The Mike Pence Scandal: he doesn't harass women!

In honor of Kathy Shaidle, we should call this one Pence-a-quiddick.

Via Small Dead Animals, and Instapundit who said "How stupid are you?" we are alerted to this scandalous scandal:

The vice president—and other powerful men—regularly avoid one-on-one meetings with women in the name of protecting their families. In the end, what suffers is women's progress.

Wow! Really? How extraordinary! Tell me more!

In a recent, in-depth Washington Post profile of Karen Pence, Vice President Mike Pence's wife, a small detail is drawing most of the attention: "In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won't attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either." 

In context, this choice is not especially surprising. The Pences are evangelical Christians, and their faith animates both their policy views and how they express devotion to one another. Eight months into their courtship, the Post reporter Ashley Parker writes, "Karen engraved a small gold cross with the word 'Yes' and slipped it into her purse to give him when he popped the question."

Clearly these people are evil and must be purged. I mean, Christians? In the White House? Scandalous!

I was going to ignore the whole thing because it is the stupidest feminazi hackery yet, topping even the pussy hats. Particularly coming after the pearl-clutching uproar of Trump and his pussy-grabbing comment ten fricking years ago.

But then, I saw this. Ashley Csanady in The National Post, going full retard.

The Atlantic, bless its soul, actually dug up the context of the 2002 piece in The Hill. They add the details that Pence also sometimes eschews dinners and parties with male colleagues and it's "about building a zone around your marriage."

...snippage...

Pence is an evangelical Christian and his faith is being used to both defend and excoriate his no-ladies-for-lunch policy. The aforementioned Atlantic piece calls it the "Billy Graham rule, named for the famous evangelist who established similar guidelines for the pastors working in his ministry."
The religious origins of Pence's self-restriction don't make it any less sexist.

Really? Defending your marriage is sexist, now? Well no, actually it is so much worse than that.

At its core, Pence's self-imposed ban is rape culture.
Nor is that a label I assign lightly. "Rape culture" is a phrase so overused it's become almost meaningless, like calling someone a Nazi on the internet. But it has a very clear meaning: the notion, whether conscious or unconscious, that men can't control themselves around women because "boys will be boys."
The explicit reasons for Pence's restriction are religion and family, but the implicit reason is that he must avoid alone-time with women lest his stringent religious moral code fall apart in the presence of a little lipstick and décolletage. That is rape culture.

 And that, my friends, is why you never go full retard.

The Scandalous Phantom

When doctors lie.

When doctors lie, they do it really carefully. They use lots of charts, big words in Latin, and complicated statistics.

Compared with nonimmigrants, immigrant children and youth had a lower risk of unintentional firearm injury, although the risk of assault-related firearm injury was higher among refugees and immigrants from Central America and Africa. The results suggest that prevention strategies for firearm safety should target nonimmigrant youth as well as these newly identified high-risk immigrant populations.

The money quote:

 We counted almost 1800 firearm injuries among children and youth in Ontario over a 5-year period, which represents almost 1 injury per day.

What this study purports to show is that Canada needs more gun control, because kids are getting shot in this country. This leads to sensational headlines.

From the Blob and Snail:

New Canadian research shows one young person is shot almost every day in Ontario, with the vast majority of injuries being unintentional.

The Toronto (Red) Star:

 Every day a child or youth is shot in Ontario and three out of four of incidents are accidental, says a groundbreaking study on firearm injuries in Canada.

The problem is, "one young person is shot almost every day in Ontario" is a lie. One young person is not shot with a gun every day in Ontario. The point of the study is to make you think that, but it just ain't so.

The 1800 firearm related injuries turns out to not be 1800 gunshot wounds from actual bullets fired out of actual guns, hitting actual children/youths.

Lie One, 1800 "children" or "youths" did not get hurt. The age admitted to the study goes up to 25 years old. "Youth" implies an age under the voting, or at the most the drinking age. Voting is 18, owning a firearm is 18, drinking is 19. The study falsely labels those over the age of majority and legally adults as "youths." Why? To get the numbers up, because children never really get shot in this country.

Lie Two, "1800 firearm related injuries" turns out not to be actual gunshot wounds. The study considers air pistols and air rifles, BB guns and paintball guns to be "firearms." So if you twist your ankle playing paintball or pinch your hand in the hinge of a pump air rifle, those are "firearm related injuries." Of note is the omission of their interesting interpretation of the word "firearm" from the study. A reporter had to phone them up to get this rather important information.

How many ACTUAL children had an ACTUAL gunshot wound in Ontario from 2008–2012? We do not know from this study. I suspect the real number is under 100, but since the authors conflated paintball welts and BB gun bruises with gunshots, I can't really say.

They also use a bunch of other studies with equally dodgy evidence to lie about a bunch of other stuff. I'd go into it, but then this would be a book, not a blog post.

Bottom line, they lied. Like a pile of Persian carpets. Then the Canadian Medical Association Journal editors and the journal's reviewers allowed the lie to stand. Then the Canadian media en-mass transmitted and amplified the lie.

That is how things are, here in Canada in 2017. Nice, eh?

The Phantom

Smart TV hackable by TV signal.

This is making the "smart" TV market look very bad indeed.

A new attack on smart TVs allows a malicious actor to take over devices using rogue DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial) signals, get root access on the smart TV, and use the device for all sorts of nasty actions, ranging from DDoS attacks to spying on end users.

The attack, developed by Rafael Scheel, a security researcher working for Swiss cyber security consulting company Oneconsult, is unique and much more dangerous than previous smart TV hacks.

...

At the center of Scheel's attack is Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV), an industry standard supported by most cable providers and smart TV makers that "harmonizes" classic broadcast, IPTV, and broadband delivery systems. TV transmission signal technologies like DVB-T, DVB-C, or IPTV all support HbbTV.

Scheel says that anyone can set up a custom DVB-T transmitter with equipment priced between $50-$150, and start broadcasting a DVB-T signal.

We are nowhere near paranoid enough.

The Phantom

 

University of Regina to be renamed with a "Va"

In the ever-accelerating Race To Insanity, the newly renamed University of Vagina will have a "Masculinity Confession Booth" for boys to confess their sins.

