Excessive tattoos and mental health: Zombie Boy dies.

We have sad news today, which I am now going to exploit to make a point. The artist and model known as Zombie Boy died yesterday of an apparent suicide. RIP Rick Genest.

Montreal model and artist Rick Genest, also known as Zombie Boy, has died, police sources have told Radio-Canada. Genest was 32.
Genest came to the public's attention after tattooing his body from head to toe, including images of a skull and brain on his head. He holds a Guinness World Record for most insect tattoos (176) and another for most human bone tattoos (139).
His body-art attracted fashion designers and he modelled at high-end shows in Paris and Berlin. In 2011, he appeared in Lady Gaga's music video for the song Born This Way.
Police sources told Radio-Canada that Genest died in Montreal's Plateau–Mont Royal borough around 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. They are classifying his death as a suicide.

When an otherwise healthy man commits suicide at age 32, that is a very sad thing. It is, apart from being a tragedy, a failure of the mental health establishment as well, to help this man find his way through his illness. That's their job, and they didn't get it done. This is not to sit in harsh judgement of the individuals involved in this man's care, if he was even getting any care. It is merely a statement of fact. Whatever measures were taken, it didn't work.

But for the greater community, it is also a failure. When a handsome man has every inch of his body covered in -painful- tattooing, furthermore depicting images of rot and death, it is a sign that he's having a problem. This man had a biohazard emblem a foot tall on his chest and a skull tattooed on his face, that's not something a healthy, well-adjusted person does. They get "Mom" on a shoulder, or a tribal arm band. Maybe a heart on their butt or something.

Yes, I'm actually saying that his body art was a manifestation of a dangerous illness. Which killed him by the way, making it a -fatal- illness.
Again, I'm not sitting in harsh judgement on the individuals involved in that art. They didn't make him that way, it isn't their fault. But, the bald facts are: fatal mental illness.

My harsh judgement is reserved for the people screaming at their computers right now because I dared mention excessive tattoos and mental illness in the same sentence. Radical body modification is strongly correlated with suicide, and y'all need to pull your heads out of your asses. There's some guy out there getting surgical modifications to make him look like a Ken doll. He's got a problem, which might very well kill him.

It isn't cosplay, people.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundid, and thanks for the comments!

Woman crashes into man's car because TRUMP!!!

Today in our "random acts of kindness and senseless beauty" file, some liberal woman road-raged a complete stranger over a Trump bumper sticker on his car. Drove into his car stopped at a stoplight, with his girlfriend inside at the time, and took off.

Chloe Wright is charged with driving offenses, vandalism and assault with a dangerous weapon. No word if hate crime charges are pending. If not, they should be.

And here we thought it was going to be Republicans shipping black people off in cattle cars, right?

The Ironic Phantom

Britain blinks: Tommy Robinson freed on bail.

Her Majesty's government has blinked. It appears that between the hordes of protesters in the streets and the upcoming Brexit debacle, somebody decided it would be smart to let Tommy Robinson out.

This is probably a good decision. Jailing a guy for literally standing on the corner minding his own business with a phone in his hand was not a good look for Britain.

Because you know what? If the government is doing something in public that they can't afford to have live-streamed, they shouldn't be doing it. Taking a video of public employees doing something is a public service to the nation, not a crime.

As well, it is not a good sign for British democracy that they have vast mobs of 25,000+ taking to the streets over political issues. Rule by mob is not what you want to see in a democracy. Its more what you expect in a South American banana republic, where forming a mob is the only power common people have over government.

The Phantom

Kewl mathematics may explain Standard Model. Maybe.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-peculiar-math-that-could-underlie-the-laws-of-nature/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsmxUuD5ZdOGittaeosXMA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BR8tK-LuB0

The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called "octonions."

This is so cool.

"Amsterdam 'lawless jungle' at night"

Amsterdam, the super Progressive Dutch center of Do Your Own Thing, with legal prostitution and legal drugs, has a problem. The problem is that people from all over Europe are coming to Amsterdam to get wasted, visit prostitutes, and do their own thing.

Tourist hotspot Amsterdam turns into a "lawless jungle" after dark with the police powerless to intervene against crime and violence, the city's ombudsman warned in an interview Saturday.
"The city centre becomes an urban jungle at night," Amsterdam's official ombudsman Arre Zuurmond told Dutch daily Trouw, warning of illegal car and bike races zooming through the streets, open drugs sales and general mayhem.

It seems that just as in Toronto Canada and London England, the cops have stopped arresting people for committing crimes in the street in broad daylight.

Zuurmond paints a painful picture of the city centre's nightlife after previously setting up three cameras in the busy Leidseplein square ringed by bars and clubs.
"One night we counted 900 offences, mainly between the hours of 2:00am and 4:00am. The atmosphere is grim, and there is an air of lawlessness," he said.
"Scooters race through the pedestrian areas. There is a lot of shouting. Drugs are being bought. There is stealing. People pee and even poop on the streets," he said.
"There is violence but no action. You can even pee on the van of a mobile (police) unit and the driver won't say anything."

Yep. When cops stop arresting people for doing crime, the people do more crime. And they keep doing more and more and more. Crime pays, unless you arrest the people doing it.

Its funny that Leftists and community organizers never seem to be able to grasp this basic reality of human behavior. Then they are all shocked and surprised when their city gets over run by drunken assholes and panderers.

The Phantom.

Update: Here's a contrary opinion.

Sorry, but this is all the purest of nonsense. I'm in Amsterdam quite frequently – most recently in June, when, as it happened, on several days in a row, I walked a great deal around parts of the city center, including Leidseplein and the fringes of the Red Light District. I did much if not most of my walking during the hours between midnight and six A.M. I like walking, and after forty years in New York City I know how to keep my eyes open – and I know Amsterdam well enough to know where I'm likely to be safe.

In downtown Amsterdam, with a few exceptions, you're safe. That's not the dangerous part of the city.

...

Why, then, did Arre Zuurmond give such a dishonest interview? I don't know the man, but when I read AFP's story (before I saw Moran's), my first thought was that this silliness was part of a desperate attempt at deflection – an effort to draw attention away from Amsterdam's real problem. And that problem has nothing whatsoever to do with young guys from Britain, let alone from the Dutch provinces, roaming the inner city at night. No, it's about the Islamic communities on the fringes of downtown and in the city suburbs. Hand me a map of Amsterdam and I'll show you just how far you can go in any direction from the center of the city before you start risking real trouble. It's not that far – heading west, it's only a matter of four or five tram stops.

Canadian Media pushing gun control this week. Hard.

The National Post, which is the -least- socialist newspaper in Canada, printed this today:

Actually, guns do kill people, according to a new study

A new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open underscores an often overlooked factor in gun-policy debates: When it comes to lethality, not all guns are created equal.

Analyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality than those with a smaller-caliber gun. Caliber is a measure of the diameter of the bullets fired by a particular gun.

The study analyzed data on 221 gun homicides and 1,012 nonfatal shootings that happened in Boston between 2010 and 2014. On first glance, the numbers provided a confirmation of the depressing demographics of shooting cases: "Most gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments," Braga and Cook found. "Most attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role." Most occurred outdoors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

I like that, "on first glance" thing, because now they're going to tell you how its the gun that is at fault.

They controlled for a number of other factors, such as circumstances of shootings and the number of times victims were shot. They then found that all else being equal, a person shot with a medium-caliber weapon, such as a common 9mm handgun, were roughly 2.3 times as likely to die of their wounds than someone shot with a small-caliber gun. Large-caliber gunshots were even more deadly, resulting in odds of death 4.5 times that of small-caliber gunshots.

This is fricking Earth-shaking science here, right? Note that there's no mention of them controlling for the type of bullet, as in hardball vs. hollow point. Because its the GUN that did it.

 "The implication," they write, "is that if the medium- and large-caliber guns had been replaced with small caliber (assuming everything else unchanged) the result would have been a 39.5% reduction in gun homicides" in Boston during the study period.

You know what galls me here? Those assholes got PAID to write that paper. National Post goes on to say:

The results undercut the idea that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That catchy turn of phrase is often used by gun rights supporters to emphasize the human role in gun violence rather than the gun itself. The idea is that the gun matters a lot less than the murderous intent of the person pulling the trigger. If the person matters more than the gun, in other words, it's better to focus policy on people than to regulate guns.

This view is widespread among experts who take a permissive attitude toward gun regulation. A Rand Corp. study published earlier this year, for instance, surveyed a group of gun experts who generally favored fewer gun restrictions, asking what would happen if a given gun policy was successful at reducing gun homicides. On average, those experts believed that about 90 percent of the prevented gun homicides would simply end up as homicides by other means. That reflects a belief that homicidal intent is the key factor driving the lethality of gun violence.

But National Post knows better! Some guns are MOAR LEEEETHAL!!!!

Yeah. They are. Rifles are much more powerful than handguns. You get shot with a .308 hunting rifle, or a shotgun slug, chances are you are going to die no matter where you get hit. You get shot with a 9mm pistol, unless they get you in the brain or the heart, you'll probably live. It'll suck, but you'll live.

What guns are going to be banned by the Federal Liberals if they have their way?

Pistols. You know, the smallest and least powerful guns you can get.

This is what passes for journalism in Canada. For fuck sakes.

The Phantom

 

Ottawa floats handgun ban.

Well now, that didn't take long, did it?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will decide in mid-August whether to pursue a ban on handguns as part of a new legislative agenda he would outline in a fall Throne Speech, a senior official says.

Mr. Trudeau has asked a team of advisers to examine the pros and cons of proroguing Parliament and starting over with a fresh policies and priorities for the period leading to the election in October, 2019. The official said the Prime Minister wants them to report in time for the Liberal cabinet retreat on Aug. 22 in Nanaimo, B.C.

Y'all wanted to know why the government is so determined to make us think this shooting isn't terrorism? This is why. This is what they want. They want a blanket pistol ban. Then they want a blanket semi-auto ban after the next shooting. Then they'll want a blanket, all encompassing gun ban the shooting after that.

That's the plan.

Of course, after that comes the knife ban, which I wish I was joking about, but I'm not. They really will go there. Britain is, right now.

The Phantom

Update: Oh, and while Toronto is still wondering what the hell happened on Sunday night, Justin Trudeau has been paddle-boarding all week in BC. Nice!

Gun control a topic in Canada again. Inevitably.

I posted this comment at Small Dead Animals, and include it here for y'all's edification and enjoyment.

"Why are they blaming legal shooters and not the obvious?"
That is a legit question. I've wondered about that for a long time. Here's your answer.
The Rebel has a video up of a Toronto teacher going off on one of their reporters at the memorial for the slain on Danforth. You watch the video, and the teacher ranting wildly (at what is essentially a funeral, to be sure) is the reason for Ottawa blaming shooters. There's a huge number of her clones out there, all doing the same thing. You've all seen the type, you know a bunch yourselves.
Politicians go where the votes are. There's a BIG constituency of people in Canadian cities who HATE and FEAR other people. Politicians are pandering to that hate and fear.
What's easier for John Tory, really? To start jailing all the gang pukes selling drugs in Toronto? To run stings on murderous @$$h0le$ like Mr. Hussein the Danforth shooter? To shut down all the illegal stuff being done by immigrants, that leads to them knifing and shooting each other? (White people are not getting knifed and shot. Same as the USA, the victims and the shooters are pretty much all black. Nobody gives a !@#% about black people at City Hall, for realz.)
There's no political will out there for him to do that. He'll get called a racist/bigot/homophobe. So Tory blathers about guns instead. It doesn't impact his budget, his poll numbers go up, and after the speech he doesn't have to -do- anything. The mayor of Toronto cannot institute a gun ban, he has no power to do so. But he can SAY he's going to, and all the moronic school teachers will scream approval, and then… nothing happens. Just saying it is sufficient. That's why the crime keeps getting worse.
The people who will be affected negatively by the new law, if there is one, all live OUTSIDE TORONTO. They don't vote for John Tory, or the Liberals generally. Liberals lose nothing by angering the entire rest of Canada outside the three big cities, and they know it.
There you go. That's why. So, either we all get together and change that equation to one where John Tory is terrified to mention guns or gun control in public because he'll lose his next election, or it just keeps getting worse.
You don't have to look far to see how its going to go, either. Just consider Buffalo and Detroit, those two places are the model for where this is all headed.

The Phantom

Update: Instalanche!!!

Toronto Danforth shooter, Wednesday update.

Ezra Levant at The Rebel has been busy this week, asking questions that the Metro Toronto Police and the CBC have been very slow to answer. This video encapsulates his efforts, and their results. Thanks to Kathy Shaidle from Five Feet of Fury for the video.

Ezra Levant: Canadian media hides Toronto shooter's links to Islamic terror

Mr. Levant observes that it is interesting the CBC released the letter alegedly from the shooter's parents, at exactly the same time that Metro Police released his name. Meaning, among other things, that CBC certainly had a heads-up on the name before the release, and also meaning that somebody had time to draft the letter CBC reported. CBC to date has not provided any information on the provenance of the letter, or said how they got it, or when. He noticed, as I did, that the shooter seemed very well trained for a depressed mental health patient, and wondered where the gun came from..
Mr. Levant also mentions he's being chastised on Twitter by establishment media people for daring to raise questions about the shooter, and the letter. Nobody appears to care much that two girls died, or that this may have been a terror attack, or that there may be more people planning terror attacks. What they really want is for Ezra Levant and The Rebel to shut the hell up.
My question here is, why the focus on getting people to shut up and stop asking questions? Why the obvious media stick handling to obscure the facts of the case? Two kids are dead here, we need to know what the hell happened, and as soon as possible. The only concrete news is on blog sites like The Rebel and Small Dead Animals.  (Surprising no one, the gun was illegal and Canadian legal gun owners are to blame. The answer is more gun control, and that will be coming down the pipe from Ottawa with unseemly speed.)
The answer is, Liberals as a group are much, much more afraid of Canadians than they are of criminals and terrorists.
Here's the proof, another Rebel video courtesy of Kathy Shaidle in my inbox.

