Just so you're clear who's mailing your welfare check...

This little beauty caught my eye today, thought I'd share it with you. 

The Ontario arm of the Canadian Union of Public Employees announced yesterday it would propose, in a meeting next month, "a ban on Israeli academics doing speaking, teaching or research work at Ontario universities," if they do not explicitly condemn Israeli action in Gaza.

The Blob & Snail characterizes this as an occurence which "sparked a bitter debate" between "both sides".  The reason for CUPE to do this? (Oh, you're going to love it!)

The proposal comes specifically after a Dec. 29 attack on an Islamic University in Gaza, which Israel claimed was affiliated with Hamas.

"Attacking an institution of learning is just beyond the pale," CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan said last night. "They deliberately targeted an institution of learning. That's what the Nazis did."

No mention of the little kids in the Israeli school that DIED from the Hamas missile the other day, but maybe the Blob staffers can't remember back that far.

Anyway, superdude Bernie Farber charges to the defense of his co-religionists:

The connection – of Israel to the Nazi regime – infuriated Bernie Farber, chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who said no one yet knows whether the university was a legitimate target, and that Mr. Ryan's comments were "nasty and bigoted rhetoric."

Way to go Bern, you're a mench.  "Maybe Israel is run by Nazis, we aren't sure, but Ryan is a meanie for saying so."

Israel "claimed" the Gaza University was "affiliated" with Hamas because missiles were being built on the premises and arms stored there.  I could be wrong but I heard they had video of ordinance being fired from there too.  I did not personally see any of this with my own two eyes, because I live in Ontario Canada.  But I believe the IDF.

If there's a choice between believing the IDF or Hamas, I chose the IDF every time.  This is because the IDF does not have its soldiers riding around in ambulances, hiding among civilians and indescriminantly shooting large rockets at towns and cities.  Hamas is known to do that, and is doing it right now, today, even as I write this.

Your Canadian Union of Public Employees, whose members include pretty much every worker in the Ontario government bureaucracy, choses to believe the claims of the ambulance riding, skirt hiding, missile firing Hamas pussies whose entire purpose is to kill all the Jews in Israel.  Says so in their charter.

I'm thinking the drones at the Ontario Human Rights Commission are probably CUPE members. Quite the conundrum they face today.  On the one hand their union screaming that the sacred cow of Leftism, the Holy Victims of Palestine, are being gored.  On the other hand their raison d'etre, anti-Semitic words being voiced in public... by their union.  It will be enlightening to see how they manage this growing conflict of interest, won't it?

My money is on them charging Bernie Farber with being off side.

Take your good intention in one hand and spit in the other...

Habitat for Humanity is being sued!

RESIDENTS of a model housing estate bankrolled by Hollywood celebrities and hand-built by Jimmy Carter, the former US president, are complaining that it is falling apart.

Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day "blitz" organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.

Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.

I will note here that eight years is about the right length of time for the paint and the caulking to have cracked on the exterior.  Florida is pretty rainy, you don't keep up with the painting and bad things start to happen. 

Maybe giving a house to people who don't understand/can't afford basic maintenance is not the best idea?

The future is hammering on the door again.

Saw this little announcement today.

Update, April 1st 2015:  http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-claims-quantum-leap-in-fibre-optic-detectors/

Intel has developed silicon-based photoelectric detectors that could cut the cost of fiber-optic communications to a fraction of their current value.

That's nice I thought, and almost skipped on.  But then I saw this part:

"Just to put it into context, a commercial [photodetector] that is used in telecoms typically sells for $200 to $300," Paniccia said. "We're talking devices that are probably an order or two in magnitude lower in cost." This prediction makes Intel's devices between 10 and 100 times cheaper than current photodetectors.

This means fiber optic to your house, which is already a paradigm changing event and already happening.  But it gets better.  These guys are talking about 40 to 200 gigabit per second speeds. For peanuts.  
A DVD movie with all the trailers and special features is about 7 gigabytes, 56 gigabits.  We're talking the downloading of a whole DVD movie in under two seconds.Your hard drive isn't nearly that fast, not even close.

This means a couple of things.  First, bandwidth will soon be just amazingly cheaper.  Fiber optic cable is -way- cheaper than coaxial cable or twisted pair copper, its just glass.  The thing that's been holding back optical cable is the expense of these photodetectors.  Intel can replace a $300 part with a $3.00 part, there's going to be optical cable getting laid down frickin' everywhere.   That will mean your local cable company, local phone company etc. will be running optical to your house, and you'll probably be running optical -in- the house instead of CAT5 Ethernet or wireless.  Sending really enormous amounts of data will be extremely cheap.

