Bureaucrats find ways to use cool SWAT equipment.

The last couple of years I've been saying that arming regulators with all kinds of special SWAT stuff is a bad idea, because they will find a way to use it. Or make one. Being right all the time is a terrible burden.

When agents with the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force surged out of the wilderness around the remote community of Chicken wearing body armor and jackets emblazoned with POLICE in big, bold letters, local placer miners didn't quite know what to think.

Did it really take eight armed men and a squad-size display of paramilitary force to check for dirty water? Some of the miners, who run small businesses, say they felt intimidated.

Others wonder if the actions of the agents put everyone at risk. When your family business involves collecting gold far from nowhere, unusual behavior can be taken as a sign someone might be trying to stage a robbery. How is a remote placer miner to know the people in the jackets saying POLICE really are police?

Miners suggest it might have been better all around if officials had just shown up at the door -- as they used to do -- and said they wanted to check the water.

Well, yeah. Why DIDN'T they just show up and knock on the door the way they usually do?

The EPA has refused to publicly explain why it used armed officers as part of what it called a "multi-jurisdictional" investigation of possible Clean Water Act violations in the area.

A conference call was held last week to address the investigation. On the line were members of the Alaska Congressional delegation, their staff, state officers, and the EPA. According to one Senate staffer, the federal agency said it decided to send in the task force armed and wearing body armor because of information it received from the Alaska State Troopers about "rampant drug and human trafficking going on in the area."

The area is 140 miles from anywhere, and the local law enforcement said:

"The Alaska State Troopers did not advise the EPA that there was dangerous drug activity. We do not have evidence to suggest that is occurring," said Trooper spokesperson Megan Peters.

So the real reason is somebody decided they were bored off their ass, and wouldn't it be fun to go play soldier in the woods with all this cool cop shit we've got.

Somebody needs to be fired, and that guy is the one who issued super duper cop stuff to the Podunk Alsaka EPA branch office.

The Phantom

Big Brother will control your car. Like, by 2015!

I've been on about government running your car by remote control now for some time, and the possibilities are chilling. Well here we have a policy proposal from the European Union that the government will MAKE you drive the speed limit, by remote control.

All cars could be fitted with devices that stop them going over 70mph, under new EU road safety measures which aim to cut deaths from road accidents by a third.

Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded.

Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, is said to be opposed to the plans, which could also mean existing cars are sent to garages to be fitted with the speed limiters, preventing them from going over 70mph.

The new measures have been announced by the European Commission's Mobility and Transport Department as a measure to reduce the 30,000 people who die on the roads in Europe every year.

Governors you say? Cars already have those, they are called "rev limiters" and they keep engine speed below a set maximum. What are they really proposing here?

The scheme would work either using satellites, which would communicate limits to cars automatically, or using cameras to read road signs. Drivers can be given a warning of the speed limit, or their speed could be controlled automatically under the new measures.

A spokesman for the European Commission said: "There is a currently consultation focusing on speed-limiting technology already fitted to HGVs and buses.

See, that's not a speed governor. That's a system that knows how fast you're supposed to be going, and won't let you go any faster. Probably supplemented with roadside RFID tags, radio commands by satellite, cell phone towers and WiFi, plus other means.

Sound far fetched? It isn't. Camera, GPS, satnav, RFID reader and cell capability are all in one little flip phone. The kind they give away when you buy a $25 phone card. Plug it in to the vehicle's computer with a little dongle, and Big Brother runs your car.

With the result that people will, for the first time ever, really be going 40kph in those asinine 40kph zones you find all over the place. The traffic jams will be stupendous I'm sure, but the Big Brains won't care because its all for the children, you know.

If that sounds like not much of a reason to do it, I've no doubt you're right. The real deal is this: With with such a system, you can set the maximum speed in a given zone to ZERO whenever you want. Meaning there will be lots of places people can't drive into, or more to the point, out of. You would also be able to stop one particular car at will. Don't like a particular guy? Strand his ass by the side of the road in a snowstorm, where the plow will get him.

No word on what the plan is to deal with wise guys defacing road signs. 160KPH MAXIMUM will be found all over Europe before you know it. I'm sure people will have stickers printed up, to make the process easier. Rogue radios too. What Big Brother can make, little brother can hack in a weekend. When fast cars are criminalized, only criminals will have fast cars.

DEA makes NSA look like pikers. Oh, and Google reads your mail.

From the overflowing "No, you are nowhere near paranoid enough" file, new revelations indicate that the DEA is using, by subpoena for once, a huge AT&T database of phone call and location records that goes back to 1987. And they've been doing it for six years.

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans' phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency's hotly disputed collection of phone call logs. The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

I think it would be naive in the extreme to assume, as the author does in the first sentence, that the NSA doesn't have that AT&T database backed up on its server farms. Plus the complete databases of every other phone company and cable company and cell tower company and what have you in the USA. And Canada. And Britain. And most likely all of Europe and most of Asia. Either because they demanded it at gunpoint, they were given it by the local regime, or they stole it.

