Wednesday, October 31, 2012

US Cops can now put cameras on your property without a warrant.

Big Brother is getting it all his own way in court these days, let me tell you.

CNET has learned that U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission -- and without a warrant -- to install multiple "covert digital surveillance cameras" in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana plants were being grown.

Now, I'm no lawyer. At all. But it seems to me that if a person is to have any hope of security on their own property, whatever size it may be, then government officials need to show -somebody- probable cause before waltzing around on your property, much less planting cameras there. Otherwise cops can do whatever the hell they want, and that is not a good position for citizens to be in.

According to Wikipedia, Judge William C. Griesbach is a Bush appointee. George seems to have screwed the pooch on this one.

Will Hurricane Sandy Help Obama? (He asked with gritted teeth.)

The Big News of today is that Barry is heading down to New Jersey to "view the devastation" with Chris Christie the Republican governor of NJ. Mr. Christie said nice things about Barry yesterday, and the recovery effort is being reported wall-to-wall with unctuous praise by the big media outlets.

The Image.

Will this help Barry next Tuesday?

Short answer, No.

I don't think it will help him even in New York and New Jersey.  Because despite the vast media build-up and 24/7 coverage of the storm, Sandy was NO BIG DEAL anywhere except the NY/NJ shoreline. If you weren't within a mile of the ocean and at or below sea level, nothing extraordinary happened to you. Normal storm, normal storm damage.

In my case, the storm center tracked right over my house in Ontario. It was so windy and rainy that a bit of bark came off one of my trees. That was the common experience across most of the affected area. We all rolled our eyes, cut up the odd tree limb with the trusty chainsaw and went to work as normal Tuesday morning.

Cars belonging to people who parked below sea level.


People with underground parking on the southern tip of Manhattan are having a bad week for sure, but in all fairness they were warned and warned and warned and threatened and screamed at for a week to move those f-ing cars. Sorry dudes, but my sympathy is somewhat limited.





The reality.

Today Barry will stupidly go down to the affected area of the Jersey shore. He and his security detail will frig up traffic and stop work for most of the day while he gets photographed looking pensively out to sea, maybe picking up a child's toy he finds right next to where he's standing in the wreckage.

Where's the tape? How's Barry gonna find that?!
Which will absolutely not have been planted there and marked with orange gaffer tape by the advance team. Then they will all go away, and the actual work will finally resume. And Barry will jet off to Vegas again.

gaffer tape begone!
 Longer answer, nobody with a brain is watching the mainstream media anymore, so the photo-op will be a complete waste. It may even hurt him if guys like me get hold of a picture with orange gaffer tape next to a cute toy during the event. Also he's flying to Vegas again, which naturally leads us to think about his last Vegas trip right after Benghazi. It seems that there is much more and dirtier dirt about to come out regarding Benghazi. So that's going to hurt.

Also there are some indications that Barry's personal fingerprints have been found on some of the solar power grants that went bad.

Unless there is some massive vote fraud and shenanigans, I hereby renew my prediction that Barry will be a one-hit wonder. Should shenanigans prevail and he gets elected by the graveyards of the nation, the House and Senate will go majority Republican and Barry will be impeached before Easter.

Enjoy your Halloween, and all you Americans vote early and often!

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

How to tell when Conservatives are wining.


When you see Liberals busy with moving the goal posts, Conservatives are winning. Here's Iggy moving them at Stanford:
"Speaking recently to an audience at the Stanford Humanities Center, Ignatieff described a "crisis of representation" that he sees emerging from the increasingly divided political culture of both the United States and Canada.
One of the few political intellectuals to have led a political party, Ignatieff drew on personal knowledge as he outlined in his talk, part of the Presidential Lecture series, how partisanship is tearing politics apart by turning adversaries into enemies."
This is of course utter balderdash. Iggy experienced first hand the wrath of a Canadian electorate sick to death of tax-and-spend Liberalism and wide spread corruption in high places.  Between Adscam, the gun registry, Dionkey's Green Shaft and Paul Martin's military photo-op adventures in Afghanistan, the Liberal Party of Canada has burned through all its credibility. They are reduced to pimping Justin "Shiny Pony" Trudeau as a replacement for Count Iggula, in the faint, tenuous hope that mere name recognition will re-ignite the cold dead ashes of what used to be Canada's Ruling Party.  A guy who's brother does propaganda for Iran. No one else with any pretensions at common sense will touch the Liberal leadership race with a barge pole.

In other words, they're thieving assholes who got away with it for 70 years.