Apparently, bringing up the fact that media outside of Canada are reporting that the killer, Faisal Hussain, may have had an ISIS connection is "racist".
WATCH as a teacher attending the memorial with her children, berates The Rebel for doing journalism by asking uncomfortable questions about the murderer's motivation.

Now, I've never met the woman in the video. Let's be clear about that, I don't know her from Adam.

But I've met clones of her a thousand times in Canadian schools, hospitals, government institutions, Toronto street corners and businesses. She's a Liberal voter, or maybe NDP, and she's representative of the reason our media and our government are the way they are. They are trying to get her vote and her readership. She's the target demographic. So watch the video, if you can, and get a load of what's running our institutions.

At this point, I've come to my own conclusions and they're different than what the woman in the video and obviously my government want me to think. Clearly, the shooter was a trained man. Clearly, he didn't get his training in Canada. This was a straight-up terrorist attack, his goal was to kill as many people as he could. I don't really care what his political or religious affiliation was beyond that, but given reports from American news it seems obvious this was an Islamic State deal, that explains the training, the gun etc.

But even if he really was a lone nutcase, as a practical matter it doesn't really make any difference. There's shooters running around Toronto, and the government's main thrust of effort is to make sure I don't get out of line. The propaganda, the official speeches, the existing policy, the police protocols and tactics, all pointed at keeping people in line and quiet.
People are literally dying in the street, and the government is afraid of me. I'm their biggest problem.

It is the official policy of Canadian governance, and it has been for a very long time indeed if you look at how the laws are written, that the general citizenry is largely composed of unreasoning brutes. Peasants who must be corralled, fenced, directed and occasionally culled for the good of the herd. People who are too stupid to be trusted with their own money or their own freedom.

The reason Liberals love tax increases is that they view ever dollar in private hands as WASTED. If only that dollar was the propery of government at some level, then it could be more surely directed to the betterment of all men, instead of the mere enrichment of a few greedy scum. The reason Liberals love gun control is because while they, Liberals might be trustworthy enough to have a gun (maybe), surely all those OTHER people out there, those [shudder] Doug Ford voters, those Trump and Brexit voters, they're crazy! They're NAZIS!!! They'll kill everyone!

Too much? You think I overstate the case? Go back and watch that video again. That woman fears the danger of "demented Doug Ford voters" soooo much more than an actual killer really killing people in her neighborhood. Hey, only two kids died, her kids were okay, its all good, right? Gotta make sure those white supremacist racists don't start death marching brown people into Lake Ontario, that's the real danger here.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is where we are right now.

The Phantom

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

Nanoscale images of the entire fruit-fly brain!

This is huge.

Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19 in the journal Cell.
"The entire fly brain has never been imaged before at this resolution that lets you see connections between neurons," he says. That detail is key for mapping out the brain's circuitry — the precise webs of neuronal connections that underpin specific fly behaviors.

They took over 7,000 slices of the brain, and made 21 million electron microscope images of the slices, allowing them to trace each neuron and synapse in the brain. This is nothing less than a nanoscale 3D model of the fruit fly brain, made slice by slice.

Suck it, David Suzuki. ~:D

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapunditeers! This brain did not belong to Ms. Ocassio-Cortez, but if it had, it might have been the right size to fit in her solid bone cranium.

Toronto shooter named.

Toronto Danforth shooter was named today.

A 29-year-old man opened fire with a handgun in Toronto's busy Greektown neighbourhood Sunday night, according to Ontario's police watchdog, leaving at least two dead, and injuring 13 others.
On Monday afternoon, Ontario's police watchdog named the suspect as Faisal Hussain, of Toronto.
The Special Investigations Unit said the shooting began around 10 p.m., when the gunman began firing at groups of several people as he made his way down Danforth Avenue in the city's east end.

Apparently the man had unspecified mental health issues, according to his parents.

Just like the last guy who killed a bunch of random people on a Toronto sidewalk. That guy is amazingly absent from the news lately.

This one is another "incel", no doubt. (That sound is my eyes rolling.)

I'm not going to say anything more about that, except to note that this guy was moving and shooting pretty good for a depressed psychotic. Somebody taught him how to do it, given the video.

On a completely unrelated note, did y'all Americans know that it is massively illegal for a person diagnosed with a serious mental illness to buy or own any gun in this country? Did you know that there is a special pistol permit and course that you have to go through to get a pistol here? Did you know that there is ANOTHER permit you have to get to allow you to transport your pistol to the shooting range to practice? Did you know you can't get any of those permits or take any of the required courses if you have a diagnosis of mental illness?

I'm just wondering, where did this murderer learn to shoot? Inquiring minds want to know.

Update: Welcome, unruly Instapundit horde!

Update 2: 

Canadian authorities said Wednesday they have no evidence to substantiate a claim by the Islamic State group that the gunman who killed two people in a Toronto rampage was an IS soldier.

The group's Amaq news agency said the gunman, identified by police as 29-year-old Faisal Hussain, was an IS "soldier" responding to its calls for attacks on nationals from countries fighting the group in Iraq and Syria.

"At this stage, we have no evidence to support these claims," Toronto police said in a statement.

They do though. Video of him moving like a trained guy. People with no training do not move like that.

Is something rotten in the State of Denmark Canada? 

Shooting in Toronto, dead suspect still not named.

Last night there was a shooting attack on Danforth Avenue at Logan, out in front of Mr. Greek and The Big Carrot. Two victims died so far, twelve more were wounded. Wounded means shot, by the way. Wounded means they'll never be right again. One of them is a 9 year old girl.

Here's what the Mayor of Toronto, John Tory, has to say about it:

Toronto Mayor John Tory called the shooting "a despicable act" and expressed outrage that someone had "unleashed such a terrible attack on our city and people innocently enjoying a Sunday evening."

At a sombre gathering of Toronto council Monday morning, Toronto Mayor John Tory renewed his call for tougher gun laws, wondering aloud "why would anyone need a gun in this city at all?"

"There are far too many people carrying around guns in our city and our region who should not have them," Tory said as he addressed council in the wake of Sunday night's mass shooting before council was adjourned until later Monday out of respect for the shooting victims.

