How does a Brontosaurus know when its been shot in the ass?

In Media Dinosaur news today, Paramount Pictures has lost its funding deal with Deutche Bank.  Or walked away, depending who you talk to.  Oddly, the people saying "walked away" all seem to work for Paramount.

Opinions on the cause may vary, but the bottom line is nobody wants to lend Paramount half a billion dollars ($450 mill, close enough eh?) to make movies this year.  Last year they were lining up with cash in duffel bags, this year not so much.  As Deadline Hollywood notes:  "After all, if it hadn't been for DreamWorks, DreamWorks Animation, and now Marvel, and also Steven Spielberg, the Paramount balance sheet over the past 2 1/2 years would be a total disaster area." 

From the horse's mouth to the Phantom's ear.

The Phantom Dinosaur Hunter

Segregation BAD... except when its GOOD.

More evidence the people who run the BC Human Rights Tribunal/Commission
<http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=40ef408e-1ed0-4de1-a2df-f113ec08b7fa>
are batshit crazy:
> The B.C. Hu-man Rights Tribunal has dismissed a complaint by two
> members of the Indo-Canadian community who were denied membership in a
> Burnaby Sikh temple because of their social ranking in India's caste
> system.
>
> Gurshinder Sahota and Sohan Shergill said they were discriminated
> against by the Shri Guru Ravidass Sabha Temple because they belong to
> a higher caste in the traditional system of social ranking than do
> temple members.
>
So my friends, it is now ok to discriminate against people based on
caste in Canada. One very important thing to know about in this case is
that _/*SIKHISM DOES NOT RECOGNIZE CASTE*/_. One of the reasons the
Sikh religion was founded in the first place was to get rid of the Hindu
caste system. Another big reason was to fight off the Muslims, but I
digress.

Getting back to the BCHRC decision,
> The tribunal dismissed the complaint for two reasons: First, it found
> it does not have jurisdiction over temple membership; and, second,
> citing a prior decision regarding the United Native Nations, it agreed
> that the temple should be allowed to restrict membership to a minority
> group in order to promote the group's welfare.
So just to be clear:
-it is NOT ok to have a men-only social club, because that's sexist.
Complaining about women-only clubs is also sexist.
-It is NOT ok to have a White's only or Christians only golf club,
because that's racist. Jews-only golf clubs are not racist, unless
Israel is in the news that day.
-It is NOT ok for the Catholic Church (or any Christian church) to
refuse to conduct weddings for same sex couples because that is
homophobic. Don't even think of complaining about other religions
refusing, because that's racist!
-It is NOT ok to mock Islam, even though it IS ok to mock Christianity,
because...well just because the BCHRC said so, damnit, so suck it up.
-It IS ok for Dalits to refuse to admit Jats into their Gurdwara, even
though Sikhism itself forbids this, even though it is unfairly
discriminatory against Jats, and even though the caste system itself is
inarguably evil and has caused a thousand years of misery in India and
all those Indian guys came here to Canada to get away from it.

Everybody got that? Me neither.

The Phantom

Britian: Land of the Insane.

Ye Olde England, land of gun bans, where the top judge in the land was recently heard to say that maybe Sharia law should be above British law sometimes, has proven today to be populated by insane idiots.  All the other evidence is as nothing compared to this.

Yes friends, in a country where you can't look out your kitchen window without being imaged in real-time by a police camera, people are freaking out about Google StreetView.  Google is employing "spy cars" no less, to take pictures of streets in England, just like they did in the USA already to absolutely no ill effect anyone can see.  The USA being that country where the cops do NOT have fricking CCD spy cameras every 30 feet in every city, town, village and fricking cross road in the country, and where Constable Plod does NOT scold you from a loudspeaker for dropping a gum wrapper or taking an emergency piss in a secluded corner.

Without even a shred of irony, the Daily Mail titles their article

Big Brother: The Google cars that will photograph EVERY front door in Britain

Holy crap, a private company is going to take a picture of your house, once. 

The internet giant's StreetView website will allow anyone in the world to type in a UK address or postcode and instantly see a 360-degree picture of the street.

It will include close-ups of buildings, cars and people. Critics say the site is a 'burglar's charter' that makes it easy for criminals to check out potential victims.

The pictures also show people leaving and entering hospitals, health clinics, adult shops and hotels. Although their faces are deliberately blurred, many could still be recognised by their clothing and hair colour.

Wow, its the end of the friggin' world, innit?  I mean, somebody might <gasp!> SEE me!  In public!!! Aieee!

Look, there's a picture of some guy wearing a jacket that looks kinda like mine, walking out of Dirty Joe's Porno Emporium and Dry Cleaner's Shop.  AIEEEE!!!!

Robbers will be able to go online and see exactly what they would be able to see driving by on the street!  Except by the time they see it on-line I may have moved, or gotten a different car, or painted the house, or...  AIEEEEEEE!!!!!