A "divided political culture" is not a problem when one side of the division is working to subvert the will of the electorate and pervert the machinery of government, changing it into their own private cash machine. The other side of that equation is the people trying to stop them.
As Ignatieff outlined, voter disdain is warranted. Together, waning legislative democracy and heightened partisanship threaten democracy's key role, which is to "enable opponents to compromise for the good of the nation."
Except compromise does not serve the good of the nation. At the present time, "compromise" only benefits the Liberals. A compromise with the Liberals these days is like compromising with robbers that they only take your cash, not your credit cards too.

You don't make deals with robbers. You beat them up.

The Phantom

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Why am I against Big Government?

Many, many times over the years I've heard the words "Why do you hate government, Phantom? What the hell is wrong with you?" from the mouths of frustrated liberals.

Exhibit A:

New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Services.
"According to the Census's American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795," the Senate Budget Committee notes. "If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011." 



Translated for irascible, thick headed liberals: If you FIRED every single seat polishing son of a bitch in every US state and federal welfare agency, and just sent a check for $30K to every poor household in America, THERE WOULD BO NO MORE POVERTY. Oh, and you'd have done it for half what gets spent not doing it every year.

That's why I'm against Big Government. Because its bollocks.

You're welcome.

The Phantom

UPDATE: A reader writes in! Names changed to protect the guilty!

"Even though this is true since I was able to obtain a 50k non payable back loan. They would not give me the money directly but insist they use the money for me.

The problem always has been with liberals is that they want to spend your money for you (high taxes) as you are not capable of using it correctly. But I have not seen the government use my tax money the way I want them too. So now what?

What country on this planet can a person flee too and get better care, benefits, loan, education where the people born in this country cannot get? And you can thank a liberal for this....
Oh hell yes! Nameless Reader hits it out of the park! As I wrote the post I could hear liberals screaming in my head: "YOU CAN'T JUST GIVE THEM THE MONEY!!!" THEY'LL SPEND IT ON CRACK!!!"

This then is the core of the liberal effort. It has never been about poverty. Its about Control with a capital "C". People are too stupid to live without Big Brother's hand on their neck, forcing them in the right direction.

On the subject of bumper stickers...

... in July I noted the paucity of bumper stickers in New York and Massachusetts, and opined that possibly people were trying to avoid vandalism.

The Phantom is never wrong!

A case of campaign vandalism is under investigation Friday in Alta Loma.

Someone keyed the word "Obama" into two cars and slashed seats in another outside a residence that had Mitt Romney campaign signs.

Please note that at this time I have yet to see reference to a car vandalized because it had an Obama sticker on it.

Although I do confess to horn-blasting the hell out of some doddering old fool in Simcoe Ontario last Thursday. New York plates and Obama/Biden 2012 all over the back of her Honda blue-hair special. Asleep at the light.

That's right Grandmaw, that was ME in that huge black thing behind you walking you the hell up. Old bat!

Boy, us Conservatives sure are dangerous eh?

The Dangerous Phantom. (Watch out, he's got a horn!)

Friday, October 26, 2012

Dunce cap? Could be worse.

Headline at Drudge is the Obama campaign Photoshopped Romney in a dunce cap. That's not all they did:


DemocRats celebrating their complete lack of couth.

The Phantom

Hot girls and bacon!!!

Didn't I just do this? The week has flown by and today is Friday again! Hot girls from Iran!! Hot bacon! Life is good!

Miriam Shenasi is from Iran. I like Iran!


More Iran! YES!



BOOM baby!

That's it, the heat is too much.  I'm melted.  No wonder the mullahs make these chicks cover up, that girl could hurt a wrinkly, shrivelly old zealot just by walking by. Sprain his whatsit for sure.

And the bacon is done!

The bacony goodness cooked to perfection by SHEER HOTNESS! Oh YEAH!.

The Phantom!

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Why are judges this stupid?

Here's a 90 year old man getting sued for shooting a man who broke in his house and shot him first. Only in California? God I hope so.

A 90-year-old Greenbrae man who was shot in the head during an alleged burglary has been sued by the alleged burglar.

Samuel Cutrufelli, who was also shot during the incident, claims Jay Leone "negligently shot" him during the confrontation inside Leone's home.

Cutrufelli, 31, claims Leone caused him "great bodily injury, and other financial damage, including loss of Mr. Cutrufelli's home, and also the dissolution of Mr. Cutrufelli's marriage."

Cutrufelli shot Leone once in the face during the alleged burglary, and Leone returned fire, hitting Cutrufelli several times. Both men were hospitalized for an extended period after the gun battle.