A university will be hosting a "Masculinity Confession Booth" along with a number of other workshops and screenings to combat "hypermasculinity."
"We have all reinforced hypermasculinity one way or another regardless of our gender!!" explains the University of Regina event description. "Come and share your sins so we can begin to discuss how to identify and change our ways !!!"
The "Man Up Against Violence" initiative will be hosting these events at the University of Regina in Canada during the present week.

No word on whether they will have a "Femininity Confession Booth" for young women to confess their use of sparkle and pink ribbons.

The Phantom

Walmart as vending machine? It might happen.

Further to my ongoing ravings about minimum wage and how it is killing us, we have news. Walmart is doing an experiment.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is creating a technology-startup incubator in Silicon Valley to identify changes that will reshape the retail experience, including virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery and personalized shopping.

The incubator will be called Store No. 8, a reference to a Wal-Mart location where the company experimented with new store layouts. Marc Lore, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart's e-commerce operations, announced the incubator Monday at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas.

Amazon is kicking their ass lately, is what this boils down to. The "virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery" part is to reduce employee headcount in the store. "Personalized shopping" is code for data mining. They track your every move in the store, and on-line, then serve you advertisements based on your behavior.

Pretty much they want a situation where you drive up, the store automatically knows exactly what you want, and spits out a box. You load the box in your car and drive away happy, while they bill your bank account remotely. What they really, really want is for you to chose items on their web site, then robots deliver them to your house. Because that can be end-to-end machinery.

Pretty soon, the only retail jobs that will be available will be robot mechanic.

Hacking your way to freedom, farmer style.

This is just unbelievable, on a bunch of levels.

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

You call that a nightmare? How about this: somebody else who isn't John Deere could shut down -every- tractor. Maybe the local government, maybe the state or federal government, or maybe plain old criminals. Hold the whole state of Nebraska to ransom at harvest time? They could do it!

On a plain old corporate level, every farmer who had to sign that contract is now looking at John Deere's competition for an alternative, because JD just pissed him off. This is what happens when sociopaths get into a company's management. They see the customer as a sheep to be sheared, and they trim as close as they can.

On a societal level, this is a thing we cannot allow. You are not leasing your house and everything in it, you -own- it. It belongs to you. Those two words, "own" and "belong" are the basis of Western civilization. Nobody is going to buy a tractor or a car, for tens of thousands of dollars, and then meekly accept that they have to keep paying the company so they won't turn the thing off. You buy it, you own it.

Except as we know, there's a huge push from Big Corporate and Silicon Valley to make this leasing model the new reality. They want Ford to retain ownership of your new Mustang, and prevent you from repairing or modifying it outside their dealer network.

Keep your eyes open for this, coming soon to consumer appliances in your house. Annual fee to keep your Smart Fridge going. You will be seeing this soon.

The Phantom Cassandra

Pernicious special pleading.

I stumbled across something irritating in the National Post. This isn't surprising, but as it was about science fiction and writing, I looked into it.

Fireside Fiction owner and editor Brian White outlined a systematic structure of racial biases that have been built into the larger sci-fi publishing community.
"The advice to write 'what the market wants' is code for white characters and white stories," he wrote in his editorial, also arguing that black authors leave the field due to the lack of opportunities, while "subtle biases" continue to proliferate on a wide scale.

Making news when there isn't any, 101: take any issue and add "race" to it. Instant news story. Colour me bored.

But I looked up his editorial anyway, and found this:

Fiction, we have a problem.

Racism.

Structural, institutional, personal, universal.

We all know this. We do. We don't need numbers to see that, like everywhere in our society, marginalization of black people is still a huge problem in publishing. Specifically, as outlined here in Fireside's special report, we see that marginalization in short fiction magazines and their online equivalents. These same problems persist across publishing, but our study is focused on the world Fireside lives and breathes in: the speculative short fiction market.

We don't need the numbers to know that racism is a problem in our field. But we have them.

Oh, there's numbers. Whee.

So I looked into that a bit. To my eye its the usual crap, because the study authors do not know how many black authors submitted work, they don't know how many went independent on Amazon instead, and they don't know the criteria the publishers use in choosing submissions. They don't really know much of anything. Plus, their analysis seems a bit thin.

Besides which, I am a science fiction author. I have submitted work. I haven't even been turned down yet, I just haven't heard back. What I have to show for a couple of years of solid work is zippo. I will be going indy for my next work.

I don't have anything to blame for my failure so far. Nobody knows who I am, after all. I'll admit to being a bit weird in person, but nobody can tell when I hide behind a keyboard.

My explanation for it is:

A) I'm nobody in the industry, with zero track record. Who's going to take a risk on that? Only a publishing house that has money set aside for test-flying new talent. With the industry in a downturn, the new talent is going to have to be pretty damn special.

B) The publishing industry is in a downturn. Bookstores are closing left and right. Amazon.com is kicking sand in their faces and then eating their lunch.

C) Social Justice Warriors are running New York and Chicago publishing houses these days. They're running Hollywood too. They're also running Marvel and DC comics.

D) I'm a new writer. My stores are probably not Super Duper enough to leap up off the page and grab the slush reader by their nose.

That's what's going on, from my perspective. Black authors aren't getting published? Boo hoo, neither am I. It ain't because you are black. Try harder.

But then something interesting popped up. I read this bit here:

We strive to be honest, open, up-front and straightforward, which is why when we received an odd email last week, we declined to engage with it beyond what we posted publicly.
Tonight, the author of that email made good on their promise and published their report, albeit still pseudonymously. After just a few hours of getting some pretty valid critique on twitter, citing "receiving threats," they decided to take it down.
Well, we think that's a shame—now that they've published it, their work should be available for the rest of our community to refer to and to engage with. So we've taken the liberty of copying their original Medium post, and pasting it in here.

Somebody posted a rebuttal to the bad study? Then they had to take it down, because they got threats? Now I'm interested.

Then I remembered a while ago there was another of these "studies" that claimed to show black authors were not getting published because racism, so I looked that one up again.

