Europe: you can smell their fear.

Europe, the cradle of the Enlightenment, 2018:

The freedom of speech does not extend to include defaming the prophet of Islam, the European Court of Human rights ruled Thursday.

The Strasbourg-based ECHR ruled that insulting Islamic prophet Muhammad "goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate" and "could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace."

The court's decision comes after it rejected an Austrian woman's claim that her previous conviction for calling Muhammad a pedophile, due to his marriage to a 6-year-old girl, violated her freedom of speech.
The ECHR ruled Austrian courts had "carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected."

No word on when it'll be a crime to defame the Buddha, or Christ, or Ya*we*, or Thor and Odin, for that matter. And hey, how about Dread Cthulhu, no love for squid worship? Come on!

The Phantom

Update: Link fixed! Thank you, sharp-eyed reader!

Day after Weed Day: post-Apocalypse!

Well here we are, October 18th 2018, and I am not standing in the smoking ruins of my civilization. They made the demon weed legal yesterday, and the world did not come to an end.

The Ontario Cannabis Store web site was getting something like 100 orders per minute, and sold out not long after it opened. Similar situations across Canada at the Official Legal Weed Outlets. All shelled out before noon, from what I'm seeing in the news.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The official government plan was Fail On Purpose. Make weed "legal," sort of.  License its sale and growth, regulate and tax the living shit out of it, and make sure there's not enough for everybody.

Obviously the next few years the private sector will sue their way into profitability, because the way things are set up right now can't survive a court challenge. Its as if a high school cheer leading squad was given the job.

What I find interesting is the media buzz on this whole thing follows much the same pattern as when a state in the USA declares shall-issue concealed carry permits will be the law. Tons of fear-mongering, End Of The World, Blood In The Streets stories get circulated. Then the day arrives that everybody's been propagandized into terror about... and nothing happens. It was all bullshit. They were winding us up to sell papers.

By Tuesday you're not going to see the word "cannabis" in the news. That's what's going to happen. So make your life better and do what I do. Cut your TV cable, shut off the radio, and don't look at the newspapers. They're all lying to you about virtually everything, all the time, just like they lied about weed.

"LET them die!" James T. Kirk.

Happy Weed Day!

Congratulations Canada, we made it! We survived until the most important change in human history finally came. The demon weed is finally legal.

We can get wasted in peace.

Yay.

The Phantom

Illegal gun making... in Canada!

Over the years I've been yelled at by a -lot- of people over guns. Every good socialist knows that guns are horrible evil bad things, and only an insane evil Nazi murderer would even look at one in a store. I wish I was exaggerating. They're really like that.

The other favorite trope with them is that everybody is an inch away from SNAPPING!!!! and going on a murder spree. Take human, add gun, instant mass murder/death/kill. Yes, they really think that.

That's why they all love them some gun control, and they all demand a total 100% ban on civilian ownership of firearms. But not cops. Cops should have guns. Because a badge and a government paycheck are potent charms which render the police permanently sane, responsible, honest and guarantee they will never SNAP and do murder/death/kill. But anyone else will.

Essentially its moral laziness. They can't be assed to do the work to protect themselves. They think safety is something that should be handed to them on a silver platter, like television and health care.

But, being the eternal optimist, I often introduce inconvenient truths into the conversation. Such as, would you rather be shot or stabbed? Because when you ban guns, the thugs immediately switch to knives. So you are going to ban knives next? How are you going to do that? Prisoners in jails around the world make their own, under the most stringent surveillance that can be contrived by Man. You can make a knife out of a toothbrush. It just takes time and patience.

Another inconvenient truth, when you ban guns, people make their own. Yep. Just like with the knives, they get busy and make their own guns. Now, usually we see these little gun factories open up in places like Mexico, Brazil, Afghanistan, Pakistan. You know, them furrin countries where those picturesque primitive villages are, and where UNICEF goes to save the children. Places where Liberals like to send money, but they don't want to actually visit.

But not this time. No, this time the gun factory is in Montreal. This time it was a CANADIAN making guns for criminals.

A man who helped manufacture many illegal semi-automatic firearms at a factory in LaSalle faces the possibility of a four-year prison term for his crimes.

Daniel Spain, 51, appeared before Quebec Court Judge Mélanie Hébert at the Montreal courthouse on Monday for what was supposed to be the start of sentence arguments in his case. Instead, his lawyer, Joseph Elfassy, filed a motion arguing that the three-year mandatory minimum sentence he client already faces is unconstitutional.

Hébert agreed to carry over the sentence hearing to January to allow time for both sides to prepare arguments on the motion.

On March 29, Spain, an Île-Perrot resident, pleaded guilty to two counts of manufacturing prohibited firearms knowing that he was not authorized to do so. He worked Perfection Métal, a company based in LaSalle while its owner Jean-Pierre Huot made dozens of Tec-9-type semi-automatic pistols, including several that ended up being recovered by police at crime scenes in Quebec and Ontario.