My question is not how the lawyers and the criminal got the nerve to do this. Scumbags have no shame. You can file anything you want, but some judge has to use his discretion if he's going to hear it or not.
The story does not say if the suit will be heard, but really the problem is now the old guy has to pay a lawyer to show up in court even if the judge throws it out. Having a judge do that is not a foregone conclusion.
This is exactly what the Castle Doctrine is designed to stop. The only reason we even need such a thing is that judges cannot be relied upon to use their friggin' heads in cases like this. In the past, guys like this robber have won large settlements from the people they robbed.

Just thought y'all might want to know.

The Phantom

 

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Obama: Liar or Prevaricating Chunk of Rat Poo?



Well kids, it looks like Romney didn't have to go after Obama on Benghazi in the debate Monday night. News story today, Obama knew what was up the day of the attack.


Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show.
The emails, obtained by Reuters from government sources not connected with U.S. spy agencies or the State Department and who requested anonymity, specifically mention that the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks

So there you go. Proof that Barry lied for two weeks about this. From Reuters no less (although releasing it two days -after- the debate is interesting).


Therefore, Barry had that stupid Mo movie guy arrested FOR NOTHING, knowing 100% that it was not a demonstration but instead was a terrorist attack.

We also know from other articles that the administration had advance knowledge something was planned for 9/11/2012, and they refused to increase security at several locations including Benghazi.

My American friends, your President got four guys killed by playing stupid policy games, and then jailed another guy to cover it up. Who is STILL in jail, incidentally.

Consider that on November 6th when you go cast that ballot.

The Phantom

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Retards mad at Ann Coulter.

And by "retards" I mean the usual suspects in the mainstream media's sub-specialty of perpetually offended journalists. Not people who have actual brain damage. They actually don't care, mostly.

Here's the Coulter tweet: "I highly approve of Romney's decision to be kind and gentle to the retard."

I said something like that last night while watching Barry crash and burn, that Romney was looking at him pityingly. As if Barry were just a "pair  laddy who couldn'ay help it." That's Scottish for "retard".  Grandfather Phantom speaks from beyond the veil.
Well, now comes the hissy. From Tommy Christopher:

Conservatives will have to square this deranged disrespect for the office of the presidency for themselves, but hopefully, people all over the political spectrum will educate Ms. Coulter about the relative merits of attacking an entire population of disabled people.

Apart from the hilarity of the claim that "disabled" (retarded) people would be upset by Coulter comparing them to Barack Obama (psssst, Tommy! They won't get it. They're disabled.) , I think Barack Obama has shown more disrespect for the office of the presidency these last four years than Coulter ever could.

I mean, all Ann ever does is talk and write books.  Barry has gotten people -killed- lately.




H/T Kathy Shaidle, 5ft of Fury

The Phantom

Monday, October 22, 2012

Barack Obama: saboteur or vandal?

I keep saying that everyday Muslims are not the problem, but some of you argue with me. I keep saying that the -real- problem is our own home-grown Leftists who promote Islamism (as distinct from the Mohammedan religion), and some of you pooh-pooh me.

Well pooh-pooh no more my friends. Barack Obama, caught with hand in cookie jar. To the shoulder!

A year-long investigation by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has found that scores of known radical Islamists made hundreds of visits to the Obama White House, meeting with top administration officials.

Court documents and other records have identified many of these visitors as belonging to groups serving as fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and other Islamic militant organizations.

Why is the Arab Spring turning to Arab Hurricane Season? Because Barry is letting it. Deliberately. Those Mo-Bro rat-bastards couldn't organize an orgy in a brothel without outside help.

See? The Phantom is right!

The Phantom

Friday, October 19, 2012

Hot Girls and Bacon!

Yes its already Friday! The heat commences!

When girls like you, you can tell.


When they don't like you, you can tell that too. Ouch!


Well, usually anyway.


Oh wait, she LIKES you! Yay!


And now, yummy bacon!
I'll have a big cup of that, please!

The Phantom

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The US POTUS debate.

Well, I watched the debate. This is a picture of my eyeball bleeding from it.

Candy Crowley deserves a Heisman trophy for best blocker of the year. Most blatant interference in a debate imaginable. CNN credibility goes down out of the gutter and enters new subterranean territory.

Barry blathered, Romney skewered him time after time despite Crowley throwing herself on grenade after grenade for Barry. The guy has the game fixed and he still can't win.

What a tool.

The Phantom

Update: Morning after! This is a very apt critique of the debate from John Tamney at Forbes magazine. It is entitled "Romney v. Obama Was a Nauseating Draw, and Both Deserve to Lose"
Surely there were differences between them, but to watch the debate was to see two candidates vying to say who would cut taxes the least for top earners, who would “crack down” most on China, and who believed the most in an “all of the above” energy strategy. Neither said much of import, if at all, each candidate won certain segments, but the impossible to escape conclusion was just how unimpressive both candidates were.
This seems a trifle harsh, because as I said above Barry  spent a great deal of time blathering. Also lying. Like, outright bald faced kinda lying. However Tamney is right. Mittens is first and foremost a Big Government liberal. He likes regulation and social control. He likes gun control. He just isn't a saboteur, whereas Obama absolutely is.