Second, cheap data means more data.  The limiting step won't be transmission any more, it will be storage.  You'll be able to have hi-def quality video in the security cameras at the bank machine.  Count the pores on your nose quality.  Live, real time, all the time.  Youtube won't be shaky little squares on your screen anymore, it will be broadcast quality. On-line video games will be faster than lan-party, and the graphics will be Hollywood movie good.

Third, all this is going to crash together with the wireless boom going on right now and something will emerge that I can't even imagine.  What could you do with every cell phone/Blackberry in the city having hi-def video and stereo sound recording and playback, plus GPS, plus as much on-board processing as a desk-top PC does today?  Plus desk tops with 20 CPU cores, 200 gigs of RAM and multi-terabyte storage?  Hooked to a  200 gb/sec  fiber backbone?

This is going to be a Big Fricking Deal my friends, and it will be coming down the pipe to your house in under ten years.  The internet, turbo-nitrous version.

Buy Cisco.  They'll be selling some servers, I bet.  Corning is going to sell some glass, too.

Will you be protected from a hate crime?

On the subject of hate crimes and police protection, we have this week the example of the Bombay terror attacks. 10 men apparently were able to kill 300 people (so far, anyway) using rifles and grenades. No fancy gas or suicide bombing, just plain ol' blast away. In a modern city (which Bombay most certainly is) how is such a thing possible?

Eye witness tells all.

But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D'Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. "I couldn't believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn't run, we told them to stay put."

The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D'Souza added: "I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."

You hear that a lot in eye witness accounts of attacks like this.

There is the example of the Luby's Cafeteria atrocity in Killeen Texas. Suzanna Hupp famously testified to Congress that she would have been able to end that massacre before it started, but for the law that required her to leave her gun in her car. That's where it was when she watched the man kill her parents, nice and safe in the glove compartment... and completely useless.

At the Columbine high school massacre, the two killers started shooting at 11:19 am, police entered the building at 1:09pm. They had free rein for two hours.

There are many more examples. "Call 911 and die" is a famous saying for a reason. Cops are not motivated to take a bullet for you. The pay is good, but not that good.

Let us take Paladiea's posting in hand now. The Toronto Star report on the assault states a man started punching out two gay women in the school parking lot, and that this man had threatened them before. The only reason he didn't put them both in the hospital (or kill them) was other people in the parking lot stopped him. Those two women got lucky, in other words. Good Samaritans were on hand to save their asses.

Point being, the two women were not in a position to save themselves from one unarmed asshole who decided to beat them up on the spur of the moment. They were prevented, by law, from having weapons that would equalize their ability to fight with the much larger and stronger man who attacked them, a person who had threatened them before. Just as the photographer and Suzanna Hupp were prevented.

If I were the type of person who despised gays and wanted to hurt them, I'd find this legal regime entirely to my liking. Same deal if I were a terrorist. Lots of nice fat targets waiting unarmed, like sheep in the fold.

Paladiea's response to the incident is interesting. She seems much less interested in empowering women, visible minorities and other target groups (like Christians) to protect themselves from attack than she does in using government to preemptively punish groups she feels are responsible for the attacks. Primarily men, from her comments.

This leads me to think perhaps she may not be interested in in preventing hate crimes at all, but rather in taking revenge after the fact. This is not a wholesome attitude.

For myself, it is my firm conviction that justice is best served by the intended victim upon the attacker, during the attack. Call me crazy, but two short, weak little chicks sticking guns in the big, strong man's face seems a better impulse control lesson for him than fines and sensitivity training.

Regarding hate crimes, and their prevention

The other day I casually commented on a post by Paladiea over at Stormy Days of March, and got a response I really didn't expect.

Her post was this. which I reproduce here for easy reading.

Take a Stand Against Hate Crimes!

In support of the two women who got assaulted in front of their children for being homosexual;

There is going to be a rally in front of Oshawa City Hall this Friday at 7:30pm to 8:15 pm. The rally will be on the north side of City Hall (King at Centre). Speakers will include: Community Development Council, PFLAG Canada, Egale, AIDS Committee of Durham Region. Other potential speakers include: Dr. Brent Hawkes (MCC Toronto) and the Mayor of Oshawa. The City of Oshawa is working to help set up the rally.

Please attend if you can make it!

Well, a rally isn't going to do much is it?  My comment was that I've been teaching martial arts and shooting to anybody who will sit still for it since the 1980's, and women are going to keep getting attacked until they get back their right to defend themselves with a weapon.

Pal's response kind of made my hair stand on end..

Anyhow, that's a fair trade Phantom, more shooting deaths for the "safety" of minorities. Or is it only women who would get to shoot people on sight? What about a gay woman? Does being a person of colour afford you a free shoot to kill card too?