"You've heard me ask the question of why anyone would need to buy 10 or 20 guns, which they can lawfully do under the present laws," Tory said.

"And that leads to another question we need to discuss: why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?"

People in Toronto need guns because there are assholes walking down Danforth Avenue shooting random passers-by, John. Wake up and smell the fucking gunpowder.

iCloud data in China stored by government servers

Everybody loves that little cloud backup thing. All your crap, backed up in one, supposedly really safe, place.

A state-owned telecommunications company in China now stores the iCloud data for Apple's China-based users. This is really bad news for dissidents and critics of the government.

In February, Apple caused an uproar when it announced it would be moving Chinese users' iCloud accounts — and their encryption keys — to a China-based server company Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. Human rights advocates warned this move would be dangerous, especially so for Chinese dissidents. Apple's response was that it simply had no choice but to comply if it wanted to continue providing its iCloud service to Chinese customers.

But then it got worse.

Fast forward to today: China Telecom, a government owned telco, is taking over the iCloud data from Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. This essentially means that  a state-owned firm now has access to all the iCloud data China-based users store, such as photos, notes, emails, and text messages.

Yeah. The Chinese Stazi has full control and access to all the shit your iPhone does if you live in China. What are the main differences between the present day Chinese Stazi and the old East German Stazi? The original was smaller and therefore less evil. On the other hand, the Chinese knock-off has much better press coverage from the American media.

Here's a question you should consider before pushing that cloud button: Who, exactly, has access to all your iPhone shit here in North America? The answer is:
YOU DON'T KNOW.

There's literally no way for us to know, for sure, who has access to all that stuff on those remote servers.

Hmmmm.....

The Phantom

Another Lefty documents his fall from Grace.

Seen at Instapundit, another Soyboy takes the fall for being insufficiently soyfull.

I drive food delivery for an online app to make rent and support myself and my young family. This is my new life. I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer's taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community. Writing anything under my own byline now would invite a renewal of this mobbing—which is why, with my editor's permission, I am writing this under a pseudonym. He knows who I am.
In my previous life, I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.

What happened? He got called out for some miniscule (or imaginary) deviation from the Straight And Narrow Path. (I use that bible allusion advisedly, it is always fun to see the SJWs behaving like a bunch of Puritan spinsters.)

Here's the money quote from this guy, its is an excellent observation:

Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That's why I'm delivering sushi and pizza.

He means its the Stazi. And it totally is. Ask yourself, when the Stazi came knocking, would a grovelling apology have saved the one they came for? Nope. By then its too late.

When the Stazi comes, all there is left to choose is the manner of your death. You can die well, on your feet like a Man, or like a dog in a ditch. Metaphorically speaking of course. They can't -really- come for you.

Yet.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome tsunami of Instapunditeers coming in over the transom! Surf that wave, baby!

Me too = #YouToo!

Professor at Canadian university.

Seen first at Small Dead Animals, this is the perfect example of Leftists and effete literary snobs behaving like a pack of rabid dogs.

In an exclusive account, author Steven Galloway reveals for the first time how shocking accusations of sexual assault devastated his career — and his life. In the fall of 2015, Galloway was suspended as chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia for unspecified "serious allegations." By the summer of 2016, he had been fired over what the university called an "irreparable breach of trust." But last month, an arbitrator awarded Galloway $167,000, ruling that UBC violated his privacy rights and damaged his reputation. Now, in his own words, the celebrated novelist says he will no longer be silent.

What follows is a big long tale of woe, about how all his Ivory Tower friends JUMPED at the chance to believe the accusations, piled on, and generally acted like insane weasels. He was shocked by this.

The hatred and gleeful malice I have seen directed at me, my family, and anyone with the temerity to suggest I am not a monster has shattered me. I have watched as individuals who have never met me spent the past few years relentlessly attacking me, treating it all like some sort of game, a way to carve out a name for themselves. They display their false virtue like the tail feathers of a peacock. One University of Alberta professor puts her hatred of me in her official bio, and when I wrote to her asking that she take into account that I am a human being with feelings, and that my children read what she says about me, she responded by hosting a live-tweeted "academic" conference in which I was called a rapist and compared to Robert Pickton.

Later on, we get this gem:

When my first novel was accepted for publication I was 23 years old and encountered nothing but supportive people in the world of Canadian writing. That changed overnight. Recently, "CanLit" has been described as a dumpster fire. Though juvenile, the description is apt. I've watched what I always imagined to be a kind, inclusive, supportive community turn against itself. The cruelty some people have displayed has been shocking. There have always been those who seek to build themselves up by tearing others down, but I'd never seen so much of it until recently. We have been taken over by a bloodlust in a search for targets of indignation.

Yeah. Shocking.

I wonder if Steven Galloway still thinks that Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a Nazi?

The Wondering Phantom

Update: Welcome huge flood of Instapundit readers!

Always-on listening devices, everywhere.

An interesting thing is happening in the tech world. Little tiny microphones have gotten -really- fricking cheap.

I believe that is a dime the microphone is sitting on.

Startups such as Boston-based Vesper Technologies, Inc.—which has received money from Baidu, Bose and Amazon's Alexa Fund—are meeting the challenge with even tinier, yet more capable designs built around minuscule flaps of silicon that generate electric current when bent by sound waves. Vesper claims this gives their microphone unique capabilities, like understanding your voice even in windy conditions, and drawing zero power when awaiting a "wake word," since sound itself generates the power the microphone needs.

The total cost to equip a gadget with an array of these tiny microphones and the electronics to interpret simple commands is approaching $10 or less, says Matt Crowley, Vesper's chief executive. Individual microphones now cost between 20 cents and 60 cents, says Mike Rosa, an analyst and marketing chief at Applied Materials Inc., which supplies manufacturing equipment to makers of microchips.

You know what else is cheap and small? WiFi and Bluetooth modules, cameras, system-on-chip computers, and batteries. That zero power draw in sleep mode is a very big deal, it makes possible all sorts of applications that would otherwise bee much too power hungry.

The little thing on the end is the whole camera.

Full wireless transmitter/receiver for a cell phone type application.

Essentially it will be possible to have wireless video and sound capability in pretty much anything you can imagine, cheaply. I'm sure if a clever lad sat down and designed a dedicated silicon package, he could get it under ten bucks a unit. That means toy drones with full video/audio AND wireless AND processing on board. That means video/audio enabled glasses/brooches/rings/watches etc. Car sun visors with video/audio. Literally anything that plugs into a wall socket can be a full-on Alexa-style device.

But not in the future. I mean right now. They can do it right now. In the future it will only get smaller, cheaper and easier.

Just so you know.

The Phantom

California University Racism

A major California -technical- university is choosing students based on skin colour.

In keeping with the diversity and inclusion movement sweeping campuses across the country, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo recently released a 30-page report outlining plans to "improve diversity" via a series of initiatives.