Americans have yet again been denied the opportunity to vote for a Conservative presidential candidate. Yet again stuck with voting for the lesser of two liberals. So really in the next four years its going to be up to the US conservatives to get out there and kick their Congresscritters in the tender parts and shrink the government by slow strangulation. It does not seem that y'all are ever going to get somebody who believes in Conservatism past the entrenched poobahs of the Republican party.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Dalton: Done like dinner!

Early Christmas present for Ontario, Dalton McGuinty resigns!



Stick a fork in him, he's done!

Propaganda is insidious!



Reader Daryl writes in to say the following about the CBC gun article I just posted:

Daryl: Let's assume for one second the numbers are within an order of magnitude of correct. Outlawing all guns in the world changes the numbers not a whit.

Kudos to Daryl for this comment. Now I'm going to rip it apart. Because it made me think, and I think this is worth talking about.

First, Daryl is 100% right.

The CBC propaganda says:

The total came to $3.1 billion, or about $93 for every person in the country, says the study, completed last year by two federal researchers.

Outlawing all the guns in the world will not reduce the cost numbers from the CBC article. Why? Because the cost is from guns used in crime, by people who are already banned from having guns. Banning guns even harder will not effect the people using the guns in crime. At all. They will still be doing crimes, and they will still have guns.

However, because this is propaganda we're only talking about half the story. Because that's how the argument is framed, and that's what the CBC wants you thinking. In the cost-only half, the worst that can happen from banning all guns everywhere is -nothing-.

Second, Daryl is 100% wrong.

That's the insidious, evil part of the anti-gun lie. Nothing is not the worst that can happen.

Outlawing all the guns in the world doesn't disarm criminals, but it does disarm everybody else.

What is the cost of disarming everybody else? Are we going to hear about those costs? No we're not, because the CBC doesn't want you thinking about that. They want you emotionally invested in banning guns, not thinking about what will happen afterward.

Lets' think about history for a second.

When you ban guns from a country or a city you don't get idyllic peace with zero crime. You get Mexico. You get Jamaica. You get Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, New York City. Toronto.

What you actually get from a gun ban is a permanent crime wave, where punks shoot it out with the cops and with each other every night and all weekend. That's what happens with a functioning democracy still in place.

History shows us of course that a permanent crime wave isn't the worst thing that can happen. Its just the first thing that happens. The worst is the Armenian Genocide. Or Stalin's efforts in the Ukraine. Or Mao's Great Leap Forward.

So next time somebody starts braying about the Cost To Society of XYZ, ask them about the other side of the ledger. That's where the interesting info will be.

The Phantom

Muslims protest Age of Mockery!

Well protest away, bearded weirdies. Its only going to get worse!

A protest by 10,000 Muslims outside the offices of Google in London today is just the first in an orchestrated attempt to force the company to remove an anti-Islamic film from website YouTube in Britain.
Thousands had travelled from as far afield as Glasgow to take part in the demonstration, ahead of a planned million-strong march in Hyde Park in coming weeks.
Anger over 'The Innocence of Muslims', an American-produced film which insults the Prophet Mohammad and demeans Muslims, according to protesters, remains available to watch on the website YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.
Organiser Masoud Alam said: "Our next protest will be at the offices of Google and YouTube across the world. We are looking to ban this film.
"This is not freedom of expression, there is a limit for that. This insult of the Prophet will not be allowed."

Oh, "there is a limit" is there? Well maybe we should all think about that just a little bit, hmmm? Where might such a limit be set?

Well it might be set, as in this case, by whatever pack of idiots can turn out the largest most unruly crowd. On the other hand, after people get heartily sick of unruly packs of idiots burning cars, the limit may very well be set by the MAJORITY.

 That would be the Scary People. The ones that don't protest and burn cars. The ones who quietly, reluctantly think about the day we might need to do something about all those idiots wrecking our place. Think about the most efficient way to do things.

We might decide to do something precipitous, like jail every Muslim in the country. We've done it before. Ask the Japanese in BC, they know. Ask the Germans in Ontario. Ask the Taliban, if you can get them to stop running away from the Canadian Army for a second.

Now as to Google. I hope this cements in the minds of the upper management the fact that appeasement breeds contempt. Bending over backward to accommodate these cretins gets you nothing... except bent over. And over and over and over.

