Wendy's to install ordering kiosks.

Remember how there used to be gas station attendants? Some kid (or grown man sometimes, I recall) in a uniform would fill your tank and clean your windshield for you. Ever wonder why you never see that anymore? Minimum wage.

The correct (and only) answer to minimum wage hikes is to fire staff.

As Dispatch.com reports, the Dublin-based burger giant started offering kiosks last year, and demand for the technology has been high from both customers and franchise owners.

"There is a huge amount of pull from (franchisees) in order to get them," David Trimm, Wendy's chief information officer, said last week during the company's investors' day.

 

"With the demand we are seeing ... we can absolutely see our way to having 1,000 or more restaurants live with kiosks by the end of the year."

 

A typical store would get three kiosks for about $15,000. Trimm estimated the payback on those machines would be less than two years, thanks to labor savings and increased sales. Customers still could order at the counter.

 

Kiosks are where the industry is headed, but Wendy's is ahead of the curve, said Darren Tristano, vice president with Technomic, a food-service research and consulting firm.

 

"They are looking to improve their automation and their labor costs, and this is a good way to do it," he said.

Who could have seen that coming? As we noted previously, minimum wage laws - while advertised under the banner of social justice - do not live up to the claims made by those who tout them. They do not lift low wage earners to a so-called "social minimum". Indeed, minimum wage laws — imposed at the levels employed in Europe — push a considerable number of people into unemployment. And, unless those newly unemployed qualify for government assistance (read: welfare), they will sink below, or further below, the social minimum.

This is already in place in Ontario McDonalds, and being well used. Next step will be a McDonalds app for your phone. I know nothing at this point, I have no rumor, no news release. But if they're not working on rolling something like that out, I would be shocked. Because then they can eliminate the $5,000-each terminals and make you use your own hardware.

The cashiers of this world had best polish up their resumes, is my guess. Because a kiosk that costs $5K this year will cost half that in two years. Where the big companies go, the little companies follow. A store with five employees this year will have one security guard in five years. Most likely the owner. Because he won't have the profit margin to hire a security guard.

Picture this: your grocery store is really a warehouse they let you walk through. Same with Home Depot etc. What if they took your order and your credit card from your phone and the bags of groceries came out a little door at the front? Think of how many people they could fire and how much HR hassle they could avoid by doing that! Think of the fun of going shopping, tapping on your tiny little phone screen, loading all your crap in the car yourself, and never having to speak to a human being the whole time. Wouldn't that be great?

I hasten to assure you that the tech required to do that exists now and people are working furiously to make it happen now. If not sooner. Because the alternative is bankruptcy.

Or, the companies could hire illegals under the table and pay them five bucks an hour. That's how its done presently. Illegal foreign workers. Low wages, no HR issues, easy replacement. Companies offload all their staffing and moral humanitarian issues onto the public purse.

The Mechanized Phantom

Your car, ratting you out to Big Brother.

I post this little article in relief that I am not merely crying in the wilderness about this mass surveillance by our electronic devices.

While on the subject of apps, coincident with this year's CES, Subaru announced that it has added eight cloud-based apps to the STARLINK multimedia system in the 2017 Impreza. Some are familiar, like Yelp. Some are a bit narrow in focus, like eBird, which was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for birdwatchers. And one ought to give a bit of pause: RightTrack. According to Subaru,
"RightTrack Test Drive from Liberty Mutual Insurance monitors driving habits and provides customers with tips on driving safer to help lower their insurance rates and improve their safe driving skills."

Or said more simply: You drive. It watches. And let's the folks at Liberty Mutual know how well, and how fast, you've been driving.

But this is old news. Big Brother already knows where you are every minute, because cell phones. Big Brother already warehouses that data forever. Private companies like Target already can tell if your teenage daughter is pregnant by analyzing credit card purchases.

Let me add something now that may bring this all home to you nice and hard.

Imagine if you will, you are some schlubb in an office at Big Brother Data Inc. You have access to Donald Trump's and Milo Yiannopoulos' driving data, their Vizio TV data, their radio listening habits, their credit card data, their second-by-second location data for the last twenty years, every phone call, email and web site visit since there was an internet...

You are going to be one rich office schlubb, if all it takes to destroy a public figure is a re-cut video of him telling a joke.

Now imagine you are Milo. All your shit is spying on you, 24/7/365. Car, TV, phone, radio, fridge, toaster, if it plugs in its collecting data. If you have a non-standard way of picking your nose, there's probably video of it somewhere. More to the point, if you have ever lost your temper in a car or told an off-colour joke, there's video of that too.

There is not a human being on the planet who can survive that proctology exam.

