IRS is very well armed.

Mid-Christmas week news, the IRS has a -lot- of guns and a -lot- of ammunition.

The Internal Revenue Service had in its weapons inventory 4,487 guns and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition as of late 2017, according to a report published this month by the Government Accountability Office.
Included in this arsenal, according to the GAO, were 15 "fully automatic firearms" and 56,000 rounds of ammunition for those fully automatic firearms.
The same report--"Federal Law Enforcement: Purchases and Inventory Controls of Firearms, Ammuntion, and Tactical Equipment"--says that the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services had 194 fully automatic firearms and 386,952 rounds of ammunition for those fully automatic firearms.

That's because they have armed officers, and many of these departments have a SWAT team. Full time SWAT teams exist in the Dept. of Education, HHS, HUD, all kinds of alphabet soup departments have them. Not absolutely certain that IRS has a SWAT team, but it would not surprise me to hear that they did. They certainly have M-16 rifles and shotguns, so that's a SWAT setup right there.

Also, remember this?

And this?

And this?

Just thought y'all ought to know. ~:D

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Small Dead Animals! 

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

The Phantom

As the camel-turd whirls.

Picture first, obviously!

Flopping camel flop is at it again, making up blog posts out of blocked comments and invoking my name to get rage-clicks from his flying monkey troupe.

My reply to his click-bait posted here, because I know he's not going to.

Gee floppy, that's a lot of work you did. However I am strangely unmoved by your Wikipedia research.

The core of your discontent appears to be that you assume all these data are honest. You seem outraged that I do not accept them too. Interesting thing to be upset about, floppy. Sacred cow being gored? Structural pillar of your worldview being undermined?

I merely observe that corrupt governments are disgustingly common these days, and their minions lie with every breath. I mean, do you believe any official number coming out of Venezuela right now? The people who live there don't, that's for sure.

Or the Canadian government. Guns, for example. They lie about that an awful lot, and really shoddy lies too. Easily exposed, you know. Pipelines? Windmills? The lies are numerous and flagrant.
Are they lying about population, immigration, things like that? I'd like to think they're not, but I'm not going to bet money on their veracity, lets just say.

Also, you have some interesting people commenting here. JohnQPuzzle for example: "So I am not swallowing Hoyt/Phantom’s crap until they give more than vague claims of non-white people being liars."

Curious how "non-white" got in there, I don't recall either Sarah Hoyt or myself mentioning race or colour. The boy must have just made it up out of whole cloth, eh floppy? There's a lot of that going around...

Well, there you have it. I'm not insisting the global population is hugely different than the official UN number of 7 billion, I'm just saying I don't take it as holy writ anymore. They may have lied about that in pursuit of an agenda. Wouldn't be the first time.

It is interesting how fast Lefties will begin howling when you question something like that though, isn't it? Almost as if there was money involved.

The Flop-Dodging Phantom

Playboy at the Vatican again...zzzzzz

Hey, edgy New York pricks, try this shit in Mecca if you want me to buy your washed up, worn out, boring-ass magazine.

A Playboy model who has posed naked at the Vatican while holding a large wooden crucifix in the latest of a series of controversial photoshoots has been arrested.

Belgian model Marisa Papens is seen dragging the cross across a street with St Peter's Basilica visible in the background - while nude.

Another of the pictures shows Papen sitting naked on some bibles on the wet cobblestones of St Peter's Square while other snaps show her tied to the cross.

Papens made global headlines when she was imprisoned after posing naked at the Karnak Temple Complex near Luxor, Egypt.

Wow. Super transgressive. Say what you want about Hugh Hefner, that guy knew how to sell a magazine.

NYT: would extinction be a bad thing?

The New York Times pops the question that's clearly on a lot of SJW minds.

There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?

To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I'm not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. (In these pages, Samuel Scheffler has given us an important reason to think that it would be.) I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.

The author, one Mr. Todd May who the NYT assures us  is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University, is going to suggest human extinction is a Good Thing. Oh, and that global warming is the thing that's going to kill us all.

Of course he is.

Mr. May is an American academic in 2018. If he didn't hold this view he wouldn't have a job. And what is the core of this view, anyway? What notion could view the extinction of Humanity to be a good thing?

One could press the objection here by saying that it would only be a loss from a human viewpoint, and that that viewpoint would no longer exist if we went extinct. This is true. But this entire set of reflections is taking place from a human viewpoint. We cannot ask the questions we are asking here without situating them within the human practice of philosophy. Even to ask the question of whether it would be a tragedy if humans were to disappear from the face of the planet requires a normative framework that is restricted to human beings.

 Emphasis mine. The issue is that Mr. May does not restrict his "normative framework" to humans. In other words, he's a bunny hugger.

So, then, how much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth? Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger. Moreover, those among us who believe that there is such a gap should perhaps become more familiar with the richness of lives of many of our conscious fellow creatures. Our own science is revealing that richness to us, ironically giving us a reason to eliminate it along with our own continued existence.

