Naked man with knife shot by armed guard...at McDonald's.

So it seems some guy got some bad drugs in Palmdale California. He stabbed an old man in McDonalds, then attacked the security guard, who killed him with a pistol.

It began when the suspect, described initially as a shirtless Latino man, crashed his car into into the wall of a Carl's Jr. restaurant, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He then got out and ran across the street to a nearby McDonald's, during which time he undressed completely.
Deputies said the man, now naked, entered the McDonald's and stabbed an 88-year-old man who was eating with his grandson.
As the suspect was coming out of the McDonald's, he was confronted by an armed security guard, the sheriff's department said. When he tried to assault the guard, the guard shot him at least once, hitting him in the upper torso, deputies said.
Both the suspect and the stabbed customer were taken to local hospitals. The suspect was pronounced dead, while the stabbing victim was listed in stable condition and was expected to survive, officials at the scene told CBS2.
The guard was unhurt.

Two things stand out here.

1) McDonald's has a fricking armed guard in Palmdale California. Are you kidding me? They have to have private security at the burger joint?!

2) McDonald's has an armed guard and a stark naked dude with a knife managed to get into the place, stab a guy and get out, before the armed guard got his shit together and did something about it.

What a shit hole. Way to go, California. Looks good on ya.

Update: Welcome Instapundit! Thanks, Sarah! ~:D

The End of women's sports if the Dems get their way.

Previously I've covered the throwing under the bus of radical lesbians, radical fruitbat-feminists (as distinct from equal-opportunity feminists)  and women's sports advocates by the Political Left. I've covered former Lefty lesbian heart throb Martina Navratilova getting ShirtStormed for saying trans-women playing women's sport is cheating. I've covered lesbians getting beat up at Pride Day last year by Antifa for not wanting "persons of penis" in their grrrrlz-only spaces. Like the change room, the showers, etc.

And I've covered all the reasons why a sex-change doesn't change a damn thing about the male performance advantage over women in speed, power and endurance.

Physics. Doesn't. Change. You fricking Lefties can cry all you want about how gender is a "social construction" and cry all day long about the feeeeelz, physics does not care.

Okay, so we got all that. For all that arguing, yelling and hitting, here's your results:

The Daily Caller reports that "Democrats' Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make 'sexual orientation and gender identity' protected characteristics under federal anti-discrimination law," and would force schools to accommodate "transgender" male athletes who identify as female by placing them on female-only sports teams.
Biological males competing as females have become a trend in high school sports (as well as some professional sports), and several biologically male athletes have earned top honors in state sporting competitions, beating out the women for whom the all-female contests were created.
...[some snippage]...
Activists who support "transgender rights" in sports contend that there are no innate physical differences between women and men, and that men who identify as female are "authentically women," and should be allowed to compete, even if they have a clear and undeniable statistical advantage.
The Human Rights Coalition even wrote a statement in support of the bill, claiming that opponents of the measure are denying science.
"Opponents of equality in athletics for transgender athletes have argued that girls who are transgender have unfair physiological advantages over cisgender girls and as a result, will dominate women's competitive sports," they wrote, adding that it is not "rooted in fact" that men are stronger and faster than women, according to the Caller.
Rep. Dan Lipinksi (D-IL), the last remaining pro-life Democrat, was the only member of the caucus to oppose the bill. Republican Reps. John Katko (R-NY) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) joined with Democrats to press the bill forward.

The entire DemocRat caucus, except one guy, signed on to this thing. They intend to legislate, cast into law, that there are no physical differences between men and women. You take a man, put him in a dress, and he's now a woman. By declaration alone.
This is a stunt, just like Alexandria Occasional-Cortex's Green New Deal which did not receive even one vote in the House. The "Equality Act" will pass through the House, all the good people will vote for it, all the bad people will vote against it, and it will vanish, never to be seen again.
But it does tell us a great deal about what kind of people these DemocRats are, and what their intentions are. They're quite happy to throw 150 years worth of gains made by the progressive women's movement out the window for a bit of momentary virtue signalling. If they get what they say they want, all the top women athletes in the United States will be men.
Full disclosure, I don't play sports, I don't have kids that play sports, and I don't watch sports. I detest sports.
As a large and grizzled old male, I don't care a good goddamm who else is using the bathroom at McDonald's. If some girl wants to stick on a mustache and pretend to pee standing up, that is her problem. I'm in no danger from mustache girl, she's a twig compared to me.
As a Conservative, I don't care that the women's movement is getting squashed. Women are supposed to be property, aren't they? Kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen to make me a sandwich. That's what Conservatives believe, right? Fer shur.
Y'all Lefties and lesbians have brought all this shit on yourselves. I'm sitting here with my popcorn and beer, laughing it up. I don't have a dog in this fight.
Oh, but wait. I do. I'm living next to a nation whose government is composed of thieves and liars. That probably won't turn out well for me. Eventually one of them will want to take -my- stuff. "First they came for the Lezzies, but I'm a dude so I said nothing..."
Dear Americans, please stop voting for these Leftist assholes. I'll see what I can do about the Liberals in October.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit horde! Woohoo!

How the "armed civillian" thing works.

There's been some confusion about how this whole "armed civilian" concept works among Leftists and government officials in Canada, Australia, Britain and New Zealand.

This is a video of a typical armed citizen encounter with violent assholes.

Pay particular attention to how nobody dies. Over 90% of self defense encounters, no shots are fired.

Also notice how, on a crowded street in Chicago, right in front of McDonald's, nobody comes to help the old man. They're ALL taking video with their fucking phones. If he didn't have that gun, those two would have beat him as much as they wanted to. Maybe to death.

You're welcome.

Trans-athletes. If the facts are against you...

...argue the law.

As a performance scientist and someone who has worked in elite sport for over a decade, I am interested in the determinants of physical performance and how to manipulate and enhance these variables. Over my years working with athletes, I have become accustomed to observing the differences between the sexes and have extensively studied why these differences exist. It has therefore been baffling to me to see some of the discussions regarding why sex categories in sport exist and how to include trans-athletes. What we must understand is that there is currently a general lack of understanding regarding the potential consequences on elite sport due to ill-informed policy making and the pressures of activist groups.

He has a list of performance differences, they average out somewhere between ten and twenty percent. Women being on the low side of the ratio.

As a physical therapist, part of my schooling was the "determinants of physical performance" that the author, Andrew Langford, talks about. These determinants are myriad. Bone density, the physical size of tendons and ligaments, the size of muscle attachments to the bone, muscle cell twitch speed, the ratio between "fast twitch" and "slow twitch" muscle cells in the major skeletal muscle groups, the width of the pelvic girdle and distance between the hip joints, on and on it goes.

Men have bigger, denser bones. I'm not going to add the idiot boilerplate because its a lie. 80% or more of men have bigger denser bones than 80% of women. They have larger contact surfaces in every major joint. Their muscle attachments and ligaments are larger. Their narrower pelvic girdle provides a mechanical advantage in walking, running, jumping etc. None of this goes away when a man or woman "transitions." It all stays the same. To bad so sad, physics is physics.