What idiocy…

Over the next couple of days I'm going to have a go at this comment, because it shows a very common, mainstream Toronto belief.  A belief which is quite frankly getting people killed.  I shall produce the evidence which disproves the idea, then I will have a look at who is pushing the idea and why.

But first I must move about 2 tons of flooring into the basement.  The snow has stopped here at Chez Phantom, so I better get to it.

I'll leave you with this thought.  Heinlein said in one of his books, "If you can't measure it, it ain't science."  If Paladiea is correct and allowing "the masses" to have firearms results in more shooting deaths, you should be able to measure that.  How would one go about making such a measurement?  Has it been done, and how did it turn out?

The Measuring Phantom

See? Told ya!

Evidence du jour supporting my Official Phantom Prophecy of the immanent demise of Greenie Weenie causes in the political realm:  NBC jettisons Weather Network Environazi Unit.

NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the "Forecast Earth" environmental program during the middle of NBC's "Green Week," as well as several on-camera meteorologists.

And the money quote:

Forecast Earth was hosted by former CNN anchor Natalie Allen, with contributions from climate expert Heidi Cullen. It was the sole program on TWC that focused on global climate change, which raises the question of whether the station will still report on the subject. Cullen's future role at the network is not known.

There was a bunch of bafflegab at the end from NBC "explaining" why they shit canned 80 people and a whole global warming scare show, which boiled down to its essence translates to "This greenie propaganda isn't selling, advertisers are fleeing and we are losing our shirts here, so we are cutting our losses."

Hasta la vista, environazi programming.  Pretty soon you're not going to see the words "green" or "environment" anywhere in the media.  Its over.

The Crystal Ball Gazing Phantom

The nature of freedom's enemy.

I read today a nice little spark of insight from Five Feet of Fury:"Because Harry Potter is not a documentary".


Here in Soviet Canuckistan as y'all know (because I never shut up about it!) we have the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its various provincial versions acting as judge, jury and executioner in various cases where a person has posted something on the Internet that proved to be "unacceptable".  Or refused to print something, in one case. 

Anyway, there is in fact a little industry at the HRC of government employees beavering away all day posting really objectionable things at blogs and message boards, trolling for agreement or just trying to see if their filth gets left on the board for a while.  Then a different person files a complaint, and in 100% of the cases (so far) the target is found guilty and fined.

There are those in Canadian public life who have said out loud and in print that this is A Good Thing, and the HRCs should keep doing this and probably do it more.  Regarding these worthies, The Furious One says:

Remember: our fight is only 50% ideology, if that.

<cowardly Phantom snippage of naming names, I don't have a legal defense fund>

 

This fight is really about class, social standing, prestige. Who has it, who doesn't, and how that status quo can be maintained, by using the powers of the State to break the law, if necessary.

I would venture that this is more about -money-.   Prestige don't pay off the car loan, know what I mean?

Maybe not a buttload of money, but they are paying the bills and the work is pretty easy.  If anything the small sums involved make these individuals go all the harder.  They're trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table by hunting "bad guys", so "bad guys" is what they will come up with.   Even if they have to manufacture them.  If in the process they manage to destroy MY freedom to say what I want, well that's just too bad.  Business is business.

As an employment model I'd rather shovel shit from one place to another myself, but then I'm the "bad guy" here.  By insisting that the government has no business censoring speech in a free country, they say I'm "enabling" eeeevile  racist/bigot/homophobes to damage our society.  I should just shut up and let the Big Brains get things done, because I'm stupid and must be controlled for my own good.

Well no, actually I'm screwing with these Nazi hunter's paycheck and benefits package, which makes them frantic.  Double that for the global warming and gun control crowds, they are watching their golden geese shrivel and die already.

Read the whole Furious piece, its a giggle.

The Phantom Nazi-Hunter Hunter

I may have to barf. Or break something. I can't decide.

Noah Richler's piece in the National Post today has flipped my biscuit, I must say.  Entitled "Our Obama Will Be Native" he says:

In all of this lie intimations of our own possible destiny. If Canada is to experience its own extraordinary, galvanizing political progression, it will not be because it has elected a black to high office. That would be pleasing enough, not least because slavery was also practised here, though it would be misrepresenting history to pretend that the issue is as profoundly troubling here as in the United States. But no, our own Obama moment will occur when Canada upholds a candidate from the First Nations as prime minister. Then we shall have confronted our own national shame. Then we shall have surmounted our own historical disgrace.

Will the race huckstering never cease?  Will the bleeding hearts bleating for "social justice" never be silent?  Will the accusations of bigotry continue forever?