The Phantom

Milo-quiddic: just how full of it is the press these days?

There's been some full-volume defense of Milo Yiannopolis the last few days at some blogs that I visit. Mad Genius Club, According To Hoyt, Small Dead Animals, Five Feet of Fury.

There's also been some remarkably pusillanimous monkeys throwing poo at said defenders, people one would expect to come to the defense of a falsely accused gay man. Unless you know them, then you understand they have no morals or standards. Because they are pusillanimous, shit-throwing, apes.

Well here we are today, after a week or so of Five Minute Hates against Milo from the regular media outlets. What was going unreported while Milo got his turn in the ducking chair?

Well, that is very interesting. Re-posted from Small Dead Animals, we find this absolutely fascinating article.

Since President Donald Trump has been sworn in on Jan. 20, authorities have arrested an unprecedented number of sexual predators involved in child sex trafficking rings in the United States. This should be one of the biggest stories in the national news. Instead, the mainstream media has barely, if at all, covered any of these mass pedophile arrests. This begs the question – why?

As a strong advocate for sex crime victims, I've been closely following the pedophile arrests since Trump took office. There have been a staggering 1,500-plus arrests in one short month; compare that to less than 400 sex trafficking-related arrests in 2014 according to the FBI.

So just to recap:

A re-cut video of a gay abuse victim talking about other people having gay sex with minors, and making a joke about his own abuser, all taken out of context let us be clear, that's evil incarnate. He must be purged! To the ducking chair with him!

A Republican rodeo-clown president leading the charge to get 1500+ actual child molesters/kidnappers/traffickers arrested and off the street... that's nothing. Nobody cares.

Therefore, one must conclude that the press in the USA (and Canada, they are 100% in on it) is completely corrupt.

The Irredeemable and Deplorable Phantom

The Press, and the meteor that hit it.

This is reblogged from Small Dead Animals, as usual, because I did a big long comment and it seems a waste not to post it here too.

Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump, and the Death of the American Press

How did we get from 'Village Voice' reporters digging up everything there is to know about a flashy New York real estate salesman to not knowing anything about the President of the United States and his ties to Russia?

I grabbed a coffee. I read the whole thing. It's pretty good. But I do have an issue.

I was at the Voice when the meteor hit. Like many papers back then, dailies and weeklies, the Voice made its money on classified advertising. The New York Times, for instance, had three important classifieds sections—employment, automotive, and housing—but if New Yorkers really wanted to find a great apartment, they'd line up at the newsstand on 42nd Street to get a copy of the Voice hot off the press.

And then the internet came along, and it was all there in one place—for free. The press panicked. The Voice's publisher at the time, David Schneiderman, announced to the staff that the paper was going free. It made no sense, he argued, to keep charging $1 for what consumers could get on the internet for nothing.

Here's how the staff heard it: Who would want to pay $1 a week to read Nat Hentoff on civil liberties, Robert Christgau on music, Michael Musto on New York nightlife—or Wayne Barrett on the follies of real-estate mogul Donald Trump? That is, who would want to pay $1 a week to feel themselves a part of what the Village Voice had made them feel part of for decades? But at the time, devaluing content was in fashion—which meant, as few saw back then, the profession was digging its own grave.

Mr. Lee Smith the aurthor, like many in the media, is blaming the Drudge Report and Craigslist for killing off "quality content" as they like to call it. Otherwise known as Real Journalism (TM).

But the meteor did not hit when Drudge broke the Blue Dress for free on the internet. The meteor hit a really long time before that, back before the Great Depression.

Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt won three terms as President, the American Press has been leaning hard Left. The author mentions this, but he doesn't really understand what it means.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon calls the media the opposition party, but that's misleading. Everyone knows that the press typically tilts left, and no one is surprised, for instance, that The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican candidate since 1956. But that's not what we're seeing now—rather, the media has become an instrument in a campaign of political warfare.

That's not true. I -remember- the pre-Internet press. The American press/tv/radio has been an instrument of political warfare for the DemocRat Party my entire life, 60 years. Big Government is their argument, and has been since the 1920's at least. Probably since Teddy Roosevelt, come to think of it.

The datum that the NY Times hasn't backed a Republican since 1956 is a bigger deal than Mr. Lee Smith would like to let on. They backed Jimmy Carter. That's pre-Internet. There was no excuse for that. Carter was and remains an -idiot- and they backed him to the hilt. Disaster followed, as day follows night.

Only now, since the back of the monopoly was broken by nerds in lab coats, are we actually having a real debate.

Other than that minor quibble, it was a pretty good article. >:)

The Irredeemable Phantom

Today's feminist outrage.