But the law, thanks to Leftist activists, says "that's a woman now." Sports governing bodies are in the interesting position of being forced to let second or even third-string formerly-male athletes compete against the top women, and beat them. Nobody seems concerned about formerly-females competing against the men, even though that's wildly unfair in the reverse direction.

The law does have one problem though. There's this other pesky law called "free speech" that allows sporty transphobes to mention the above immutable facts. Physics, you know.

The quote goes: "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell."

That's when this type of thing starts happening:

In mid-March 2019, Farrow was investigated by the Surrey police at the behest of Susie Green, the founder of Mermaids Gender, a trans activist organization. Green reported tweets in which Farrow used male pronouns to address her MTF daughter, believing them to be a violation of the UK's Malicious Communications Act.

Green also noted a tweet from October of 2018 in which Farrow accused Green of facilitating the 'castration' of her underage trans daughter. This was related to claims that Green brought her trans daughter, then 16 years old, to Thailand to receive a sex-change as she was not of the legal age to do so in the UK. This was confirmed by Green herself in a 2012 BBC 3 Documentary. Green eventually dropped the complaint into Farrow, claiming she did not want to give Farrow a wider platform to spread "misinformation."

Since, Farrow and her family has been the target of rapidly escalating cyber-abuse.

 

In a development that shocks no one, the police who were after her with one phone call from Suzie Green have been remarkably useless at protecting Caroline Farrow and her family. This is in the same country where not one but two national retail chains have stopped selling kitchen knives to prevent "knife crime." One of the reasons violent crime is out of control is the use of police resources to harass people like Caroline Farrow.

The same wave of bullying has been turned on two famous sportswomen, Martina Navratilova and Sharon Davies. Lesbians, aka "TERFS", aka older ladies who don't like men and don't want them around, are getting beaten up at Gay Pride Day parades by "trans-allies" and ejected from Lefty venues for speeches etc. leaving them begging The Heritage Foundation for a safe place to talk. By which I do not mean a "Safe Space," I mean a place where they won't get their asses kicked by armed Antifa goons.

All this for a disorder that AT MOST affects 0.004% of the population, and affects perhaps 100 athletes in the whole of Britain. Which is clearly insane.

So why are they doing it, when young men are stabbing each other to death in London in record numbers?

They're doing it so they can have a Malicious Communications Act, that's why. They're doing it to justify seizing control over the entire internet and shutting it down.

Leftists in the West have been losing elections pretty steadily since the 1990's brought us the Internet. Thanks to outlets like the Drudge Report and the fact that some guy like me can publish whatever I want for free, from my phone if neccessary, Leftists have found their lies getting shot out of the water pretty much 100% of the time. They don't care about sports or trans-athletes or women at all. They care about making it illegal to publish anything they didn't say was okay. They want to get back to the days when the BBC ruled the airwaves and the newspapers all printed what they were bloody well told to print.

That's why.

More militants attacking farms.

More violent assholes attacking a farm, this one in Australia.

A family-owned cafe has been forced to close its doors and leave staff jobless after they were relentlessly abused by vegan animal activists for months on end.

The Gippy Goat Café in the small Victorian town of Yarragon, about 110km south-east of Melbourne, closed its doors for the final time on Sunday, claiming they could no longer stand the abuse.

Owners John and Penny Gommans said they have been targeted for months. 

They claim tensions have only gotten worse since activists broke into their farm and stole three goats last December.

That's at least break-and-enter plus theft and property damage. According to the Gommans, the authorities declined to prosecute said well organized, well funded violent assholes. Read the whole thing, its revolting.

Coming soon to a town near you in Canada, unless we vote out the Liberals.

British stores stop selling cutlery? Apparently yes.

Co-op stores and the Walmart owned Asda stores will no longer sell kitchen knives.

Britain's sixth largest supermarket operator Co-operative Group was the latest chain on Friday to say it had stopped selling single kitchen knives in response to a wave of fatal stabbings.

Chief Executive Officer Steve Murrells told reporters on a call after the company's annual results that it put a halt to the sale of knives about three weeks ago.

"We've launched our safer colleague, safer community campaign to support colleague safety and help identify the causes of community crime. This has seen us remove kitchen knives from sale in our stores," he said.

Because knives cause crime, you know.  No knives, no stabbings. The calculus is really very simple.

How long before the populace is preparing their dinner with a shiv made out of a melted toothbrush? My guess, 2025. 

United Kingdom Ministry of Truth.

Somewhere, no doubt somewhere unpleasant, Hitler is laughing.

The UK government is taking a hard line when it comes to online safety, moving to establish what it says is the world's first independent regulator to keep social media companies in check.

Companies that fail to live up to requirements will face huge fines, and senior directors who are proven to have been negligent will be held personally liable. They may also find access to their sites blocked.

The new measures, designed to make the internet a safer place, were announced jointly by the Home Office and Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The introduction of the regulator is the central recommendation of a highly anticipated government white paper, titled Online Harms, published early Monday in the UK.

A brief listing of things which Must Not Be Allowed:

The regulator will be tasked with ensuring social media companies are tackling a range of online problems, including:

• Inciting violence and spreading violent content (including terrorist content)
• Encouraging self-harm or suicide
• The spread of disinformation and fake news
• Cyberbullying
• Children accessing inappropriate material
• Child exploitation and abuse content

As well as applying to the major social networks, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the requirements will also have to be met by file-hosting sites, online forums, messaging services and search engines.

Meaning every time one kid texts "KYS" to another kid (or when The Phantom uses KYS as an example) the internet provider and the phone company pay a fine. Which they pass on to their customer base, meaning us.

This accomplishes two things. It institutes a new realm or tax and regulation which will be very profitable for government, and it makes cell phones and internet too expensive for the peasantry. Gasoline tax for the internet, essentially. The peasants shall walk, the lords shall ride.

This will end well, I'm sure.

Screen time does NOT rot teenaged brains.

Another moral panic bites the dust.

Data from more than 17,000 teenagers show little evidence of a relationship between screen time and well-being in adolescents. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming, or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health.

Every new technology that comes out has this said about it. Comic books, television, pinball, arcade games, video games, the internet, and most recently "Screen Time" were all going to rot the brains of the younger generation. Every single time it turns out to be bullshit.

You'd think people would learn.

The Phantom

Even Microsoft can learn. Eventually.

Finally, the Windows 10 forced update retardation will cease.

Microsoft has announced that starting with the Windows 10 May 2019 Update, which will hit general availability late next month, users will no longer be forced to install new Windows 10 feature updates as they become available.

Because, as everyone has been telling them since they started with this shit, it breaks everything whenever they send another update. Sometimes printer drivers, sometimes the network, sometimes the PC itself. I run three networks in separate locations, two are business. Every new update, stupid little stuff breaks and I have to scramble. I can't even imagine what the IT department at a company like Proctor and Gamble or Ford has to deal with.

Saudis going after Jeff Besos? WTF?

