The Mike Pence Scandal: he doesn't harass women!

In honor of Kathy Shaidle, we should call this one Pence-a-quiddick.

Via Small Dead Animals, and Instapundit who said "How stupid are you?" we are alerted to this scandalous scandal:

The vice president—and other powerful men—regularly avoid one-on-one meetings with women in the name of protecting their families. In the end, what suffers is women's progress.

Wow! Really? How extraordinary! Tell me more!

In a recent, in-depth Washington Post profile of Karen Pence, Vice President Mike Pence's wife, a small detail is drawing most of the attention: "In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won't attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either." 

In context, this choice is not especially surprising. The Pences are evangelical Christians, and their faith animates both their policy views and how they express devotion to one another. Eight months into their courtship, the Post reporter Ashley Parker writes, "Karen engraved a small gold cross with the word 'Yes' and slipped it into her purse to give him when he popped the question."

Clearly these people are evil and must be purged. I mean, Christians? In the White House? Scandalous!

I was going to ignore the whole thing because it is the stupidest feminazi hackery yet, topping even the pussy hats. Particularly coming after the pearl-clutching uproar of Trump and his pussy-grabbing comment ten fricking years ago.

But then, I saw this. Ashley Csanady in The National Post, going full retard.

The Atlantic, bless its soul, actually dug up the context of the 2002 piece in The Hill. They add the details that Pence also sometimes eschews dinners and parties with male colleagues and it's "about building a zone around your marriage."

...snippage...

Pence is an evangelical Christian and his faith is being used to both defend and excoriate his no-ladies-for-lunch policy. The aforementioned Atlantic piece calls it the "Billy Graham rule, named for the famous evangelist who established similar guidelines for the pastors working in his ministry."
The religious origins of Pence's self-restriction don't make it any less sexist.

Really? Defending your marriage is sexist, now? Well no, actually it is so much worse than that.

At its core, Pence's self-imposed ban is rape culture.
Nor is that a label I assign lightly. "Rape culture" is a phrase so overused it's become almost meaningless, like calling someone a Nazi on the internet. But it has a very clear meaning: the notion, whether conscious or unconscious, that men can't control themselves around women because "boys will be boys."
The explicit reasons for Pence's restriction are religion and family, but the implicit reason is that he must avoid alone-time with women lest his stringent religious moral code fall apart in the presence of a little lipstick and décolletage. That is rape culture.

 And that, my friends, is why you never go full retard.

The Scandalous Phantom

When doctors lie.

When doctors lie, they do it really carefully. They use lots of charts, big words in Latin, and complicated statistics.

Compared with nonimmigrants, immigrant children and youth had a lower risk of unintentional firearm injury, although the risk of assault-related firearm injury was higher among refugees and immigrants from Central America and Africa. The results suggest that prevention strategies for firearm safety should target nonimmigrant youth as well as these newly identified high-risk immigrant populations.

The money quote:

 We counted almost 1800 firearm injuries among children and youth in Ontario over a 5-year period, which represents almost 1 injury per day.

What this study purports to show is that Canada needs more gun control, because kids are getting shot in this country. This leads to sensational headlines.

From the Blob and Snail:

New Canadian research shows one young person is shot almost every day in Ontario, with the vast majority of injuries being unintentional.

The Toronto (Red) Star:

 Every day a child or youth is shot in Ontario and three out of four of incidents are accidental, says a groundbreaking study on firearm injuries in Canada.

The problem is, "one young person is shot almost every day in Ontario" is a lie. One young person is not shot with a gun every day in Ontario. The point of the study is to make you think that, but it just ain't so.

The 1800 firearm related injuries turns out to not be 1800 gunshot wounds from actual bullets fired out of actual guns, hitting actual children/youths.

Lie One, 1800 "children" or "youths" did not get hurt. The age admitted to the study goes up to 25 years old. "Youth" implies an age under the voting, or at the most the drinking age. Voting is 18, owning a firearm is 18, drinking is 19. The study falsely labels those over the age of majority and legally adults as "youths." Why? To get the numbers up, because children never really get shot in this country.