The horror.

A billboard on Interstate 40 West near Winston-Salem is angering many who say its message is offensive to women.
The board reads: "Real men provide. Real women appreciate it." The owner of a Winston-Salem women's boutique called Kleur has organized a demonstration against the billboard's message for Sunday at 11 a.m.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article134440999.html#storylink=cp

Hey, you can't say that!

I am so triggered...

The Deplorable, Irredeemable Phantom

Google explains, SHUT UP!!!

A new "anti-trolling" tool at Google.

Google's freely available software, known as Perspective, is being tested by a range of news organisations, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Economist, as a way to help simplify the jobs of humans reviewing comments on their stories.

Make your plans now to switch blogging platforms, ladies and gentlemen. And back up all your stuff locally. Cloud servers can also be "anti-trolling" scoured.

The Deplorable Troll Phantom

CBC journo wants journalism licensing.

Your betters are tired of listening to you, Canada. Neil Macdonald:

A lawyer is governed not just by normal criminal and civil law, but by clearly defined ethics, interpreted by quasi-judicial boards of his or her peers. The same self-regulation is practised by most other professions.

Not journalism. There is no uniform qualification for a reporter, no uniform code of behaviour. Journalism has vigorously resisted any efforts to legally define journalism, or any sort of peer review.

Yes, some of the bigger journalistic organizations have ombudsmen, or public editors, but their only power is suasion. Yes, there are press councils that judge public complaints, but they have no fangs. Yes, some outfits, like CBC, have internal policies that set rules of behaviour for their reporters, but enforcement is at the discretion of managers.

A huge swath of journalism doesn't even bother pretending self-regulation.

And in any event, who is a journalist anymore? The answer is anyone who says "I'm a journalist," and has access to the internet.

The solution? GOVERNMENT REGULATION. Obviously.

But nothing would go further in recapturing public trust than becoming a true profession, with standards, qualifications, accountability and enforceable rules. As much as I shudder at being judged by other journalists, there is no longer any other way.

There is nothing that government cannot do. Blessed be government, and keep those taxes rolling in, you peons.

A shorter Neil Macdonald: "SHUT UP!!!!"

A shorter Phantom: "No."

The Deplorable, Intolerable Phantom

Liberal sports writers suck at their job.

Someone FINALLY says what Rush Limbaugh has been saying since forever.

You can see it in the way sportswriters police a consensus against the Washington Redskins' name, or for on-field political activism. They tweet against President Trump, and for undocumented immigrants. They pile on populist loudmouths like former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and may even be punishing him for his politics with their Hall of Fame ballots. They proudly admit that they are at a remove from their readers. HardballTalk's Craig Calcaterra owns it: "It's folly for any of us to think we're speaking for the common fan."

The Phantom

SJWs and S&M is a thing?

Here we have a post that's making the rounds. I saw it first in the comments at According To Hoyt, today its at Small Dead Animals as well. It rang a chime in my brain, so I linked it yesterday here.

Go on social media, and you will see SJWs telling us that Nazis are everywhere, that they are evil, and foul, and legion. They are in the White House, they are on Youtube, they are on Twitter, they are in Video Games. Nazis, everywhere. And so they march out into the streets, the Black Bloc, Antifascists engaging in what Tom Kratman calls a bit of political theater (not unlike Fascists once did).
But at the end of a long week of fighting the cisnormative heteropatriarchy, they come to be beaten by men dressed as Nazis, to the gritty beats of loud Industrial music in the depths of an Industrial park.

He goes into considerable detail, so consider yourself warned.

The thing is, according to this guy, this type of behavior is becoming "normal."

However, things have gone slowly downhill over the years. It's a mess, now. Even the BDSM folks are often shocked by it. They've been around a lot longer than most people realize, but there was a time where they were very underground. When to get in, you'd have to know someone, and pretty much everybody respected it as highly private and eccentric. When I first DJed for them, it was because a friend of mine was dating the guy that organized it. I was pretty poor in those days, and the money was good.
These days, bondage is normal. It's everywhere. Everybody does it. It's almost a cliche now. Normal people do bondage like it was something you could find on rollback at a Walmart.

Well, what happens when you can find bondage "on rollback at a Walmart"?

Remember the Abu Ghraib scandal? Prisoners tortured in Iraq by US soldiers? Remember this guy?

That's what you get.

The Phantom.

SJWs really are getting worse.

Today's outrage.

Imagine carrying a child for 9 months & give birth & take care of them for years for them to grow up to be the person who created this?

Aaaaiiiii! The horror!.. oh, wait.