This is just so weird.

"The security chief for Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said on Saturday that the Saudi government had access to Bezos' phone and gained private information from it," Reuters reports.
But in addition, the National Enquirer's lawyer "tried to get me to say there was no hacking," writes security specialist Gavin de Becker.

Rest of the story is at the Daily Beast.

It seems the Saudis were not happy with Bezos' owned Washington Post coverage of the Kashogi murder, and that there are wheels within wheels. Naturally since its the Daily Beast the whole thing winds up being cause by Trump, somehow. That guy gets around, eh?

But the take-home is that the Saudis hacked Jeff Bezos' phone and peeled it like a banana, then tried to blackmail him with the contents.

So the moral of the story is, don't have compromising pictures on your phone.

Long term, I forsee a resurgence of Polaroid and 35mm film cameras. Because you can't remote hack a piece of film.

The Phantom

Europe will Big Brother your car by 2022.

This is really quite amazing. New European Union proposal, on track to become law, aims to have full control over cars produced in 2022 and after.

EU leaders on Monday agreed that every car, van, truck, and bus should be fitted with a feature called "Intelligent Speed Assistance" designed to slow them down if they go too fast.
The software uses a combination of GPS, sign-recognition cameras, and advanced map software to pinpoint a vehicle's location and the local speed limit. The software is designed to automatically slow down vehicles found to break the limit.
Drivers would be able to override the software by pushing hard on the accelerator.

The plans, set out by the European Commission in May, were signed off on by politicians from EU countries in the European Parliament and European Commission on Monday night.
Vehicles under the proposal would also be required to have "Automated Emergency Braking" – designed to detect pedestrians and cyclists and brake accordingly.
The proposal also includes a rule meant to make it harder to drink and drive.
The proposal would make it easier to retroactively add a built-in alcohol breathalyzer, called an alcohol interlock device, which won't let a car start until the driver has blown into it.
The proposed changes also include the addition of onboard "Electronic Data Recorders" meant to track data in the moments before a crash. The EU hopes this would make it easier to work out why crashes occur.

For the math challenged, 2022 is not the remote future. It is THREE FREAKING YEARS from now.

So, to recap: The EU will make all new cars have all the drawbacks of a self-driving car with none of the benefits, they are setting up for pay-by-the-mile taxation, they are setting up for breathalizer inside your car, remote-served traffic tickets, and on-command disabling of all the vehicles in Europe.

All this at a time when Frenchmen in yellow vests are burning shops in Paris over a fuel tax, and have been for six months.

You add gun control and all the other crazy shit they've been pushing since the 1960s, and it begins to look like they have something really unpleasant planned.

The Phantom

Update: Yes, this technology does already exist and it is already deployed. Tesla. Like I said.

Tesla vehicles sent to the junk yard after a crash carry much more data than you'd think. According to CNBC, citing two security researchers, "Computers on Tesla vehicles keep everything that drivers have voluntarily stored on their cars, plus tons of other information generated by the vehicles including video, location and navigational data showing exactly what happened leading up to a crash."

The European Union proposes to make this mandatory for ALL cars. Plus the speed control thing, which I'm sure will lead to a ton of car crashes.

Automation does not stop with burgers and Walmart.

Hey all you snooty musical creative types, guess what? It is no longer just Juan Valdez and his donkey getting fired because the farm bought a coffee-picking machine.  Your artistic ass is getting REPLACED by a machine.

Endel is an app that generates reactive, personalized "soundscapes" to promote things like focus or relaxation. It takes in data like your location, time, and the weather to create these soundscapes, and the result is not quite "musical" in the traditional sense. It's ambient, layering in things like washed-out white noise and long string notes. It's the type of stuff that's exploded on streaming platforms in recent years under newly invented genre names like "sleep."

Although Endel signed a deal with Warner, the deal is crucially not for "an algorithm," and Warner is not in control of Endel's product. The label approached Endel with a distribution deal and Endel used its algorithm to create 600 short tracks on 20 albums that were then put on streaming services, returning a 50 / 50 royalty split to Endel. Unlike a typical major label record deal, Endel didn't get any advance money paid upfront, and it retained ownership of the master recordings.

Stripping away all the bullshit and cutting right to the end of the article, here's what happened:

Ultimately, the Endel / Warner deal is an inflection point. A major label made the decision to distribute and monetize automated audio, and it got 20 hours' worth of material for relatively little labor and expense that will now live alongside traditional music on playlists that are only viable because of streaming. Other labels will soon follow.

Thus, where filler music and ambient elevator noise used to be created and recorded by humans, now there's a computer program to do it that Warner Studios considers to be "close enough." If the production cost is low enough, it is worthwhile to make music and play it to cows.

So yeah, musician dudes. You can be replaced just like burger flippers and authors. Learn to code, boi.

The Phantom

Vegans now attacking farms.

https://www.2gb.com/i-dont-think-i-can-recall-a-worse-story-than-this-farmer-terrorised/

This is from Australia. A farmer had his place swarmed by 150 vegan protesters.

A distressed farmer has fought back tears after 150 vegan protesters stormed his family's Southern Queensland property, chanting "meat is murder".

Dressed in white overalls and black t-shirts that read "meat the victims", representatives from the Animal Activists Collective stormed the feedlot and dairy farm in Lemontree at Millmerran, shortly before midday Saturday.

This happened previously this month in Ontario.

In both cases, both Australia and Canada, the "protesters," otherwise known as trespassers and a few more things, were not arrested. Not for trespass, not for being a common nuisance, not for health-and-safety violations, not for assault nor any other similar offense they should have been charged with.

Does anyone think that 150 farmers invading PETA headquarters, trampling around the place with placards and chanting, would not be charged with common trespass? They would. For sure. Because an office is private property, and 150 farmers are not allowed to go traipsing through whenever they like.

This is yet another example of our Western governments behaving very oddly. Favoring fringe nut groups over the people who grow our FOOD, for fuck sakes. Why would you do that?

I'm growing increasingly convinced there's some kind of back-room money deal going on here between the people funding nut-groups like PETA and the Left side of the political spectrum. No one actually supports radical vegans, they're clearly crazy. So where's the political protection for them coming from? There's got to be money involved, and lots of it.

Follow the money, my friends.

The Phantom

Update: From Small Dead Animals.

Neuroscience breakthrough: men different than women!

New study finds male brains differ from female brains in second trimester of pregnancy.

In a scientific first, researchers claim to have found that differences between men's and women's brains start in the womb.

The conclusion is likely to be controversial, with some experts claiming social influences are more important.

But scientists who did brain scans of 118 foetuses in the second half of pregnancy to analyse the links between gender and the connectivity of a developing brain believe the differences are biological.

This is "controversial" because of the number of Gender Studies idiots out there claiming biology is irrelevant, and gender is all how you feeeeelz about it.

Funny how biology keeps showing up as a defining issue. The structural brain differences between men and women are many and well-documented, with new ones being discovered all the time. For example, I recall Oculus Rift having problems working with female gamers because the way their brains process visual information is different from males.