However there is one sensible thing said by one of the protesters:

Self-employed businessman Ahmed Nasar said he was worried the video could lead to violence in Britain in the same way as it had abroad. "If you push people too far," he said, "You will turn the peaceful elements into violence."

Of course Mr. Nasar meant that as a threat, that the "peaceful" elements making a bloody nuisance of themselves in the street might get all violent if Google doesn't give them what they want. Again. But Mr. Nasar should carefully consider what could happen if the huge number of English and Scots and Welsh who are NOT Muslim should grow weary of his antics. There hasn't been a country or an empire yet that survived pissing off the English.


Wake up and understand who you are dealing with, Ahmed.


The Phantom


Sunday, October 14, 2012

CBC anti-gun propaganda mill churns out another winner.

The CBC is braying propaganda about guns again. They never ever stop, do they? Ooooh, the dreaded Kalashnikov! I bet that could kill ya just from looking at it.

 
Crimes involving guns cost Canadians more than $3 billion a year, suggests an internal Justice Department study that may stoke the gun-control debate.
The newly released report examined all firearm-related crime in 2008, and calculated costs across a broad range, including the value of policing and prosecuting offenders, lost income and even burial fees for victims.
The total came to $3.1 billion, or about $93 for every person in the country, says the study, completed last year by two federal researchers.

What makes this propaganda and a -lie- is two things. First, this is an estimate.

The largest part of the total, about $2.5 billion, arose from so-called "intangible" victim costs, such as amounts assigned to pain, suffering and loss of life.

Emphasis mine.

Just to be clear, most of this number is conjured out of thin air by assigning a dollar value to things that don't actually involve money. Shall we say considerable room for interpretation?

Second, and of far more import, is that this is only half the story. Even granting their cost number for argument's sake, what benefits do guns bring to Canadians every year?

Ledgers have two sides. Costs and profits. You NEVER hear anything about the profit to Canada from civilian gun ownership. You never hear about the economic activity surrounding hunting and shooting sport. You never hear about the crimes prevented by guns. You never hear about the dangerous animal attacks prevented by guns. City dwellers think stuff like that never happens, but this is Canada. We have bears. They EAT people sometimes. Usually they don't eat people who have a gun on them though.

So yeah, CBC = propaganda. Close the CBC now.

The Phantom

Update, welcome  Five Feet of Fury readers! Kathy has some of the finest flying monkeys in the entire blogosphere. ~:D

Friday, October 12, 2012

Hot girls and bacon!

Yes my friends its Friday again and that means HOT GIRLS!!!

Hot girls from Pakistan! Nice hats, girls!

Very hot girl apparently melting snow in Pakistan! No need to shovel, just send this babe out for ten minutes, job done!


Cracking the books in Pakistan... with hotness!


And now in a Soapbox first, a hot girl wearing bacon! And apparently wiping her nose on her arm. Nice!

The Phantom!!



Thursday, October 11, 2012

More Paglia, Camile poses with the shovel.

I find myself both impressed and disgusted with Camile Paglia today. She has an interview at Salon.com, which is I think an extremely important thing for us all to read.

She's got some good points and then she goes and throws it all away on the WRONG conclusion. To wit:

The biggest issue for me is the Obama administration's continuation of endless war, war, war.

That's a good point. The USA isn't winning anything, they're spinning their wheels in a public relations exercise which is directed toward making friends of people who really don't want to be friends with the USA.

Second is the appalling rise in the military and domestic use of drones.

That's something I've been pounding away at for several years now. Drones are a major danger to free society.

The way liberals lay down flat to accept this massive, totalitarian takeover of the American medical system was shocking to me.

Yep, Camile doesn't like Obamacare and thinks it is a totalitarian takeover. Which it is, so good point.

She even straightens out the interviewer when he says something idiotic:

Totally agree on two subjects, Afghanistan and the growing surveillance state. But it seems like those are issues brought up — we raise them, other progressives raise them a lot — but part of why it never comes up is because the Republicans are completely complicit and would likely be worse in both of those areas.

Camile Paglia: Wait a minute, hold it, no! Listen — a huge point I want to make is that the protest against the surveillance state has, with only a few exceptions, been mainly coming from the Right and not from the Left! Talk radio has been seething with this issue for years. A good example is talk-show host Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny," which was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller three years ago and yet got very few mainstream reviews. Democrats have got to wake up! This is why the Republican Party has gained and why the Democratic Party is in disarray — because the Democrats have lost one of their key signature issues from 1960s leftism. Why has the GOP become the freedom party?

That's the first time I've seen -anybody- from the Left come out and say the truth about the Republican party and particularly the Tea Party. The DemocRats are the party of tyranny, and here's a Lefty come out and finally said it really loud and up in their face. Finally.