A final note: We know that some usual suspects will attempt to invalidate what we've captured by claiming that our analysis lacks rigor, or our methodology was faulty. This is a smokescreen that these individuals use to hide the fact that they are against making the speculative fiction publishing space inclusive and respectful to black writers–all writers, really–and their work. Using assumed (and faulty) scientific expertise to attack the experiences of marginalized people is not a new tactic, and one that is frequently used by these groups in an attempt to maintain the oppressive systems that they believe should solely benefit them. They will never admit that fact so we are making it plain here.
This report is not for those people.

Again, this was a terrible study. This one the authors come right out and tell us all we better shut up if we don't agree 100%. To be fair to the first study, they only heavily imply doubters are racist, they don't come out and say so.

That appears to be where we are at right now, ladies and gentlemen. You put out some dodgy statistics, and then call down the wrath of the mob upon your opponents.

Classy!

The Doubting Phantom

Amazon is destroying America!!!1!

More overwrought stupidity from the business newsies. Amazon.com is DESTROYING American retailers! Oh noes!

What Amazon AMZN, -0.06%  won't tell us is that every job created at Amazon destroys one or two or three others. What Jeff Bezos doesn't want you to know is that Amazon is going to destroy more American jobs than China ever did.

How is this destruction happening?

For the consumer, Amazon has brought lower prices and unimaginable convenience. I can buy almost any consumer product I want just by clicking on my phone or computer — or even easier, by just saying: "Alexa: buy me one" — and it will be shipped to my door within days or even hours for free. I can buy books for my Kindle, or music for my phone instantly. I can watch movies or TV shows on demand.

But for retail workers, Amazon is a grave threat. Just ask the 10,100 workers who are losing their jobs at Macy's. M, -0.76%  Or the 4,000 at The Limited. Or the thousands of workers at Sears SHLD, -0.45%  and Kmart, which just announced 150 stores will be closing. Or the 125,000 retail workers who've been laid off over the past two years.

Oh. Amazon is better/faster/cheaper than the competition? Those BASTARDS! How dare they be better!

Could Amazon actually kill more American jobs than China did? It's quite likely. Economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson have estimated China's manufacturing exports to the U.S. may have cost as many as 2 million jobs.

If Amazon can capture 40% of the GAFO market within five years (as seems likely), about 1.5 million jobs at brick-and-mortar stores could be lost. Add in the jobs Amazon will kill at grocery stores, drugstores, warehouses and delivery services, and the total would be well over 2 million.

And unlike the manufacturing jobs lost to China, which were clustered in a comparatively few counties, those retail jobs are located in every city, town and hamlet in America.

There you have it. Amazon.com is a THREAT to the American way of life because they are out-competing the crappy big box retail stores that I hate going to and never have what I want anyway. Or, ghod help me, the mall. I -hate- the mall. It is a pit of despair.

Don't I remember this same argument from twenty years ago, when the Big Box retailers were a THREAT to Small Town America and were DESTROYING Main Street USA? I think I do. I've heard this song before. It was bogus then, and it is bogus now.

The Phantom

Intel releases rootkit finder.

Intel has released a new piece of software that allows a user to see in the firmware of their PC is compromised by a rootkit.

The Advanced Threat Research team at Intel Security has created a new module for its existing CHIPSEC open-source framework to detect rogue EFI binaries. CHIPSEC consists of a set of command-line tools that use low-level interfaces to analyze a system's hardware, firmware, and platform components. It can be run from Windows, Linux, macOS, and even from an EFI shell.

The new CHIPSEC module allows the user to take a clean EFI image from the computer manufacturer, extract its contents and build a whitelist of the binary files inside. It can then compare that list against the system's current EFI or against an EFI image previously extracted from a system.

If the tool finds any binary files that don't match the clean EFI list, it's possible that the firmware has been infected. The rogue files are listed and can then be further analyzed.

No word if this new tool will find -official- CIA rootkits. However, if those heinous Russian hackers have invaded your PC, you are all set.

The Phantom

Shia LaDoof p0wn3d by 4Chan

This is hilarious.

Shia LaBeouf launched Version 3.0 of his plagued He Will Not Divide Us exhibit, originally intended as a four-year-long running protest of President Trump, but it barely lasted a day before Internet detectives conquered it using an astonishingly skillful scientific approach.
LaBeouf and his co-creators erected a white flag emblazoned with the words "He Will Not Divide Us" in an undisclosed location and trained a webcam on it, which he planned to stream continually at the website dedicated to the project.

Spoiler, they found it.

Users deployed to the location, lowered the flag, and replaced it with a bright red "Make American Great Again" hat and t-shirt depicting Donald Trump and Pepe the Frog.

Can you imagine the aneurysm LaBeouf must have had when he finally looked at the feed? Bwaha!

The Eeevile Phantom

Update: Welcome to Kate's flying monkeys from Small Dead Animals! Woo hoo!

Violent video games -not- harmful!

Here's something you don't see every day. Confirmation of what we already know to be true, playing video games does not turn you into a sociopath.

The link between playing violent video games and antisocial behavior, such as increased aggression and decreased empathy, is hotly debated. Researchers in Germany used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on long-term players of violent video games and found that they had the same neural response to emotionally provocative images as non-gamers. This finding suggests that empathy is not blunted by playing such games long-term.

 No duh. If games did make you violent, Pewdie Pie and Mariplier would both be serial killers by now. Always handy to have a measurement though, eh?

The Measured Phantom

Inevitably, a burger flipping robot.

This one is a show-piece, but it does replace one kid in a kitchen.

A burger-flipping robot has just completed its first day on the job at a restaurant in California, replacing humans at the grill.

Flippy has mastered the art of cooking the perfect burger and has just started work at CaliBurger, a fast-food chain.

Notably, it is a self-contained robot that you can roll up beside any grill, and set it to work flipping away.

For the McDonalds of the world of course, this machine is much too slow. They use a conveyor oven and pre-cook everything. But there's no reason they can't design a machine-deliverable sandwich. I'm sure they're doing it right now. Eliminating one human saves a franchise $30-50K a year, I would guess. In a 24 hour operation, that's three people. There's your profit margin back to looking a little more healthy in one shot.