When you are trying to -injure- the audience.

Lately, particularly in book awards nominations but also very much in films and television, I have noticed a "race to the bottom". Authors and film makers contesting with each other to come up with THE most heinous, most injurious thing that's ever been produced. As if they want the people who read or watch to finish the thing and be catatonic at the end.

Well, apparently it isn't just me. Others have noticed.

"I'm concerned about the trajectory we're on," said Glenn Sparks, a professor at Purdue University who has studied the effects of media violence, and is one of a number of critics who come not from the more traditional ranks of conservative family groups but are instead academics, journalists and mental-health experts.

"If I worked at Netflix I might say, 'Well, this is what people want.' But that doesn't mean it should be provided," he said. "The research shows that escalating violence on-screen can make us more tolerant of it in real life; it can leave 'lingering fear' that can cause sleep disturbances and other problems."

"There is," he added, "an issue of social responsibility here."

There's a reason why comic-book movies are the biggest sellers out there right now, and this is it. They're the only movies you can watch to escape the horror.

I'm calling this "attacking the audience." The writer treats his audience as a group of criminals to be punished. This is very much on track with the general run of SJW journalism and "scholarship" (I use the term loosely) out there in universities these days. The Left side of the political spectrum considers Humanity to be a plague on the Earth, and seeks to chastise us all for the sin of being imperfect.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend I believe in the "escalating violence on-screen can make us more tolerant of it in real life" argument, it is 100% moral-panic horseshit. I've seen the odd bit of violence over the years, let me assure you that television does not make it more tolerable. I might go so far as to say that by watching violence on television one becomes inured to violence -on television- but beyond that, no.

However the "lingering fear", that's real. You can feel it, and it isn't a subtle thing. That's the whole point of a scary movie, to scare you.

Scary is a little different than what's going down lately though. These days they project horror, fear and hopelessness. They want you to lie down and die.

The cure for this sort of thing of course is to stop watching it. Stop reading it. I stopped years ago, and I feel WAY better.

The advanced course is to create uplifting and invigorating stories yourself. That's my present project.

The Phantom

New hate crime: Feminism!

Having abandoned women and chucked them under the bus, the Left has now decided to make Feminism a hate crime.

A second woman is being investigated by the police following allegations that she made transphobic comments on social media, the Telegraph can reveal.

Womans' rights campaigner, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, has been interviewed by two separate police forces after being accused of committing a hate crime by Susie Green, who runs a charity helping transgender children.

The news comes after it emerged that devout Catholic, Caroline Farrow, had been asked to attend an interview by the Surrey force, for allegedly using the wrong pronoun to refer to Ms Green's transgender daughter.

That's right, all you super feminist GRRRL Power ladies, you are now required to SHUT UP just like us straight white boys. Sucks, don't it?

Amazing how fast feminists went from special pets to reviled haterz, eh?

The Phantom

Big Brother says SHUT UP!!!

New Zealand and Australia government response to Christchurch shooting: ban Zerohedge.

In the wake of last week's terror attacks at two New Zealand mosques which left 50 dead, several websites which either reported on the incident, hosted footage of the attacks, or have simply allowed people to engage in uncensored discussion such as Dissenter or Zero Hedge, have been partially or completely blocked in both New Zealand and Australia for the sake of "protecting consumers," according to the CEOs of three New Zealand telcos. 

Proving how pointless this is, here's the same article on Infowars.

Summing up, the New Zealand government vowed to ban guns, they took down a bunch of internet sites, and they made a bunch of brave "Never Again!" speeches.

I guess they figure if you don't know about terrorist attacks, you won't know you need a gun and you'll get on with paying your taxes like a good little citizen.

The Phantom

Terrorism: Big Brother will not save you.

Well, here we are. Last week a mass shooting atrocity in New Zealand, today another, smaller one in Holland.

I'm not going to bow to convention and put in the usual boilerplate. I believe, at this point, that the emotional response to terror attacks and the separate, moral attack from the media is getting in the way. People die and we feel bad. But we have to get past that and create a defense against it.

To that end, I have noticed some things.

1) We are the most surveilled, most planned, most regulated culture in history. The East German Stazi had nothing compared to the surveillance apparatus available to authorities at present. They can literally track people in real-time, read all their mail, and know their innermost thoughts by tracking internet use and purchase history. All of this is useless for catching mass murderers.

2) Mass murderers kill the most people when they are unopposed. As soon as anyone gets after them, they go down.

3) I'm seeing this statement a lot lately: "Nothing justifies the evil actions of [New Zealand shooter boy]." This shows that people are not thinking. The mass killers are getting exactly what they want. They want to kill people. Either over religion or politics, as a tactic in war or for an unknown reason due to a mental disorder, they are getting exactly what they want. They are successful, and as long as that continues, they will keep doing it. Mass shootings are now a successful tactic.

Therefore, we as a society are going to have to deal with it.

Currently our "leaders" are dealing with it by increasing regulation and surveillance, by disarming the public, and by using the atrocities to go after their political/religious opponents. That this isn't going to work is quite apparent to everyone, but the attraction of slagging your political opponents by saying they caused the slaughter is just too juicy.

Therefore, a new approach is needed. The nature of the problem is:

1) Attacks are random.

2) They occur against unarmed people.

3) They can't be predicted.

Israel already handled this. That's why the Palestinians switched from shooting attacks to suicide bombers, and now have settled on lobbing home-made rockets over a fence at the Jews.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader what we should do next. Maybe you can come up with something better than I did, or the Israelis did. However, may I suggest that as a first step that y'all should pull your heads out of your asses.

The Phantom

Update 1: Guy sets bus full of kids on fire in Italy, media silent because he's not white.

Update 2: While not-white guy is setting bus on fire and the other not-white guy was shooting up the streetcar, media weenies are blaming everything on Toxic Whiteness.

Kate McMillan did a nice juxtapose on these two.

Salutations from the frozen North.

I made it back! I am firmly re-ensconced at Phantom Northern Command, back in the bunker as they say. The compound at Chez Phantom survived in one piece. Yay!

Big news for the week, I squished a real scorpion. Also went to the Good Guys car show in Scottsdale on Friday, that was very cool indeed.

Greetings from Phantom Southern Command!

Salutations, friends, from sunny Arizona. The Phantom Redoubt has been opened and found all present and correct. Currently blogging from McDonalds wifi, so updates will be sporadic.

Currently sweatshirt and long pants weather, but the sun is out and we have hope for some swimming later in the day.

Phantom Northern Command is buried in snow and the temp is about 10F, or ~-12C for you poor metric people.

So basically, feel free to hate me as hard as you want. ~:D

The True Face of the Liberal Party of Canada

This pic is making the rounds on Twitter today. Its a picture of some old bastard attacking a woman at the Justin Trudeau event that was held at the Danforth Music Hall. There is video out there too. He shoved her down to the floor, looks like by her neck.

He didn't get kicked out of the event, according to the source article. So far, no word on who he is.

Here's a closer look. Check out the expressions on women's faces.

