Greenies are coming for your inhaler. No, really. They are.

You know what's wrong with having a big government that decides everything?

Fashion.

Not just hemlines, ladies. Fashionable theories, fashionable causes, these things sweep through institutions like the flu, infecting everyone and changing policy directions on a dime.

Case in point, greenhouse gases. Its the latest fashion in government. In Canada we have a carbon tax and we're not building any pipelines, thereby ruining our own economy.

In England the National Health Service is going vegan and taking away people's asthma inhalers.

Asthma carbon footprint 'as big as eating meat'

Making the swap would have as big an "eco" impact as turning vegetarian or becoming an avid recycler, they say.
It's because some inhalers release greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
There are more than five million people with asthma in the UK.
The research looked at the environmental impact of different inhaler medications prescribed to patients on the NHS in England.
In 2017, about 50 million inhalers were prescribed. Seven out of every 10 of them were metered-dose inhalers - the type that contain greenhouse gases.
The gas - hydrofluoroalkane - is used as a propellant to squirt the medicine out of the inhaler.
Metered-dose inhalers account for nearly 4% of NHS greenhouse gas emissions, according to experts.

So they're going to be switching people to non-propellant inhalers to save the planet. Being a government institution, they will have targets and quotas for numbers switched to the LESS EFFECTIVE dry powder version.

Sounds great, right?

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

Upperdate: Welcome all you Small Dead Animals and flying monkeys! Thanks for the linkage Kate! 

Farmer uprising spreads from Holland to Germany.

There is a -huge- protest movement going on right now in Europe that nobody has heard about. Complete blackout in the international news. I saw this at Blazing Cat Fur.

Funny that this wasn't on the news.

Thousands of farmers in their tractors have taken to the streets of Germany, protesting the government's environmentalist agenda and the climate of hostility that agriculture faces from urban eco-warriors.
On Tuesday, farmers across Germany led 'tractor parades' into the nation's cities.
According to the German newspaper Die Welt, some 2,000 tractors descended upon the city of Bonn, and thousands of farmers took the same path in Hanover, Munich, Berlin, and Hamburg.

Organized by a group called 'Land Creates Connection', the farmers demanded not only a say in the formation of agricultural and environmental policies but also respect from the public who rely on the fruits of their labor.

Most people haven't heard about this because the lamestream media haven't reported it. Similarly to the massive Tea Party events with 100,000+ attendees a few years ago that went missing in the news, thousands of tractors showing up in big cities all over Germany isn't "news" that we should know about.

We also shouldn't know that Dutch farmers have been doing the same thing for some time now. Since October 1st. The only reason I knew about it was WiFi Lunchbox Guy dropped a link for me. It goes to a Twitter page. https://twitter.com/detgrim/status/1184898297217069056 

That's a lot of tractors, my friends.

Sea of tractors that did NOT get permission to be there.

So it seems that the Powers That Be are very happy for us to know if Frau Jackson's Grade 10 class showed up with signs at City Hall in Yourtown Germany to protest climate change. Less happy if we find out that the people who grow all our food showed up and kicked in the front door of Parliament because a new regulation is putting them all out of business.

And by the way, this is the "coddled and subsidized" European farmers we're talking about here, the ones North Americans think have such easy lives. Maybe that's another lie we've all been fed.

Elections have consequences. Already!

The saying is that elections have consequences. Usually we don't see those consequences the NEXT DAY after the election though.

American burger chain Red Robin says it will be closing all of its Alberta stores by Dec. 8.
Global News has spoken to all five locations the company currently operates in the Edmonton area and each location confirmed they have been told they will be shut down by that date.
A previous location in the city on 112 Street and 104 Avenue also closed earlier in the year.
The company, known for its bottomless fries and expansive burger choices, currently has a total of 17 Canadian locations. The other 12 stores operate in British Columbia.

So there's 75 people times five locations that are out of a job as of December 8th, not to mention the franchisees who are now out several million dollars for each location. Those places are not cheap to start up.

