Bananada! The day Canada became a banana republic.

That day was May 23, 2019. The day that the Supreme Court of Canada decided that the laws of Canada, specifically the Electrical Code which governs all electricity construction and repair in the country, can be privately owned. As of May 23rd 2019, it has been established that you have to pay money to a private company, the CSA, just to read the law. You have to buy a copy. From them.

The Supreme Court was the last chance to overturn Manson's Law, the Ruling that introduced private ownership of legislation.  Private law is now entrenched and unappealable.

As a result, any non-government employee who's ever contributed any text to legislation now owns that legislation privately.  And they can restrict public access to their law.  And they can charge for access, usage and enforcement.  And they can prevent governments from using their laws, making enforcement of law unequal, a patchwork of privilege based entirely on the preferences, biases, and financial interests of these owners of law.

As economic activity is always under a wide range of legislation, and as nearly all such legislation is contributed to by private interests, almost all economic activity is now subject to veto by any of the hundreds of contributors to the laws governing that activity.

It's more than a thumb on the scales of competition, it's a veto over every business activity in the Country given to those with vested interests in favouring one entity over another.

Emphasis mine.

Now, the above statement of fact is clearly insane. Private companies OWN the law? If you want to know the regulation way to install a light switch, you have to BUY ACCESS to the regulations. If you want to argue in court that your light switch was installed properly, you have to first BUY A COPY of the regulations.

Furthermore the company who made the light switch wrote the regulation. They can change the regulation to make your installation illegal if they don't like you. They can write the regulations to make it impossible for any other company to make a light switch. AND THEY DO. They do stuff like that all the fricking time. Ever wonder why electrical stuff is so expensive and so crappy in this country? That's why. CSA approval process, doing favors for Friends.

Who's going to do business in an environment like that? Nobody honest, that's for sure.

Now, lest anyone think this is only about the CSA, let me assure you this is only the little tip of the very big iceberg. This decision to do this flatly insane thing came from the Supreme Court of Canada. Highest court in the land. If they did this over electrical construction, try to imagine what they'll do to you on free speech, self defense, educating your kids, you car, your house and property, your savings account.

Its a banana republic now, folks. Anything goes.

Crossfit quits Facebook, Instagram: "utopian socialists"

This is going to leave a mark.

CrossFit, the branded workout regimen, accused Facebook of being "utopian socialists" and left the platform after the social network deleted a group dedicated to a diet.

The move to quit both Facebook and Instagram came in the wake of the decision to delete "without warning or explanation the Banting7DayMealPlan," a group that advocated a diet aimed at eating "food that is as close to its natural state as possible — free from processing, additives, preservatives and sugar."

Down at the bottom comes the good part:

The company then added that "Facebook's news feeds are censored and crafted to reflect the political leanings of Facebook's utopian socialists while remaining vulnerable to misinformation campaigns designed to stir up violence and prejudice."

For a company like Crossfit to quit social media is quite a big deal. One wonders where they'll find their advertising. But apparently they are not only dissatisfied with the advertising power available, they are also being censored.

Who on earth is stupid enough to censor their own customers?
The people who pay them? California SJWs, that's who.

The stampede away from social media begins.

Update: Welcome, Instapundit! Thanks for the linkage, Sarah Hoyt!

Oh noes, the TREEEEEES!!!!!!!

Cut down trees to save the planet!!!!

According to the data he gathered, Crowther suggests that about 10% of EM-associated trees could be replaced by AM-associated trees as the planet warms. "Microbes in forests dominated by AM fungi churn through carbon-containing organic matter faster, so they could liberate lots of heat-trapping carbon dioxide quickly, potentially accelerating a climate change process that is already happening at a frightening pace," the report says.

The mind reels.

Happy "Molly Norris is still in hiding" Day.

Yes friends, its that time of year again when we look back to 2010 and remember a nice girl who decided the First Amendment of the US Constitution was more important than some douchbag hillbillies in Afghanistan. So she posted a little picture on her blog, which went viral, and the FBI advised her to go into hiding and never, ever come out.

So she's been hiding since 2010, and now it is 2019.

Over a blog post.

Let's not forget.