That's who is supporting Trudeau. That guy. Take a hard look.

Now think about this, and this, and this. Yes. The government contains a lot of people who are crazy, they know everywhere you go and everything you do, they have no problem lying and stealing, and they work for THAT GUY.

Oh yeah, and you didn't see this first on the CBC. You saw it here, on the Nobody Important Yelling At The TV blog.

Okay? Everybody caught up? All on the same page? Goody.

So given all that, don't you think it might be time for a tax cut, so that violent assholes like white-hair-crazy-man don't have so much of our money to push us around with?

The Phantom

Left abandons women. Inevitably.

Dear ladies of women's professional sport. Your betters in the political Left would like to explain to you: SHUT UP BITCHEZ!!! First Martina Navratilova, now Sharron Davies.

"To protect women's sport those with a male sex advantage should not be able 2compete in women's sport."
The tweet was 'liked' more than 7,000 times in just 24 hours and she was met by support from former Olympic track winner Sally Gunnell, gold medallist boxer Nicola Adams OBE and gold middle distance athlete Dame Kelly Holmes, who commented: "Setting fair and safe markers in sport is a must."
But the comments faced fierce backlash online, with some even calling on Davies to be stripped of her MBE. Lucy Clark commented: "Well done Sharon, fuel the hate!
"No one chooses to be Transgender. You have no idea about what it is like to be TG. Shame on you! StriptheMBE."

 

That was the Sun UK, which reported it fairly straightforwardly. Ish.

The Independent article is interesting though. It starts with a TED talk video about trans and has numerous links and pictures promoting trans throughout the body of the text. Fanning the flames, one might say.

Davies is another liberal woman finally come to the point where she can't be dragged any further, because there is something she cares about more than politics. For her, that thing is women and women's sport. She knows, viscerally, that a third rate male can beat a first-rate female in almost any physical sport, every single time. About the only exceptions are things like car racing, shooting and certain gymnastics events where smaller size and weight are a greater advantage than muscle density.

I'm beginning to wonder not if she will be silenced by the law, but rather how long it will take them to get around to charging her.

There are at this point two or three possible end results of this farce.

First, and most likely, the top ten "female" athletes in the world will be men. That's where the gravy train is heading. People like Davies and Navratilova will be forced from public life by a barrage from the shite-flinging SJW apes, and women's sports will become men's sports. And then die, as women stop competing and men stop watching.

Second, and probably still fairly likely, the international sports committees will start feeling the quiet heat of every pissed off female on planet Earth, and create a special Trans-division where the men-in-dresses can compete with each other fairly. Which will be a cause celebre for 15 minutes of fame, and then fade away quietly because nobody actually cares. That's about the best outcome I can see, from a fairness and Humanity viewpoint. Everybody plays fair, everybody gets along, and the Market is allowed to speak.

Third, the most unlikely but probably the most fun, every female on every Olympic team in every sport refuses to compete against the men in dresses. They just down tools and walk out, leaving the IOC spluttering and shouting on the podium. That would be a thing of beauty, a blow struck for freedom and fair competition by every competitor.

The Phantom

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

MS13 targets NYPD at home.

Speaking of surveillance and corruption, here's an example of the shoe being on the other foot.

The NYPD is warning police officers about a possible threat from the MS-13 gang, particularly when they are off-duty.

CBS2's Dick Brennan reports that in a bulletin the NYPD put out this alert: "Members of MS-13 are looking to 'hit' NYPD police officers, specifically in the Brentwood/Central Islip area as well as possibly Patchogue."

The bulletin says that the gang members would carry out the attacks on off-duty officers "in order to gain street credibility."

This is the thing that gangs in Latin America commonly do. They attack the families of police and court personnel. They attack policemen when they are alone or at home without backup. They do this stuff in Mexico literally all the time, that's why the Mexican Army is performing police duties. The Army can bring guys from all over the country, so the local punks can't get at their families.

But now lets talk about civilian capabilities for a second. Drug gangs have a lot of money. They can buy top-grade weapons and kit if they want to. What if they bought a couple of $100,000 cell-phone trackers? They'd be able to track policemen by their cell phones. (Remember, in some countries like Mexico, Brazil, Columbia etc. the police are -part- of the gang. So gangs can buy police-only kit.)

Kinda puts a whole new complexion on the ubiquitous surveillance thing, eh?

The Phantom

Surveillance in Canada, yes they're doing it to everybody.

Something to consider for y'all Canadians today, the cops are hooked up with Ontario Ministry of Health records. Big time.

Documents obtained by Motherboard from Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (MCSCS) through an access to information request show that at least two provinces—Ontario and Saskatchewan—maintain a "Risk-driven Tracking Database" that is used to amass highly sensitive information about people's lives. Information in the database includes whether a person uses drugs, has been the victim of an assault, or lives in a "negative neighborhood."
The Risk-driven Tracking Database (RTD) is part of a collaborative approach to policing called the Hub model that partners cops, school staff, social workers, health care workers, and the provincial government.
Information about people believed to be "at risk" of becoming criminals or victims of harm is shared between civilian agencies and police and is added to the database when a person is being evaluated for a rapid intervention intended to lower their risk levels. Interventions can range from a door knock and a chat to forced hospitalization or arrest.

Sounds faintly Orwellian, the cops using healthcare records to decide who gets a knock on their door, based on an algorithm. What could go wrong, eh?

But there's more, as I've been saying for a long time. RCMP pretty much tracks whoever they want, whenever they want, by their cell phone.

IMSI catchers essentially act like fake cell phone towers. They force every phone within range—which may be up to two kilometres away—to connect and communicate information such as the handset's unique ID, the ID of the phone's SIM card, and its carrier and country of origin. Some IMSI catchers are capable of intercepting texts and phone calls.
IMSI catchers are indiscriminate. They act more like a dragnet than a targeted surveillance tool, and one can imagine how many innocents may be surveilled when an IMSI catcher is deployed in a bustling city centre.
Although the use of IMSI catchers by police in the US is well-known, the RCMP has been remarkably guarded about revealing its capabilities to the public.
"This technology is so privacy-invasive that it is essential we be given enough information to ensure that it is only being used lawfully and with respect for our Charter rights," said Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association's surveillance project. "Only then can we have a real debate about whether the benefits to public safety are at all proportionate to the profound privacy risks presented by this technology."

The key thing to remember here is that not only does the RCMP track cell phones, they maintain a database of that tracking. According to the article, for ten years. Oh, and they're covering it up. That's also a thing. This is a secret capability.

Lets put these capabilities together, shall we? We have a randomized database of health records, a non-randomized database of police records, and a ten year long secret database of cell-phone movements and calls. Plus the usual telephone records the phone company keeps. Plus commercial databases from companies like Facebook, who track literally everything you say or do online.

That is one hell of a collection of data, my friends. Add in some license plate readers and the odd video camera mounted in a streetlight, you've got the All Seeing Eye of Sauron. If you walked past a hooker on Main Street in Hamilton in 2011 on October 2nd, that's potentially in the database. If we let these guys do what they want, in ten years it will for-sure be in a database.

