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!

A war on nerds? Could be.

Fixing your shit for you, because you Normies can't read the manual.

I've noticed, over the years, that everybody likes to push the nerds around. We're "weirdos." We act "funny."

Yeah, we do. Because our fucking brains work different than the Normie brain. Usually, better in most respects. We actually know how to program the VCR. That absent-minded dork you're making fun of? He's doing calculus in his head, trying to figure out how to make your friggin' iPhone work better.

But we can be annoyingly dense in social situations. Its true. We actually annoy each other.

Normies like to pretend that our failings are some kind of choice to misbehave, a moral failing, the result of Mommy Issues or some other need to be nonconformist square pegs in a world of round holes. But that is not the case, my friends. The difference is literally bone deep. We have different DNA than you Normies. We're built to be this way from the ground up.

What's that like? Its like being a Ferrari Dino, living in a world made for Volkswagen Beetles. Everything moves too slow, the speed limit is too low, all the other cars are sluggish and they get in the way. The best part of life is when you find a piece of open road. Then you can put your boot down and hear that engine roar like the raging beast that it is, eating up the miles and leaving the little piss-can Beetles in the dust.

Beetles don't like that. They gang up and trap you in traffic. That's what its like. Thanks, Normies. You pricks.

So how far would the Normies go to be rid of the annoying Nerds?

Two fairly scary news items tell the tale when you put them together.

First, a very large scale DNA survey study claims to have found genetic markers unique to ADHD.

Geneticist Ditte Demontis and her colleagues used data from more than 20,000 people with ADHD, comparing them to a control group of 35,000 people without an ADHD diagnosis. They found 304 points where tiny differences in DNA—like single letter swaps—were distributed across their two groups in a statistically telling way. If any of those variants were very close together, the researchers counted them as representing the same stretch of DNA, grouping them together into 12 important regions.

The authors of the study emphasize that there is no "gene for ADHD," but they have found that in their study population genes common in ADHD were also common in other disorders, like Autism and Schizophrenia.

Which sounds about right. People with Aspergers or more pronounced Autism often are also diagnosed with ADHD. Twenty or thirty more years of research in that direction, they may be able to isolate all or most of the markers for a wide range of behavioral neurology.

Nerds will be instantly identifiable with a cheek swab. How do you like that?

Second, the Chinese have been gene-editing humans. Link to Nature article here.

They finally hatched two that lived.

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.
If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.
A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.

Taken with a grain of salt, this claim is a bit questionable. Nobody really knows if they actually managed it. But the thing is, they clearly want to, and eventually they will manage to gene-edit human beings and bring them to term.

Therefore China will be the first country to discover just how bad an idea it is to meddle with the Human genome. If they really did bring two baby girls to term, my prayers go out to those two babies. I really hope that the eggheads didn't frig something up. But they probably did, and nobody will ever know exactly what.

Well, so what, Phantom? What's that got to do with nerds?

If you can identify nerds with a simple test, and you can modify DNA at will, how long before nations (or companies!) start demanding citizens weed undesirable nerd traits out of their offspring? 

Particularly tech companies. They've shown a fine disregard for privacy and basic human rights, and they really don't like depending on guys like James Damore to create their products.

Damore is a great example. He's a huge Nerd. He's famous for being the guy who put his foot wrong in a typically Nerd way, by pointing out the elephant in the room at Google. They need his Ferrari 500hp brain to solve their problems, but they can't stand the way he doesn't know to shut up like any Normie would. He uses his brain to discover Truth in places where they don't want him to. But they NEED him, because they are all just fucking Volkswagens where it counts.

(And you better believe that every Nerd in Silicon Valley was watching that whole thing. If there's one thing nerds all know, its bullies. Like nerds everywhere they made plans to deal with it. Are you watching Google and Facebook stock prices tank? That's what happens when you piss off the Nerds. They are subtle and quick to anger.)

Wouldn't it be nice if the authorities could chop and channel that nerd-brain into something a little more Normie and a little less annoying and loose-cannon? Wouldn't China, and probably Google, love the chance to -make- people get their children edited?