The Mechanical Phantom

Wikkileaks: CIA is listening to YOU.

Reposted from Small Dead Animals, the new Wikkileaks document dump pulls the sheets off the CIA.

A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of 'Year Zero', the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said that 'Year Zero' revealed details of the CIA's "global covert hacking program," including "weaponized exploits" used against company products including "Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones."

The repercussions of this are going to be YUUUUGE, if you get my drift.

The Phantom

Stay classy, Snopes.

Snopes is partisan now. Just thought y'oughta know.

Snopes is a well-known fact-checking site that looks at "rumors, urban legends, myths and misinformation." That includes stories that involve politics. Yesterday the top story on the site was a fact check of claims that Democratic Representatives Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Keith Ellison refused to give a standing ovation to widow Carryn Owens during a joint session of Congress.

Initially, the site listed that claim as unproven but then changed it's rating to false. There was a problem, though. The claim wasn't false, at least not if you noted the caveats made by the people making the claim.

It appears that Snopes has abandoned principle and fallen back on the usual Lefty rules-lawyering, goalpost moving, SHUT UP! argumentation we have come to expect from Left leaning partisans.

Fake news at its finest.

The Deplorably Fake Phantom

Russian space revolver

This is a very unique and interesting piece of kit. One of a kind museum item.

Shortly after that, Tula Arms Plant (TOZ – Tulskiy Oruzheyniy Zavod) started the development of a revolver, which they called TOZ-81 "Mars". The design idea of this revolver was offered by a famous Soviet gun writer and firearms historian Alexander Zhuk. You may have seen the "Illustrated Encyclopedia of Handguns" written by A.B. Zhuk, which almost entirely consists of firearm drawings with short descriptions. There is an English translation of this book. So the Tula factory formed a designing team, which would work on this gun. A. Zhuk and several firearms designers and engineers were the main members of that team. Zhuk drew the initial sketch of his idea of space revolver. Interestingly, the team first made a plastic mockup of the gun and submitted for final approval of the concept. Only after getting the design approved, they started to make the actual gun.

It was meant to be a survival pistol in case the astronauts got stranded on Earth by a bad landing, not to be used in a space war. But still, very cool.

The Phantom

Another new state of matter: supersolid

The physicists have been at it again, another new state of matter observed in the lab.

MIT physicists have created a new form of matter, a supersolid, which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids.

By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.

The work with laser cooling has really been perking along it seems.

The SuperDeplorable Phantom

DIY barrel rifling by electrochemisty.

This is very interesting.

Here are pictures of a preliminary setup for creating rifling grooves in a piece of steel tubing by using a 3D printed spiral insert, lots of salt water and a battery charger. Electrochemical Machining is a process whereby metal is removed by passing an electrical current through a solution, the insert in this case exposing the specific areas to be 'cut' during the process. The results are quite interesting and certainly open up some possibilities for homebuilders.

The possibilities for creating complex metal parts in kitchen are fascinating, to be sure. I think getting the dimensions right would be a Thing for sure, lots of fiddling about to be done there.

The Dimensional, yet Deplorable, Phantom

"Disney's first 'exclusively gay' moment

That is the title of the piece, and I couldn't have done better. Or worse, depending on the point of view.

Matt Cain, editor-in-chief of Attitude magazine, said: "It may have been a long time coming but this is a watershed moment for Disney.
"By representing same-sex attraction in this short but explicitly gay scene, the studio is sending out a message that this is normal and natural - and this is a message that will be heard in every country of the world, even countries where it's still socially unacceptable or even illegal to be gay.
"It's only a first step towards creating a cinematic world that reflects the world in which many of us are now proud to live. But it's a step in the right direction and I applaud Disney for being brave enough to make it - and in doing so hopefully helping to change attitudes and bring about real social progress."

It remains to be seen if audiences will agree with Mr. Cain, and pay money to bring their kids to see "this short but explicitly gay scene."

Because that is what we are talking about here. This is a kid's movie, not an adult movie.

Given the audience response to similar things in comic books, I very much expect that in twenty years this will be viewed as a "Fonzie jumping the shark" moment for Disney. Children's movies are not primarily intended as instructional screeds to uplift the barbaric masses of foreign countries, any more than comic books are.

This type of thing is like the old question, how many drops of pee does it take to spoil the soup? Can a children's movie this big survive one tiny scene with gay content? Probably. This year. The Clinton Archipelago dwellers will take their kids and say its cute.

Problem is, it does not enhance the movie. It does not make the movie better for 97% of the audience. The 3% of gay men in the population, they like it. But they are not going, because by definition they don't have kids.

From the Trumpland perspective, this is a Social Justice Warrior public service announcement in the middle of a fairy story for children. It is jarring, inappropriate and potentially a good reason to skip the movie altogether.

Hey, big boy.

Think of it, Liberals. Are you going to take your kids to see Disney's first official 'reverse cowgirl' moment by Princess Bella and Gaston? Come on, this is a message that will be heard in every country of the world, even countries where it's still socially unacceptable or even illegal to be a slut! Get over yourselves, you uptight WASPs!

The Deplorable Phantom

Wendy's to install ordering kiosks.

Remember how there used to be gas station attendants? Some kid (or grown man sometimes, I recall) in a uniform would fill your tank and clean your windshield for you. Ever wonder why you never see that anymore? Minimum wage.

The correct (and only) answer to minimum wage hikes is to fire staff.

As Dispatch.com reports, the Dublin-based burger giant started offering kiosks last year, and demand for the technology has been high from both customers and franchise owners.

"There is a huge amount of pull from (franchisees) in order to get them," David Trimm, Wendy's chief information officer, said last week during the company's investors' day.

 

"With the demand we are seeing ... we can absolutely see our way to having 1,000 or more restaurants live with kiosks by the end of the year."

 

A typical store would get three kiosks for about $15,000. Trimm estimated the payback on those machines would be less than two years, thanks to labor savings and increased sales. Customers still could order at the counter.