But then there is obsolescence to consider. As we saw yesterday, police departments and governments keep old stuff around way past its expiry date. Some of the Canadian government still runs on VAX mainframes from the 1980s, with data stored on TK50 tape cassettes. I expect the court system both provincial and federal runs on some really scary antique shit.

The astute reader will notice a pattern forming. Anything in government where they provide a service, such as real estate registration, drivers licenses, court documents, computerized health care records, health insurance (OHIP) etc., all these government organs don't get technology upgrades in a reasonable, businesslike fashion. They stumble along with backlogs of several years. Anything where the government is controlling the citizens, that gets all the brand new fancy technology. Those guys are cutting edge.

Because the final piece of this puzzle is CORRUPTION. Our government is corrupt from the bottom to the top. At the bottom its looking the other way for a small fee. At the top it is AdScam, it is the Gun Registry Scam, it is this week's brand new SNC-Lavalin Scam. Provincially there's the windmill scam, the gas-plant in Oakville scam, ORNGE, and on and on it goes.

But the crowning glory is that you're not reading this today on the CBC website. The Globe and Mail didn't put this on their front page. The media is covering for them, actively and passively both. We see it literally every day, there's no denying it.

You have to come to some weird obscure blog, who got it from another weird obscure blog, who got it from some bunch of agitators who used the Freedom if Information Act and read 40,000 pages of redacted court documents. But at least you got it.

Up to y'all what is going to be done about it.

The Phantom

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

Brain Plasticity, fuel injected turbo+nitrous version.

I ramble on about brain plasticity a lot. Somebody comes up with some crap about "National IQ" etc., I talk about how the brain adjusts to its environment. Brains change, basically.

Collins was three months shy of seven years old when surgeons sliced open his skull and removed a third of his brain's right hemisphere. For two years prior, a benign tumor had been growing in the back of his brain, eventually reaching the size of a golf ball. The tumor caused a series of disruptive seizures that gave him migraines and kept him from school. Medications did little to treat the problem and made Collins drowsy. By the day of his surgery, Collins was experiencing daily seizures that were growing in severity. He would collapse and be incontinent and sometimes vomit, he says.

Fast-forward to the happy ending, they excised the tumor along with half of the temporal lobe and the entire right occipital lobe, pretty radical, but the kid is fine. He can see, walk, talk and chew gum the same as before. Long story short, the intact side of his brain took over and now does the work of the part that was removed.

So the next time some idiot starts raging on about how the Sudanese have a national IQ of 40, or that there's a "gay brain" etc. just think about the power of the human brain to entirely replace parts that are missing, and consider what that means for "racial characteristics" and IQ.

The Phantom

Government is a disease.

Title seem a little extreme, I'll admit. But looked at from a social health standpoint, government is the thing that ruins everything.

Want to start a business? Want to buy a house, or get married, or even get a dog? Hell, you want to drive your car to Grandma's house? Government is there! And it is mostly in your way. And YOU pay for it too, that's the best part.

What set me off today? This is a situation I keep seeing over and over again, and it means something. Headline: America's Cities Are Running on Software From the '80s

The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it's the 1980s is the city assessor's office. Its property tax system dates back to the dawn of the floppy disk. City employees appraising the market work with software that runs on a dead programming language and can't be used with a mouse. Assessors are prone to make mistakes when using the vintage software because it can't display all the basic information for a given property on one screen. The staffers have to open and exit several menus to input stuff as simple as addresses. To put it mildly, the setup "doesn't reflect business needs now," says the city's assessor, Carmen Chu.

The particulars of this clusterfuck bear repeating.

In San Francisco the assessor uses a Cobol-based system called AS-400, whose welcome screen reads, "COPYRIGHT IBM CORP., 1980, 2009." As the city tax rolls jumped 22 percent over two years, workers were struggling to keep track of the changes on their ancient systems. At one point they fell three years behind. It's a "lot of manual work" just to perform basic functions, Chu says.

Searches that should seem simple take much longer because of the system's quirks. If a resident contacts the agency saying her house should have a different assessed value, a worker has to look up the block and identification number that's technically taxed; there's no way to filter by address. Also, all street numbers need to have four digits, so 301 Grove St. becomes 0301 Grove St.

Need I emphasize, this is San Francisco. The place where all the biggest brains in computing live, work and play. If you can't get somebody to sort out your fucked up mainframe in San Francisco, then a disinterested outside observer would have to conclude you are not trying to fix it. This is not East Moose Antler Montana, where the deer and the antelopes play.

Friend of mine works in a computer junkyard. This guy knows every damn thing about the Old Iron from the now defunct Digital Equipment Corporation. He can take apart and fix a worn out DEC TK50 tape drive to as-new condition. Why does he have a job fixing 1980s tape drives from a company that died in the 1990s? Because the federal and provincial governments of Canada are still running DEC-VAX mainframes, that's why. Also SUN SPARC stations, Silicon Graphics worstations, IBM AS-400 minicomputers, all kinds of obsolete hardware from the 1970s to the 1990s. Running software that may have originated in the 1960s and been upgraded in the 1980s. All this ancient shit is slower than your phone. Most of it is slower than a flip-phone.

Now, speaking of private businesses, we can safely assume that there are none still running faulty databases on antique AS-400 hardware from the 1980s. Why? Because they would be OUT OF BUSINESS by now. Who is going to hire a company to do anything when their order-entry department is three years behind?

Why is every state and federal government in North America in this position? Because they do not experience any pressure to get their work done. There is no eeeevile profit motive to work harder and do more. They just keep doing what they always do, the way they always do it, until one day they come in and the computer is a puddle of melted slag on the floor. Then they hide the evidence, and beg for more money.

We see this exact thing played out in nature. Businesses are like predators, always active, always hunting for new ways to make money, to cut costs, to stay ahead of the competition. Governments by contrast are like parasites. They latch on to a host, and they quietly suck the blood out of it nice and slowly, never making a fuss, never moving so the host doesn't notice their blood disappearing. Like gut worms.

Lately there's been evidence come forth that a few gut worms from time to time increase the health of the host by stimulating the immune system. But we all know that too large a load of parasites will kill anything, even an elephant.

That's where we are today. Sucked dry by a parasitic infection that does no work and adds nothing.

Here endeth the rant.

The Phantom

PayPal partners with SPLC to shut down Conservatives.

Yep that's right, the Southern Poverty Law Center tells PayPal who to do business with and who to deplatform.

The CEO of PayPal has revealed the multi-billion dollar service partners with the leftist organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to decide who should be blacklisted from their company. Using "company corporate values" as their defense, PayPal has taken intentional steps to deny access to conservatives.

Let there be no mistake, the SPLC is the hardest Left there is out there. They've been the moving force behind getting a lot of people kicked off social media, Youtube, and now PayPal.

In other news, various conservative companies and organizations have been suspended by Visa and Mastercard, such as David Horowitz and the NRA.

I do not see this ending well.