One goal is to increase the number of people of color on campus beyond the increases that have already occurred over the past few years, as "applications from underrepresented minority students doubled between 2008 and 2018."

"In 2011, the campus was 63 percent Caucasian," the May 2 report informs readers, "in fall of 2017, it was less than 55 percent … but there is still much work to do."

That this is precisely the reverse of "diversity and inclusion" seems to have escaped the administrators. One wonders what the hell is in their heads besides sand.

The end point of this will be the same situation that used to apply before WWII, when "people of colour" had their own universities and major institutions were Whites Only. I would not view that as progress.

The Phantom

Dinosaur media finally notices cities are being hollowed out.

Here we have a liberal bemoaning "The Death of a Once Great City".  He's whining about gentrification in NYC, and naturally blaming it all on Trump. A sample:

We have been almost a parody of multiculturalism on our little street. Black and white, Hispanic and Asian; straight, gay, and transgender; families of all kinds—extended, adopted, arranged by convenience or design. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist. I would come home and see the daughters of our Sikh mailman, before they grew up, playing baseball in the halls. In the evening, I sat at my desk in a little space, in this building cubbyholed with other little spaces and held together by what was once described as "a hundred years of spit and dust," and felt as though I were poised over the center of the world. Beneath me I could hear a hive of dinnertime conversations carried on in half a dozen languages, smell cooking that came from all over the world, hear someone ringing a gong and repeating a Buddhist chant.

To me, that sounds like my worst nightmare. The sound of "a hive of dinnertime conversations carried on in half a dozen languages" means the building is an ancient firetrap with no insulation and no privacy. What I hear at my house at dinner time is frogs chirping in the pond. At noon it is so quiet here, you can literally hear a hawk glide by overhead. Shhhwsh. So I can already tell this person has zero conception of what life is like outside his teensy experience. He'd probably lose his little liberal mind here in Hooterville.

It is through all these interactions, multiplied a million times, that a truly great city is made.

No, don't think so. A truly great city is a place you can find food, shelter and a job, live peacefully and raise your family safely. NYC hasn't been that since the 1960s. Toronto stopped being that in the 1980s.

The street life—the warrens of little shops and businesses that once sustained our neighborhood in the sort of "exuberant diversity" that Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite for a successful city—is being eradicated as well: the botanica on 96th Street that Susan, my sister-in-law, always visited to buy her healing herbs when she was in town; the Indian spice shop next to it, with the protective elephant-headed idol of Ganesh mounted outside.

This is the actual meat of the conversation, that retail stores are fleeing downtown and semi-downtown areas of large American cities, driven out by rent hikes.

These stores, like so many others in my neighborhood, have not been replaced. They are simply . . . gone. In an informal survey of Broadway, from 93rd Street to 103rd, I recently counted twenty-four vacant storefronts—many of them very large spaces, enough to account for roughly one third of the street frontage. Nearly all of them have been empty now for months or even years.

The truth is that most of the buildings in NYC are so expensive that no retail operation in existence can afford to rent them. Retail of anything doesn't produce enough income to pay for the space.  In Toronto the price of a detached house, even a falling down one, is north of a million bucks. Stores are sitting empty all over Toronto, the only ones still going are big chains who can afford the obscene rents. Which means it is a bubble. In-city prices all over North America for retail space and for housing are in a bubble.

Of course the liberal author, Mr. Kevin Baker, blames racism and the Republicans. Racists are everywhere for Mr. Baker it seems, hiding in ever closet and sewer grating, waiting to jump out. He also, hilariously, blames foreigners for buying $20 million dollar apartments downtown and not living in them most of the year. Which somehow isn't racist, because... well never mind, it just isn't.

Worth a read.

Perverts in high places: America's elite is bent.

Anyone still wondering why hard-core perversions are being normalized in the America media should check this out:

Joel Davis, 22, is accused of trying to set up sexual encounters between himself and young children, as well as soliciting an undercover FBI agent to send sexually explicit videos of minors. 

The New Yorker was arrested on Tuesday on child sex abuse and child pornography charges.

Davis is the chairman of the International Campaign to Stop Rape and Gender Violence in Conflict - an organization devoted to ending sexual violence.

Fair warning, it is very, very ugly. You don't need to know, the link is there to show it really happened.

I speculate that ICSRGVC might be a front to allow its members to indulge themselves, given this guy is the chairman.

But wait, there's more.

A Canadian real estate tycoon's son who wrote a graphic novel that features gruesome killings was sentenced Tuesday in California to life in prison for the torture and mutilation of a live-in girlfriend who had given birth to their child weeks earlier.
A Los Angeles jury found Blake Leibel, 37, guilty last week of first-degree murder, torture and aggravated mayhem in the slaying of 30-year-old Iana Kasian.

Mr. Leibel was apparently part of the freak S&M subculture, also doing "creative" work with graphic novels, movies and animation. He's an ahhhtist you see. Do yourself a favor and don't look up the details of the murder, apparently there are pictures out there. You don't want to know. All I saw were the headlines, and that was bad enough.

Point is, these two were rich kids of the pampered elite, just like Shiny Pony who has his own perv accusations to deal with these days. I'm told by other news tidbits that there are -many- pop-up S&M clubs in the LA, San Francisco, Silicon Valley areas, frequented by those in the know with some money to spend. Its a popular Saturday night outing, apparently.

In the Science Fiction world of course there was the "Breendoggle," a seemingly funny name for a spectacularly un-funny child molestation ring, and of late there are certain individuals on the Left trying to normalize the participants in that atrocity.

This is over and above the comparatively "normal" perverted and abusive behavior of Harvey Weinstine and the 400+ others caught up in the #MeToo phenomenon.

Time for a bit of pushback on perverted art, books and movies I think. It isn't harmless entertainment.

The Phantom

Update: Here's another one. Don't read the link unless you want to know a lot more about some really disturbing shit. A Hollywood guy ends up dead from being wrapped in plastic in another Hollywood guy's S&M  dungeon. These are important businessmen, also massive perverts. These are the type of guys responsible for all the pervy bondage shit we see in movies these days. There are a lot of them, and they're dangerously crazy.

Upperdate: Welcome deluge of Instapunditeers!

Kickin' them Sad Puppies again.

I'm so sad.

Now that the Sad Puppy Campaign has been dormant for two years, those of us who participated having declared victory and moved on, there are still those people trying to start shit up out there in Media land.

This time it was the Arizona Republic.