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

We could actually live to see that. And the terrifying Revenge of the Nerds that inevitably followed. It would be legendary.

Dear Normal People: please realize that the last guy on Earth you want to toy with is the guy that designed everything that keeps you alive. There's no more dangerous creature than an engineer with a grudge. So cut us weirdos some social slack and get the fuck out of the way. We've got stuff to do.

The Phantom

Update! In case some of you think I was a little harsh lumping Google in with the Chicom government as a force of diabolical oppression in the world, guess what? You're wrong. I was not harsh enough:

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/28/google-employees-chinese-surveillance-tech/

Google employees unhappy with the project, which would extend China’s surveillance state by creating an application that would further censor Chinese search engines, renewed their protest in a new letter published Tuesday by Medium, which has about 435 signatures.
 “Dragonfly would also enable censorship and government-directed disinformation, and destabilize the ground truth on which popular deliberation and dissent rely,” the open letter reads.
The signatures on both letters objecting to Project Dragonfly reveal a growing internal concern among employees who do not wish to be part of a company that allows governments to censor its citizens and enable a surveillance state.

However, around twice as many employees signed a letter in April opposing Google’s involvement in a Pentagon program, Project Maven, that aimed to improve drone analysis to better identify civilians, thus reducing the amount of accidental civilian casualties.
This opposition letter was signed by between 3,100 and 4,000 employees between April and June and included dozens of senior engineers, according to another Times report.
Thousands of Google employees addressed their letter to Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive officer, asking that Project Maven be canceled.

 Now, I don't know about y'all, but in my school days 4,000 is more than twice as many signatures than 435. 4,000 is an order of magnitude larger than 435.

An order of magnitude more Google employees object to working for the United States government than object to working for the Communist Chinese government.

Upperdate! The Chicom government blinks!

China’s government ordered a halt Thursday to work by a medical team that claimed to have helped make the world’s first gene-edited babies, as a group of leading scientists declared that it’s still too soon to try to make permanent changes to DNA that can be inherited by future generations.
Chinese Vice Minister of Science and Technology Xu Nanping told state broadcaster CCTV that his ministry is strongly opposed to the efforts that reportedly produced twin girls born earlier this month. Xu called the team’s actions illegal and unacceptable and said an investigation had been ordered, but made no mention of specific actions taken.

 I would like to think that this move was brought on by a sudden attack of conscience on the part of the Minister of Science and Technology. I would like that a lot. But the cynic in me suspects it may have more to do with the Party being made to look bad in front of the international community.

The cynic also suspects that Dr. Evile was spirited off by the Chinese Secret Squirrel Squad to a secret lab on a mountain peak somewhere, and set to work making more CRISPR tots.

Self-driving hotel room?

Some things simply demand to be mocked.

Robotic self-driving hotel room, dream version.

The robotic hotel room on wheels - is this the future of travel? Self-driving suite can ferry guests from place to place - and drones deliver room service through the sunroof

• Toronto-based Aprilli Design Studio has designed a hotel suite housed within a self-driving vehicle 
• Renderings reveal how the battery-powered hotel-room-on-wheels includes a double bed and shower room
• The vehicle's designers note that travellers would simply specify the route they wanted to take via an app

Yes friends, the "future of travel" is a camper van.

Actual robot hotel room after 15 years of service.

Also, these geniuses think that "room service" can be delivered by a quadcopter to a moving vehicle that is driving down the highway. Because that will totally work, right?

But best of all:

So that travellers wouldn't miss out on the usual perks of staying in a hotel, Aprilli says it plans to install dozens of hotel facilities across road networks.These stop-off points would house 'public amenities such as food and beverage, meeting room, spa, pool, and gym along with housekeeping, maintenance, and charging services for the travel suites'.

Hotel faclilty with public amenities, dream version.

Trailer parks.

Actual version. Good luck getting room service, bro.