Its a completely harmless cartoon. Get over it.

The Phantom

Update: Possible explanation for the freaky SJWs. They're really insane.

Simon & Schuster explain, "SHUT UP!!!"

Milo Yiannopoulos's book "Dangerous" cancelled for publication by Simon and Schuster.

Shocking no one at all.

Also "disinvited" to CPAC by pearl-clutching Republicans who remain the Party of Stupid despite winning the election in a landslide.

Because Milo is a pedophile, according to this.

Is Milo a pedophile? Maybe. Maybe not. We can't tell. Because there's no trustworthy source out there to report. Left wing hates him because he's a conservative homo. Right win hates him because he's a homo conservative.

Me, I think he's a canary in the coal mine. I'd like to see him keep on going, and keep on saying all kinds of super controversial stuff. Just to see who tries to shut him up.

On his side, there's NOBODY filing molestation charges against him. That puts him well ahead of Hillary and Bill, in my book.

The Phantom

Zuckerberg explains, "SHUT UP!!!"

At Slashdot today, it seems the Father of Facebook has some power user issues. He posted a large screed regarding the type of world he want to create using Farcebook, then edited something out of it. The idea that a software company can and should be deciding what kind of future we get is interesting in its own right, but the edit is even more interesting. Quoth the King of the Book of Faces:

The long term promise of AI is that in addition to identifying risks more quickly and accurately than would have already happened, it may also identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all — including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global. It will take many years to develop these systems.

The original Mashable article notes that the revised version leaves out that bit about scanning private channels. Presumably because "private channels" are supposed to be, you know, private.

That Zuckerberg suggested AI could be used to monitor "private channels" in the same letter he used to praise WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption and the importance of protecting user privacy would seem to be at odds. There's a distinction between using AI to distinguish between propaganda and news coverage and using it to monitor private communication which, if taken at face value, would be counter to the CEO's stated desire in the letter to keep Facebook users safe without "compromising privacy."

My conclusion is that Marky has a major woody for centralized social control and top-down engineering. He's a Big Iron, time sharing, server side kinda guy. Make it nice on the surface for the stupid peasants, keep a big Ban Hammer handy for when the peasants get revolting.

Essentially, he wants Newspeak. You will not be able to express selected concepts on Farcebook. It will do what Twitter is doing: ban you for saying anything Marky decides you shouldn't be able to say.

No word on whether the system will also vector Predator gunships on your location, or plot a firing solution for FCC cruise missiles. That'll be version 2.0, probably.

The Retarded Phantom Retard. (That's sufficient to get me booted from Twitter right now.)

Twitter explains, "SHUT UP!!!"

Good thing I never Twitter.

Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily "limiting" their account.

Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network can't see those retweets.

Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.

This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.

Take for example the Twitter user @Drybones5 who got his account limited after using the word "retarded."

https://twitter.com/drybones5/status/831571001897017344?refsrc=email&s=11

He claims he got his account limited directly after saying retarded twice. The first time he called a Nintendo policy adding paid extra content to their new Zelda game retarded.

Yes, they are responding to the Rise of Trump by doubling down on their liberal/socialist behavior. They will do what didn't work before, twice as hard and twice as fast.

It is distressing to see this kind of behavior in tech companies, but not surprising. Techies don't run companies. MBAs do. MBAs listen to the Conventional Wisdom, as offered up in the Conventional Media. Twitter Inc. probably thinks this move will expand their user base and make their brand more valuable. Because they are -stupid- and do not understand how the world works.

Or, possibly somebody like Soros offered them a zillion dollars.

At time like these, I embrace the power of and. Evidence indicates they are venal AND stupid.

Needless to say, shortly there will be a company called Twitter Inc. for sale, cheap. Faster, please.

I fully expect the retarded retards at Google Blogspot and ArseBook to pull the same retarded maneuver. Good thing the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

The Phantom

SFF, SJWs and the circular firing squad.

The Stupid burns ever deeper in SJW Land, according to the Washigton Post.

These days, though, a book may get an additional check from an unusual source: a sensitivity reader, a person who, for a nominal fee, will scan the book for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content. These readers give feedback based on self-ascribed areas of expertise such as "dealing with terminal illness," "racial dynamics in Muslim communities within families" or "transgender issues."

These are people who read your book and tell you all the parts you weren't "woke" for, in the hope that the Social Media Swine will leave you alone.