Q: There's been some pushback against emerging voices in science fiction, especially women of color, particularly with the campaign a few years ago to vote against those authors for the Hugo Awards. How do you respond to that?
A: Science fiction, as Ursula LeGuin would probably tell you, is always about social issues. It's never not been about social issues. Even if you're writing rocket men going to space, you're writing from a certain perspective. Whatever it is that defines your place in society, that's where your voice comes from. So actually it makes a lot of sense that if science fiction is telling us what the future is supposed to look like, or fantasy is letting us play out our dream ideas of what society might be, that they would take up these issues of identity. I think it's kind of exciting that you're seeing the science-fiction and fantasy community push back against people like the Sad Puppies, the organizations that were trying to push out the voices, some of the underrepresented voices, from women of color, disabled voices, queer voices.

This was from the Friday edition of the Arizona Republic, from an article about a "Navajo" author's first book. The author of the article is Kerry Lengel, and a quick duckduckgo gives us: https://twitter.com/KerryLengel, revealing the usual SJW boilerplate one expects in an "Ahhht" critic. He loved Hamilton, 'nuff said. He's the "Q:"

The "A:" is Rebecca Roanhorse the author of "Trail of Lightning," her first book. Trying to get some SJW cred and brownie points with her publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Just so you know who is making shit up about y'all this week.

The Proudly Puppy Adjacent Phantom

Update: Welcome vast wave of Instapundit! Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so tell all your SFF friends that Arizona Republic is making shit up about them. Again.

Hollywood: Would you all just die already?!

The creator of the critically acclaimed TV show "Westworld"Jonathan Nolan shared his creative vision and his "take" on Humanity as a whole.

"No, it's a f—ing disaster," he said. "It's a f—ing total disaster. And every time I turn on the news I'm provided with fodder for our discontent. I think our timing might have been exactly right on. Listen, I'm surrounded by the wonders of the creations of human beings. I have children and [co-showrunner Lisa Joy] and I are reminded daily of how much beauty there is in humanity. But yeah, you turn on the f—ing news and it's a s—tshow. And I've been reading a lot of history this season, a little bit connected to the show, but also just following the train of things I'm interested in, and it's depressing to realize how familiar some of these problems are, right? It's like we just can't figure these f—ing things out. We come back to them again and again. It's as if there's a flaw — and this is very much the premise in our second season — there's a flaw in our code and it follows us around. Wherever we go, there we are. And we just can't get out of our own f—ing way. All the beauty and incredible things we brought, and we just consistently find a way to f— it up."

If this sounds familiar, it ought to. It's Mary Shelley. That's the theme of Frankenstein. It is the theme of every Liberal-leaning book, magazine, movie and TV show out there right now.

Put in its simplest terms it is this: People are stupid. They have to be controlled. Reduced. Contained. Boxed in so they can't do what they always do, which is destroy everything.

Now, in all fairness Mary Shelly was a good Christian lady, and believed in redemption. That's where she and Mr. Nolan part company.

Continued Nolan: "Much of [dramatic storytelling across the ages] has concerned itself with 'how will we overcome?' and personal growth and change. At a certain point you gotta f—ing call it. We're not going to fix this s—, we're not going to figure it out. But there's an opportunity for the things that replace us to do so. And that's the dream of every parent, right? That their child doesn't face the same things they do, that they make better choices? But there does seem to be a pattern of behavior that follows us, that history echoes from the past, the same mistakes, the same foibles. So you say: At what point does this fix itself? Or are we just stuck this way?"

Going by the Westworld show, Mr. Nolan has drunk deeply of the Liberal kool-aid. His world view is one where humans are irredeemable wreckers, agents of destruction and doom. Just like every other pseudo-intellectual in Hollywood.

I posted this because, like the Mark Hughes thing the other day, Nolan spells it out for us. Until we all repudiate this odious worldview, we can look forward to ever-more-concentrated doses of the same thing in our entertainments and media sources. What will be required is the realization by people like Mr. Nolan that a movie, TV show, book or piece of music that has "People Are Stupid!" as the theme, it will be a sales failure. We have to stop paying them for this bullshit, in other words.

The best and fastest way to make that happen is to start writing screenplays, books and music with a different theme. ANY different theme will do at this point, because anything other than "People Are Stupid" will be a brand new experience for the whole audience. That's all most people have ever seen who were born after 1980.

The Thematic Phantom

David Hogg with armed security in NYC.

The latest joke from Hitler Salute Boi David Hogg:

Yeah, dat boi.

The 18-year-old attended the Parkland, Florida school where a student murdered 17 people in February, then made himself famous with relentless calls for gun control in the wake of the tragedy.
Now he's got a book deal, and publicists — and armed guards.
Sean Di Somma snapped some pictures of Hogg strolling the streets of New York City recently with his new entourage in tow.

The article is mostly Twitter drama, but the photo shows lil' David with a bunch of women and two no-neck plain clothes security dudes. I'm sure they're volunteers, right?

The Doubtful Phantom

Update: Welcome InstapundiiiiiiT!!! Hey kids, anybody out there know who paid for the Hogglet's armed security, and his book deal? Inquiring minds want to know.

Finally, sanity on phone tracking: warrant required!

The Supreme Court of the USA has ruled that police require a warrant to track your cell phone.

In the Supreme Court's ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the government's searches of Carpenter's phone records were considered a Fourth Amendment search.  

"The Government's position fails to contend with the seismic shifts in digital technology that made possible the tracking of not only Carpenter's location but also everyone else's, not for a short period but for years and years," he wrote. 

Roberts pointed out that allowing government access to historical GPS data infringes on Carpenter's Fourth Amendment protections and expectation of privacy, by providing law enforcement with an "all-encompassing record" of his whereabouts. He added that historical GPS data presents an "even greater privacy risk" than real-time GPS monitoring.

Leftists and SJW scum please note, it is the CONSERVATIVES protecting your God given right to privacy and protecting you from government surveillance.

In Canada of course nothing has changed, the cops can (and do!) still track everybody's cell phone whenever and where ever they like.

The Phantom

Good news: Stanford Prison Experiment was a lie.

This one is long overdue. The Stanford Prison Experiment so beloved by Ivory Tower Psychologists since it was done in 1971, was a lie. It was bullshit.

But it is no longer just a question of Zimbardo's word against theirs. This past April, a French academic and filmmaker named Thibault Le Texier published Histoire d'un Mensonge [History of a Lie], plumbing newly-released documents from Zimbardo's archives at Stanford University to tell a dramatically different story of the experiment.

The essential thrust of the experiment was to show that anyone made a prison guard would spontaneously begin abusing the prisoners and treating them with increasing cruelty. Particularly if you coached the guards that they should be dickheads.

Once the simulation got underway, Jaffe explicitly corrected guards who weren't acting tough enough, fostering exactly the pathological behavior that Zimbardo would later claim had arisen organically.

"The guards have to know that every guard is going to be what we call a tough guard," Jaffe told one such guard [skip to 8:35]. "[H]opefully what will come out of this study is some very serious recommendations for reform… so that we can get on the media and into the press with it, and say 'Now look at what this is really about.' … [T]ry and react as you picture the pigs reacting."