Lie Two, "1800 firearm related injuries" turns out not to be actual gunshot wounds. The study considers air pistols and air rifles, BB guns and paintball guns to be "firearms." So if you twist your ankle playing paintball or pinch your hand in the hinge of a pump air rifle, those are "firearm related injuries." Of note is the omission of their interesting interpretation of the word "firearm" from the study. A reporter had to phone them up to get this rather important information.

How many ACTUAL children had an ACTUAL gunshot wound in Ontario from 2008–2012? We do not know from this study. I suspect the real number is under 100, but since the authors conflated paintball welts and BB gun bruises with gunshots, I can't really say.

They also use a bunch of other studies with equally dodgy evidence to lie about a bunch of other stuff. I'd go into it, but then this would be a book, not a blog post.

Bottom line, they lied. Like a pile of Persian carpets. Then the Canadian Medical Association Journal editors and the journal's reviewers allowed the lie to stand. Then the Canadian media en-mass transmitted and amplified the lie.

That is how things are, here in Canada in 2017. Nice, eh?

The Phantom

Smart TV hackable by TV signal.

This is making the "smart" TV market look very bad indeed.

A new attack on smart TVs allows a malicious actor to take over devices using rogue DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial) signals, get root access on the smart TV, and use the device for all sorts of nasty actions, ranging from DDoS attacks to spying on end users.

The attack, developed by Rafael Scheel, a security researcher working for Swiss cyber security consulting company Oneconsult, is unique and much more dangerous than previous smart TV hacks.

...

At the center of Scheel's attack is Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV), an industry standard supported by most cable providers and smart TV makers that "harmonizes" classic broadcast, IPTV, and broadband delivery systems. TV transmission signal technologies like DVB-T, DVB-C, or IPTV all support HbbTV.

Scheel says that anyone can set up a custom DVB-T transmitter with equipment priced between $50-$150, and start broadcasting a DVB-T signal.

We are nowhere near paranoid enough.

The Phantom

 

University of Regina to be renamed with a "Va"

In the ever-accelerating Race To Insanity, the newly renamed University of Vagina will have a "Masculinity Confession Booth" for boys to confess their sins.

A university will be hosting a "Masculinity Confession Booth" along with a number of other workshops and screenings to combat "hypermasculinity."
"We have all reinforced hypermasculinity one way or another regardless of our gender!!" explains the University of Regina event description. "Come and share your sins so we can begin to discuss how to identify and change our ways !!!"
The "Man Up Against Violence" initiative will be hosting these events at the University of Regina in Canada during the present week.

No word on whether they will have a "Femininity Confession Booth" for young women to confess their use of sparkle and pink ribbons.

The Phantom

Walmart as vending machine? It might happen.

Further to my ongoing ravings about minimum wage and how it is killing us, we have news. Walmart is doing an experiment.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is creating a technology-startup incubator in Silicon Valley to identify changes that will reshape the retail experience, including virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery and personalized shopping.

The incubator will be called Store No. 8, a reference to a Wal-Mart location where the company experimented with new store layouts. Marc Lore, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart's e-commerce operations, announced the incubator Monday at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas.

Amazon is kicking their ass lately, is what this boils down to. The "virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery" part is to reduce employee headcount in the store. "Personalized shopping" is code for data mining. They track your every move in the store, and on-line, then serve you advertisements based on your behavior.

Pretty much they want a situation where you drive up, the store automatically knows exactly what you want, and spits out a box. You load the box in your car and drive away happy, while they bill your bank account remotely. What they really, really want is for you to chose items on their web site, then robots deliver them to your house. Because that can be end-to-end machinery.

Pretty soon, the only retail jobs that will be available will be robot mechanic.

Hacking your way to freedom, farmer style.

This is just unbelievable, on a bunch of levels.