Or my absolute favorite Really Bad Thing, "The site has even been used by teenagers arranging unauthorised (sic) swimming parties in unoccupied homes."  Oh gawd not SWIMMING PARTIES, we're all gonna DIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

They are all insane.  Gibbering, slobbering, incontinent lunatics.

The Phantom

A worthy consideration.

Just read an article that was featured at Five Feet of Fury, which has crystallized some thoughts about our society I've been having of late.  It is a posting by Diana West regarding her book, "The Death Of The Grown-up".  Her contention is that our "war on terror" is just a misstatement of the facts.  She contends we are at war with Islam itself.

I have come to believe that the Western way of life — which I’ll define in brief as life lived according to Judeo-Christian-evolved morality and liberty — is imperiled by the demographic spread and influence of Islamic ideology and laws. Notice I didn’t say the spread of “Islamism.” Or “Islamist-ism.” Or “Islamofascism.” Or just “Wahhabism.” Or “fundamentalist militant extremism.” Over the years, I have used most of these “ists” and “isms” in my column, trying them out one by one until I got to the point where I realized they were serving as a distraction, a form of verbal camouflage that turns our attention away from the ideology and laws of Islam itself. In the cause of not-giving-offense — the highest cause of Westerners-turned-multiculturalists—we have prevented ourselves from undertaking a hard-eyed appraisal of Islamic ideology as a whole, jihadism included, and engaging in a serious discussion of how to contain it.

This is of course a very radical statement.  Being at war with the entire nature of Islam, not just the violent elements of it, wowser.  That would imply there's a <gasp!> value judgment to be made that Western Civilization is <double gasp!> better than Islam!  In fact, better enough that its worth fighting, maybe even dying for.  Holy crap, Batman!

Well, yeah.  I agree with that.  And I agree with Ms. West that we are in a war.  But I don't think Islam is who the war is against. 

Consider the Sikhs, just for a bit of real world contrast.  They basically live in a constant state of war with Islam.  Their whole religion is designed with that in mind, and it has worked really well since they've successfully resisted wave after wave of jihadi invasions for 500 years.  The Punjab is not Muslim, even though some new Muslim instigated outrage is seen once or twice a year.  Non-Muslims dragged from their houses and killed in retribution for the outrage of the week, mosques burned as payback for that, what have you.  The war continues, the Sikhs keep being Sikhs.

We are not at war with Islam.  They may think they are at war with us, and in fact there's some justification for them thinking that.  Women's rights and the sovereignty of the individual are reason enough for them to think that.  As Ms. West says,

Consider the overarching conception of “freedom” itself. The entry on freedom, or hurriyya, in the Encyclopedia of Islam describes a state of divine enthrallment that bears no resemblance to current Western understandings of freedom as predicated on the workings of the individual conscience. But multicultural “we,” rigorously trained to see all peoples and all cultures and all religions as ultimately wired in precisely the same way, persist in overlooking such distinctions. We instead regard our kind of “freedom” as being one-size-fits-all “universal” freedom — universally valued and universally desired. Then we scratch our heads when large swaths of the monocultural Muslim world regard it as an ineluctably Western (if not infidel) threat to Islam. Frankly, I don’t think that convincing Islam otherwise is where our security interests will be met, or even can be met.

If we were at war with Islam the way the Sikhs are, even just since 2001, it'd be over by now. Europe and N. America  vs. the rag-tag "armies" of the Middle East?  Fighting like we mean it?  No PC rules of engagement, just full-on if it moves shoot it, if its not moving blow it up real friggin' war?  Over already.  Ask Saddam, he knows.

So who are we at war with, really?  Diane West explains it well.

Recall the academic “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s — a struggle that was, in large part, a war over cultural identity. Were we going to remain heirs to the Western canon, or become children of a multicultural world? Because that question was asked of a post-grown-up society exhibiting classic symptoms of “identity crisis,” the winning answer came decisively from the multicultural Left.

I didn’t realize the full extent of that victory until much later, beginning on 9/11, when the Multicultural States of America—a nation that had taught itself to believe, for example, that the complete works of Alice Walker and William Shakespeare were interchangeable, offering equal enlightenment and meriting equal study (giving Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt) — came under cataclysmic attack. Was it a real war, this time, not a culture war … or was it a real culture war?

I submit, now its a real war.  Islam can't possibly win unless WE LET THEM.  The only reason we might even think of letting them is multi-culti socialism.  That's who we're really at war with.  You can tell because the bad guys have started doing things like the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the gun registry (and gun control generally), and this gem of gems from England yesterday, which I can't freakin' believe: Britain's top judge says Sharia law should be allowed in Britain.

I'd prefer to win this war in the propaganda stage and defeat these CRETINS at the ballot box, before the shooting starts.  Shooting is for the range.  Shooting downtown, that's not good.

The Phantom