There's a lot more in that vein, but just that one piece of coaching takes the thing out of the realm of "experiment" and into "performance art."

So no, if you put a normal human being in a position of power over a prisoner, they do not automagically become literally Hitler. The guy just plain lied. And yes, psychology is packed full of appalling horseshit like the Stanford Prison Experiment. Whammin's Studies etc. is of course much worse. SJWs really are cwazy cwackers.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapunditeers!

Police in England stopped arresting criminals.

Lately we've been seing lots of new calls for knife control from police and professional hand-wringers in England, Scotland and Wales. In case it was unclear -why- all these murders and maiming have been taking place the last little while, it has become clear that the UK police as a whole have stopped arresting people for doing actual crimes, and have instead started arresting anyone who criticizes the government.

Police data shows that the percentage of all crimes solved by police has plummeted from 19 per cent in 2013 to just nine per cent in 2017.

Perpetrators in violent and sexual offences were brought to justice only in eight per cent of cases last year - a mere third of those in 2013.

So much for the government taking down all those rape-gangs, eh?

To be clear, this is in a nation where every telephone pole, streetlight and fence post has a CCTV camera on it.

Then there's this:

There were 159 robberies in Holloway Road and Highgate Hill last year, making them the streets most plagued by moped gang crime. 

However, just one offender was caught and punished.

A "moped gang" is a bunch of stupid teenagers on Vespas and other similar crap bikes, who rob people in their cars in broad daylight in the middle of the street. Despite the nature of these dickheads, they caught and prosecuted ONE out of 159. Given CCTV they already know who the robbers are. They just aren't picking them up,

Meanwhile the leadership is moaning about "lack of resources".

To me, troglodyte Conservative rural Canadian, that looks like an undeclared, slow-motion police strike. You pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.

But seven cops are available to arrest and subdue a guy standing on a street corner with his cellphone out. Also deny him a call to his attorney, and have him shipped off to the slammer in under six hours.

That looks more like the Gestapo. Maybe the KGB, or the Stazi. They liked that sort of thing.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome to Kate McMillan's flying monkey horde!

Hollywood: "Take what we give you, and shut up!"

Incoming.

In the latest in a series of science fiction fandom witch burnings, we have this article in Forbes magazine:

Kathleen Kennedy Is Still The Best Person To Make 'Star Wars' Movies

The reason I post this apologia to the Disney gods is the virulent language in it. It reads like a comment at Vile 666 or floppy cameltron. Or maybe Jezebel. Emphasis and colours mine.

Rumors surfaced this week that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy might step down from company leadership in the aftermath of Solo: A Star Wars Story's box office failure. This comes amid rampaging racism, sexism, and other extreme toxic behavior from a segment of mostly male (and mostly white) fans who've taken to harassing female actors and artists for existing. This is all part of a larger bigoted backlash of complaints against Star Wars for incorporating people of color and other types of diversity into the previously predominantly white male storytelling.

That's the first three sentences. Yes, you read that right, Solo, or Soylo as they are saying over at Ace of Spades, is tanking -hard- at the box office, and the reason is... the audience is a bunch of toxic racist fanbros. Yep. Movie tanks, blame the -audience-. Oh, and shut up!, because ain't nobody got time for none of your "extreme toxic behavior."

Amazing in Forbes magazine, right? But wait, there's more! The next three paragraphs:

Mindless screams of "keep your politics out of my entertainment" abound from that corner of fandom ignorant of the most basic facts about what the films say and represent (the Empire's designs and titles were heavily influenced by fascism and Nazi imagery, the Ewok uprising was a veiled commentary about the Vietnam War, and the entire concept is about rebelling against authoritarianism and fighting back against oppression and slavery).

This is the same group of fans, remember, whose entire rant is rooted in their own personal politics and a desire to see their personal preferences projected onto the screen while nobody else is entitled to the same right or representation. That enraged reactionaries want to deny everybody else equal representation while demanding their own right to be heard and obeyed is hardly new or shocking, of course. These types of vulgar fans always existed, because fandom is just a portion of the population as a whole, and the population always includes angry self-entitled bigots.

In other words, it's fine to ignore them and to not care what they want or what they say, and to deny them the myopic whitewashed world they demand. They don't deserve representation of their ideas, since their ideas are backward, hateful, and devoid of merit in the first place. If you scream in anger about seeing other people represented, if you harass and insult and threaten marginalized people for daring to exist and to appear in movies, then you and your beliefs have no place in modern storytelling or modern society (except as villains to be defeated and cast aside forever).

Yeah! De-platform those assholes! No place in modern storytelling! Wait, wut?

Who -is- this maniac? Well, he's this guy. Mark Hughes.

Mark Hughes, screen writer and SJW weenie.

I work as a screenwriter for film and TV. In a former life I was a media specialist & campaign ad writer.

I think he left out a word. He meant to say DEMOCRAT campaign ad writer.

Thing is, I've seen this reaction before. Remember Fantastic Four? We were all nerd-racists for saying that was going to suck, right? Then when Marvel Comics was tanking hard in April last year? That was nerd-racism then, too. The four years of the Sad Puppies Campaign, super-duper nerd-racism. Kicking nerd-racist Conservative authors out of Guest-of-Honor spots at conventions, totally consistent with the narrative.

Prediction: If she doesn't get fired over the failure of Solo, Kathleen Kennedy will double down on the SJW themes for the next Star Wars. There will be gay droids and trans Jedi, disabled POC heros and the whole quilt-bag full of progressive agenda goodness. The movie will suck, the box-office will bomb harder than a B-52 squadron, and Ms. KK will be violently defended by Mark Hughes. Right before they fire her.

Dear Disney, save yourself the money and fire her now. Your shareholders will thank you.

The Phantom NerdRacist.

Update: reposted at According to Hoyt, with extra-spicy commentary by Sarah! Welcome Hoyt-Horde!

Prophet Mohamed cartoon contest!

Sharpen up those pencils, kids!

The Freedom Party of Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders will hold a competition of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, it said on Tuesday.

The party said the plan to hold the competition in the party's secure offices in Dutch Parliament had been approved by the Dutch Counter-terrorism Agency NCTV.

Remember friends, Freedom of Speech is not the freedom to be nice to everybody all the time.

The Phantom

Liberal science priorities: huh wut?

Question: What is the biggest priority to the Federal Science Minister of Canada? Getting more science done in Canada? Getting more money for more science? Developing more/bigger/better facilities and infrastructure for more/bigger/better science?

Answer: Nope. Gender bias.

Question: Seriously, gender? Are you fucking kidding me?

Answer: Nope. Gender. And you better report for some sensitivity training there, comrade.

Federal Science Minister Kirsty Duncan has made it clear that gender equity in science is a big priority for her. And now she's looking beyond universities to scientists employed by the federal government.