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

You call that a nightmare? How about this: somebody else who isn't John Deere could shut down -every- tractor. Maybe the local government, maybe the state or federal government, or maybe plain old criminals. Hold the whole state of Nebraska to ransom at harvest time? They could do it!

On a plain old corporate level, every farmer who had to sign that contract is now looking at John Deere's competition for an alternative, because JD just pissed him off. This is what happens when sociopaths get into a company's management. They see the customer as a sheep to be sheared, and they trim as close as they can.

On a societal level, this is a thing we cannot allow. You are not leasing your house and everything in it, you -own- it. It belongs to you. Those two words, "own" and "belong" are the basis of Western civilization. Nobody is going to buy a tractor or a car, for tens of thousands of dollars, and then meekly accept that they have to keep paying the company so they won't turn the thing off. You buy it, you own it.

Except as we know, there's a huge push from Big Corporate and Silicon Valley to make this leasing model the new reality. They want Ford to retain ownership of your new Mustang, and prevent you from repairing or modifying it outside their dealer network.

Keep your eyes open for this, coming soon to consumer appliances in your house. Annual fee to keep your Smart Fridge going. You will be seeing this soon.

The Phantom Cassandra

Pernicious special pleading.

I stumbled across something irritating in the National Post. This isn't surprising, but as it was about science fiction and writing, I looked into it.

Fireside Fiction owner and editor Brian White outlined a systematic structure of racial biases that have been built into the larger sci-fi publishing community.
"The advice to write 'what the market wants' is code for white characters and white stories," he wrote in his editorial, also arguing that black authors leave the field due to the lack of opportunities, while "subtle biases" continue to proliferate on a wide scale.

Making news when there isn't any, 101: take any issue and add "race" to it. Instant news story. Colour me bored.

But I looked up his editorial anyway, and found this:

Fiction, we have a problem.

Racism.

Structural, institutional, personal, universal.

We all know this. We do. We don't need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalization of black people is still a huge problem in publishing. Specifically, as outlined here in Fireside's special report, we see that marginalization in short fiction magazines and their online equivalents. These same problems persist across publishing, but our study is focused on the world Fireside lives and breathes in: the speculative short fiction market.

We don't need the numbers to know that racism is a problem in our field. But we have them.

Oh, there's numbers. Whee.

So I looked into that a bit. To my eye its the usual crap, because the study authors do not know how many black authors submitted work, they don't know how many went independent on Amazon instead, and they don't know the criteria the publishers use in choosing submissions. They don't really know much of anything. Plus, their analysis seems a bit thin.

Besides which, I am a science fiction author. I have submitted work. I haven't even been turned down yet, I just haven't heard back. What I have to show for a couple of years of solid work is zippo. I will be going indy for my next work.

I don't have anything to blame for my failure so far. Nobody knows who I am, after all. I'll admit to being a bit weird in person, but nobody can tell when I hide behind a keyboard.

My explanation for it is:

A) I'm nobody in the industry, with zero track record. Who's going to take a risk on that? Only a publishing house that has money set aside for test-flying new talent. With the industry in a downturn, the new talent is going to have to be pretty damn special.

B) The publishing industry is in a downturn. Bookstores are closing left and right. Amazon.com is kicking sand in their faces and then eating their lunch.

C) Social Justice Warriors are running New York and Chicago publishing houses these days. They're running Hollywood too. They're also running Marvel and DC comics.

D) I'm a new writer. My stores are probably not Super Duper enough to leap up off the page and grab the slush reader by their nose.

That's what's going on, from my perspective. Black authors aren't getting published? Boo hoo, neither am I. It ain't because you are black. Try harder.

But then something interesting popped up. I read this bit here:

We strive to be honest, open, up-front and straightforward, which is why when we received an odd email last week, we declined to engage with it beyond what we posted publicly.
Tonight, the author of that email made good on their promise and published their report, albeit still pseudonymously. After just a few hours of getting some pretty valid critique on twitter, citing "receiving threats," they decided to take it down.
Well, we think that's a shame—now that they've published it, their work should be available for the rest of our community to refer to and to engage with. So we've taken the liberty of copying their original Medium post, and pasting it in here.