This is why I don't believe in global warming.

Finally, some official NOAA numbers to go with the photographic evidence.

I've been saying for years that surface temperature measurements (and long term trends) have been affected by encroachment of urbanization on the placement of weather stations used to measure surface air temperature, and track long term climate. In doing so we found some hilariously bad examples of climate science in action, such as the official USHCN climate monitoring station at the University of Arizona, Tucson:

USHCN weather station in a parking lot. University of Arizona, Tucson

I have published on the topic in the scientific literature, and found this to be true based on the science we've done of examining the USHCN and applying the siting methodology of Leroy 2010.

In Fall et al, 2011 we discovered that there was a change to the diurnal temperature range (DTR). It decreased where stations had been encroached upon, because of the heat sink effect of man-made materials (asphalt, concrete, bricks, etc.) that were near stations.

With regard to this example of U. Arizona, there's an interesting thing that one notices down in Phoenix and Tucson at night. After the sun goes down, if you drive (or walk or bike)  under a bridge, you can feel the heat radiating from it. This phenomenon lasts a couple of hours at least. The desert gets cold at night, but a concrete bridge will stay warm half the night. Everyone who can see lightning and hear thunder knows this.

Therefore the siting of the official NOAA thermometer in an asphalt parking lot in front of a brick building is not accidental.

Small Dead Animals ran a long series of pictures like this one many years ago. Hundreds of sites on parking lots, roofs, next to air conditioning outlets, all kinds of arrangements clearly made to increase the temperature reading.

Hanlon's Razor says  " Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." Stupidity could account for maybe 5% of official scientific instruments being set up completely wrong, despite all the management and supervision such things are subject to. If pressed I might go as high as 10%, because government. Unionized public employees, you know.

The number of sites not meeting official NOAA standards is more than 10%. You get up over a third, stupidity isn't an explanation anymore. That's a deliberate campaign. Its corruption.

Now, some people (and one camel) seem to think that my objection is that the surface temp numbers are not accurate, so obviously I should be satisfied by satellite data. That is because some people are IDIOTS who should not be let out without a keeper.

 

The surface temperature monitoring system has been corrupted by agenda-driven ideologues. It no longer reports the actual temperature, it reports what they want it to report. Propaganda, not science. That much is obvious.

But the surface monitoring system does not exist like an island, whole and complete, isolated unto itself. The same organization that allowed so many surface temp stations to be corrupted also controls all the other monitoring systems, and the record keeping as well. Do we actually know what the temperature was on May the 15th 1927 in Topeka Kansas? Or did they corrupt the records too? Did they corrupt the satellite data?

I think yes, they probably did. Clear, blatant and LONG TERM corruption in one part of any organization is an indicator of corruption throughout.

I don't believe anything that comes out of climate science these days, whether the numbers indicate global warming or not. Because liars lie.

The Phantom

Microsoft is trying to force me to use Linux.

Microsoft is pushing a new suite of tools for Word.

Coming soon to a word processing app you probably already subscribe to is Microsoft's new Ideas plugin. This leap forward in the predictive text trend will endeavor to help you be less offensive. Worried you might be a little bit racist? A little gender confused? Not sure about the difference between disabled persons and persons who are disabled? Never fear, Microsoft will fix your language for you.

Using machine learning and AI, Microsoft's Ideas in Word will help writers be their least offensive, most milquetoast selves. Just like spell check and grammar check function, Ideas will make suggestions as to how to improve your text to be more inclusive. On the surface, this seems like a terrible idea, but when we dig further beneath the impulse, and the functionality of the program, it gets even worse. What's happening is that AI and machine learning are going to be the background of pretty much every application, learning from our behaviours not only how we'd like to format our PowerPoint presentations, but learning, across platforms, how best to construct language so that we say what we are wanted to say as opposed to what we really mean.

They plan to take Auto-corrupt to a whole new level by suggesting different word choices for controversial concepts like "his", "she will" and "ham sandwich."

Of course you have the option of turning those suggestions off, or ignoring them. For now.

But really, do I want to be writing stories on software that counts up every time I use a gender pronoun and keeps a record of it on a server somewhere? Indeed, keeps everything I write on a remote server somewhere if I have Autosave turned on.