Duncan said in an interview in Toronto this week that she has asked science-based departments in the federal government to collect demographic data about their staff...

Should we have seen this coming?

Gender equity is something Duncan, a former medical geographer who studied diseases like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, has already shown she is passionate about.

"As a former scientist who happens to be a woman, it was not always easy, and I spent 25 years fighting for diversity in research," she said. Last year, she wrote an opinion piece about her experiences, including being paid in the bottom 10th percentile at her university and being told it was because she was a woman.

"We know that diversity and research excellence go hand in hand," Duncan said. "We need different ideas, different perspectives."

She gave several examples where male-dominated research has let women down, such as voice-recognition software calibrated to male voices, early airbags designed for men that injured women and children, and the first artificial heart valves, designed to fit a male-sized heart.

But her passion isn't driven purely by pragmatism. She also cited stories she didn't expect to hear about — the negative experiences that women are still having in science.

"A lot of young would women would come up and cry in my arms, no exaggeration. And I was determined that I would take action."

Yes, we should. You vote Liberal, this is what you get.

Now, don't forget that the NDPee [spit!] would be doing exactly the same thing, but harder and faster. They'd have made it illegal to hire a man for any job in science until the numbers matched.

Liberals Go Full Monty:Trump=Hitler!

The full Monty is when your "adult entertainer" takes it off and is left standing on the stage in a pair of shoes, letting it all hang out as it were. On Thursday night, June 7th, the Liberal Party was handed an historic defeat in the Ontario provincial elections. They were not decimated, a loss of one in ten. They were obliterated. Seven seats left standing, and Krazy Kathleen Wynne, Ontario's most powerful substitute high school librarian, won her seat in the safest Liberal riding imaginable by only 200 votes.

So today, Sunday June 10th, the Federal Liberal Party is going full Monty and letting it ALL hang out.

In the New York Times magazine:

During our conversation, Freeland — who insists that everyone call her Chrystia — came off as acutely conscious of the perils of the moment, of how a provocation or an insult, perceived or real, could damage Canada's relationship with the United States, or at least with the current president. What has been the most durable and reliable alliance on the planet for the past century now seemed to hang on one man's easily excited sense of grievance.

This is going well, right? Seems promising, fair and balanced so far. Go all the way to the bottom, you find this:

America's closest friend and ally and a country that might see America more clearly than it sees itself now offered a dire warning about the perils to liberal democracy in this "fraught" era. Freeland said she had recently come across a "terrifying" quote from Adolf Hitler, explaining his rise to power in Germany in a time of economic uncertainty and grievance. "I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached," Hitler had said. "Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them. ... I, on the other hand ... reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me."

She leaned forward, a look of concern in her eyes. "How do you attract voters and public support compared with the flashiness of exciting, chaotic, fact-ignoring populism?" she asked. "The reason Hitler won was because all of the other politicians were giving complicated and difficult explanations about difficult things. Hitler just told people simple things that they wanted to hear."

Full.Monty. The federal Liberals just dropped trou and showed us what they got.

And the resounding cry from the electorate is not applause. It is a cry no stripper ever wants to hear: "Chrystia, for the love of god, put it back on!"

The Phantom

 Update: Welcome, unruly horde of Instapundit deplorables.

Ontario election and Fake News.

The results are in, here at Chez Phantom, and they are interesting. The Ontario election is over, and the Liberals are reduced to below official party status. In order to be an Official Party in Ontario, and partake of all the goodies inherent therein, you have to win eight (8) seats in the House. The Liberals won seven (7). That's got to sting a bit.

The interesting part is the role of the Canadian Media in all this. Two weeks ago we were informed that the NDPee [spit!] was surging, and that it was possible we would have a minority NDPee [spit!] and Liberal coalition egging each other on to ever-greater "acts of random kindness and senseless beauty"... at our expense.

It isn't philanthropy when the government does it, boys and girls. It's virtue signaling.

As Kate McMillan says in the link, the "experts" said this race was too close to call.

The tally this morning is PC 76, NDPee [spit!] 40 and Liberals 7. the Greenie Weenies squeezed out 1 seat.

58% voter participation too. Half the voting public stayed home.

All told, the media failed to anticipate a CRUSHING victory for the PCs and an utter repudiation of the Liberals. 7 seats means pack your bags, bitchez, and get outta town.

What I suspect of course is that they did anticipate it and simply lied about it. I think that was hubris on their part, the fear that reporting the truth from their outlets would affect the outcome. There's nothing they could have done to change this. Lying just makes them look like liars and reduces their effectiveness even further.

Nobody cares about Ford. He's just some guy who said he doesn't like tax-and-spend liberalism, and his brother was Rob Ford. Everybody cares about their job, and their taxes. They don't have any money, and the reason why is clear. Government takes it all.

The Phantom

BigInternet openly works with SPLC.

In a development that surprises no one, the Big Internet firms are working with Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on their "hate" policies.

Facebook, Amazon, Google and Twitter all work with or consult the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in policing their platforms for "hate speech" or "hate groups," a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found.
The SPLC is on a list of "external experts and organizations" that Facebook works with "to inform our hate speech policies," Facebook spokeswoman Ruchika Budhraja told TheDCNF in an interview.
Facebook consults the outside organizations when developing changes to hate speech policies, Budhraja said, noting that Facebook representatives will typically hold between one and three meetings with the groups.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the SPLC considers the NRA and the Tea Party to be hate groups, and while I've seen no public denouncement, I speculate they may also include the Roman Catholic Church and the US Republican Party as hate groups.

Which is right in line with what we are seeing out of Farcebook, Twitterer and Gloogle these days. Amazoon seems to be moving a little slower on the whole hate thing, maybe that's business managers with a brain or maybe its just inertia, hard to say at this point.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit!

Remember, all cultures are equally valid.

We must respect the beliefs of other cultures. Especially when they don't respect ours.

He rests in peace no more. The one bone is all that's left of the dearly departed. His remains were likely stolen by grave robbers who use human bones in religious ceremonies or sell them on the black market.

"There's a lot of witchcraft going on, and I've been offered $1,000 for a skull," Kennedy said. "It's inhumane how they're attacking the dead and dismantling the graves. Our history is buried in these cemeteries."

A rash of vandalism and an increase in trespassing at three of Miami's oldest cemeteries has not only disturbed the repose of the deceased but complicated the struggle of protecting and preserving historic sites that have been neglected for years.

Remember friends, that the White Xtian Cismale Patriarchy is the thing that's most dangerous in life and must be resisted.

'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.'
G.K. Chesterton

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article212504519.html#storylink=cpy

Engulf, assimilate and pervert.

Microsoft bought Github for $7.5 BILLION dollars.

If you are not now screaming at your computer screen, you are not a software developer.

That is all, as you were.

The Developing Phantom