Also, Husky Oil laid off hundreds of employees on October 22nd.

Thanks, Liberals. Thanks Toronto.

Update: Encana packs it in, they are moving to the USA, taking their bat and ball with them. One of the largest and oldest companies in Canada just said "fuck it!" and left. Now that's what I call an election consequence.

Well, here we all are again. Election results.

On the surface, it looks like dirty politics and slimy propaganda are a winning combination ladies and gentlemen. The Shiny Pony lives. Surely there are a lot of articles today braying that this is a Big Resurgence of the Left.

So lets look and see what happened.

First thing that happened, obviously, is that Andrew Scheer screwed the pooch bigly this election. With the amount of truly criminal bullshit being done by the Liberals this thing was Scheer's to lose, and he did. But, the CPC is UP 26 seats to 121 from 96.

Second thing that happened, the Liberals lost influence. Hard. A majority is 170 seats, the Liberals held 177 going into this thing, and now they are down 20 to 157.

The third thing that happened, the NDP lost in every possible way. They are down from 39 seats, losing 15 seats to end up with 24.

Forth thing, and probably amounting to nothing, the Bloc won big last night going from 10 to 32, gaining 22 seats. The only thing of note about this is that the Bloc now has 32 seats despite the fact that they only got 7% of the popular vote. There's 338 seats for 30 million people, 7% should give them 24 seats. But because of the peculiarities of ridings and population density in Quebec, they swing a pretty big bat today. They can go in with the NDP and the CPC to bring down the government any time they want.

Looking at the map, the West is solid CPC blue all the way from Ontario to the BC coast. Ontario, mostly blue except for the 905 area code, Toronto/Mississauga/Burlington/Hamilton went solid Liberal. But that's where all the people live. Job done, Canadian media.

Moving east, there's a surprising amount of blue in Quebec down by the St. Lawrence river, then the middle of it is Bloc with Montreal going pretty much solid Liberal, and the Maritimes solid Liberal.

That my friends is what you call a nation divided. This is an urban/rural divide, one which is probably going to get MUCH deeper before it starts to let up. Because the urban side owns all the propaganda machinery, and the rural side owns all the food and industry.

Bottom line, Canadians didn't really care that the government is a bunch of corrupt assholes led by a child.

But at least now I know what its going to take to get them to pay attention. It'll take random blackouts, food shortages, rioting and a constant fear of death to wake them the fuck up. Venezuela north, basically. Or the West could start separation proceedings, that might work too.

12 months of legal weed already?

Happy Weedaversary everyone. Yes, the Demon Herb has been legal to buy here in the Demented Dominion for a whole year. Twelve months of getting wasted whenever you want, all legal and everything.

Tommy Chong is so happy!

Notably absent are the zillions of car accidents and hordes of brain-dead zombies shuffling about our ruined cities that we were all warned about right up until the 17th last year. I always thought it was a little suspect that the warnings and the Scientific Studies! all stopped on 10/18/2018, as if somebody threw a switch to turn off whatever was generating them.

But hey, today's a big celebration. So hoist a celebratory joint, take a little puff, and then get the hell back to work. You've got taxes to pay, peons.

The Phantom

Hardware subversion for cheap.

Something I've been wondering about for a long time is now officially a thing.

More than a year has passed since Bloomberg Businessweek grabbed the lapels of the cybersecurity world with a bombshell claim: that Supermicro motherboards in servers used by major tech firms, including Apple and Amazon, had been stealthily implanted with a chip the size of a rice grain that allowed Chinese hackers to spy deep into those networks. Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro all vehemently denied the report. The NSA dismissed it as a false alarm. The Defcon hacker conference awarded it two Pwnie Awards, for "most overhyped bug" and "most epic fail." And no follow-up reporting has yet affirmed its central premise.

