Crossfit quits Facebook, Instagram: "utopian socialists"

This is going to leave a mark.

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

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

Down at the bottom comes the good part:

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

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

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

The stampede away from social media begins.

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

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

Cut down trees to save the planet!!!!

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

The mind reels.

Happy "Molly Norris is still in hiding" Day.

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

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

Over a blog post.

Let's not forget.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Phantom

Microsoft is trying to force me to use Linux.

Microsoft is pushing a new suite of tools for Word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the top female athletes are boys...

...the girls will sit on the bench.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexa and Smart-home are spying on you.

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there's more:

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

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

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

And even more:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not a phone. Its a tracker.

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

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

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

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

The Phantom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is there no off switch?

Somebody finally asks. Larry Sanger, American internet project developer and co-founder of Wikipedia, wants to know why nothing has an OFF switch anymore.

It's almost as if the vendors of common, must-have devices want to make it possible to spy on us. An enterprising journalist should ask why they don't make such switches. They certainly have deliberately made it hard for us to stop being spied upon -- even though we're their customers. Think about that. We're their bread and butter, and we're increasingly and rightly concerned about our security. Yet they keep selling us these insecure devices. That's just weird, isn't it? What the hell is going on?

I remember a loooong time ago when I was in high school, my mother's office got an Apple computer. On an IBM PC, the off-switch was an OFF switch, it stopped the power to the motherboard. On the Apple, it was a suggestion. You pushed the "off" button, and eventually the machine would get around to shutting off. Unless it was hung, in which case it would just sit there, forever. Mom solved the problem by unplugging it at the end of the day.

But this is 2019, and now none of your shit even has a plug. The last phone I had that you could get at the battery was a Blackberry. Apple has had inaccessible batteries since the iPhone 1, I think.

Currently, as Mr. Sanger says, no hard-wired power-interruption switch is available on ANY portable electronic device I can think of off hand. And we know those devices can be turned on remotely. As Sanger says in the article, and as I've said elsewhere, people have been putting stickers or tape or bandaids over those laptop webcams since they started making them. We know that Facebook Messenger serves ads based on voice-only conversations.

For that matter the latest Big Marketing Push is for Amazon Alexa and the Google equivalent, which are always-on recording devices. With no off-switch.

Therefore, when you see an entire industry doing something bad, you must immediately follow the money. Clearly, there's money being made from spying on customers and selling the data. A great deal of money, probably. As well, there are probably government mandates buried deep in regulations that we don't know about.

What would it take to make them stop spying? That is the next question.

The answer is the same as it always is. Threat of bankruptcy. You spy, you die. That will take a social movement the size of the one currently being waged for #MeToo.

Update: Welcome Instapundit! In the comments, one person suggested an aluminum pot as a makeshift Faraday cage. Excellent thought!

On Good Friday, an admonition to virtue from a Capitalist Asshole.

This article is by Aaron Clary, owner of Asshole Consulting. Seen first at Small Dead Animals.

The House on Lake Minnetonka That Never Existed

Because of its proximity to the campus me and my friends would regularly bike and run around this lake.  Not only for the beauty of the lake, but the architecture of the houses that surrounded it.  And even though one would prefer to run around this lake during summer, one of my fonder memories of the Twin Cities was running around Lake of the Isles at night during winter.

Even though it may have been -5 outside, I still enjoyed running around Lake of the Isles because it gave me my goal, my inspiration, and my incentive to work hard and study hard in school.  I did not come from wealth, but at night (and not in a creepy, stalker type sense) many of the mansions would have their lights on allowing me to kind of peer into these homes and wonder about what life was like on the inside.

What was it like to have a nice warm home and not sleep in a basement?
What was it like to have so much wealth you didn't have to worry about student loans?
Is that a wall oven I see?  Is the wife of that home making dinner?  Gosh, a home cooked meal would be great.
And forget dinner, I bet those people have nothing to worry about. They're RICH.  They got it made.

Spoiler, they weren't rich and they didn't have it made. What they really were was miserable. Envy, greed and hate are the killers of life. Mr. Clary explains, in considerable detail.

Its a bit long, but on a Good Friday with all that's been going on the last few years, and with the Cathedral of Notre Dame burning the way it did, I found this post of Aaron's to be one of the best practical bits of advise on a virtuous life I have ever seen.

The Phantom

North Korea mean to animals! [sob!]

This is what I love about bunny-huggers, as a race. Of all the horrors in North Korea, from death by starvation to sex slavery, these assholes are upset about the bears in a circus.

Campaigning group Animal Defenders International (ADI) said circus animals like these had been tamed by a lifetime of suffering.

ADI president Jan Creamer said: "Forced to perform in circus style shows, these poor animals endure a lifetime of suffering and deprivation.

"Denied the normal, social and mental stimulation they would enjoy with their families in the wild, the compliance of these intelligent, feeling animals is achieved through violence, threats, and withdrawal of food, water and affection during training.

"The public can help end their suffering by avoiding animal shows and letting attractions know why they are taking their custom elsewhere."

Tell you what snowflake, those bears are better taken care of and better fed than most of the people watching them. Grow a brain cell.

The Phantom

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