Somebody posted a rebuttal to the bad study? Then they had to take it down, because they got threats? Now I'm interested.

Then I remembered a while ago there was another of these "studies" that claimed to show black authors were not getting published because racism, so I looked that one up again.

A final note: We know that some usual suspects will attempt to invalidate what we've captured by claiming that our analysis lacks rigor, or our methodology was faulty. This is a smokescreen that these individuals use to hide the fact that they are against making the speculative fiction publishing space inclusive and respectful to black writers–all writers, really–and their work. Using assumed (and faulty) scientific expertise to attack the experiences of marginalized people is not a new tactic, and one that is frequently used by these groups in an attempt to maintain the oppressive systems that they believe should solely benefit them. They will never admit that fact so we are making it plain here.
This report is not for those people.

Again, this was a terrible study. This one the authors come right out and tell us all we better shut up if we don't agree 100%. To be fair to the first study, they only heavily imply doubters are racist, they don't come out and say so.

That appears to be where we are at right now, ladies and gentlemen. You put out some dodgy statistics, and then call down the wrath of the mob upon your opponents.

Classy!

The Doubting Phantom

Amazon is destroying America!!!1!

More overwrought stupidity from the business newsies. Amazon.com is DESTROYING American retailers! Oh noes!

What Amazon AMZN, -0.06%  won't tell us is that every job created at Amazon destroys one or two or three others. What Jeff Bezos doesn't want you to know is that Amazon is going to destroy more American jobs than China ever did.

How is this destruction happening?

For the consumer, Amazon has brought lower prices and unimaginable convenience. I can buy almost any consumer product I want just by clicking on my phone or computer — or even easier, by just saying: "Alexa: buy me one" — and it will be shipped to my door within days or even hours for free. I can buy books for my Kindle, or music for my phone instantly. I can watch movies or TV shows on demand.

But for retail workers, Amazon is a grave threat. Just ask the 10,100 workers who are losing their jobs at Macy's. M, -0.76%  Or the 4,000 at The Limited. Or the thousands of workers at Sears SHLD, -0.45%  and Kmart, which just announced 150 stores will be closing. Or the 125,000 retail workers who've been laid off over the past two years.

Oh. Amazon is better/faster/cheaper than the competition? Those BASTARDS! How dare they be better!

Could Amazon actually kill more American jobs than China did? It's quite likely. Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson have estimated China's manufacturing exports to the U.S. may have cost as many as 2 million jobs.

If Amazon can capture 40% of the GAFO market within five years (as seems likely), about 1.5 million jobs at brick-and-mortar stores could be lost. Add in the jobs Amazon will kill at grocery stores, drugstores, warehouses and delivery services, and the total would be well over 2 million.

And unlike the manufacturing jobs lost to China, which were clustered in a comparatively few counties, those retail jobs are located in every city, town and hamlet in America.

There you have it. Amazon.com is a THREAT to the American way of life because they are out-competing the crappy big box retail stores that I hate going to and never have what I want anyway. Or, ghod help me, the mall. I -hate- the mall. It is a pit of despair.

Don't I remember this same argument from twenty years ago, when the Big Box retailers were a THREAT to Small Town America and were DESTROYING Main Street USA? I think I do. I've heard this song before. It was bogus then, and it is bogus now.

The Phantom

Intel releases rootkit finder.

Intel has released a new piece of software that allows a user to see in the firmware of their PC is compromised by a rootkit.

The Advanced Threat Research team at Intel Security has created a new module for its existing CHIPSEC open-source framework to detect rogue EFI binaries. CHIPSEC consists of a set of command-line tools that use low-level interfaces to analyze a system's hardware, firmware, and platform components. It can be run from Windows, Linux, macOS, and even from an EFI shell.