But even as the facts of that story remain unconfirmed, the security community has warned that the possibility of the supply chain attacks it describes is all too real. The NSA, after all, has been doing something like it for years, according to the leaks of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Now researchers have gone further, showing just how easily and cheaply a tiny, tough-to-detect spy chip could be planted in a company's hardware supply chain. And one of them has demonstrated that it doesn't even require a state-sponsored spy agency to pull it off—just a motivated hardware hacker with the right access and as little as $200 worth of equipment.

Here's what was actually done:

With only a $150 hot-air soldering tool, a $40 microscope, and some $2 chips ordered online, Elkins was able to alter a Cisco firewall in a way that he says most IT admins likely wouldn't notice, yet would give a remote attacker deep control.

"We think this stuff is so magical, but it's not really that hard," says Elkins, who works as "hacker in chief" for the industrial-control-system security firm FoxGuard. "By showing people the hardware, I wanted to make it much more real. It's not magical. It's not impossible. I could do this in my basement. And there are lots of people smarter than me, and they can do it for almost nothing."

Elkins used an ATtiny85 chip, about 5 millimeters square, that he found on a $2 Digispark Arduino board; not quite the size of a grain of rice, but smaller than a pinky fingernail. After writing his code to that chip, Elkins desoldered it from the Digispark board and soldered it to the motherboard of a Cisco ASA 5505 firewall. He used an inconspicuous spot that required no extra wiring and would give the chip access to the firewall's serial port.

The article goes on to explain the exploit in some detail. Short version, wiring a pre-programmed ATtiny onto the motherboard of a router is a piece of cake. Its not the smallest or cheapest thing that could be used either, just the one this guy found convenient.

Okay, so now I want you to imagine some guy soldering something the size of kosher salt to a motherboard in your Tesla. He's now got remote access to everything electronic in there. Which is -everything-. Door locks to steering and brakes, all electronic control.

Pretty bad, right? Now make your car a transport truck. Much worse. How about an airplane? Instant cruise missile.

Somebody out there is thinking about this, I guarantee you. Probably a lot of them.

What's your defense? Manual controls.

The Phantom 

Lies the New York Times told me.

Today in the New York Times, the Newspaper Of Record, "all the news that's fit to print" and etc, we have this big, big extravaganza on vehicle "emissions".

Reducing emissions from driving has been a big challenge, said Conor Gately, who led the project mapping CO₂ on America's roads as a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University. Emissions dipped during the recession of the late 2000s, but have been ticking back up since 2013.

National fuel economy standards put in place under the Obama administration have helped temper the rise in automotive emissions because the rules require cars and trucks to use less gasoline per mile traveled. But even as vehicles have become more efficient, Americans, buoyed by a strong economy and low gas prices, have been driving more miles and buying more S.U.V.s and pickup trucks, which have lower gas mileage. Freight trucking is also on the rise.

The Trump administration is expected to finalize a rollback of efficiency standards for passenger vehicles this month, a move that could significantly increase future emissions from America's cars and trucks.

So, Brown Man Good, Orange Man Bad, and how dare you peasants drive the kind of cars you want instead of put-putting around in tiny death-trap eco-mobiles like good little consumers ought to. Get a friggin' bicycle, prole!

Couple things that make this whole article a heinous lie.

First, and most important, this is not a map of pollution. Its a map of CARBON DIOXIDE which is not pollution, it is the stuff humans breath out. Plants -need- carbon dioxide, right? This is another global warming fairy tale filled with dire Greta Thunberg warnings about how your car is going to cause the end of the world.

Which is, I'm sorry New York Times, a lie.

Second, and this is my favorite part right here, they didn't measure a goddamn thing to make this map. Nope. This is an estimate.

To create their database, Boston University researchers used federal traffic data to calculate the number of miles travelled on local segments of each road in the United States and converted those miles to carbon dioxide emissions by estimating how much fuel is consumed by different types of vehicles using those roads.

and

An additional New York Times analysis used Boston University's on-road CO₂ data and population figures from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Census Bureau to derive total and per capita emissions for each metropolitan area.