But then she she comes up with this stunningly stupid thing:

Kenny Lauerman: So then, why not vote for Romney?

Camile Paglia: I cannot cast a vote for a party that cast so many votes in the primaries for the vile Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum! The Democrats may be naive about institutions and economics, but the Republicans seem to be culturally and psychologically naive in imagining for a single second that Newt Gingrich is a deep and erudite thinker! I watched that boomlet happen, and I thought, "What world do Republican voters inhabit if they mistake Gingrich's glib, snickering, tittering snarkiness for depth and learning?"

So she's going to cut off her nose to spite her face and vote Green Party.

...I think that Mitt Romney is a moderate — like Nelson Rockefeller, who as governor of New York poured money into the state university system that educated me. Romney is an affable, successful businessman whose skills seem well-suited to this particular moment of economic crisis. Hence I want to use my vote to make a statement about my unhappiness with the Democratic Party and the direction it has taken.

She doesn't like TWO GUYS in the Republican party, who aren't even running, so she's going to vote for the most totalitarian bunch of pinkos available, the Green Party, as a "protest". Oh. My. Ghod.

This kind of juvenile vote protest crap is what I expect from idealistic punk kids who think anybody gives a shit how they voted. Throwing away your vote just splits the effort against the thing you're protesting and LETS IT WIN.

So despite all the good points and despite "getting it" about Barry and his totalitarian party, and despite all the sound and fury, she's really very stupid about this. She's posing with the shovel instead of filling the sandbags as the water is rising around her ankles.

If that seems a little harsh, consider this gem here:

The TSA's security policies are getting more and more bizarre, from testing people's drinks for explosives to ordering all travelers to freeze on command, but could a frightening policy that was seriously explored by the DHS be resurrected – forcing people to wear taser bracelets that would deliver an electric shock if they got out of line?

That links to InfoWars, but the research was from the Washington Times and a few other places, so I think its safe to say that its the real deal. Homeland Security was and probably still is considering taser bracelets for air travelers. To be fitted at the security checkpoint in the departing airport and worn until reaching the security checkpoint at the arriving airport.

And Camile Paglia is voting Green Party.

Genius really can dwell in the same body with utter, burning stupidity.

The Phantom

Update, welcome Five Feet of Fury readers!

Monday, October 08, 2012

Two retarded things I have to rant about.

Two items sticking in my shoe today. First is this bit from Scotland the (formerly) Brave, where a Conservative Party bigwig is being told off for saying that "almost nine out of 10 Scottish households take more from the public purse than they contribute in taxes" Second is the Supreme Court of the United States is going to decide if people have a right to sell their own stuff second-hand. Yeah, for real.

So first from Bonny Scotland, the Big Cheese of Scots Conservatives is going to address a Tory Party conference, and in her speech she will mention certian truths. This it seems is "controversial."
Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, is to highlight official figures showing that only 283,080 households north of the border – 12 per cent of the total – pay more in tax than they receive in public services.

[snippage]
"The rotten system of patronage, which denies so many people real choices in their lives, has created a corrosive sense of entitlement which suits its political gang masters," she will say. "Only 12 per cent are responsible for generating Scotland's wealth. I wonder how many of them work on public sector contracts."
Referring to her party's dismal election record, the Scottish Conservative leader will conclude: "If the gang master state is the only provider people can see for their housing, education and employment, it's no surprise those who seek to break the stranglehold find barriers in their way."
Now, what bothers me here is not that Ruth Davidson is blaming other people for why her party sucks. That's lame, and she's lame for doing it. No, what bothers me here is this guy:

Kenny Gibson, a Nationalist MSP, described it as Miss Davidson's "Mitt Romney moment". He added: "At least Mitt Romney only insulted around half of Americans, while Ruth Davidson believes almost 90 per cent of Scots do not 'contribute' to society."

The British Crown presently teeters on the very knife-edge of insolvency. They certainly spend a lot more than they take in taxes, making up the difference by borrowing. Like Greece, but not quite so far along. In that environment, criticizing a politician for saying that nine out of ten Scots receive more from the state than they put in, is insanity.

Mitt Romney was right, 47% of Americans ARE clients of the state, and Ruth Davidson is right as well. If nine out of ten people are depending on Big Jimmy Government for their daily bread and roof over their head, literally, that's a freakin' disaster. Its the kind of thing to be screamed from the roof tops, not hidden under a bushel and tut-tutted about.

Second, we have a state of affairs that only a crooked lawyer could possibly come up with, and only a Lefty activist judge would countenance in their courtroom.