Sensitivity readers have emerged in a climate — fueled in part by social media — in which writers are under increased scrutiny for their portrayals of people from marginalized groups, especially when the author is not a part of that group.
Last year, for instance, J.K. Rowling was strongly criticized by Native American readers and scholars for her portrayal of Navajo traditions in the 2016 story "History of Magic in North America." Young-adult author Keira Drake was forced to revise her fantasy novel "The Continent" after an online uproar over its portrayal of people of color and Native backgrounds. More recently, author Veronica Roth — of "Divergent" fame — came under fire for her new novel, "Carve the Mark." In addition to being called racist, the book was criticized for its portrayal of chronic pain in its main character.

In other words, its a protection racket. For suckers, because the only way to get the Perpetually Aggrieved to back of is... well actually, there is no way. If they don't find something to be offended by, they will make something up.

Personally, I consider it a sacred crusade to piss these cretins off. Some of y'all may know, I've been doing some writing. When my work finally hits print or ebook, if I don't get at least one bitter denunciation on Twitter from some pink haired sea mammal, all upset because of the sexy robot girlfriends, I will be quite disappointed. Yep, sexy robot girlfriends. With guns.

However, the next bit is even better.  Some lady named Jodi Meadows wrote a "young adult" fantasy book, and recently gave a teaser pic of the book cover. Well, apparently some people were upset because there was a black girl on the cover. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, it is stupider than you think.

First, so many people have said so many nice things about the cover. Thank you! I'm happy you like it! I love it, too.
A few people have mentioned they see this as an important cover, because it has a Black girl in a dress. That's what I want to talk about. I didn't realize when the cover was being designed (that's my privilege), but this is the first time a big publisher has this kind of cover.
It shouldn't be the first time.
The first time a major publisher designed a YA cover with a Black model in a gown, it should have gone to a Black author.
Again, me not realizing that hadn't happened yet: that was my white privilege at work.
The fact that mine came first is a symptom of the problems in publishing, and who publishing is designed to work for. By the time I knew what was at stake with this cover and the timing, the model had already been hired and her photos taken. At that point, changing the cover would have meant telling a Black model that she couldn't be on my cover because she's Black.

Yes friends, the Perpetually Aggrieved were angry that a black girl appeared on the cover of a book by a white author. They flamed poor ol' Jodi, and she had to go back on her blog and apologize all over the place.

That is what I'd call a Blue on Blue circular firing squad event. And they missed the target too.

The Deplorable Phantom

Internet of Things DDOS attack danger.

Yes friends, those wifi capable lightbulbs may not be such a great idea.

A full-blown Skynet situation might be the thing of science fiction (we hope, anyway), but that doesn't mean bizarre things involving machines can't happen. As proof of this, Verizon teased an entry in its upcoming 2017 Data Breach Digest that describes a recent DDoS attack on an unnamed university involving vending machines, light bulbs, and 5,000 Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

As with many DDoS attacks involving IoT devices, this one is the result of system administrators being a little too lax with security on these seemingly benign devices. The university in question dismissed complaints from students across campus about slow or inaccessible network connectivity. When things took a turn for the worse, the university called in the cavalry—Verizon's RISK (Research, Investigations, Solutions, and Knowledge) team, in this case.

It is worth reading in its entirety, because the university very nearly had to -replace- 5000 some odd light bulbs, vending machines and other little IoT doodads. That would be a big bunch of money. All because of some script kiddie with a hack, and really bad network security.

Now, here's why this is even a thing. This chip right here: ESP8266. From the wikipedia article on it:

The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and MCU (Micro Controller Unit) capability produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif Systems.^[1]
The chip first came to the attention of western makers in August 2014 with the ESP-01 module, made by a third-party manufacturer, AI-Thinker. This small module allows micro-controllers to connect to a Wi-Fi network and make simple TCP/IP connections using Hayes-style commands. However, at the time there was almost no English-language documentation on the chip and the commands it accepted.^[2] The very low price and the fact that there were very few external components on the module which suggests that it could eventually be very inexpensive in volume, attracted many hackers to explore the module, chip, and the software on it, as well as to translate the Chinese documentation.^[3]
The ESP8285 is an ESP8266 with 1 MB of built-in flash, allowing for single-chip devices capable of connecting to Wi-Fi.^[4]

This particular little devil is the size of a fingernail and costs ~$5US in bare-chip form at bulk prices. One-of is $7.00. Here it is at Adafruit, with a break-out board and power circuitry etc. for under ten bucks.

This unity allows WiFi connectivity to virtually anything, amazingly cheaply. There are other such chips on the market, some are a lot cheaper. That's why we have WiFi connected LED light bulbs on the market, suddenly.

This particular chip is not as powerful as a PC, but there are lots of implementations out there that are. There are others that have less capability but are smaller, they get down to rock salt grain sized.