This is an ESTIMATE based on a federal government ESTIMATE of traffic and an NIH ESTIMATE of population. Nobody counted the cars, nobody measured the CO2.

They made it up.

So, ladies and gentlemen rest easy in the knowledge that the New York Times is completely full of shit. To the brim. So full of shit in fact that it is unfit even to wrap fish.

The Phantom

More Real Oppression in China

Antifa and the other Leftist idiots like to scream about Oppression! like its something they've experienced in a Western nation like the USA or Canada.

This is the real thing right here:

The Chinese Communist Party has razed dozens of Uighur Muslim cemeteries in western Xinjiang province to create more "civilized" areas, the Agence-France Presse (AFP) reported on Wednesday.

China has taken over Uighur burial rites and replaced them with Communist Party-controlled cremations staged in "burial management centers" that ban religious activity surrounding the handling of a person's remains. Uighur locals and activists have accused China of attempting to erase the ethnic minority's history and uproot them from their ancestral home.

But wait, there's more. A Greenie connection!

The destruction of Uighur graveyards is not new. The Print reported in July that the Communist Party began rapidly constructing "burial management centers" throughout the region after destroying at least three cemeteries in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. One was turned into an "ecological" park; Chinese authorities have also used a green agenda as an excuse to eradicate Uighur holy sites.

I was reading along and the notion of bulldozing cemeteries pissed me off, I must say. But then I read this:

In Hotan, another major Xinjiang city, the Csehine regime razed a 1000-year-old cemetery holding the remains of several historic figures, including Muslim crusaders from the late second millennium who brought the religion to western China.

The Communist Party has also built thousands of concentration camps in Xinjiang holding millions of Uighurs – and used the camps to excuse the replacement of private burials with "burial management centers," arguing that they are necessary because not enough young men remain free from the concentration camps to help carry bodies and perform burial rites.

First of all, a 1000 year old cemetery? Wow. We think shit that's 100 years old is old. Second of all, this is like destroying Martin Luther's burial site in Germany. Its the same thing.

So, all you Lefty snowflakes, just read all that and have a good hard think about what Oppression with a capital O really is, and who in the world is really doing it.

The Phantom

Racism at Harvard A-OK!

More legislating morality from the bench: US federal judge rules in favor of Harvard. Shocker, right?

A lawsuit, backed by President Donald Trump's administration, had challenged Harvard's use of race in determining admissions, part of a decades-old push to boost minority enrolments at America's oldest university.
Federal Judge Allison Dale Burroughs said in a long-awaited decision that while Harvard's admissions process is not perfect, it was right, for now, to factor in race to form a diverse student body.
"The rich diversity at Harvard and other colleges and universities and the benefits that flow from that diversity will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race-conscious admissions obsolete," she said.
The case was filed in 2014 by Students for Fair Admissions, a group led by conservative white activist Edward Blum, who previously attacked the affirmative action policies at the University of Texas.

 Love that subtle journalistic characterization there, eh? "Conservative White Activist", real smooth. The byline is AFP New York, just so you know the type of hipster dickweeds they hired.

But, obscene journalistic bias aside, what's being celebrated here is literal racial discrimination against more qualified candidates in favor of less qualified ones. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, using race as the determining factor for admission.

Back in the good old days it was all A-OK because it was only discrimination against white kids, which is always good in the minds of Lefties. But lately Harvard has been discriminating against Brownies too, because Indian and Asian (Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese etc.) kids are showing up with SAT and high school marks in the A+++ range, over 95%. Harvard has basically said that if you have a 95%+ GPA and you're a Brownie, they don't want you. They will take a black or Hispanic kid with an 80% first. Because Diversity!!!11!

Real, live, racial discrimination.

The Federal court of the USA just said they're good with that.

So, if your kid is a brownie or a whitey and has a fucking 98% GPA because they worked their ass off, but for some reason still wants to get into Harvard to rub shoulders with the 80 percenters, you're going to need to have them dye their hair pink and claim to be transgender. Because tranny is the new black.

The Phantom

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