You want national shame Noah?  You want historical disgrace? 

How about $14 billion a year, every year, spent to keep Indians rotting in starving, alcohol soaked, drug addled penury on reservations across the country?  How about the two-tier Ontario justice that allows a glorified biker gang to hold both the Six Nations reserve and the entire town of Caledonia hostage for three years now?  How about an infant mortality rate in northern reserves which approaches that of the Congo ?  How about an old boy network in the mythical First Nations governance that ensures nothing changes on these reserves, and the same people keep soaking up all the money?  How about a White socialist generated culture war that has Indians across the country repudiating Canada and pretending to be separate countries, as if that was a good thing?

Canada is absolutely the most tolerant nation in the world, to the point where we tolerate things that harm us all for fear of appearing judgmental.  There are no "victim groups" in this country, no sex or race or religion which is singled out for organized oppression by the general public.  There is only misguided, destructive government policy generated by IDIOTS the like of Mr. Richler, who seek to feather their own nests by keeping the Indians as clients of their oh so generous hand-out machine. The faster we dump this kind of thinking the sooner the suffering on the reserves will cease.

Should an Indian man become Prime Minister, I would hope that unlike Mr. Obama it is because he earned it with his abilities, hard work and honorable behavior.  You know, the way the rest of us do things.

The Phantom

Governator terminates Kalifornia!

The tax hikes continue!

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed $4.4 billion in tax increases and billions more in spending cuts to close California's worsening budget deficit, declaring: "We must stop the bleeding."

Schwarzenegger on Thursday called for a special session of the state Legislature to address a deficit that has grown to $11.2 billion just six weeks after he signed the budget for the current fiscal year.

There you go kids, New York City and California first out the gate with tax hike proposals. More soon to follow, no doubt.

I don't know where the hell they think people are going to get the money, nobody is going to have a frickin' job. The Big Three car company CEOs are in Washington tonight begging Nancy Pelosi for money. If they go under, it will be some pretty serious shit. Not only will Big Three employees be out on the bricks, so will all the guys who work for the hundreds and HUNDREDS of little companies who make stuff for the Big Three. That's a lot of guys.

Washington may actually have to cut its spending. By which I mean not reduce the rate of spending increase, but actually spend -less- money. Watch what the government unions do. ~:D

The Amazing Bloomberg will now make NYC vanish!

Yes friends, the Amazing Bloomberg will astound you with his feats of prestidigitation, as he causes the entire working population of New York City to disappear in a puff of smoke!

The mayor proposed raising the income tax by either 7.5 percent or 15 percent.

Oh, and budget cuts too! Yep, the Amazing Bloomberg will be slicing off 1000 cops from the NYPD. But don't worry friends, he's going to add 200 new Green Hornets to hand out traffic and parking tickets.

What do the DemocRats say? Wait for it, this is just too juicy:

"I think the people of the city are going to be enraged," City Councilman Simcha Felder, D-Brooklyn, said."

Funny stuff, Councilman!

The Phantom

How to tell bad policy.

This is rich. Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry is a little book by two avowed Marxists. Which is funny as hell, because the "Aboriginal Industry" is pretty much a creation of Marxists from the 1970's. Its created a situation so heinously bad even fellow travelers can't stomach it.

"These revelations came to them when the two worked advising the Northwest Territories government in the 1990s. The territory had incorporated into official policy something called "traditional knowledge," requiring departments to include the spiritual folklore of Inuit and First Nations culture in decision-making about resource management - say, approving mines or setting hunting quotas."

Religion in government?! This cannot BE!

So they wrote a little book. You can tell something is really, really not working when it won't stand up to a functional analysis done by actual Marxists. I mean, 14 billion a year and people are still starving/freezing to death? Even a Commie can tell that ain't right.

Will Dems seek to censor the Right?

Is the Pope a Catholic?

From the NY Post today, the magic question:  What would Obama do?

SHOULD Barack Obama win the presidency and Democrats take full control of Congress, next year will see a real legislative attempt to bring back the Fairness Doctrine - and to diminish conservatives' influence on broadcast radio, the one medium they dominate.

Yes, the Obama campaign said some months back that the candidate doesn't seek to re-impose this regulation, which, until Ronald Reagan's FCC phased it out in the 1980s, required TV and radio broadcasters to give balanced airtime to opposing viewpoints or face steep fines or even loss of license. But most Democrats - including party elders Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Al Gore - strongly support the idea of mandating "fairness."

Would a President Obama veto a new Fairness Doctrine if Congress enacted one? It's doubtful.

I ask a slightly different question.  Would a guy who already says he wants to "spread the wealth around" shrink from telling y'all to shut up about it? Would he buck the people who moved heaven and earth to get him in to office just to protect the God given right to free speech?  Of his opposition?