Yes, we should all die so that nice cows and bunnies and timber wolves will be happy. I can see you doubting me out there. I can see your eyebrows going up with skepticism. Nobody could be such a dick to think Humanity should die because bunnies. Sadly, dear reader, yes they could:

One might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying. In contrast, preventing future humans from existing does not introduce such suffering, since those human beings will not exist and therefore not have lives to sacrifice. The two situations, then, are not analogous.

 So we don't have to kill ourselves, really. But we do have to stop breeding. But killing ourselves would probably be a plus, and we should strongly think about it.

That's what passes for Post Modern Philosophy at universities these days, ladies and gentlemen. These clever fools like Mr. May think themselves very erudite, very enlightened and Avant Garde for having these anti-Human views, but it has all been done before. If you look at the kind of vile writings current in the Germany of the 1920s, you'll see ideas very similar, differing in minor detail only.

How else does one justify mass murder?

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapunditeers!

What's your comfort number, Lefties?

It's a good question, don't you think?

My question for Congressjerk Eric Swalwell is pretty simple: "How many Americans would you murder to achieve your goal of disarming us?"
It's a fair question.
Swalwell is the MSNBC stalwart who recently wrote an op-ed advocating that the government confiscate the guns that make people like him wet themselves and imprison those of us who decline to surrender them.
...
Now, we know that some Americans would resist this kind of tyranny. People all over the world are resisting the elite's commands. The Brits Brexited. The French are rioting because they don't want to sacrifice their livelihoods on behalf of the global elites' weird weather religion. And a decree that the Second Amendment is not a thing anymore would certainly provoke some serious pushback here.
That's why it's fair to ask Rep. Bloodlust how much blood he's prepared to shed to achieve his goal of disarming Normal Americans.

I think its time this question started being asked of our glorious leaders. Larry Correia has a bruising takedown of the good Eric Swalwell, one which covers all the practical reasons why Swalwell is not even wrong about the issue. Swalwell is saying something like 2+2= aardvark.

But, as I mentioned yesterday and today, people like Swalwell and Occasionally-Cortex have no interest in facts and practicality. When faced with opposition, they will double down every time. Because they are playing to a crowd. And that crowd is angry, they want red meat and lots of it! They don't care what's real, or what's true. They just want a target.

So there's really only one question worth asking DemocRats in the USA and Liberals here: how many people are you willing to throw out of work to get your socialist plan enacted? How many will you imprison to enforce your regulation? How many senior citizens are you willing to freeze to death for your ecological fuel tax? How many resisters will you kill? Hmm?

One?

Ten?

Ten thousand?

The Communist's answer was 100 million in the 20th Century. The entire nation of Canada, four times over, died for the myth of the Worker's Paradise. The Chinese Communists are still at it.

How many injured and jailed this week in France, over a fuel tax? How many citizens will the French government be willing to sacrifice for their regulations? The number is already more than ten.

Next time you go to a town hall to hear a politician speak, you ask them that. How many resisters will you kill to get what you want? What's your casualty comfort number?

The Numerology Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapunditeers!

Muy caliente: Occasionally-Cortex goes full Stazi!

Not content with saying stupid shit about Glowball Warming and nationalizing private companies, Alexandria Occasionally-Cortex confirms all our worst fears about socialists. She threatened to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., a private citizen, because he posted a spicy meme about her.

Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatened to use the powers of her elected office to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr. on Friday after the president's son posted a meme trolling her on his personal Instagram account.
"I have noticed that Junior here has a habit of posting nonsense about me whenever the Mueller investigation heats up," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "Please, keep it coming Jr - it's definitely a "very, very large brain" idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month. Have fun!"

The meme is a great one, incidentally. Picture of Occasionally-Cortex with the question: "Why are you so afraid of a socialist economy?" Picture of Donald Trump Sr. with the answer: "Because Americans want to walk their dogs, not eat them."

Again, this is not because Occasionally-Cortex is an idiot. It is because that's what her idiot New York City followers want to see in her Twitter feed. I can see them sitting in bars downtown, showing this tweet to each other and yelling "You go, girl!"

They don't understand that a government official who can and will send cops to you house because you posted a meme is a bad thing. Occasionally-Cortex is like a zoo-keeper, feeding outrage pellets to the monkeys so they'll put on a good show for her.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome vast horde of Instapundit!

Occasionally-Cortex: watch her double down!

Newly elected Lefty Alexandria Occasionally-Cortex demonstrates the one trait that we have all come to associate with The Left: stupidity.