You can WiFi chip anything. Kid's dolls, Hot Wheel cars, flying drones smaller than a pack of smokes. Or how about an extension cord, a USB or HDMI cable, a stapler, a watch, an eraser, a pencil... an Ethernet connector... You get the picture.

And when I say "you", I mean you, Mr./Ms./Whatsit Reader can most likely crank one of these things together and program it to do what you want. It is really not hard, if you have the determination or the driving need to do it.

What has not happened, is an industry standard method for SECURING these things. You have 5,000 PC-grade devices on a network, you need to password protect them. Unfortunately, most people have no experience doing that kind of thing. Hence a university having to hire Verizon to clean up their network for them.

Here's something from 2007 about that very issue. You don't have to be a genius, the tools are out there. But, you do have to pay attention and keep up with the jerks who crack these things.

Also the hardware, Qualcom announced 802.11ax today. Brand new ARM quad-core routers and brand new receivers, a whole new universe of hackery to guard against.

Just remember, if it doesn't HAVE WiFi they have to stick a wire into it to crack it. I'm all about the wires, these days.

The Deplorably Wired Phantom

Transgressive!

Joy Villa's dress at the Grammies. Sweet!

Truth to power, baby! Looking good!

Oops! NOAA caught cheatin'.

It appears that the NOAA Climate Scientists have been fudging. Wow, didn't see that coming, right?

They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week's damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.

A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.

Really? Say on, good sir.

It turns out that when NOAA compiled what is known as the 'version 4' dataset, it took reliable readings from buoys but then 'adjusted' them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations.

They did this even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.

No kidding. They do that with the land based readings too. Here's an example, Furnace Creek and Badwater stations in Death Valley are deliberate set up to make new temperature records.

Can you say heat island?

But wait, there's even more:

Our revelations showed there was another problem with the Pausebuster paper – it used an untested experimental version of the dataset recording temperatures on land, which had not been properly archived and made accessible to other scientists.

Yeah, using data that nobody else is allowed to see in a no-no in science. Not so much in climate science though, apparently. They do this shit all the time.

You'd have to be an idiot or a DemocRat to take this stuff at face value anymore.

The Phantom

Update, just for Camestros Felpatron, Michael Mann is a political activist. Harder to delete mentions of Michael Mann here, eh?

Nothing is ever really gone from the Intenet.

Mr. Camestros Felpatron (clearly a nom de plume) has taken to deleting my comments at his blog. Him being a Leftist, this is not surprising behavior.

Me being me, I kept a copy of my comment. Here it is:

[In a previous comment, Camestros asks:] "Can you actually think for yourself."

This from the man who thinks sucker punching "Nazis" on the street is a legitimate political tactic.

But while we're on the subject of argle-bargle, I have yet to see any of y'all argue coherently against the posted link. Not one.

NOAA made a claim about Africa. Where did the NOAA Africa data come from? The link is to Tony Heller, who proposes that they pulled it out of their ass. He has supporting arguments, with supporting data.

I find his presentation reasonable, and consistent with the previously noted behavior of people like Michael Mann, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and others. Also consistent with a photo survey that found a large percentage of NOAA US data units sited in artificially hot environments. Famously, the Death Valley stations at Furnace Creek and Badwater are a particularly egregious example of the trend. Sited deliberately to create a new record high temperature.

You, rather than address Tony Heller, his arguments and his data, deleted my comments. That's not thinking. That's finding a "Nazi" and sucker punching him in the street, internet version.

That's why I try to resist posting links to logical arguments here, Camestros. It's a waste of time.

Now, if you have some -insight- into Tony Heller, his presentation and his conclusions, that might be interesting. And by insight, I mean something other than character assassination.

That's the sort of thing getting deleted by Camestros Felpatron these days. A bald admission that he has no argument, just poo flinging. Again, not a surprising state of affairs for an avowed Warmer and Lefty.

DC Comics races to the bottom, adds turbo and nitrous.

Snagglepus rebooted as gay southern playwright.

The eight-page story will debut this March in the Suicide Squad/Banana Splits Annual #1, before turning into a regular DC series this fall. "I envision him like a tragic Tennessee Williams figure," writer Marc Russell told HiLoBrow.com. "Huckleberry Hound is sort of a William Faulkner guy, they're in New York in the 1950s, Marlon Brando shows up, Dorothy Parker, these socialites of New York from that era come and go."

The sexual orientation was never affirmed in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but Russell, who has also done an updated take on The Flintstones for DC Comics, is making Snagglepuss' sexuality a key part of the story, in which the pink mountain lion is dragged before the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He's accused of being a pinko, get it?