 

Kiosks are where the industry is headed, but Wendy's is ahead of the curve, said Darren Tristano, vice president with Technomic, a food-service research and consulting firm.

 

"They are looking to improve their automation and their labor costs, and this is a good way to do it," he said.

Who could have seen that coming? As we noted previously, minimum wage laws - while advertised under the banner of social justice - do not live up to the claims made by those who tout them. They do not lift low wage earners to a so-called "social minimum". Indeed, minimum wage laws — imposed at the levels employed in Europe — push a considerable number of people into unemployment. And, unless those newly unemployed qualify for government assistance (read: welfare), they will sink below, or further below, the social minimum.

This is already in place in Ontario McDonalds, and being well used. Next step will be a McDonalds app for your phone. I know nothing at this point, I have no rumor, no news release. But if they're not working on rolling something like that out, I would be shocked. Because then they can eliminate the $5,000-each terminals and make you use your own hardware.

The cashiers of this world had best polish up their resumes, is my guess. Because a kiosk that costs $5K this year will cost half that in two years. Where the big companies go, the little companies follow. A store with five employees this year will have one security guard in five years. Most likely the owner. Because he won't have the profit margin to hire a security guard.

Picture this: your grocery store is really a warehouse they let you walk through. Same with Home Depot etc. What if they took your order and your credit card from your phone and the bags of groceries came out a little door at the front? Think of how many people they could fire and how much HR hassle they could avoid by doing that! Think of the fun of going shopping, tapping on your tiny little phone screen, loading all your crap in the car yourself, and never having to speak to a human being the whole time. Wouldn't that be great?

I hasten to assure you that the tech required to do that exists now and people are working furiously to make it happen now. If not sooner. Because the alternative is bankruptcy.

Or, the companies could hire illegals under the table and pay them five bucks an hour. That's how its done presently. Illegal foreign workers. Low wages, no HR issues, easy replacement. Companies offload all their staffing and moral humanitarian issues onto the public purse.

The Mechanized Phantom

Your car, ratting you out to Big Brother.

I post this little article in relief that I am not merely crying in the wilderness about this mass surveillance by our electronic devices.

While on the subject of apps, coincident with this year's CES, Subaru announced that it has added eight cloud-based apps to the STARLINK multimedia system in the 2017 Impreza. Some are familiar, like Yelp. Some are a bit narrow in focus, like eBird, which was developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for birdwatchers. And one ought to give a bit of pause: RightTrack. According to Subaru,
"RightTrack Test Drive from Liberty Mutual Insurance monitors driving habits and provides customers with tips on driving safer to help lower their insurance rates and improve their safe driving skills."

Or said more simply: You drive. It watches. And let's the folks at Liberty Mutual know how well, and how fast, you've been driving.

But this is old news. Big Brother already knows where you are every minute, because cell phones. Big Brother already warehouses that data forever. Private companies like Target already can tell if your teenage daughter is pregnant by analyzing credit card purchases.

Let me add something now that may bring this all home to you nice and hard.

Imagine if you will, you are some schlubb in an office at Big Brother Data Inc. You have access to Donald Trump's and Milo Yiannopoulos' driving data, their Vizio TV data, their radio listening habits, their credit card data, their second-by-second location data for the last twenty years, every phone call, email and web site visit since there was an internet...

You are going to be one rich office schlubb, if all it takes to destroy a public figure is a re-cut video of him telling a joke.

Now imagine you are Milo. All your shit is spying on you, 24/7/365. Car, TV, phone, radio, fridge, toaster, if it plugs in its collecting data. If you have a non-standard way of picking your nose, there's probably video of it somewhere. More to the point, if you have ever lost your temper in a car or told an off-colour joke, there's video of that too.

There is not a human being on the planet who can survive that proctology exam.

The Phantom

Milo-quiddic: just how full of it is the press these days?

There's been some full-volume defense of Milo Yiannopolis the last few days at some blogs that I visit. Mad Genius Club, According To Hoyt, Small Dead Animals, Five Feet of Fury.

There's also been some remarkably pusillanimous monkeys throwing poo at said defenders, people one would expect to come to the defense of a falsely accused gay man. Unless you know them, then you understand they have no morals or standards. Because they are pusillanimous, shit-throwing, apes.

Well here we are today, after a week or so of Five Minute Hates against Milo from the regular media outlets. What was going unreported while Milo got his turn in the ducking chair?

Well, that is very interesting. Re-posted from Small Dead Animals, we find this absolutely fascinating article.

Since President Donald Trump has been sworn in on Jan. 20, authorities have arrested an unprecedented number of sexual predators involved in child sex trafficking rings in the United States. This should be one of the biggest stories in the national news. Instead, the mainstream media has barely, if at all, covered any of these mass pedophile arrests. This begs the question – why?

As a strong advocate for sex crime victims, I've been closely following the pedophile arrests since Trump took office. There have been a staggering 1,500-plus arrests in one short month; compare that to less than 400 sex trafficking-related arrests in 2014 according to the FBI.

So just to recap:

A re-cut video of a gay abuse victim talking about other people having gay sex with minors, and making a joke about his own abuser, all taken out of context let us be clear, that's evil incarnate. He must be purged! To the ducking chair with him!

A Republican rodeo-clown president leading the charge to get 1500+ actual child molesters/kidnappers/traffickers arrested and off the street... that's nothing. Nobody cares.

Therefore, one must conclude that the press in the USA (and Canada, they are 100% in on it) is completely corrupt.

The Irredeemable and Deplorable Phantom

The Press, and the meteor that hit it.

This is reblogged from Small Dead Animals, as usual, because I did a big long comment and it seems a waste not to post it here too.

Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump, and the Death of the American Press

How did we get from 'Village Voice' reporters digging up everything there is to know about a flashy New York real estate salesman to not knowing anything about the President of the United States and his ties to Russia?

I grabbed a coffee. I read the whole thing. It's pretty good. But I do have an issue.

I was at the Voice when the meteor hit. Like many papers back then, dailies and weeklies, the Voice made its money on classified advertising. The New York Times, for instance, had three important classifieds sections—employment, automotive, and housing—but if New Yorkers really wanted to find a great apartment, they'd line up at the newsstand on 42nd Street to get a copy of the Voice hot off the press.