Yes that's right kids, if you want to use Autosave with Word, then you have to have OneDrive turned on, and the Autosave sends everything to OneDrive.

Which I am assured is -tewtally- safe and secure, dewd. Nobody could EVER use the contents of your OneDrive to train AI software, just ferinstance. Right? Oh no wait, they can. Says so in the fine print.

So really, they're fucking well copying every damn thing I do and keeping it forever someplace I can't get at it. And then SELLING IT. For which privilege I pay a yearly fee.

Yes, they really are trying to force me off their platform onto something that doesn't constantly steal my private stuff and sell it. Linux with Open Office is useable, stable and FREE.

Keep going, Microsoft. Eventually you will make me switch.

When the top female athletes are boys...

...the girls will sit on the bench.

A junior, Selina [Soule] missed qualifying for the 55-meter in the New England regionals by two spots. Two spots, she said, that were taken by biological boys.

Had the boys who identify as girls not been allowed to compete, Selina would have placed sixth, qualifying to run the 55 in front of college coaches at the New England regionals.

Instead, she placed eighth, watching the 55 from the sidelines after qualifying in only the long jump, an event in which the transgender athletes didn't compete.

"It's very frustrating and heartbreaking when us girls are at the start of the race and we already know that these athletes are going to come out and win no matter how hard you try," Selina told The Daily Signal. "They took away the spots of deserving girls, athletes … me being included."

Really, this is all down to politics over sanity. The people of Connecticut need to decide if they want to keep voting DemocRat, or if they want their young daughters to be able to play sports and go to the damn bathroom in safety.

What's very evident in this piece is the amount of naked fear these girls and their parents have about speaking out. They are petrified the Left is going to come for them. Eventually they will get tired of being afraid, and will instead become angry. And Trump will win Connecticut in 2020.

Alexa and Smart-home are spying on you.

From the Washington Post, an article outlining just how much Amazon's Alexa is recording you.

Many smart-speaker owners don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligences.

So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

Yep. And that's why I don't have one. That's why all the voice activation crap is disabled on my phone too. Because voice command is an always-on internet appliance, which can and does record random conversations without use of the code-word "Alexa" or "Siri" or whatever you have.

And there is no OFF switch. "OFF!" is a software setting, not a hardware switch that stops the flow of electricity. That means that "OFF!" is a suggestion, not an enforceable condition.

But wait, there's more:

Alexa's voice archive made headlines most recently when Bloomberg discovered Amazon employees listen to recordings to train its artificial intelligence. Amazon acknowledged some of those employees also have access to location information for the devices that made the recordings. [Emphasis mine]

Yes! Location information is also stored. So they know what you said, when and where you said it, and using location data from other companies, they know who else was there to hear it.

Wait. Location data from other companies? Isn't that illegal? Why yes, it IS illegal, and they sell it anyway. Yes friends, the top four phone companies in America are selling your location data illegally. Have been for years.

And even more:

Every kind of appliance now is becoming a data-collection device. My Chamberlain MyQ garage opener lets the company keep - again, indefinitely - a record of every time my door opens or closes. My Sonos speakers, by default, track what albums, playlists or stations I've listened to, and when I press play, pause, skip or pump up the volume. At least they only hold on to my sonic history for six months.

And now the craziest part: After quizzing these companies about data practices, I learned most are sharing what's happening in my home with Amazon, too. Our data is the price of entry for devices that want to integrate with Alexa. Amazon's not only eavesdropping - it's tracking everything happening in your home.

Amazon acknowledges it collects data about third-party devices even when you don't use Alexa to operate them. It says Alexa needs to know the "state" of your devices "to enable a great smart home experience." But keeping a record of this data is more useful to them than to us.

Yep. The NEST thermostat, the network-connected lights, the power company's smart meter on your electrical service, your network connected smart TV, your Spotify account, your smart-speakers, smart doorbell... all this shit sends its data back home to the company, and Amazon keeps it FOREVER.

So yeah. The Alexa-connected sensor web in your house knows you got up to take a leak at 2AM last Tuesday, and with enough connecting of databases from credit cards and stores etc. they may know it was because you had three beers after dinner on Tuesday.

