50 a.m. Sunday, "destroying merchandise displays and items," a sheriff's deputy's report of the incident noted.

Now, the cynical and jaded individual such as myself has seen this kind of thing reported on Drudge about every week,  and it has become part of the background noise of our society.

We here in Canada don't see this kind of thing happening on the news, not because it never happens here but more because it never gets reported. It never gets reported because the perpetrators are ALWAYS from one "protected group" or another, members of any one of several Holy Visible Minorities that the Canadian media simply will not report on. Ever. Unless there's juicy video or somebody dies, it doesn't get mentioned. Almost like a news blackout, but more insidious because the people not-reporting on these "high spirited youthful hijinks" really don't think it is news when ten kids knock over a 7/11 and punch out the guy behind the counter.

Unless they are WHITE kids punching out a MINORITY counter guy. Then its news. But oddly, that never happens. Like, really never. So swarmings are never seen in Canada.

We watch them on the American news instead. All the friggin' time. Weekly. Its become the water we swim in. Tuesday rolls around, another Wal-Mart in East Shitkicker Missouri gets swarmed and trashed, ho hum.

But I have to report on this one in Macon Georgia. I do. Because of this bit here:

The teenager seen leading the rushing horde of young men and women told a Wal-Mart employee "that this was a planned event ... to see how much damage they could cause," the sheriff's report said.

The teen, identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green, of Ashton Drive in northwest Bibb County, was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone.

Arrested when he went back to the freaking store because he forgot his cell phone in the middle of pulling a flash-riot. For realz.

Now, without wanting to seem a racist here, its pretty obvious that this is a black kid. The reason it is obvious is NOT because he's dumber than a bag of hammers. It is NOT because he has a friggin' idiotic made-up name. It is NOT because the cops busted him. It is NOT because only blacks swarm stores. I'm sure a determined researcher could dig up a news report about a non-black store-swarming, with enough work.

No, its obvious he's black and indeed all the 50 little shithead rioters are black, because we are reading this report in the Macon Telegraph and not in an hourly report on CNN. If it was white kids did this, it would be international news 24/7 for two weeks.

Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog, that's news.

For the reading challenged Leftists among my potential readers, let me translate all that wordz above for you: I'm not criticizing black people. I'm telling you the media are a bunch of lying liars. Turn off the TV and your IQ will immediately gain 40 points.

The Phantom

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-The mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

The teenager seen leading the rushing horde of young men and women told a Wal-Mart employee "that this was a planned event ... to see how much damage they could cause," the sheriff's report said.

The teen, identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green, of Ashton Drive in northwest Bibb County, was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Overflight report.

Reporting overflight by Douglas DC3, North American Harvard and Westland Lysander this AM.

So yeah. Life could be worse, my friends. ~:)

The Spoiled Phantom.

Facial recognition tracking, now in churches!

According to this article, there are now 30 or more "mega-churches" in the USA using facial recognition software to identify people for purposes ranging from fundraising to... whatever the hell they want to do with it.

We know that Facebook has a vast facial recognition database so good that it can recognize you when your face is hidden, that the FBI has built a millions-strong criminal facial recognition system, and that Google's new Photos app is so effective at face recognition that it can identify now-adults in photos from their childhood. But now facial recognition is starting to pop up in weird and unexpected places: at music festivals (to identify criminals); at stadiums (to weed out "sports troublemakers") and at churches. Yes, churches.

Moshe Greenshpan, the CEO of Israel- and Las Vegas-based facial recognition software company Face-Six, says there are 30 churches around the world using his Churchix technology. He launched the service just four months ago and says churches are already using it to scan congregants' earthly visages to keep track of attendance at events in order to know who wasn't there so they can check up on them, or who attends most frequently so they can ask those people for donations. He declined to name any of the churches using the technology citing the controversy around facial recognition. I asked him if any of the churches are based in Texas or Illinois, the only two U.S. states that have laws on the books about getting permission to collect peoples' faceprints. "I prefer not to say," said Greenshpan.

(If a facial expression-detecting camera were trained on my own face, it would read "skeptical." Without being able to talk to one of the churches using this technology, it's impossible to verify Greenshpan's claims.)

Ok, granted it may be a smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch. However the reporter, Kashmir Hill, seems more concerned that there is "no controlling legal authority" than the fact of this software's existence.

"There are no federal laws that specifically govern the use of facial recognition technology," wrote Ben Sobel in a Washington Post editorial that discussed the only two states with relevant laws on the books. In lieu of a law, the Department of Commerce has been trying to establish facial recognition industry standards in a "privacy multistakeholder process." For more than a year, industrial representatives and privacy advocates have been taking part in negotiations to come up with standards for how facial recognition should be deployed by businesses in the U.S. Last week, those negotiations broke down. Privacy groups involved in the process, including the ACLU and EFF, withdrew, saying in a letter that companies refused to agree to core principles of privacy.

Me, I don't worry so much that there's no controlling legal authority.  For me, having been brought up in a town where we all knew each other, the question is more about if this is going to increase or decrease the stress in my life, and damage my already rapidly eroding personal freedom.

We know two things about government and private surveillance in general. The first thing is that the amount of information available to authorities and large companies on any individual's movements and personal habits is virtually complete. They can know every place you have been and everything you have bought for the trouble of doing a quick database search. Target Inc. can know if your daughter is pregnant before you do.

The second thing we know is that IT DOESN'T REDUCE CRIME. At all. In the slightest. Britain literally has a CCD camera on every street corner and half the fence posts in the country. Their crime "clear-up" rate is complete crap and getting worse every year despite the fact that they really do know every goddamn thing you do every day.

The thing we know about government and data privacy is that they suck at it. Any data on you that the government has is most likely going to leak in the next ten years or less by my seat-of-the-pants prognostication. That means tax records, medical records, criminal records, phone records, you name it.

The thing we know about computer technology is that it always only ever gets cheaper and cheaper. Twenty years ago speech recognition was a fantastically expensive lab toy, now its on your phone. Facial recognition is a very expensive data-mining tool this year, in ten years or less it will be a phone ap. You'll be able to take a picture of a crowd and have names for every face in it, and probably comments and credit scores too. Everybody will know your business.

Or nobody will, because Very Important People may not like having random strangers identifying them and buttonholing them at Starbucks first thing in the morning.

In the mean time I predict a new fashion trend: masks and hoods.

The Phantom