In a week that brought the unprecedented sight of the French Super Lefty government backing down off an Eco-friendly fuel tax because half the population of France were in the streets baying for their heads, Miss Occasionally-Cortex was all about the ecology and taxes:

"As a matter of fact, it's not just possible that we will create jobs and economic activity by transitioning to renewable energy, but it's inevitable that we are going to create jobs," Ocasio-Cortez said. "It's inevitable that we're going to create industry, and it's inevitable that we can use the transition to a hundred percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America."

 Ocasio-Cortez also suggested the federal government should nationalize Tesla's technology, following the company's receipt of tax subsidies.

This was a Bernie Saunders event by the way, just so you know what snake oil Bernie Bros are going to be peddling the next two years.

One would almost think she doesn't watch the news. A fully-fledged tax revolt in Europe, as the peons -finally- reach their limit for being pushed around, taxed and told-off by government assholes, and little Alexandria is proposing more of it.

But it is worse than that. She -does- watch the news. She knows there's widespread rioting in the intellectual birthplace of Marxism and Post Modernism, and she knows why. This is her response. She's doubling down. Same message, twice as hard.

Because why? Because that's what sells.

It isn't Alexandria Occasionally-Cortex who is stupid, my friends. She has identified a constituency, she has won them over, and she is throwing them red meat as fast as she can. She's probably above-average smart. She's certainly very high energy.

Its the people who voted for her, who want more and more and more taxes and regulations on every goddamn thing in the world. They see France going up in flames, and they say There Oughta Be A Law!!! They'll keep on saying the same fucking thing until there's literally bodies hanging from streetlamps in front of their house. There is no situation where they smarten up. They'll go to their graves like that.

You can seen the stupid fuckers doing it right now in Venezuela. There's no money, no food, no fuel and no cops, but they're out demonstrating for Maduro because he's promising More Free Stuff again.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: there is no free stuff. Never was, never will be. If somebody promises you free stuff in exchange for your vote, it is a -lie-. You have been warned.

The Warning Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!

Lefty receives death threats, oh the humanity...

This is something kind of new. I don't recall seeing this type of thing played out in quite this way before.

The LGBT news website INTO has removed the byline for an opinion piece accusing Ariana Grande's new music video "thank u, next" of being "anti-queer" after the writer of the story received death threats.
"We have decided to remove the author's name from this piece after the editorial team was alerted that a high number of death threats were being made against the writer as a result of the opinions presented in this piece," read an editor's note affixed to the top of the article.

Some Usual Suspect SJW writer delivers the expected "That's Anti-Gay!!!" tirade against a new and very popular music video by very popular singer, and the unexpected happens! People, instead of accepting that this sort of thing is the New Normal, are pissed off. They vent their rage on the web site in the New Normal fashion, with death threats. "Ah'mina killz ya!"

Web site management is super surprised by this, removes the author's name. I guess it never happens when they call Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga videos racist/bigoted/homophobic.

This is two brand new things happening in two weeks. The Middle Class rioting in France and forcing the government to back the hell down off their shiny new fuel tax, and now pop music fans telling Lefties to shut the fuck up about their diva.

The death threat thing, I'm unimpressed. I know people who get blood-curdling death/torture/rape rape threats every day. Conservative women receive that shit all the time, they still post their by-lines and tell the little Threat Fairies to come and get them. Milo Yiannopoulos had a mob try to burn down a building trying to get at him in Berkeley. Jordan Peterson gets internet death threats all the time, and has been mobbed and de-platformed at venues in boring-ass Canada.

Even I, your humble host, have things like this said about me out there in Internetz Land: "...the deep searing hatred of free speech, free association and freedom of ideas reveals itself every time." Way to go, floppy camel dork.

But for a gay mafia site to get mobbed, that's new. This is a sign that a segment of young people may have had enough of the gay mafia. Unlike Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande is popular with the Diverse kids, meaning those who tan. That particular group has never bought in to the LGBTQFBICIAKGB agenda. Previously they've settled for writing rude things in the bathrooms of the nation with magic markers, but now maybe they're tired of it.

This is how these popular movements go, you know. They slide along in the grass roots for a long time, kind of simmering away, nobody talks about it but everybody is thinking it. Then some little thing happens, and suddenly half the population of France is tearing down the Arc De Triumph. Or Donald Trump gets elected President of the USA.


Update: Welcome Instapundit horde!

And speaking of white privilege...

Is it still a privilege to be white when people try to kill you and make magic spells out of your innards?

The first Mr. and Miss Albinism East Africa pageant on Friday night in Kenya's capital saw participants from Tanzania and Uganda as well.
Elizabeth James of Tanzania said she was forced to change schools as a child when people, staring and pointing, started trailing her home.
She called for an end to the ignorance that drives some to kill people with albinism for their body parts or even dig up graves in the misguided belief that they will bring wealth and good fortune.

The above question is of course directed at all the SJWs and race-huckster scum who continually rage on about Whiteness.

Nothing but praise and respect for the people in the fashion show, particularly the women. They've got more guts than all the SJWs on Twitter combined.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!