The Phantom

No Whites Yoga!

Wish I was making this up.

Brown Girls Yoga - Every Thursday from 5:10 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Brown Girls Yoga is a yoga class students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a People of Colour, and who currently or formerly identify as female.
We welcome students from all bodies-types, sizes and skill-levels. We also provide a Queer- and trans-positive space.

What to bring: Bring your own yoga mats. (Some yoga mats available on site.)
Registration: No registration required.
Location: Main Activity Hall, Multi-Faith Centre

Brown Girls Yoga is joint program presented by the Multi-Faith Centre in partnership with First Nations House and the Centre for Women and Trans People, University of Toronto.

Seen first at Small Dead Animals

RIP Peter Tork of the Monkees at 77.

Godspeed, Peter.

Its funny, Peter Tork is one of those people I never think about, but he was a big part of my television life as a kid.

So sad to hear he's gone.

The Phantom

Martina Navratilova, now a Conservative? Really?

Outspoken radical feminist, professional lesbian agitator and sportswoman Martina Navratilova is now a Conservative.

"It's insane and it's cheating," the famously gay tennis star said in a Sunday op-ed published by the Sunday Times.
"Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair — no matter how those athletes may throw their weight around," Navratilova said of transgender players' efforts to be recognized under their "chosen" gender.

This is not her first transgression against the Received Word:

This is far from the first time the 62-year-old player has spoken out against transgender players. Only a few months ago the multiple Wimbledon winner wrote on Twitter that men can't just "proclaim" themselves a female and then play against real women. "There must be some standards," she wrote, "and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard."

I do fear that Ms. Navratilova will now discover that the obvious biological truth is not a defense.

On the bright side, this particular bridge-too-far is separating the Reality Based people from the fruitcakes. Madam Martina has picked Reality over politically correct insanity, so I'm willing to cut her a little slack on the man-hatred. Some girls have good reasons for that sort of thing, and it falls under the "free country" exception. In a free country, you're free to be filled with hate all you want. Hard way to go through life, but none of my business.

The Phantom

Update: That didn't take long!

Athlete Ally, a group advocating LGBT inclusion in sports, has severed ties with tennis legend Martina Navratilova despite her longstanding advocacy for gay rights. Her crime? She disagreed with the idea that biological women should be forced to compete with biological men in sports, and especially tennis. To Athlete Ally, this constitutes heresy against transgender identity.

"Martina Navratilova’s recent comments on trans athletes are transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people through discriminatory laws, hateful stereotypes and disproportionate violence," Athlete Ally said in a statement announcing they were severing ties with the openly gay tennis legend.

How long before all the chickenshit sports gear companies dump all Martina's sponsorships? Couple more days. maybe?

Rule 4: DC Comics cancels book for blasphemy.

In an interesting turn of events, DC comics has cancelled a series because of a ShirtStorm.

DC Comics is set to release an outrageous and blasphemous new series featuring Jesus Christ as the sidekick for an "all powerful" superhero.

Let DC Comics know that this comic is inappropriate. It should be immediately pulled from their release schedule.

According to Fox News, the "Second Coming" comic "reimagines why Jesus left earth the first time and is coming back again." Author Mark Russell recently shared a bit about the concept behind his comic. He explained, "God was so upset with Jesus's performance the first time he came to Earth, since he was arrested so soon and crucified shortly after, that he has kept him locked-up since then."

There was a petition associated with this campaign, it got 20,000 signatures. DC decided that they didn't want to be on the news for blasphemy, and folded.

The Guardian was shocked, simply shocked I tell you:

But the comics publisher has now told retailers that the series has been cancelled. The decision follows a 200,000-signature petition from anti-abortion, anti-LGBT conservative campaign site CitizenGo calling on DC to pull the comic. "Would DC Comics publish similar content about other religious leaders, such as Muhammad or Buddha?" said the petition. "This content is inappropriate and blasphemous."

Leaving aside the answer to the question (which is "no" obviously, DC Comics would NOT publish similar blasphemy about Buddha or Mohamed) what's happened here is interesting. For years we have been amazed that a single phone call will cause a school board, a publisher, a TV show, basically any public body to cave in to SJW demands. One single complaint gets nativity scenes deleted from Christmas decorations at City Hall all over the Western world.

Here's one going the other way. That never happens. It never matters how many people complain about blasphemous or otherwise objectionable art, music or video. Governments and media never ever care how many people object to that stuff.

Except this time they blinked. This time, the community at large complained, and DC backed off. Live by the ShirtStorm, die by the ShirtStorm.

I don't view that as a good thing, sadly. What would have been nice is if DC respected their audience and didn't try to print this shock-schlock bullshit. I suspect they cancelled this thing because it is a turkey and they know they're going to lose money on it. The cover art looks like shit, the inside can't be better. No doubt they hoped a nice spicy bit of the usual controversy, where a few Christians yell and then get shouted down by the media horde. Except this time the horde didn't get any traction, and the Christians showed up in numbers. An accountant did the math, and that was that.

What's not good about this is one flavor of mob censorship is not better than another flavor. Lefties. righties, this is not the distinction that makes a difference. The distinction is -freedom-. There is no freedom when all that decides what gets done is the loudest mob. Freedom is telling the mob-du-jour to go fuck themselves and doing what you want.

Therefore, I can't celebrate this as a "victory" of decency against assholes. This is two sets of assholes fighting. What we want to do here is sell guns to both sides, and then run the survivors out of town on a rail. (Figuratively speaking of course. One can't take for granted that some ninny-nanny won't call the cops over a figure of speech, these things must be explicitly laid out.)

Big Study: Video games do -not- cause violence.

Another moral panic bites the dust.

A new study from the Oxford Internet Institute claims to have found no link between time spent playing violent video games, and increased aggressive behavior teen teenagers.

Wow, really. You think? Like since every teenager in the friggin' world has been playing Doom and Quake since the 1990's, if the games caused violence we should all be dead by now. Why do we keep seeing this "X causes violence!!!" trope in the news then?

This was supported by co-author Dr Netta Weinstein from Cardiff University who said: "Our findings suggest that researcher biases might have influenced previous studies on this topic, and have distorted our understanding of the effects of video games."

 

This is a polite way of saying what Mark Twain said previously, waaaay back in history there, "figures don't lie but liars figure." A sentiment so obvious that it is probably carved in hieroglyphics inside a pyramid somewhere.

Karl Marx's gravestone vandalized, oh noes!

If this isn't a sign of the times:

The suspected vandal damaged a marble plaque which was taken from Marx's original 1881 gravestone and incorporated into the 1954 monument.

Images of the defaced memorial, which attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year, show what appears to be damage done by a hammer to the lettering of Marx's name and the marble on which it is mounted.

I am not a fan of vandalism. I'm not saying it is a great thing to go out and smash up monuments to people I don't like.

What I am saying it that the Karl Marx grave marker sat undisturbed in London since they planted him in 1881, until now.