I note in passing that four years for making a gun does seem excessive when you consider that one of the guys who actually used the guns is out on day parole already. The cop who killed Sammy Yatim in cold blood only got six years. The owner of the factory, Huot, got seven years.

What's important in Canada? Cold-blooded murder, six years. Making a gun, seven years. Helping make a gun, four years. Okay, Lefties? Learning yet? Not using it, just making it.

In conclusion, lets make all this crystal clear. Nobody in government cares if you get murdered. Nobody cares if there are armed terrorists, insane cops, drug dealers, or plain-vanilla lunatics running around killing Canadians. Not to put too fine a point on it, nobody in authority cares that most of the victims are black. And most of the people getting murdered in Canada really are black, or Indian.

What they care about is their next election, and their ever-expanding retirement fund. That's all. That's who Liberals are, that's what they do.

The Phantom

WINAMP RETURNS!!!!

This is made of awesome.

The charmingly outdated media player Winamp is being reinvented as a platform-agnostic mobile audio app that brings together all your music, podcasts and streaming services to a single location. It's an ambitious relaunch, but the company behind it says it's still all about the millions-strong global Winamp community — and as proof, the original desktop app is getting an official update as well.

For those who don't remember: Winamp was the MP3 player of choice around the turn of the century, but went through a rocky period during Aol ownership (our former parent company) and failed to counter the likes of iTunes and the onslaught of streaming services, and more or less crumbled over the years. The original app, last updated in 2013, still works, but to say it's long in the tooth would be something of an understatement (the community has worked hard to keep it updated, however). So it's with pleasure that I can confirm rumors that substantial updates are on the way.

They can call it "charmingly outdated" all they want, but Winamp has always been my favorite MP3 player. It does everything I want, it doesn't do anything I don't want. I'm really very happy to see it return to run on new operating systems.

Winamp currently doesn't do any of the advertising/spying/"suggesting" that Apple and Google do. It just plays the music. You put it on shuffle, it actually SHUFFLES the songs randomly, like its supposed to.

If they can resist the temptation to put spyware in the new versions, I will be happy to pay money for a copy of Winamp to put on my phone and all my computers. Once upon a time I paid money for the original Pro version, and I'll do it again.

Big Brother hack update, new evidence!

Previously, Bloomberg news asserted that SuperMicro servers had been hardware-hacked by their manufacturers in China.

Today, new evidence and a named source.

A major U.S. telecommunications company discovered manipulated hardware from Super Micro Computer Inc. in its network and removed it in August, fresh evidence of tampering in China of critical technology components bound for the U.S., according to a security expert working for the telecom company.

The security expert, Yossi Appleboum, provided documents, analysis and other evidence of the discovery following the publication of an investigative report in Bloomberg Businessweek that detailed how China's intelligence services had ordered subcontractors to plant malicious chips in Supermicro server motherboards over a two-year period ending in 2015.

But wait, it gets better:

The executive said he has seen similar manipulations of different vendors' computer hardware made by contractors in China, not just products from Supermicro. "Supermicro is a victim -- so is everyone else," he said. Appleboum said his concern is that there are countless points in the supply chain in China where manipulations can be introduced, and deducing them can in many cases be impossible. "That's the problem with the Chinese supply chain," he said.

Yep. Just like I said. Anything PC related that's made in China is fundamentally insecure, and can't be trusted in a secure network. IT guys all over the world right now are reading this article and crapping their pants. They know how much Chinese stuff is in their inventory: most of it.

The Phantom

Mini-review of Venom.

The new Venom movie came out this week. I saw it today. I give it a solid three out of five. 3/5 Its not boring, its not irretrievably stupid, they kept the SJW bullshit to a minimum. There's some good comedy, good car chases and lots of cool shit blowing up. This is not a cerebral movie, there are no deep thoughts here. But that's okay, I can work with that.

Bottom line, better than Justice League. Not a ton better, but still. We take what we can get these days.

The Phantom Film Critic.

Hey! Rats have feelings too, haterz!

Apparently there is a pro-rat advertising campaign in Paris.

The world's first public relations campaign to persuade people that rats have feelings too, and they should learn to love them, has been launched in Paris, where city authorities are waging war to exterminate the four-million strong rodent population.
"Stop the massacre of rats," is the slogan on posters on the walls of dozens of metro stations, which show pictures of cute rats and declare that rodents "are sensitive individuals" which can "feel emotions."
The campaign was launched by Paris Animaux Zoopolis, an animal rights group that aims to defend all animals regardless of whether humans like them or not.
The group's secretary Philippe Reigné said he was not aware of any other major campaigns to laud the merits of the much-maligned rodent and that the Paris one may be a world first.
"It is a political message which targets the Paris city hall, the prefecture of police, and the exterminators (of rats)," he said.
"Rats should not be seen as synonymous with filth," he said, arguing that Paris authorities are as motivated by the damage rats cause to the image of the world's most visited city as they are about hygiene issues.