Enchanted Forest Robot Hotel, 2045. Clem cooks meth in the red one.

You know what kills me? Artists and designers got paid good money to come up with this bullshit.

The Phantom

Goalposts have moved again.

It is no longer enough to remain silent on the subject of gay marriage. If you do that, they'll come for you.

A leading Australian bridal magazine has shut after being ditched by advertisers for refusing to feature same-sex couples, one year after the country changed its marriage laws.

The Christian founders of "White", Luke and Carla Burrell, said they did not feature gay weddings in their magazine as they had "no desire to create a social, political or legal war".

In a farewell blog on Saturday, the couple said they were targeted by activists because of their stance and forced to "pick a side".

As a result, several advertisers withdrew their sponsorship making their publication "no longer economically viable", the pair added.

In another fit of "if you're not with us you're against us!!!" the gay mafia managed to get the magazine closed down. Not because the publication or the owners were anti-gay, but because they refused to bow to the Don and kiss the ring. It is no longer sufficient to just be quiet, now you have to actively go along and promote the cause.

I predict this will not end well for anyone.

The Phantom

Orangutan extinction: blame Kellogg's!!!

Are there any greater liars than Greenies? I have my doubts.

Cadbury bars and Oreos are among products from TWELVE companies driving orangutans to the 'brink of extinction' with the use of palm oil.

Long story short, the Daily Mail has a story that the poor Orangutans of Indonesia are having all their forests chopped down to grow palm oil plants.

Which is true. Palm oil plantations are growing at a huge rate in the tropics. It's a very big deal.

The lie is blaming American and European food companies for this growth. Edible oil is available from a large number of sources. Corn, flax, sunflowers, those are all grown industrially right here in Ontario. World-wide there's plenty of vegetable oil to eat. Big food companies use palm oil because it is the cheapest, not the best. Food consumption of palm oil is a tiny fraction of the overall production.

Why is palm oil so cheap, and why is so much of it produced?

Bio diesel.

Who caused that to happen?

Greenpeace.

Will they come clean and admit that burning food oils in our cars is fucking insanity?

No.

They will blame Big Business for something Big Business has resisted for 40 years, since it was first proposed. They will do this because they are pusillanimous liars.

May their trousers burst into flame. At the gas station.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!

Stan Lee passed away. Yancy Street mourns.

What a revoltin' development.

Stan Lee, the man who co-created Marvel Comics, has died ... Stan's daughter tells TMZ.

We're told an ambulance rushed to Lee's Hollywood Hills home early Monday morning and he was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. We're told that's where he died.

Lee had suffered several illnesses over the last year or so -- he had a bout of pneumonia and vision issues.

Stan started Marvel with Jack Kirby in 1961 with The Fantastic Four. He went on to create Spider-Man, Black Panther, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Iron Man and The Avengers.

Farewell Stan. Yancy Street and every superhero in the cosmos salute you.

The Phantom

The failure of imposed morality.

Here's something interesting I stumbled upon on Drudge today: "How the GOP gave up on pr0nz"

From the 1960s through the turn of the century, pornography played a dominant role in the American political argument—its morality and legality, its restrictions and regulations, its implications and unintended consequences. It was treated as a matter of urgency not just by the religious right, which decried the hypersexualizing of society, but by the radical left, which denounced the objectifying of women. Liberal feminists and conservative evangelicals found themselves unexpectedly allied in vilifying the adult entertainment industry. After decades of intensifying conflict, Ronald Reagan convened a Presidential Commission on Pornography in 1985; two years later, Reagan held a press conference to announce his administration's plan to combat illegal obscenity—and issue a warning to the porn professionals: "Your industry's days are numbered."

And now of course the pr0nz sites have the most traffic of anything in the internet. Top Five traffic sites are all filthy pictures and filthy movies. Kids, adults, everybody looks. Now we joke about Rule 34: if there's a character or an idea, then there's porn of it. But Rule 34 has gone from being a joke to being an actual rule. If you can think of it, there really is pr0nz of it. (I'm not going to give examples, sorry.)