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products. Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.[snippage] That's being challenged now for products that are made abroad, and if the Supreme Court upholds an appellate court ruling, it would mean that the copyright holders of anything you own that has been made in China, Japan or Europe, for example, would have to give you permission to sell it.

Coles Notes version, some kid named  Supap Kirtsaeng made a million bucks buying American textbooks really cheap in Thailand and selling them on Ebay for less than cover price in the USA. John Wiley & Sons sued him for "copyright infringement", which is utterly, utterly stupid. You buy a copy of War and Peace published by John Wiley & Sons in Thailand, it is not your fault that they A) sell the same book in the USA and B) sell it for three times the money in the USA. That's their problem, right?

WRONG! Now its your problem.

In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court's ruling that anything that was manufactured overseas is not subject to the first-sale principle. Only American-made products or "copies manufactured domestically" were.

This falls out of the "are you kidding me?" area and lands squarely in "you're out of your f-ing mind!"  This is nothing other than a complete rejection of legal history and precedent in favor of abject insanity.  The two lawyers for Kirtsaeng, being lawers of course, raised the following objections:
Both Ammori and Band worry that a decision in favor of the lower court would lead to some strange, even absurd consequences. For example, it could become an incentive for manufacturers to have everything produced overseas because they would be able to control every resale.
It could also become a weighty issue for auto trade-ins and resales, considering about 40% of most U.S.-made cars carry technology and parts that were made overseas.
That's true, but that's not the thing they should be worried about. The true and serious danger is that people (and companies!) will simply ignore the law. They will stop complying with it altogether and go completely black market, just as they do with music downloading now. Which would be a disaster, because black markets always are. The criminal element gets rich, and those are not the people you want getting money and power in a civilized society.

Just two more examples of socialist imbeciles doing their flat-out best to founder our peaceful, prosperous society on the rocks. May they all contract a terminal case of boils.

Here endeth the rant./

Saturday, October 06, 2012

Disagreeing with Camile Paglia.

Camile Paglia is an interesting girlie. Fabulously intelligent and talented, yet astoundingly blind on occasion, all at the same time.

Kinda cheeky looking too. :)

She wrote an interesting piece today in the Wall Street Journal. I picked it up on Drudge Report.

Here's what she says:

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

The Phantom... agrees! Visual art has indeed been a wasteland of dreck since the 1960's.
What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a contraction of ideology.
She then goes on to expand that Andy Warhol pretty much killed Avant Garde by using "gaudy commercial imagery" and print making technology etc, and that:

 The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery anti-establishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)

It is undeniably true that the "fine art" world has become a Lefty echo chamber, entry to which is closely guarded. Ticket in seems to be issued only to homosexual/lesbian atheists with a drive to shock middle class America. (I think she needs to give up on the "libertarian" self-description if she voted for Barry, the ultimate in Control Everything socialism.)

But I don't think that's what killed modern art. I think hate killed it.

Consider her discussion of modern visual art such as the "Piss Christ", versus her view of industrial design:

Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is modern reality.

Modern art has been shackled to the Left for certain, but even before that the modern artist has been much more concerned with "challenging" the culture they live in than making "art" because they HATE it. Andy Warhol just put the cherry on top of the steaming hate pile that had been building up since Art Nouveau, by hating art itself.

In my humble opinion, of course. Camile Paglia is a much greater scholar than I, but I think the kind of emotional process that produces "Piss Christ" or a print of a frickin' Campbell's soup can has a lot more to do with hate than anything else.

Paglia also mentions Minimalism, The Bauhaus movement, and I would add the Dadaists and a few more from the early 20th century were primarily reacting to the excesses of the Victorian Era. 

Compare for example the frigid steel and lacquer of Bauhaus style furniture:

... to the linear, four-square beauty of  Shaker furniture:

The Shakers created their furniture in praise of God as much as for functionality, the Bauhaus I argue was created as a rebuke to previous styles. It certainly feels like a rebuke when you sit on it.
Ouch!

I have no problem with hate as an emotion, per se. Hate can drive great things, great achievements. It can scold, mock, expose and destroy, and those are good things to do when they are required. But it does not create. And that is the trap modern art is in, beyond all the politics and money issues. They're just fucking hateful.

Then she goes off on the iPhone.

Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

The iPhone certainly has a spiritual dimension, over and above its value as a cultural artifact and its profound effect on our society. Its spiritual dimension is that it is a canvas, as well as a functional end in itself. The function is to communicate both one to one and one to many, what is being communicated is the artistic expression of the user. To me this is a bigger -artistic- impact on Western culture than anything since the Mona Lisa.