And then the internet came along, and it was all there in one place—for free. The press panicked. The Voice's publisher at the time, David Schneiderman, announced to the staff that the paper was going free. It made no sense, he argued, to keep charging $1 for what consumers could get on the internet for nothing.

Here's how the staff heard it: Who would want to pay $1 a week to read Nat Hentoff on civil liberties, Robert Christgau on music, Michael Musto on New York nightlife—or Wayne Barrett on the follies of real-estate mogul Donald Trump? That is, who would want to pay $1 a week to feel themselves a part of what the Village Voice had made them feel part of for decades? But at the time, devaluing content was in fashion—which meant, as few saw back then, the profession was digging its own grave.

Mr. Lee Smith the aurthor, like many in the media, is blaming the Drudge Report and Craigslist for killing off "quality content" as they like to call it. Otherwise known as Real Journalism (TM).

But the meteor did not hit when Drudge broke the Blue Dress for free on the internet. The meteor hit a really long time before that, back before the Great Depression.

Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt won three terms as President, the American Press has been leaning hard Left. The author mentions this, but he doesn't really understand what it means.

Trump adviser Steve Bannon calls the media the opposition party, but that's misleading. Everyone knows that the press typically tilts left, and no one is surprised, for instance, that The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican candidate since 1956. But that's not what we're seeing now—rather, the media has become an instrument in a campaign of political warfare.

That's not true. I -remember- the pre-Internet press. The American press/tv/radio has been an instrument of political warfare for the DemocRat Party my entire life, 60 years. Big Government is their argument, and has been since the 1920's at least. Probably since Teddy Roosevelt, come to think of it.

The datum that the NY Times hasn't backed a Republican since 1956 is a bigger deal than Mr. Lee Smith would like to let on. They backed Jimmy Carter. That's pre-Internet. There was no excuse for that. Carter was and remains an -idiot- and they backed him to the hilt. Disaster followed, as day follows night.

Only now, since the back of the monopoly was broken by nerds in lab coats, are we actually having a real debate.

Other than that minor quibble, it was a pretty good article. >:)

The Irredeemable Phantom

Today's feminist outrage.

The horror.

A billboard on Interstate 40 West near Winston-Salem is angering many who say its message is offensive to women.
The board reads: "Real men provide. Real women appreciate it." The owner of a Winston-Salem women's boutique called Kleur has organized a demonstration against the billboard's message for Sunday at 11 a.m.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article134440999.html#storylink=cp

Hey, you can't say that!

I am so triggered...

The Deplorable, Irredeemable Phantom

Google explains, SHUT UP!!!

A new "anti-trolling" tool at Google.

Google's freely available software, known as Perspective, is being tested by a range of news organisations, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Economist, as a way to help simplify the jobs of humans reviewing comments on their stories.

Make your plans now to switch blogging platforms, ladies and gentlemen. And back up all your stuff locally. Cloud servers can also be "anti-trolling" scoured.

The Deplorable Troll Phantom

CBC journo wants journalism licensing.

Your betters are tired of listening to you, Canada. Neil Macdonald:

A lawyer is governed not just by normal criminal and civil law, but by clearly defined ethics, interpreted by quasi-judicial boards of his or her peers. The same self-regulation is practised by most other professions.

Not journalism. There is no uniform qualification for a reporter, no uniform code of behaviour. Journalism has vigorously resisted any efforts to legally define journalism, or any sort of peer review.

Yes, some of the bigger journalistic organizations have ombudsmen, or public editors, but their only power is suasion. Yes, there are press councils that judge public complaints, but they have no fangs. Yes, some outfits, like CBC, have internal policies that set rules of behaviour for their reporters, but enforcement is at the discretion of managers.

A huge swath of journalism doesn't even bother pretending self-regulation.

And in any event, who is a journalist anymore? The answer is anyone who says "I'm a journalist," and has access to the internet.

The solution? GOVERNMENT REGULATION. Obviously.

But nothing would go further in recapturing public trust than becoming a true profession, with standards, qualifications, accountability and enforceable rules. As much as I shudder at being judged by other journalists, there is no longer any other way.

There is nothing that government cannot do. Blessed be government, and keep those taxes rolling in, you peons.

A shorter Neil Macdonald: "SHUT UP!!!!"

A shorter Phantom: "No."

The Deplorable, Intolerable Phantom

Liberal sports writers suck at their job.

Someone FINALLY says what Rush Limbaugh has been saying since forever.

You can see it in the way sportswriters police a consensus against the Washington Redskins' name, or for on-field political activism. They tweet against President Trump, and for undocumented immigrants. They pile on populist loudmouths like former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and may even be punishing him for his politics with their Hall of Fame ballots. They proudly admit that they are at a remove from their readers. HardballTalk's Craig Calcaterra owns it: "It's folly for any of us to think we're speaking for the common fan."

The Phantom

SJWs and S&M is a thing?

Here we have a post that's making the rounds. I saw it first in the comments at According To Hoyt, today its at Small Dead Animals as well. It rang a chime in my brain, so I linked it yesterday here.

Go on social media, and you will see SJWs telling us that Nazis are everywhere, that they are evil, and foul, and legion. They are in the White House, they are on Youtube, they are on Twitter, they are in Video Games. Nazis, everywhere. And so they march out into the streets, the Black Bloc, Antifascists engaging in what Tom Kratman calls a bit of political theater (not unlike Fascists once did).
But at the end of a long week of fighting the cisnormative heteropatriarchy, they come to be beaten by men dressed as Nazis, to the gritty beats of loud Industrial music in the depths of an Industrial park.

He goes into considerable detail, so consider yourself warned.

The thing is, according to this guy, this type of behavior is becoming "normal."

However, things have gone slowly downhill over the years. It's a mess, now. Even the BDSM folks are often shocked by it. They've been around a lot longer than most people realize, but there was a time where they were very underground. When to get in, you'd have to know someone, and pretty much everybody respected it as highly private and eccentric. When I first DJed for them, it was because a friend of mine was dating the guy that organized it. I was pretty poor in those days, and the money was good.
These days, bondage is normal. It's everywhere. Everybody does it. It's almost a cliche now. Normal people do bondage like it was something you could find on rollback at a Walmart.