Something else has become apparent, porn is bad. It is bad for the people who view it, and extremely bad for the people who make it. Plenty of high-profile suicides and mental disintegrations in the pr0nz "industry" make that painfully obvious.

The article makes it clear that the author thinks an opportunistic politician could find plenty of grist for their fame-mill in safety issues alone, and lots of "For The Chilllldren!!!" activity. But nobody does.
 

What happened? The pervasiveness of porn is a reminder that politics historically hasn't been much of a bulwark against the most primitive human desires—money, power, sex and, in this instance, a combination of the three. But it's also a window into the mentality on the right, which has surrendered the fight on many social issues as America has moved left. Even with Trump in the White House and five conservatives on the Supreme Court, there is no reversing the cultural tides that have swept away the Moral Majority's footprint on supporting traditional marriage and prayer in public schools. The difference is that some on the right still pay lip service to those lost causes. When it comes to porn—more accessible, more acceptable and less scrutinized than at any time during its history—they don't even bother anymore.

What happened, from my perspective, was would-be totalitarians realized they couldn't get any traction with the issue and gave up. The fact that porn may be harmful to everyone doesn't matter to them, what they want is a hot-button to push that will get them votes. But now, porn is ubiquitous. The most freaky hardcore imaginable is no farther away than your smartphone. Everybody has seen anything they want, and probably a bunch of stuff they didn't want. (Important safety tip kids, you can't un-see shit.) People are not shocked by it anymore. Nobody is screaming "there oughta be a law!!!".

So there are no votes there. No money. No leverage they can use to get power.

This leads to an interesting situation. There's nobody telling the populace not to watch the porn anymore. Churches have given up. Even the freaky Feminazis have given up, which is really saying something. If those nut-jobs give up on an issue, it is gone, baby. There is no more candy in that pinata.

From here on, until some new excuse is found, people will be free to view as much porn as they want. That it is harmful, if it is, will become apparent to everyone in due time. But it will still be there, waiting. So, it will be up to the -individual- to exercise restraint. Just like they have to exercise restraint with candy, booze and bacon.

Freedom, my friends. Sometimes it looks funny.

But the culture of self-restraint that grows from this freedom will be far more powerful and effective than the oppressive regulation imposed from above by our social betters.

The Phantom

Lest We Forget

100 years since 1918.

We still remember.

media behavior around mass shootings.

Another mass-shooting atrocity last night, this time in California. Condolences to the bereaved and the wounded.

Of note is the behavior of police and media today. This shooting occurred at roughly 11:20 last night. By 7:00AM this morning the police had released the shooter's identity.

White male, US Marine veteran.

That's pretty fast release of information on a guy that the news says didn't have any ID on him, and was too dead to have given police his name.

Ever notice how the cops seem to take a really looong time to release information on shooters, except when they're white, male and presumably Republican/Conservative Christian?

Maybe its my imagination, but there does seem to be quite a discrepancy in speed. Just sayin'.

The Phantom.

Robot grocery stores, get ready for it.

In my continuing series on job destruction and what inevitably happens when you raise minimum wage to idiotic heights, I give you the robot grocery store.

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands/NEW YORK, Nov 7 (Reuters) - Grocery group Ahold Delhaize will roll out small, automated warehouses to speed order picking and cut delivery times, Reuters has learned, as it revamps its ecommerce business in response to rising competition in a fast-growing sector.
At an investor event on Nov. 13, the world's eighth biggest food retailer is set to showcase a partnership that will allow it to automate order collection at mini "robot supermarkets" attached to the stores of its U.S. chains like Stop & Shop.
Now Netherlands-based Ahold Delhaize is teaming up with Takeoff, a start-up which builds small warehouses that stack groceries to the ceiling to save space and use robot arms to assemble shoppers' orders for items such as beer, milk, bread and fruit.
The warehouses serve as condensed supermarkets that can supply several stores with click-and-collect orders. They cost about $3 million to build, which Takeoff says is less than the cost of a typical store revamp.
"Ahold is preparing for a major push," Curt Avallone, Takeoff's chief development officer who led digital innovation at Stop & Shop until 2003, told Reuters.
"If it goes well, both from their side and our side, the hope is we would rapidly be able to build quite a few."