What I am saying is that this is the New Rules starting to bite down. Lefties have been breaking statues of Churchill and George Washington and pissing on war monuments for 20 years. Somebody out there decided it was time the Left had one of -their- monuments destroyed.

The Grauniad  was very distressed that their favorite dude Karl had his grave messed with. I hope they will think about it the next time somebody takes a hammer to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and they want to cheer him on. A faint hope to be sure, but still.

The Hopeful Phantom

Internet destroying nation's youths!!!

Yes friends, the nation's youth are being imperiled. Again.

Children have become such screen addicts they are abandoning their friends and hobbies, a major report warns today.

Researchers found under-fives spend an hour and 16 minutes a day online. Their screen time rises to four hours and 16 minutes when gaming and television are included.

Youngsters aged 12 to 15 average nearly three hours a day on the web – plus two more hours watching TV. The study said YouTube was 'a near permanent feature' of many young lives, and seven in ten of those aged 12 to 15 took smartphones to bed.

It concluded: 'Children were watching people on YouTube pursuing hobbies that they did not do themselves or had recently given up offline.'

I've lived through five of these moral panics now. When I was a baby in the 1950s, it was comic books that were imperiling the nation's youth. When I was a boy in the '60s and 70's, it was television and pinball. Then in the 1980s it was video games. In the 1990s it was video games and internet addiction. In the 2000s it was social media that was going to kill us all. Now the buzzword is "screentime".

No matter what new thing comes along, there's going to be some bunch of assholes dedicated to telling you that its going to kill your children. Just remember that its all made-up, and you'll be fine.

The Phantom

TERFs beg Conservative men for help.

Radical lesbian feminists seem rather bewildered at being left standing on the platform while the Gravy Train rattles off down the tracks on its biscuit wheels.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Kara Dansky, a feminist lawyer and spokeswoman for Women's Liberation Front (WoLF), spoke against the so-called "Equality Act" at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, denouncing the transgender and gender identity movement as anti-women and anti-lesbian in particular. Her remarks echoed the London Pride March sign declaring that "Transactivism Erases Lesbians."

Did you get that? The WoLF spokesbabe giving a talk at The Hertiage Foundation? BWAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!  But wait, it gets better! This is my favorite part:

"This is a men's Rights movement — this is really a men's rights movement," Dansky declared, calling for men to stand up for women and denounce the transgender movement.

So why are these Lefty radical fruitbats talking at the Heritage Foundation? This is awesome:

"The completely illogical statement that 'trans women are women' is recited like a Big Brother mantra in every Leftist space," Beck declared. "No one really believes it, but saying so will jeopardize your career, your community, and your life."

Beck, Dansky, and Chavez only spoke at the conservative Heritage Foundation because no liberal organization would welcome them, despite the fact that they are liberals — radical feminists!

These radical feminists received a standing ovation at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Monday. Their bravery in speaking truth to the Left's increasingly intolerant orthodoxy inspired an audience that would normally grimace at the idea of siding with homosexual activists.

Yes, those horrifying Nazis at the pro-gun, anti-abortion Heritage Foundation gave the Grrrlz a standing ovation.

Proving once again that everything you ever hear in the media about Republicans, conservatives, gun owners and what have you is always, always bullshit. Lying Lefties always lie.

The Phantom

Update: Andrew Sullivan noticed the lesbians at the Heritage Foundation.

The core disagreement, it seems to me, is whether a trans woman is right to say that she has always been a woman, was born female, and is indistinguishable from and interchangeable with biological women. That’s the current claim reflected in the Equality Act. But is it true that when Caitlyn Jenner was in the 1976 Olympics men’s decathlon, she was competing as a woman, indistinguishable from any other woman? Contemporary orthodoxy insists that she was indeed competing as a woman, and erases any distinction between a trans woman and a woman. Similarly, public high-school girls track or wrestling teams would have to include female-identifying biological males — even if they keep winning all the trophies, and even if the unfairness is staring you in the face.

Post-Modernism meets Reality, crumples up and goes on fire.

Media Meltdown: the puddle spreads.

The Daily Telegraph issues an apology for printing absolute horse shit:

Following last Saturday's (Jan 19) Telegraph magazine cover story "The mystery of Melania", we have been asked to make clear that the article contained a number of false statements which we accept should not have been published. Mrs Trump's father was not a fearsome presence and did not control the family.  Mrs Trump did not leave her Design and Architecture course at University relating to the completion of an exam, as alleged in the article, but rather because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model. Mrs Trump was not struggling in her modelling career before she met Mr Trump, and she did not advance in her career due to the assistance of Mr Trump.

There's more. It seems that the original article was absolutely stuffed with bullshit, so much so that the Telegraph is paying Melania Trump money and legal costs as a settlement.

I know there's an old saying,"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But my suspension of disbelief is a little bit stretched here. For this to be mere stupidity, all the people and all the lawyers working for the Telegraph would have to be eight year olds. Therefore, the corporate structure at the Telegraph must have considered publishing this thing "worth it" even though they knew it would cost them money.

What would make this "worth it" I leave as an exercise for the reader, because I got nothing. I can't imagine why they'd bother.

The Phantom

Update: Seen first at Small Dead Animals.

Supremes: Yes, Trump IS the commander in chief.

Today, to the sound of great tooth gnashing and wailing from the fruitbat Left, the Supreme Court held 5-4 that yes, the President does get to decide who is allowed in the armed forces and who is not.

Here is what they're screaming about:

The president abruptly announced on Twitter in July 2017 that the military would not permit trans personnel to serve. Thereafter, former Defense Secretary James Mattis convened a panel of military experts to conduct an independent review of the subject. Their findings served as the basis of Mattis' February 2018 memo which implemented Trump's request.

What does that all mean, exactly?

That memo provides that individuals with a history of gender dysphoria — a clinical term referring to anxiety triggered by the conflict between one's biological sex and the gender with which they identify — may enlist provided they are willing to serve in their biological sex and have not suffered gender dysphoria for a continuous three-year period prior to recruitment. Active personnel who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria may continue to serve provided they do so in their biological sex.

Basically, despite the shrieking and wailing of the Left and their paid character-assassins in the media, nobody is "banned" from the military any more than any other medical condition is banned. It does mean that the military has chosen not to go along with the gender-dysphoria cosplay that so many Lefties seem to consider mandatory. 

Update: To illustrate the point, here's the downside of getting your bowels in an uproar about "trans-inclusion" and "cismale white hetero patriarchy!" in the military.

As for readiness, it is not solely a Navy problem. Over the holidays, I talked to an Army dude who has been in for 17 years (and is really looking forward to getting out in 3 more years). He was bitching about readiness and how it has taken a back seat to SHARP. He was really irate about this.
“What’s SHARP”, I asked.
He told me. SHARP is Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention. According to him, that is much more important than readiness training. He’s had to stand down from a training exercise to attend a SHARP class. Can you imagine that?

Yes I can, because I've seen the same shit at hospitals. You get one (1) class on infection control. You never stop getting Wokeness and harassment classes. Because that's what's important in a hospital, y'know.