Now, I want y'all to consider that this level of surveillance and recording is far beyond what people in jails experience. Even assuming that everyone involved is acting properly and with the best intentions, its alarming.

But we also know that Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, all these companies lean HARD Left politically. Does anyone really think they don't collect dirt on people they don't like?

Are we going to sit here and pretend these guys would shrink from mining location data and recordings of Alex Jones, for example? Or Donald Trump?
 

It's not a phone. Its a tracker.

Confirming what I've been saying for years, again, 4 major USA telephone companies sued for selling user location data.

In June 2018, the four major U.S. carriers promised to stop selling their mobile customers' location info to third-party data brokers after a security problem leaked the real-time location of U.S. cellphone users. Despite the carriers' promises, a Motherboard investigation found in January 2019 that they were still selling access to their customers' location data.

Now, this is not the "location data" thing on your phone that sends your location to Google or Apple. This is the direct take from the cell towers. They're not supposed to even be able to access that without a warrant, much less sell it. But they ARE selling it.

Court mandated GPS locators offer MORE privacy to the people they are clamped on than your phone does to you.

The Phantom

Sri Lanka: first ever recorded -actual- anti-Mooselimb "backlash."

There's always a lot of loose talk after a Ram-a-Van event, a suicide bombing, a mass shooting, mass knifing or other typical atrocity where "some people did something." The media are very, very careful not to "jump to conclusions," to the point where they generally speculate that the culprit was a White Supremacist. But the unenlightened knuckle-dragging set (also know as anyone not in the media) is darkly rumbling that the culprit probably faces a certain direction five times a day, so the media goes into high gear to prevent a "backlash."

Given the evidence of what actually happens in Canada, the backlash they're afraid of is the occasional frown of disapproval, and the occasional harsh word on the Interwebz.

Dear people of the media and Leftist morons everywhere, I'd like to introduce you to the notion that frowns and strong language do not constitute a backlash.

Two people have been arrested in a Sri Lankan town after Christians attacked Muslim shops.

Residents say the mostly-Catholic mob stoned and vandalised Muslim-owned businesses in the seaside town of Negombo, where a suicide bombing targeted a Catholic church last month.

Social media was shut down and extra troops deployed onto the streets and hundreds were reportedly involved in violence over the weekend.

You can tell that Mooselimb terrorists are not really taken very seriously most places by what happens afterward. "Some people did some things" on 9/11/2001, but even though we knew who the culprits were by 9/14/2001, Americans rightly assumed that it was no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Sucks to be you, Mooselimb terrorists.

Conversely when "Easter worshipers" do some things, that's enough to get the government of Sri Lanka to shut down social media and start arresting people. Because when the Easter Worshipers start shit, that's going to be some serious shit.

"Shut up!" they explained to the child's father.

Canada is fast turning into a police state, where the government can pretty much tell you whatever the hell they want, and you have to do it.

Today's example, the truth is not a defense.

Last month, the Supreme Court of British Columbia issued an order that a father (referred to by the pseudonym "Clark") may not refer to his 14-year-old daughter (pseudonym "Maxine") as a girl or by her original name, whether in public or in private. Doing so has been ruled to constitute "family violence" because Maxine identifies as a boy. According to a separate protection order, police may immediately arrest Clark if they suspect he violated this Orwellian order.

Yes, if the father of this child mentions the fact that she is a girl, which she is, he gets a one way ticket to the Crowbar Hotel. But it gets better:

In addition to these gag provisions, the order prohibits Clark from "directly, or indirectly through an agent or third party, publish or share information or documentation relating to [Maxine]'s sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, mental or physical health, medical status or therapies," besides the Court, legal counsel, medical professionals, or any person authorized by Maxine or the Court.

The order also prevents Clark from allowing anyone besides his lawyer "to access or make copies of any of the files" relating to this ruling and order.

So essentially the defense is prevented from making public the details of the case, the ruling, or the judge's order. In other words, Shut Up! or we will hurt you. We will hurt you a lot.

Now, call me old fashioned, but this strikes me as a very big move from the law of a free country to the law of an un-free country.