Well, what happens when you can find bondage "on rollback at a Walmart"?

Remember the Abu Ghraib scandal? Prisoners tortured in Iraq by US soldiers? Remember this guy?

That's what you get.

The Phantom.

SJWs really are getting worse.

Today's outrage.

Imagine carrying a child for 9 months & give birth & take care of them for years for them to grow up to be the person who created this?

Aaaaiiiii! The horror!.. oh, wait.

Its a completely harmless cartoon. Get over it.

The Phantom

Update: Possible explanation for the freaky SJWs. They're really insane.

Simon & Schuster explain, "SHUT UP!!!"

Milo Yiannopoulos's book "Dangerous" cancelled for publication by Simon and Schuster.

Shocking no one at all.

Also "disinvited" to CPAC by pearl-clutching Republicans who remain the Party of Stupid despite winning the election in a landslide.

Because Milo is a pedophile, according to this.

Is Milo a pedophile? Maybe. Maybe not. We can't tell. Because there's no trustworthy source out there to report. Left wing hates him because he's a conservative homo. Right win hates him because he's a homo conservative.

Me, I think he's a canary in the coal mine. I'd like to see him keep on going, and keep on saying all kinds of super controversial stuff. Just to see who tries to shut him up.

On his side, there's NOBODY filing molestation charges against him. That puts him well ahead of Hillary and Bill, in my book.

The Phantom

Zuckerberg explains, "SHUT UP!!!"

At Slashdot today, it seems the Father of Facebook has some power user issues. He posted a large screed regarding the type of world he want to create using Farcebook, then edited something out of it. The idea that a software company can and should be deciding what kind of future we get is interesting in its own right, but the edit is even more interesting. Quoth the King of the Book of Faces:

The long term promise of AI is that in addition to identifying risks more quickly and accurately than would have already happened, it may also identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all — including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global. It will take many years to develop these systems.

The original Mashable article notes that the revised version leaves out that bit about scanning private channels. Presumably because "private channels" are supposed to be, you know, private.

That Zuckerberg suggested AI could be used to monitor "private channels" in the same letter he used to praise WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption and the importance of protecting user privacy would seem to be at odds. There's a distinction between using AI to distinguish between propaganda and news coverage and using it to monitor private communication which, if taken at face value, would be counter to the CEO's stated desire in the letter to keep Facebook users safe without "compromising privacy."

My conclusion is that Marky has a major woody for centralized social control and top-down engineering. He's a Big Iron, time sharing, server side kinda guy. Make it nice on the surface for the stupid peasants, keep a big Ban Hammer handy for when the peasants get revolting.

Essentially, he wants Newspeak. You will not be able to express selected concepts on Farcebook. It will do what Twitter is doing: ban you for saying anything Marky decides you shouldn't be able to say.

No word on whether the system will also vector Predator gunships on your location, or plot a firing solution for FCC cruise missiles. That'll be version 2.0, probably.

The Retarded Phantom Retard. (That's sufficient to get me booted from Twitter right now.)

Twitter explains, "SHUT UP!!!"

Good thing I never Twitter.

Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily "limiting" their account.

Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network can't see those retweets.

Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.

This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.

Take for example the Twitter user @Drybones5 who got his account limited after using the word "retarded."

https://twitter.com/drybones5/status/831571001897017344?refsrc=email&s=11

He claims he got his account limited directly after saying retarded twice. The first time he called a Nintendo policy adding paid extra content to their new Zelda game retarded.

Yes, they are responding to the Rise of Trump by doubling down on their liberal/socialist behavior. They will do what didn't work before, twice as hard and twice as fast.

It is distressing to see this kind of behavior in tech companies, but not surprising. Techies don't run companies. MBAs do. MBAs listen to the Conventional Wisdom, as offered up in the Conventional Media. Twitter Inc. probably thinks this move will expand their user base and make their brand more valuable. Because they are -stupid- and do not understand how the world works.

Or, possibly somebody like Soros offered them a zillion dollars.

At time like these, I embrace the power of and. Evidence indicates they are venal AND stupid.

Needless to say, shortly there will be a company called Twitter Inc. for sale, cheap. Faster, please.

I fully expect the retarded retards at Google Blogspot and ArseBook to pull the same retarded maneuver. Good thing the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

The Phantom

SFF, SJWs and the circular firing squad.

The Stupid burns ever deeper in SJW Land, according to the Washigton Post.

These days, though, a book may get an additional check from an unusual source: a sensitivity reader, a person who, for a nominal fee, will scan the book for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content. These readers give feedback based on self-ascribed areas of expertise such as "dealing with terminal illness," "racial dynamics in Muslim communities within families" or "transgender issues."

These are people who read your book and tell you all the parts you weren't "woke" for, in the hope that the Social Media Swine will leave you alone.

Sensitivity readers have emerged in a climate — fueled in part by social media — in which writers are under increased scrutiny for their portrayals of people from marginalized groups, especially when the author is not a part of that group.
Last year, for instance, J.K. Rowling was strongly criticized by Native American readers and scholars for her portrayal of Navajo traditions in the 2016 story "History of Magic in North America." Young-adult author Keira Drake was forced to revise her fantasy novel "The Continent" after an online uproar over its portrayal of people of color and Native backgrounds. More recently, author Veronica Roth — of "Divergent" fame — came under fire for her new novel, "Carve the Mark." In addition to being called racist, the book was criticized for its portrayal of chronic pain in its main character.

In other words, its a protection racket. For suckers, because the only way to get the Perpetually Aggrieved to back of is... well actually, there is no way. If they don't find something to be offended by, they will make something up.

Personally, I consider it a sacred crusade to piss these cretins off. Some of y'all may know, I've been doing some writing. When my work finally hits print or ebook, if I don't get at least one bitter denunciation on Twitter from some pink haired sea mammal, all upset because of the sexy robot girlfriends, I will be quite disappointed. Yep, sexy robot girlfriends. With guns.