Lets list the advantages for the vendors here:

No shoplifting (Which is huge)

No employee stealing (Which is huge)

Much reduced breakage (robots don't drop stuff as much)

Much reduced spoilage (Just In Time delivery and stock rotation goes a lot faster.)

Tiny square footage compared to regular market

NO EMPLOYEES means the store can be open 24/7/365, including Sundays and holidays. It's a vending machine.

This is a perfect setup for big cities where supermarkets can't afford the real estate costs. Tiny space stacked two stories high with racking, no aisles, no lighting, no checkout, no cash registers, no samples, no nothing. Order on your smart-phone, all your crap gets spit out a chute into your car, you drive off.

One problem. All those people currently working at stores? They're on welfare now. They can't afford to buy the food at the robot store.

The Phantom

 Update: Welcome, Instapundit!

The American Election is over!

Yes, the American election is over. The world did not end, again.

Yay.

We now return you to the never-ending media meltdown.

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!"

 .

Tim Berners-Lee re-does the web.

Ever notice how more and more information about you seems to be floating around out there on the web, and out of your reach? The father of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, he noticed.

I've always believed the web is for everyone. That's why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we've managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we've achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.

Today, I believe we've reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible - and necessary.

This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.

Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we've all discovered, this hasn't been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance - by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.

Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you use. It allows you, your family and colleagues, to link and share data with anyone. It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time.

Truthfully I have no idea what this is or how it works, but if it can get Google and Facebook out of my personal stuff, I'll be a big fan.

The Phantom

Weed for all!

According to the Toronto (Red) Star, the Ford government will not be limiting the number of weed sales licenses issued.

The sky's the limit for private pot shops in Ontario, and recreational tokers will be able to fire up wherever it's legal to puff on cigarettes under new legislation being introduced by Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government.

There will be no ceiling on the number of stores allowed to get provincial licences if their applications make the grade, Attorney General Caroline Mulroney and Finance Minister Vic Fedeli said Wednesday.

The gnashing of teeth and howls of outrage began immediatly.

Liberal MPP Nathalies Des Rosiers (Ottawa-Vanier), a lawyer, said she was surprised and concerned to learn there will be no cap on the number of stores, despite government promises the industry will be "tightly regulated."

"Other provinces have put a cap ... I hope they are ready to have a robust monitoring way of dealing with all these stores," she said.

"If you're opening the market to all these new licences you know it's not going to be a carefully planned approach. The market will dictate."

Note that the howling comes from a LIBERAL MP, clearly disturbed by the idea that "the market will dictate." Liberals don't like it when people decide things for themselves.

I will emphasize here that what Ford is doing is called "a free country." If a company wants to sell a legal product, they can. The Liberals are very, very much against the notion of a free country. What they had in mind was a government monopoly, where they kept all the money and doled out little drips of product now and then, while also keeping a list of who bought what and when.

This means that little weed shops will be popping up all over the place. Its going to be interesting to see what happens when Canadians are allowed a slight increase in freedom.

The Phantom

Silicon Valley Libs

Greetings all. I posted this without cleaning it up, but now I see that Instapundit has picked it up (thanks Sarah!) so now the cleaning.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/408063-why-arent-liberals-fun-anymore

This is a piece at The Hill wherein a Conservative reflects that in the 1960s the Liberals were the Cool Kids, whereas now they're like a bunch of old Methodist preachers that don't hold with dancing.