Consider something as silly as an iPhone game, Plants Vs. Zombies. That thing was created by a bunch of nerd kids in California. Its both a silly toy you play for a giggle and an intensely interactive piece of representational art, with music, video, drawings, all of it rolled up in a bundle. For five bucks from the iTunes store.

Never mind the iPhone, just compare the cultural impact of Plants Vs. Zombies or Angry Birds with "Piss Christ" and its entire genre of schlock-shock "art". Consider that those are merely the first two "hits" out of the gate.

Now consider the impact of 3D printing and CAD/CAM robot machining, which is getting to be starving-artist cheap very, very quickly.

In my considered opinion the "future of visual art" as constructed by Ms. Paglia is not threatened by the iPhone. That future -is- the iPhone, and ubiquitous computing generally. Because that is the place where highly motivated, highly accomplished kids are working right now. The next wave of great artists is going to be programmers.

Can you hear the screaming? That's the collective membership of every Ivory Tower fine art faculty in North America screaming "NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!"  You'll hear the Europeans in a bit, speed of sound across the Atlantic y'know.


The Phantom

Friday, October 05, 2012

Think you know everything?

You don't! This is such an obvious thing, but I bet you've never thought of it.

Researchers at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands, placed water droplets on a plate chilled to -20 degrees Celsius and captured images as a freezing front traveled up the droplet. The photos are published in the American Institute of Physics' (AIP) journal Physics of Fluids. The approximately 4-millimeter diameter droplets took about 20 seconds to freeze. During the final stage of freezing, the ice drop developed a pointy tip, as can be seen in Figure 1d. The effect, which is not observed for most other liquids, arises because water expands as it freezes. The vertical expansion of the ice, in combination with the confining effect of surface tension on the spherical cap of remaining liquid, leads to the point formation.
Once the liquid is completely frozen, the sharp tip of the drop attracts water vapor in the air, much like a sharp metal lightning rod attracts electrical charges. The water vapor collects on the tip and a tree of small ice crystals starts to grow, as seen in Figure 2. An opposite effect has been shown to preferentially extract water molecules from the sharp edge of potato wedges in the oven, the researchers note.

Which explains this:

Which I found on my pond one morning.
Kewl!

The Phantom

Hot Girls and Bacon!

No, I didn't forget!

Hot cheerleaders! Seems cricket has cheerleaders in Pakistan, who knew?

Her royal hotness, Queen Raina of Jordan!


Girls soccer team from Saudi Arabia. They must be hot, wearing all that get-up in the sun like that. This is the best picture I could find of female human beings from Saudi Arabia. There aren't any on the web worth talking about. Google "Hot Saudi Girls" and all you get is Maureen Dowd petting a camel. Not hot!

Mmmmm, yummy!

Monday, October 01, 2012

Skynet will be flying drones, says Washington.


Some egghead says the eeeevile American military wants drones that kill people BY THEMSELVES!!!
Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.
"Before they were blind, deaf and dumb," Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force, told AFP. "Now we're beginning to make them to see, hear and sense."
Ronald Arkin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.
Ronald Arkin seems to have never heard about cruise missiles, which are really nothing other than autonomous drones which fly themselves to a chosen location and then blow the crap out of it.
In truth, there's really nothing stopping the Air Force from letting autonomous Predator drones from choosing their own targets. Its just that nobody so far has been stupid enough to turn one loose on its own with live ammo. Not what I would consider to be a really, you know, -safe- kind of thing to do even in a war zone.

They're computers. They screw up. Better that the screwups don't have high explosive attached to them, eh?

The Phantom

Let the rationing begin!

Two words that describe the future for America: Healthcare Rationing

AP story today, under the new Obamacare rules hospitals are going to get -fined- for re-admitting patients in less than thirty days. Check it:

As of Monday, Medicare will start fining hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within 30 days of discharge due to complications. The penalties are part of a broader push under President Barack Obama's health care law to improve quality while also trying to save taxpayers money.
About two-thirds of the hospitals serving Medicare patients, or some 2,200 facilities, will be hit with penalties averaging around $125,000 per facility this coming year, according to government estimate.
Now, some of you Americans may not be aware of this, but a popular canard among Canadians is that American hospitals turn away the old and the poor if they can't pay. People here in Canada  have been saying that for thirty years now, and for thirty years its been a heinous lie.
Until now.
Barack Obama, The One who has brought forth Hope and Change to save us all, has finally managed to make it true.
Oh and by the way. Where does anyone think the hospitals are going to get the money to pay those fines? FROM YOU, is where. Hospitals don't actually produce anything, they provide a service. Now that they are going to get fined for providing that service, they will of course have to pass on that cost to the people who -buy- the service. That would be y'all.

Happy Monday.


The Phantom