I agree with The Post. It's doubtful. 

Instead, I think its likely a Department of Fairness will be created.  Kind of like the Ministry of Truth, but more folksy and American.  A whole new bureaucracy of bright eyed recent college graduates (English majors, of course) run by wily old Dem ward heelers.  Their job it will be to sift the Internet, print and broadcast media for "unfairness".  Which will of course be subject to interpretation.

So, all you Americans, bear that in mind when you vote.  Its going to affect you rather directly, particularly if you blog on the web or even comment on other people's blogs.

Still, the silver lining is it will be a major boon to "off-shore" web hosting should it come to pass.  Canada is pretty off-shore.  Maybe I'll buy a couple server racks and take the Phantom Soapbox international.  Seeing as how there's a butt-load of Blogger accounts going to go dark real soon, them being "unfair" to DemocRats and all.  No reason a good conservative shouldn't make some money fighting  DemocRat censorship, eh?

The Phantom

Orwell had no idea.

The Labour government has announced a bill which, if passed, will create a centralized database which stores every e-mail, web page visit, text message, fax and phone call in the country.

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the police and security services needed new powers to keep up with technology.

And she promised that the content of conversations would not be stored, just times and dates of messages and calls.

Not because she doesn't want to store all that content, but because there's not enough drive space in the entire world to do it.  They're working on that part

. Details of the times, dates, duration and locations of mobile phone calls, numbers called, website visited and addresses e-mailed are already stored by telecoms companies for 12 months under a voluntary agreement.

The data can be accessed by the police and security services on request - but the government plans to take control of the process in order to comply with an EU directive and make it easier for investigators to do their job.

Information will be kept for two years by law and may be held centrally on a searchable database.

Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "The government's Orwellian plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying.

"I hope that this consultation is not just a sham exercise to soft-soap an unsuspecting public."

He said the government had repeatedly shown it could not be trusted with sensitive data, adding: "There is little reason to think ministers will be any less slapdash with our phone and internet records.

"Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended."

"Our experience of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act suggests these powers will soon be used to spy on people's children, pets and bins.

"These proposals are incompatible with a free country and a free people."

Well, Britain hasn't been a free country for quite a while.  It stopped being free when guns became illegal.  No surprise that they've kept on turning the screw.  They can do any damn thing they want, who's going to tell them no? 

Pretty soon they'll have a global warming tax that charges you a couple quid every time you fart outside an approved Air Quality Protection Zone.  Your government issued "phone" will be keeping track.  Don't try to get it off friends, you get a nasty shock if you cut the strap, and they cut your food ration too.

More gun "science"

Wow, anybody would think there's an election on or something.  Check it:

The number of justifiable homicides committed by police and private citizens has been rising in the past two years to their highest levels in more than a decade, reflecting a shoot-first philosophy in dealing with crime, say law enforcement analysts.

Yep, a new and uuuugly "shoot first philosophy" is what we are instructed this means by our noble, unbiased media.  Damn those red state rednecks and their damn guns anyway.

Northeastern University criminal justice professor James Alan Fox describes an emerging "shoot-first" mentality by police and private citizens. For several years, police departments have armed their officers with higher-powered weapons to keep pace with criminal gangs. "Clearly there is a message out there that citizens may be able to defend themselves" as well, he says.

 Big Brained Dr. Fox is attributing the increasing numbers of justifiable homicides to "higher-powered weapons" and more armed citizens.  Bigger, badder guns and more of them.

Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University criminologist, says the gun "legalization movement" also may have helped create a "greater willingness" among citizens to act in self-defense.

Big brained Dr. Blumstein thinks there's more trigger happy rednecks feeling their oats thanks to those bastards at the NRA.

Predictably, I think something different. 

If you look at the chart that goes with the article, you see that the lines for both cops and "citizens" decline from 1994 to 2000, then climb from 2000 to the present. One would have to go elsewhere for this data, but I'm confident you'll find that the total number of homicides (as in from all causes) generally follow a reverse curve, rising through the 1990's and declining in the 2000's.  I know from having lived in the US from 1994 to 2002 that the number of guns available to citizens, and the "power" of them did not decrease during that time. The police were not issued wildly more deadly firearms either.  I also know that in ALL states which switched to a "shall issue"gun license, self defense shootings did not increase remarkably, while over all homicide rates decreased by double digits in those states.  No "blood in the streets", remember?

So, we know that since 2000 police weapons did not become more fatal, and we know that even though there were more people licensed for concealed carry they did not shoot more bad guys.  Well, what changed then?