"Similarly, the ugly incident when White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant weeks ago wasn't an aberration. Liberals are so filled with a sense of moral superiority and rage that they literally don't want to sit in the same dining room with us.
Last week, I gave a talk at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley to some 250 technology executives and the venture capitalists who fund them. I asked at the start of my speech how many of them have a positive opinion of Trump. Now, mind you, if any group has been transformed into gazillionaires because of Trump policies, it was this crowd. Out of the 250 attendees, about three people dared to raise their hands. I knew that liberalism is transcendent in the Bay Area, but I didn't realize groupthink was this lopsided.
After the speech, about 20 to 30 of the attendees came up and said they enjoyed my talk. Several whispered that they really like what Trump is doing. Huh? Why didn't they raise their hands? The answers: "I have clients here and I will lose them if they know I support Trump;" "I will be ostracized if my friends know my real feelings;" "I didn't want to get into an argument with people;" and so on."

https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/24/ted-cruz-protested-dc-restaurant/

This one is a link to a bunch of assholes yelling Ted Cruz and his wife out of a restaurant in DC this week, similar situation to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I watched it, it was a grotesque display. Reminds me of the reason rich people had "footmen" in the old days. To keep the beggars and cut-purses off.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/24/google-chrome-begins-syncing-all-browser-data-to-your-identity-without-asking/

This Google Chrome thing is a bit more serious than assholes hassling a politician at dinner. This one is the direction the Silicon Valley crowd wants to take us all.

Google users are concerned about their browsing privacy after a recent update at Google secretly logs Chrome browser users into their online Google accounts, syncing data without asking, a move one expert says has “enormous implications for user privacy and trust.”
As detailed by cryptographer and professor Matthew Green on his blog on Sunday, Google made the change several weeks ago.

“Due to Chrome’s new user-unfriendly forced login policy — I won’t be using it going forward,” declared professor Green. “A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you.”

 Which is why I use Mozilla, even on my phone. It doesn't do that. Yet.

But, as we know from what happened to Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, the little shits who work at Mozilla would -like- to do that. Because they are the type of people who think this following quote from the linked Slate article (sorry!) is reasonable:

Thirty-seven companies in the database are linked to more than 1,300 employees who gave nearly $1 million in combined contributions to the campaign for Prop 8. Twenty-five tech companies are linked to 435 employees who gave more than $300,000. Many of these employees gave $1,000 apiece, if not more. Some, like Eich, are probably senior executives.

Why do these bigots still have jobs? Let’s go get them.

Because it isn't enough to do "good works" you see. You have to "speak truth to power" and "call them out!" whenever anyone transgresses against whatever the narrative is this week. Like this. (Hi Bonnie!) 

And really, its not enough to publicly harass and humiliate these people who transgress. You have to financially ruin them, drive them out of the workplace, and make them suffer in penury forever more.

Which is why Stephen Moore waaaay back at the beginning saw three hands in a room full of people when he asked who liked Trump. They're all very well aware that the Witch Hunters are all out there looking for another Brendan Eich to burn.

When you let the Witch Hunters run things, you get stuff like the 2018 WorldCon in San Jose CA this year, which featured the specatcle of having its entire program cancelled and done over two weeks before the con, because one (1) asshole complained, Antifa on site armed and dangerous because there were [gasp!] Conservatives present protesting against child molestation and pedophilia (no really, Antifa was there to beat up the anti-Pedo demonstrators) and Jon del Arroz kicked out of the con because he voted for Trump.

At this point the bleating of WorldCon SMOFs is falling on deaf ears. Everybody knows
Jon del Arroz got booted because he's Conservative, everybody knows he was kicked out of BayCon for being a Trump voter. Now he's suing WorldCon and therefore burning up their money, a noble goal if you ask me. They deserve what they're handing out. Ruination.

Ruination will surely come to pass, I must add here. It doesn't matter how hard you call people out, it doesn't matter how many men are falsely accused of crimes, there are going to be a lot of people going through the motions with their shields up and their cloaking systems engaged. Submarine warfare.

Contrary to what Liberals would like you to think, everybody in Silicon Valley is not a Liberal. Probably half of them just mouth the platitudes, fully a third of them are nerds like James Damore and go by the science. You can't make a Liberal out of a nerd. Their brains don't work that way. 

The Phantom