However, the next bit is even better.  Some lady named Jodi Meadows wrote a "young adult" fantasy book, and recently gave a teaser pic of the book cover. Well, apparently some people were upset because there was a black girl on the cover. No, I'm not kidding. Yes, it is stupider than you think.

First, so many people have said so many nice things about the cover. Thank you! I'm happy you like it! I love it, too.
A few people have mentioned they see this as an important cover, because it has a Black girl in a dress. That's what I want to talk about. I didn't realize when the cover was being designed (that's my privilege), but this is the first time a big publisher has this kind of cover.
It shouldn't be the first time.
The first time a major publisher designed a YA cover with a Black model in a gown, it should have gone to a Black author.
Again, me not realizing that hadn't happened yet: that was my white privilege at work.
The fact that mine came first is a symptom of the problems in publishing, and who publishing is designed to work for. By the time I knew what was at stake with this cover and the timing, the model had already been hired and her photos taken. At that point, changing the cover would have meant telling a Black model that she couldn't be on my cover because she's Black.

Yes friends, the Perpetually Aggrieved were angry that a black girl appeared on the cover of a book by a white author. They flamed poor ol' Jodi, and she had to go back on her blog and apologize all over the place.

That is what I'd call a Blue on Blue circular firing squad event. And they missed the target too.

The Deplorable Phantom

Internet of Things DDOS attack danger.

Yes friends, those wifi capable lightbulbs may not be such a great idea.

A full-blown Skynet situation might be the thing of science fiction (we hope, anyway), but that doesn't mean bizarre things involving machines can't happen. As proof of this, Verizon teased an entry in its upcoming 2017 Data Breach Digest that describes a recent DDoS attack on an unnamed university involving vending machines, light bulbs, and 5,000 Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

As with many DDoS attacks involving IoT devices, this one is the result of system administrators being a little too lax with security on these seemingly benign devices. The university in question dismissed complaints from students across campus about slow or inaccessible network connectivity. When things took a turn for the worse, the university called in the cavalry—Verizon's RISK (Research, Investigations, Solutions, and Knowledge) team, in this case.

It is worth reading in its entirety, because the university very nearly had to -replace- 5000 some odd light bulbs, vending machines and other little IoT doodads. That would be a big bunch of money. All because of some script kiddie with a hack, and really bad network security.

Now, here's why this is even a thing. This chip right here: ESP8266. From the wikipedia article on it:

The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi chip with full TCP/IP stack and MCU (Micro Controller Unit) capability produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer, Espressif Systems.^[1]
The chip first came to the attention of western makers in August 2014 with the ESP-01 module, made by a third-party manufacturer, AI-Thinker. This small module allows micro-controllers to connect to a Wi-Fi network and make simple TCP/IP connections using Hayes-style commands. However, at the time there was almost no English-language documentation on the chip and the commands it accepted.^[2] The very low price and the fact that there were very few external components on the module which suggests that it could eventually be very inexpensive in volume, attracted many hackers to explore the module, chip, and the software on it, as well as to translate the Chinese documentation.^[3]
The ESP8285 is an ESP8266 with 1 MB of built-in flash, allowing for single-chip devices capable of connecting to Wi-Fi.^[4]

This particular little devil is the size of a fingernail and costs ~$5US in bare-chip form at bulk prices. One-of is $7.00. Here it is at Adafruit, with a break-out board and power circuitry etc. for under ten bucks.

This unity allows WiFi connectivity to virtually anything, amazingly cheaply. There are other such chips on the market, some are a lot cheaper. That's why we have WiFi connected LED light bulbs on the market, suddenly.

This particular chip is not as powerful as a PC, but there are lots of implementations out there that are. There are others that have less capability but are smaller, they get down to rock salt grain sized.

You can WiFi chip anything. Kid's dolls, Hot Wheel cars, flying drones smaller than a pack of smokes. Or how about an extension cord, a USB or HDMI cable, a stapler, a watch, an eraser, a pencil... an Ethernet connector... You get the picture.

And when I say "you", I mean you, Mr./Ms./Whatsit Reader can most likely crank one of these things together and program it to do what you want. It is really not hard, if you have the determination or the driving need to do it.

What has not happened, is an industry standard method for SECURING these things. You have 5,000 PC-grade devices on a network, you need to password protect them. Unfortunately, most people have no experience doing that kind of thing. Hence a university having to hire Verizon to clean up their network for them.

Here's something from 2007 about that very issue. You don't have to be a genius, the tools are out there. But, you do have to pay attention and keep up with the jerks who crack these things.

Also the hardware, Qualcom announced 802.11ax today. Brand new ARM quad-core routers and brand new receivers, a whole new universe of hackery to guard against.

Just remember, if it doesn't HAVE WiFi they have to stick a wire into it to crack it. I'm all about the wires, these days.

The Deplorably Wired Phantom

Transgressive!

Joy Villa's dress at the Grammies. Sweet!

Truth to power, baby! Looking good!

Oops! NOAA caught cheatin'.

It appears that the NOAA Climate Scientists have been fudging. Wow, didn't see that coming, right?

They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week's damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.

A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.

Really? Say on, good sir.

It turns out that when NOAA compiled what is known as the 'version 4' dataset, it took reliable readings from buoys but then 'adjusted' them upwards – using readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations.

They did this even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot.

No kidding. They do that with the land based readings too. Here's an example, Furnace Creek and Badwater stations in Death Valley are deliberate set up to make new temperature records.

Can you say heat island?

But wait, there's even more:

Our revelations showed there was another problem with the Pausebuster paper – it used an untested experimental version of the dataset recording temperatures on land, which had not been properly archived and made accessible to other scientists.

Yeah, using data that nobody else is allowed to see in a no-no in science. Not so much in climate science though, apparently. They do this shit all the time.

You'd have to be an idiot or a DemocRat to take this stuff at face value anymore.

The Phantom

Update, just for Camestros Felpatron, Michael Mann is a political activist. Harder to delete mentions of Michael Mann here, eh?