 

The FBI says a homicide committed by a private citizen is justified when a person is slain during the commission of a felony, such as a burglary or robbery. Police are justified, the FBI says, when felons are killed while the officer is acting in the line of duty. Rulings on these deaths are usually made by the local police agencies involved.

Local police agency policy on self defense is what changed.  We're not counting convicted murders, we're counting cases that were declared self defense.  You change the policy for making the declaration, you get a different number.  Under Clinton, everything is a homicide.  Under Bush, its possible to have a righteous shooting without video and the Pope for a witness.  Simple, yes?

Think they're going to put that in the USA Today?  Not a chance. They're going to find two Democrat eggheads in the country venal enough to lie about something so obvious. That's why we have the Phantom Soapbox.

Greenies, who they really are is uuuugly.

You know how we call the Greenies EnviroNazis?  If you ever thought that was unduly harsh, check this out:

"People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns. The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates."

Voluntarily, by an enlightened populace?  Hell no!

"Tara Garnett, the report's author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made. "Food is important to us in a great many cultural and symbolic ways, and our food choices are affected by cost, time, habit and other influences," the report says. "Study upon study has shown that awareness-raising campaigns alone are unlikely to work, particularly when it comes to more difficult changes."

 There will be concentration camps, mark my words.  Think upon this before you vote for Elizabeth May and her happy band of Green Party watermelons.

Another mystery solved, why vegans are weird.

Ever wonder why the most ardent supporters of crazy environazism and general left wing moon-battery are invariably ardent vegetarians as well?

Mystery solved!

MELBOURNE: Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage.

Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin.

Brain shrinkage.  BWAHAHA!!

Kidding aside, its been known since ancient times that a 100% vegetarian diet is bad for you (ask any kung fu guy, even Buddhists get to eat shellfish), and its been known for a long time that B12 deficiency causes all manner of brain-related problems.  Probably half the diagnosed depression in the Western world these days is actually B12 and D deficiency.  So if you feel like crap, bang down some vitamins.

The Supplementary Phantom

The New York Times discovers the obvious!

Here's something I've been saying for decades now, finally discovered by the main stream press.  Wind farms suck. 

Expansive dreams about renewable energy, like Al Gore’s hope of replacing all fossil fuels in a decade, are bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands.

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.

The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions.

In other words, all them gigantic bird choppers you see out there?  Even the ones that are actually turning STILL aren't making power anyone can use a lot of the time, because the grid can't take the extra variation in input.  A little too much and pop goes a circuit breaker.  A little too little, and you get a voltage drop which has to be made up by a gas turbine, then the wind picks up again and pop goes another breaker.

Today, New York State has about 1,500 megawatts of wind capacity. A megawatt is an instantaneous measure of power. A large Wal-Mart draws about one megawatt. The state is planning for an additional 8,000 megawatts of capacity.

But those turbines will need to go in remote, windy areas that are far off the beaten path, electrically speaking, and it is not clear enough transmission capacity will be developed. Save for two underwater connections to Long Island, New York State has not built a major new power line in 20 years.

New York State lawmakers (DemocRats, obviously) have already built 1,500 megawatts worth of windmill generators, KNOWING THEY COULDN'T DELIVER THE POWER. These machines are good for about 5 megawatts each, so the jackasses in Albany have already built 400 of them, which are uselessly beating the air and delivering the square root of fuck-all electricity to your New York homes, kids.  The project was so incredibly successful they've decided to erect 1,600 more of 'em to deliver even more no-power.

Ontario has done likewise.  The LIEberals know a good scam when they see one.

What does this tell us?  Two things.  First, that the Mob has moved into the windmill business.  Second, that scumbag DemocRat and LIEberal politicians are happy to ride the wave of enviro-nutbar hysteria to fame and fortune, by paying their scuzzy friends to build large yet ever so ugly non-functional wind turbines with your money.  Lots and lots of your money dudes, those friggin' things are expensive.

No wonder they love gun control so much, eh?

The Phantom

So what's all this got to do with human rights?

Now, finally we come to it.  Perfect example has come to my hands from Lorne Gunter at the National Post.

In our previous examples, we have seen some interesting stuff.  Starting waaaay back here, we have seen that many Canadians, as exemplified in this case by Jason Cherniak, believe there are some things you should not be allowed to say, and that government is the tool of choice to be used for making sure you don't say it.
Here, we saw that restricting the use of force against criminals to government agents results in increased criminality, even given ubiquitous surveillance unprecedented in human history.  They ain't gettin' it done.
Here we saw how amazingly radical it seems when official sanction to use force is distributed rather than restricted.  Armed teachers?  What if one of 'em shoots somebody?!  Holy crap, man, that's nuts!
The tale of the five toilets shows us what happens when people keep restricting the use of force to police, even when they know its a stupid idea.  Armed business owners chucking small time hookers and hoods out of their own store bathrooms, without calling the cops?  Insanity!  You can't trust those guys to do that!  Not even if the cops are not getting it done, and it just cost the city five million smackers for hood&hooker vandalized super-shitters.