Paris is lagging behind Los Angeles, the Californians skipped their rat extermination attempt entirely and went straight to the rodent population explosion.

But in case anyone was wondering -why- Typhus is making a big comeback in LA, this tree-hugging, bunny-loving, rats-have-feelings-too bullshit is why.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit! Sarah Hoyt linked me!

Upperdate: By the news, the California Typhus outbreak has spread from LA to Pasadena and Long Beach. The rats are very well fed and healthy. Thanks, Democrats!

Typhus outbreak in... Los Angeles?

How to tell when your city and state are run by DemocRats: flea-transmitted typhus.

An outbreak of flea-borne typhus has hit downtown Los Angeles, the county Department of Public Health said Thursday. Health officials say they are investigating several cases of flea-borne typhus, a disease that infected fleas can spread to humans.
...
"Although typhus normally occurs throughout L.A. County, we are observing several cases in the downtown Los Angeles area," Los Angeles County Health Officer Muntu Davis said in a statement. "We encourage pet owners to practice safe flea control and encourage all cities in the county to ensure maintenance of their trash clean-up and rodent control activities."
Typhus can spread in areas where there is an accumulation of trash that attracts wild animals like feral cats, rats and opossums.

The appearance of diseases that typically affect places like Haiti or Syria are increasingly showing up in California. These are not super bugs or crazy, rare things like Ebloa. We're talking about the type of common ailments that are spread by filth. When nobody picks up the garmage, and people shit in the street because there's no place else to go, you start seeing things like typhus, cholera, dysentery, all kinds of diseases that were defeated in Europe in the 17th Century by 1) sewer systems, 2) clean water systems and 3) garbage collection.

But in California we see these vital infrastructure systems being destroyed by the people who administer them. Between Green initiatives, Lefty labor policy and flat-out corruption, large cities in California are descending into 3rd World hell-hole status.

Just keep voting DemocRat, California. You've got two of the Four Horsemen camping in your state, Disease and Death. Pretty soon you'll have the Black Plague sweep through and kill all those inconvenient street people and illegal migrants. Won't that be handy?

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!
Upperdate: Paris is trying to catch up! 

Big Brother is hacked!

It is bad enough when Big Brother is your own country's government, watching you all the time and reading your email. But how about when Big Brother's servers get hacked, and somebody else's government is looking over their shoulder?

Welcome to America 2018, my friends.

Today, Supermicro sells more server motherboards than almost anyone else. It also dominates the $1 billion market for boards used in special-purpose computers, from MRI machines to weapons systems. Its motherboards can be found in made-to-order server setups at banks, hedge funds, cloud computing providers, and web-hosting services, among other places. Supermicro has assembly facilities in California, the Netherlands, and Taiwan, but its motherboards—its core product—are nearly all manufactured by contractors in China.

For a very long time I've been saying that having your hardware built in a foreign country, by slaves, is a very, very bad idea. Somebody might get a bright idea and do something to it, right?

Well, guess what. They finally did.

Nested on the servers' motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn't part of the boards' original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental's servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA's drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.
During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
This attack was something graver than the software-based incidents the world has grown accustomed to seeing. Hardware hacks are more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get.

The best part? This hack was NOT found by the super US Secret Squirrel gang. It was found by some un-named company in Ontario, Canada, because Amazon Web Services hired them to vet the servers. The CIA/FBI/ArmyNavyAirforceMarines/and every other alphabet-soup spook outfit was clueless. None of them checked the shit their networks ran on.

Ladies and gentlemen, every fucking thing in your life runs on hardware made in China. Your phone, your fridge, your toaster, your car. This hack was done by a chip the size of a kosher salt flake, disguised as a resistor. It had enough ROM and processing power to subvert any operating system and install its own kernel-level back door.

How easy would it be to put something like that is a car radio? If I were a Chinese Communist mastermind, I'd put something like that in car radios, and also specialized emergency services radios. I'd keep doing it for ten years, and never, ever use it. Then one day, I'd be able to shut off every car, police cruiser, fire truck and ambulance in the whole USA, and Canada, and Europe. One at a time, or all at once.

Too much? Okay, how about if I only put it in Apple iPhones? Then I could DDoS the entire telephone network.

Still too much? Okay, how about if I only subverted all those credit card swipe machines, and they all crash the same day. You can feel that one, right? Nobody carries cash, that's a problem that's right in your face.

Letting all your computer hardware be built in a foreign nation is like nailing a $100 bill to a telephone pole. Even in the most law abiding town in the world, somebody is going to take that money. Chicom apparatchiks are not the most honest people in the world.

The Phantom

Update! Welcome Instapundit! Thank you to Sarah Hoyt for the linkage!

Upperdate: Apple comes out swinging! "Its all lies, I tell you! Lies!"

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