The new CHIPSEC module allows the user to take a clean EFI image from the computer manufacturer, extract its contents and build a whitelist of the binary files inside. It can then compare that list against the system's current EFI or against an EFI image previously extracted from a system.

If the tool finds any binary files that don't match the clean EFI list, it's possible that the firmware has been infected. The rogue files are listed and can then be further analyzed.

No word if this new tool will find -official- CIA rootkits. However, if those heinous Russian hackers have invaded your PC, you are all set.

The Phantom

Shia LaDoof p0wn3d by 4Chan

This is hilarious.

Shia LaBeouf launched Version 3.0 of his plagued He Will Not Divide Us exhibit, originally intended as a four-year-long running protest of President Trump, but it barely lasted a day before Internet detectives conquered it using an astonishingly skillful scientific approach.
LaBeouf and his co-creators erected a white flag emblazoned with the words "He Will Not Divide Us" in an undisclosed location and trained a webcam on it, which he planned to stream continually at the website dedicated to the project.

Spoiler, they found it.

Users deployed to the location, lowered the flag, and replaced it with a bright red "Make American Great Again" hat and t-shirt depicting Donald Trump and Pepe the Frog.

Can you imagine the aneurysm LaBeouf must have had when he finally looked at the feed? Bwaha!

The Eeevile Phantom

Update: Welcome to Kate's flying monkeys from Small Dead Animals! Woo hoo!

Violent video games -not- harmful!

Here's something you don't see every day. Confirmation of what we already know to be true, playing video games does not turn you into a sociopath.

The link between playing violent video games and antisocial behavior, such as increased aggression and decreased empathy, is hotly debated. Researchers in Germany used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on long-term players of violent video games and found that they had the same neural response to emotionally provocative images as non-gamers. This finding suggests that empathy is not blunted by playing such games long-term.

 No duh. If games did make you violent, Pewdie Pie and Mariplier would both be serial killers by now. Always handy to have a measurement though, eh?

The Measured Phantom

Inevitably, a burger flipping robot.

This one is a show-piece, but it does replace one kid in a kitchen.

A burger-flipping robot has just completed its first day on the job at a restaurant in California, replacing humans at the grill.

Flippy has mastered the art of cooking the perfect burger and has just started work at CaliBurger, a fast-food chain.

Notably, it is a self-contained robot that you can roll up beside any grill, and set it to work flipping away.

For the McDonalds of the world of course, this machine is much too slow. They use a conveyor oven and pre-cook everything. But there's no reason they can't design a machine-deliverable sandwich. I'm sure they're doing it right now. Eliminating one human saves a franchise $30-50K a year, I would guess. In a 24 hour operation, that's three people. There's your profit margin back to looking a little more healthy in one shot.

The Mechanical Phantom

Wikkileaks: CIA is listening to YOU.

Reposted from Small Dead Animals, the new Wikkileaks document dump pulls the sheets off the CIA.

A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of 'Year Zero', the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said that 'Year Zero' revealed details of the CIA's "global covert hacking program," including "weaponized exploits" used against company products including "Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones."

The repercussions of this are going to be YUUUUGE, if you get my drift.

The Phantom

Stay classy, Snopes.

Snopes is partisan now. Just thought y'oughta know.

Snopes is a well-known fact-checking site that looks at "rumors, urban legends, myths and misinformation." That includes stories that involve politics. Yesterday the top story on the site was a fact check of claims that Democratic Representatives Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Keith Ellison refused to give a standing ovation to widow Carryn Owens during a joint session of Congress.

Initially, the site listed that claim as unproven but then changed it's rating to false. There was a problem, though. The claim wasn't false, at least not if you noted the caveats made by the people making the claim.

It appears that Snopes has abandoned principle and fallen back on the usual Lefty rules-lawyering, goalpost moving, SHUT UP! argumentation we have come to expect from Left leaning partisans.

Fake news at its finest.