Right on.  You can't trust teachers or store owners with guns, they aren't government.  They aren't qualified, specialized, screened, trained, tested and watched.  They'll surely screw up.

Ok, well then lets ask, who can we trust?

How about doctors?  Could we trust doctors to be able to do the right thing?  Your doctor is probably the most highly qualified, most stringently screened and tested, most fiercely trained individual you know.  He or she is the end product of the toughest education process we've got, and is highly motivated to do what's right by their patients.  Not what is expedient, or what is least expensive, or politically correct, or easiest for the doctor and staff of the hospital.  What's right.  Given what they go through to get that MD license, if they don't know what's right nobody does.

Enter the CPSO.  Check this out:

If the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) gets its way, Ontario's doctors will soon be stripped of their right to follow their moral convictions or religious beliefs when treating patients. In other words, doctors will risk losing their licenses if they run afoul of Ontario's human rights police.

...

The key passage in the CPSO's seven-page proposal states that a "physician's responsibility is to place the needs of the patient first, [so] there will be times when it may be necessary for physicians to set aside their personal beliefs in order to ensure that patients or potential patients are provided with the medical services they require."

Not just actual, real patients mind you.  Potential patients.  Hypothetical patients.  People who do not in fact exist, but might someday.  Maybe.

So the answer to the question "Can you trust doctors?" is NO.  You can't.  They might decide to do something other than what has been deemed acceptable by certain minions of government this week.  The details of what they might decide are irrelevant, what matters is that they are not trusted to decide.  They cannot be allowed the freedom to decide. 

This is the end-game of Progressive thought as currently formulated.  There is no one who is trusted other than government employees to decide or to do anything of any importance without strict supervision.  People are stupid and must be controlled by duly constituted authority.  No matter how expensive it is, no matter how futile it is, no matter if it is counter productive to the desired goal, no matter if people die of it. Central control must be maintained or chaos and destruction will result.

And that, my friends, is what Human Rights Commissions in this country are all about.  They decide what you will be allowed to say in public, because YOU, bumpkin that you are, might decide incorrectly.  Even doctors ate too immoral, venal, deluded, brainwashed, stupid, all of the above to get it right, what possible hope could there be that you will?  You morons!

Is there any faint chance that this belief system will turn out well for Canada?  Going by the historical record, no.  All centrally planned, centrally controlled societies have ended badly to date.  Even large companies have a habit of ending badly when they have too much centralization, too much bureaucracy and micro-management.

There is even evidence that what we see from history is something approaching a mathematical certainty.  Complex systems in manufacturing have a tendency to go out of time and devolve into chaotic uproar no matter how stringent the timing and control of each individual part is.  This Aug 9th-15th New Scientist has an article (Law and Disorder by Mark Buchanan, pg 30) on precisely this type of problem.  One example used was painting robots at GM.  When managers tried to schedule to robots the result was inefficient and costly.  When the robots were set up to schedule themselves using a simple algorithm running on each machine, the line schedule could not be predicted.  But GM saved a million bucks in paint alone that year.  Freedom to make decisions, when distributed among nodes, increases efficiency.

That's in dumb robots.  Ants don't have any central control at all, just basic programing to respond to pheromones and the rest is adaptive neurology.  Ants do pretty well, they've been around in their present form for a couple million years.

What chance is there that humans are going to respond well to rigid central controls?

And that is why I disagree with Mr. Cherniak on human rights commissions.  People can't be controlled.  Its impossible.

The Phantom

The Tale of Five Toilets.

Once upon a time there were five toilets.

March 2, 2004

The doors open and close like those on an elevator. You step in. They softly seal shut behind you.

"Welcome to Seattle's public toilet," says the kind of voice you might hear as you board a space ride at Disneyland.

The self-cleaning cylindrical bathrooms include a toilet, wastepaper basket, and sink with a dispenser that dribbles out soap. They are wheelchair-accessible.

They were wonderful toilets put up by wonderful people for wonderful reasons.

Made in Germany, and leased by the city, the public restrooms are expected to cost a total of about $600,000 a year. They will be paid for through sewer revenues. Since the 1980s, Seattle business owners have said the lack of public restrooms was the top issue facing downtown.

Business owners across the city have been forced to figure out ways to keep drug users and others out of their bathrooms while keeping the toilets open to customers.