Yeah, we get it. Next up, furry-shipping with Deputy Dawg and the Pink Panther.

We have four years of disgusting bullshit like this to look forward to, as DC Comics drags out and kills every character in their back catalogue. Eight years if Trump wins a second term.

The Deplorable Phantom

Orange Pi, like Raspberry but less filling :)

Coming in over the transom today, Orange Pi. Yet another amazingly cheap single board PC.

Orange Pi is a family of Linux-powered, single board computers manufactured by Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co., Limited, and sold on AliExpress. As with anything sold on AliExpress, be patient and plan ahead for shipping times of two to four or more weeks, because the products are shipped directly from mainland China to locations around the world.

Unlike the Raspberry Pi, which has had a small but growing family of single board computers for different price points, form factors, and features, the number of Orange Pi boards is much larger. The good news is that you have a tremendous amount of choice in the application you want, but the bad news is that amount of choice could be overwhelming. In my case, I went with the Orange Pi Zero 512MB version, because it has the right balance of features and is priced for use in high school, academic environments.

To see a high-resolution image with all the specs, go to the Orange Pi Zero website.

Key point, the boards range in price from ~$48US to $12US, all of them quad core. The $48 one has HDMI with 4K output, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, WiFi, SATA2 for hard drives and a bunch of other goodies. Perfect little box to make a low-energy cloud server/NAS/router out of.

These little machines are getting very capable. At $12US, the Orange Pi is cheap enough to use as the brain for a wireless audio speaker. Or attach a camera and have a fully PC controlled security camera, able to identify and track objects in its visual field. It is very small and low power as well, good for semi-disposable uses. Like a Pirate Box, ferinstance.

These babies are only going to keep getting smaller, cheaper and more available. You have been warned.

The Phantom

Why Liberals are stupid. A rant.

Liberals are stupid, because their answer to everything is more/bigger/better government. The stupid part is that when the more/bigger/better government they wanted DOES something... they complain.

Case in point: NEXUS cards being revoked at the US border.

Nexus memberships have been revoked from all Canadian permanent residents with citizenship in any one of the seven majority-Muslim countries affected by the U.S. travel ban, the Canada Border Services Agency has confirmed to CBC Toronto.
Citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a CBSA spokesperson said in an email that FAST memberships have also been revoked from all such individuals. FAST is a program similar to Nexus that is meant to speed up commercial shipments across the border.
The email goes on to say that memberships of dual citizens have not been cancelled. But CBC Toronto has learned of multiple Canadian-born and dual citizens who have reportedly had their Nexus memberships revoked in the wake of a U.S. executive order barring entry to passport holders from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
Toronto-based lawyer Cyndee Todgham Cherniak said she has been contacted by at least two Canadian-born citizens with Muslim-sounding names who received notices.
And five others — a mix of dual citizens and permanent residents with direct connection to the restricted countries — have also reportedly received revocations from U.S. CBP, she said.

The NEXUS and FAST programs are for getting across the border in an expedited fashion. Meaning, the Border Patrol assumes the holder of the card is pre-vetted, and -generally- chooses not to run them through the usual questioning and possible search when they enter the USA at an airport or a border point. Issuing a card like that to nationals from countries that the USA is currently AT WAR with seems, what's the word I'm looking for here, irresponsible? Rash? Retarded?

Additionally, these are not people with landed immigrant status in the USA. They are landed immigrants in -Canada-. Which is, let us recall, a foreign country. The USA ran those people through the same background check they would run me through. Which was designed to catch Canadians who have misbehaved in Canada. Not some guy who might or might not have a record in Syria, but has kept his nose clean in Canada.

Therefore, suspending expedited crossing for people from nations at war with the USA is only reasonable, and should have been done in the Bush administration. Suspending any crossing at all for people from those nations is also reasonable, with the exception of those who already have an arrangement with the USA through landed immigrant status, Green Card program or similar. Banning Green Card holders was a piece of stupidity arranged by political partisans in the INS, I'm sure. They hate Trump too, he's making them work for a living.

As for the business of random people having their NEXUS revoked because they have a Muslim sounding name? This is where my eyes are rolling, my friends. Oh, Holy Mother of Pearl.

What do you think is going to happen when you give that kind of power to the small minded, unionized public employee types who work for a government institution? They're going to throw their weight around, obviously. Have you never been to the DMV? Its the same assholes behind the counter, different shoulder patch. You want that guy to have power over you?

Graphical explanation of more government.

No, you really don't. Unless you are a Liberal. Then you do. Until you visit the DMV, or some other government  office. Or, heaven help you, an airport. Then the screaming starts.