The Deplorably Fake Phantom

Russian space revolver

This is a very unique and interesting piece of kit. One of a kind museum item.

Shortly after that, Tula Arms Plant (TOZ – Tulskiy Oruzheyniy Zavod) started the development of a revolver, which they called TOZ-81 "Mars". The design idea of this revolver was offered by a famous Soviet gun writer and firearms historian Alexander Zhuk. You may have seen the "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Handguns" written by A.B. Zhuk, which almost entirely consists of firearm drawings with short descriptions. There is an English translation of this book. So the Tula factory formed a designing team, which would work on this gun. A. Zhuk and several firearms designers and engineers were the main members of that team. Zhuk drew the initial sketch of his idea of space revolver. Interestingly, the team first made a plastic mockup of the gun and submitted for final approval of the concept. Only after getting the design approved, they started to make the actual gun.

It was meant to be a survival pistol in case the astronauts got stranded on Earth by a bad landing, not to be used in a space war. But still, very cool.

The Phantom

Another new state of matter: supersolid

The physicists have been at it again, another new state of matter observed in the lab.

MIT physicists have created a new form of matter, a supersolid, which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids.

By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.

The work with laser cooling has really been perking along it seems.

The SuperDeplorable Phantom

DIY barrel rifling by electrochemisty.

This is very interesting.

Here are pictures of a preliminary setup for creating rifling grooves in a piece of steel tubing by using a 3D printed spiral insert, lots of salt water and a battery charger. Electrochemical Machining is a process whereby metal is removed by passing an electrical current through a solution, the insert in this case exposing the specific areas to be 'cut' during the process. The results are quite interesting and certainly open up some possibilities for homebuilders.

The possibilities for creating complex metal parts in kitchen are fascinating, to be sure. I think getting the dimensions right would be a Thing for sure, lots of fiddling about to be done there.

The Dimensional, yet Deplorable, Phantom

"Disney's first 'exclusively gay' moment

That is the title of the piece, and I couldn't have done better. Or worse, depending on the point of view.

Matt Cain, editor-in-chief of Attitude magazine, said: "It may have been a long time coming but this is a watershed moment for Disney.
"By representing same-sex attraction in this short but explicitly gay scene, the studio is sending out a message that this is normal and natural - and this is a message that will be heard in every country of the world, even countries where it's still socially unacceptable or even illegal to be gay.
"It's only a first step towards creating a cinematic world that reflects the world in which many of us are now proud to live. But it's a step in the right direction and I applaud Disney for being brave enough to make it - and in doing so hopefully helping to change attitudes and bring about real social progress."

It remains to be seen if audiences will agree with Mr. Cain, and pay money to bring their kids to see "this short but explicitly gay scene."

Because that is what we are talking about here. This is a kid's movie, not an adult movie.

Given the audience response to similar things in comic books, I very much expect that in twenty years this will be viewed as a "Fonzie jumping the shark" moment for Disney. Children's movies are not primarily intended as instructional screeds to uplift the barbaric masses of foreign countries, any more than comic books are.

This type of thing is like the old question, how many drops of pee does it take to spoil the soup? Can a children's movie this big survive one tiny scene with gay content? Probably. This year. The Clinton Archipelago dwellers will take their kids and say its cute.

Problem is, it does not enhance the movie. It does not make the movie better for 97% of the audience. The 3% of gay men in the population, they like it. But they are not going, because by definition they don't have kids.

From the Trumpland perspective, this is a Social Justice Warrior public service announcement in the middle of a fairy story for children. It is jarring, inappropriate and potentially a good reason to skip the movie altogether.

Hey, big boy.

Think of it, Liberals. Are you going to take your kids to see Disney's first official 'reverse cowgirl' moment by Princess Bella and Gaston? Come on, this is a message that will be heard in every country of the world, even countries where it's still socially unacceptable or even illegal to be a slut! Get over yourselves, you uptight WASPs!

The Deplorable Phantom