See?  Wonderful!  Here's how it turned out:

August 16, 2008

Seattle has officially washed its hands of the five self-cleaning toilets.

The toilets cost the city $5 million. They sold on eBay Thursday evening for $12,549.

All five were sold to Racecar Supply, of Rochester, in Thurston County, with winning bids ranging from $1,625 to $4,899 per commode, said Pat Miller, spokesman for Seattle's Fleets and Facilities Department. "What a buy," said Racecar Supply owner Butch Behn. "Wouldn't you think it's a really good deal, considering what they paid for them? It was a gift."

At least Butch Behn is happy, eh?  But it was all so wonderful!  What happened?!

The high-tech public toilets, with sanitizing water jets and automatic doors, were installed in 2004 to accommodate tourists and transients in Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill, the central waterfront, Pike Place Market and the Chinatown International District. But the city canceled its contract this spring after the commodes became filthy hide-outs for drug use and prostitution.

When the problem is pushers, pimps, prostitutes and their clientèle mangling the toilets of private businesses, the solution is not a self cleaning public toilet.  The astute reader will note that the newspaper is ever so carefully not laying any blame here for the flushing of five million tax dollars in this affair.  They liked the idea, they are surprised and disappointed it didn't work.  They think it should have worked.

What would have been the solution?  Empowering the private businessmen to forcibly eject pushers, pimps, prostitutes and etc. from their premises, one would think.  (In some circles this is called "freedom".)  Why is this obvious, free and effective solution unacceptable to the Seattle brain trust?  Because it sends authority to make decisions and use force out to the general population at the expense of the central government control.  They don't want to give up the power to make sure everything is being done properly.

Now we begin to understand the problem.

Continue thinking!

The Phantom

Complete insanity reigns in Texas!

Further to our present conversation, we have an interesting reverse example to that of Britain's ubiquitous surveillance system.

The current official wisdom with regard to security is centralization and specialization.  In Britain we have a blanket ban on the possession of any weapon or weapon-like object in a public place.  A table leg wrapped in a plastic bag has been known to get people arrested in London.  The British answer to increased threat from terrorism and criminality has been a vast network of CCTV and laws requiring private companies to turn over pretty much any information they have on anybody upon request.

Here in Canada and in the USA and Britain, the answer to security threats to schools, both external threats and those from violent students, has been to put uniformed police officers in the schools.  Teachers cannot touch unruly students, they must call a cop, who will then follow the official SOP to subdue, restrain or otherwise deal with the kid(s).  The result over the last 20-30 years has been an ever increasing police presence in schools, and an ever increasing amount of criminality to go with that presence.  Oh, and huge cost increases, as they pay cops to cool their heels in schools all friggin' day.

Bucking the official wisdom is this bunch of crazy people in Texas.

A tiny Texas school district may be the first in the nation to allow teachers and staff to pack guns for protection when classes begin later this month, a newspaper reported.

Trustees at the Harrold Independent School District approved a district policy change last October so employees can carry concealed firearms to deter and protect against school shootings, provided the gun-toting teachers follow certain requirements.

The head looney had this to say:

Superintendent David Thweatt said the small community is a 30-minute drive from the sheriff's office, leaving students and teachers without protection. He said the district's lone campus sits 500 feet from heavily trafficked U.S. 287, which could make it a target.

"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can't defend themselves? That's like saying 'sic 'em' to a dog," Thweatt said in Friday's online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Thweatt said officials researched the policy and considered other options for about a year before approving the policy change. He said the district also has various other security measures in place to prevent a school shooting.

"The naysayers think (a shooting) won't happen here. If something were to happen here, I'd much rather be calling a parent to tell them that their child is OK because we were able to protect them," Thweatt said.

Here's a guy who has considered what's being done everywhere else, seen that it isn't working no matter how much money they throw at it, and decided to do something different.  He's said, well, we already have teachers at the school whom we have already certified as trustworthy, upstanding and proper individuals, who are trusted to look after these kids.  Is there some reason they can't be armed to protect the kids?  Do we have to pay men to do nothing other than wear a gun all day, while these teachers are probably better motivated to look after the kids?  If you can't trust the teacher to be with the kids armed, can you trust them when they are not armed?  Does the gun make the teacher into a security threat?  Are teachers too stupid to learn safe gun handling?  Are cops some kind of übermenchen, only they can safely carry a gun?

No.  So arm the teachers on the off chance some freak decides to do something nasty at the school.  Case closed, on to the next problem.

Radical, isn't it?  He's distributing the power and authority outward.  Everybody else is trying to hoard it inward. 

Continue thinking, my friends.

The Phantom