That is why Liberals are stupid. /.rant./

The Deplorable Phantom

AP publishes Trump phone call?

This is up on Drudge, and I'm sitting here stunned and amazed. Associated Press has published what it says is part of Trump's phone call to the President of Mexico.

President Donald Trump warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send U.S. troops to stop "bad hombres down there" unless the Mexican military does more to control them, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press.

The excerpt of the call did not detail who exactly Trump considered "bad hombres," nor did it make clear the tone and context of the remark, made in a Friday morning phone call between the leaders. It also did not contain Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's response. Mexico denies that Trump's remarks were threatening.

So the AP alleges that they managed to get the no-shit transcript of a phone call between the President of the USA and another head of state. I got a question: how does that happen?

If true, that's the biggest security fail since Hillary's email server. Wow.

If true, way to go Donald Trump for telling the President of Mexico to get his shit together. The border region of Mexico is in chaos, and Mexican drug smugglers are killing both Mexicans and Americans in the Arizona desert.

If not true... then that's a story also.

The Phantom

We need to talk about Judith Timson. I fear for her sanity.

This is some serious crazy right here:

We need to talk about this. We need to connect all the dots. Leitch has said, emboldened by surveys, that "70 per cent of Canadians agree" with her proposal to screen for values, which while she never says it out loud, seem at every turn to be referencing Muslims.

 snip

I am not blaming Leitch directly for the mosque killings. I am simply stating that all her words and proposals matter, and those words can help incite fear, hatred and violence.

snip

Leitch, however derivative — she has been called Trump Lite — and those like her should now be asked at every turn how their views differ from the ones that Alexandre Bissonnette admired. 

And the rest of us? We need to challenge ourselves, too on our own words and thoughts. We need to stand up not only to obvious demagogic bullies like Donald Trump — that's kind of the easy part — but to soft talking "otherizers" like Kellie Leitch. 

The lives of our fellow citizens and maybe even our own may depend on it.

Kelly Leitch is running for the Consevative Party of Canada leadership right now. She is now my new favorite Canadian politician.

Stagecraft in Quebec City: Talk Radio kills!

It has emerged that French language talk radio took up a gun and killed a bunch of people in Quebec City.

After a shooting rampage at a Quebec City mosque, the Canadian province's popular conservative talk radio hosts have come under fire for allegedly spreading intolerance and hate.

Critics say the talk shows fuel a divisive climate that allows extreme ideologies to take root and flourish -- a charge that has taken on heightened relevance after a gunman with far-right sympathies opened fire on Muslim worshippers, killing six and wounding eight more.

While not pointing a finger at any specific person or organization, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard emphasized Tuesday that "words do matter."

Residents of Quebec City tend to vote more conservatively than the rest of the province.

Some say that radio stations like local FM93 and Radio X -- which are respectively the region's second and third-most listened to, with a combined 30 percent market share -- simply reflect their audience's views.

But others say the shows stoke dangerous beliefs.

"These are right-wing talk radio stations with little substance but a lot of opinions," said Stephane Leman-Langlois, a criminologist at Laval University, where the alleged shooter studied.

These "trash radio" stations, as they have become known locally, "contribute to legitimize increasingly adversarial discourse against minorities in general and Muslims in particular," he told AFP.

Leman-Langlois said they tout "white supremacy, white victimology and repeat over and over that Quebec is in grave danger."

The Left and more chillingly the Premiere of Quebec are now arguing with each other. They're trying to decide if it was the guns that dragged the kid along for a massacre, or if it was the radio dragging him along.

Meanwhile, stagecraft continues. We still don't know what kind of gun was used, we still don't know any motive, we still don't know jack shit except what was on the kid's Facebook page. That page looks just like any other kid's page. At this point, Katy Perry could have made him do it.

Therefore, Canadians should expect a new legislation push in the next year. It will have two prongs. First will be a new gun registry, probably at the provincial level this time. Second will be a hate-speech law. That new law will make it a crime to say anything in criticism of multiculturalism. It will be called the Ernst Zundel* Memorial SHUT UP!!!! Law. I hereby prophesy this.

(*For boilerplate purposes, Ernst Zundel was and remains a psychotic liar about the Holocaust, and was one of the last 'Real Nazi' fanboys in Canada. He was also the canary in Canada's free-speech coal mine, and went toes-up in 1984. The irony of pursuing a man for speech under an unconstitutional law, in the year 1984, was apparently lost on the government of the time. I'm entirely happy with anything bad that might ever happen to Ernst Zundel, he is an evil man. I'm less happy with what his opponents did to Canada in their zeal.)

The Deplorable Phantom