Now Google and other major outfits appear to be doing the DEA/NSA dudes one better and actually READ your mail, not just store it.

Facebook, Twitter and Google have been caught snooping on messages sent across their networks, new research claims, prompting campaigners to express concerns over privacy.

The findings emerged from  an experiment conducted following revelations by US security contractor Edward Snowden about government snooping on internet accounts.

Cyber-security company High-Tech Bridge set out to test the confidentiality of 50 of the biggest internet companies by using their systems to send a unique web address in private messages.

Experts at its Geneva HQ then waited to see which companies clicked on the website.

During the ten-day operation, six of the 50 companies tested were found to have opened the link.

Among the six were Facebook, Twitter, Google and discussion forum Formspring.

High-Tech Bridge chief executive Ilia Kolochenko said: 'We found they were clicking on links that should  be known only to the sender and recipient.

Note to email users, almost everything that runs on wires crosses Google's network at some point in its travels. And as Snowden revealed, everything Google, Microsoft and Apple know, the NSA knows.

Behave yourselves accordingly, my friends.

Politico says White House "peeved" at leaks.

Gee, it seems that the military of the USA are not a bunch of mindless myrmidons after all. Speaking off-off-off the record, some guy who ought to know said this:

"I can't believe the president is even considering it," said [one] officer, who like most officers interviewed for this story agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because military personnel are reluctant to criticize policymakers while military campaigns are being planned. "We have been fighting the last 10 years a counterinsurgency war. Syria has modern weaponry. We would have to retrain for a conventional war."

Apparently there's a whole lot of this kind of leakage going on right now. Including from the spook contingent, who are busily saying this chemical attack thing is very questionable, not the "slam-dunk" Barry has been speechifying about.

Ex-administration dude says:

"They need to shut the f--k up," said a former administration official. "It's embarrassing. Who ever heard this much talk before an attack? It's bizarre."

Well no, actually what it is Mr. Ex-admin dude is PAYBACK. Budget cuts, public disrespect, petty bureaucrats using the Air Force as their personal travel service, letting guys get killed in Benghazi and then -lying- about it, letting whole SEAL teams get shot out of the sky due to bad security and then crapping on their parents and children publicly, using the Veterans Administration Hospital system to seize firearms from vets, not to mention Rules Of Engagement that have US soldiers fighting blindfolded with one arm tied behind their backs. Et cetera.

Yes friends, payback can be a stone beeotch. And payback from a bunch of spooks and professional asskickers, that could be... unprecedentedly beeotch-like. 

I have no information on such a thing of course, being just some guy in rural Ontario. But given the kind of people spooks and SEALs are, and given how bad Barry has pissed them off, I can imagine some guys setting up a big ol' military propeller aircraft in front of a huge manure pile. I bet there's a couple front end loaders too. Call me crazy, but I'd say Barry's teflon suit is going to get a workout the next couple of years.

The Phantom

Why does the Left love gun control?

This is why.

Because really, it isn't good for anything else.

Time for school, Jimmy!

Note to Christians and home schoolers generally, Germany has really -good- gun control. Might want to think about that a little bit.

The Phantom

Update: From SDA, this offering from BC Ministry of Education and Coquitlam School District. Because as we know, everything European is the model for how us bass-ackward Canadians should be doing things.

Kerry declares "WMD!"

Yep, Secretary of State John F-in' Kerry, who served in Vietnam y'know, has declared those dirty Syrians used Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Someplace in Texas, George W. Bush is laughing his ass off today. Or he would be, if he were a goof like John F-in' Kerry.

The Phantom

This is not at all alarming.

Garbage cans that track your cellphone as you walk by. I kid you not.

The City of London Corporation has asked a company to stop using recycling bins to track the smartphones of passers-by.

Renew London had fitted devices into 12 "pods", which feature LCD advertising screens, to collect footfall data by logging nearby phones.

Chief executive Kaveh Memari said the company had "stopped all trials in the meantime".

The corporation has taken the issue to the Information Commissioner's Office.

The action follows concerns raised by privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, after details of the technology used in the bins emerged in the online magazine Quartz.

Somebody thought this would be an ok idea for a city-owned service. Somebody needs to be FIRED and never work in government again, IMHO.

Pull the battery out of your phone unless you're talking on it.

The Phantom

Bono: born again capitalist? Yep!

Usually I don't care a rat's patootie what famous entertainers say, but in this case I'm going to make an exception. Proving once again that even a blind pig (or Lefty) can find the odd acorn, Bono says:

"Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce [and] entrepreneurial capitalism take more people out of poverty than aid. We need Africa to become an economic powerhouse."

Also the article says Bono is an admirer of C.S. Lewis.

Too soon old and too late schmart, eh Bono?

No word on whether U2 will be cut from radio stations across the world for falling off the Lefty band wagon.

The Phantom

This seems reasonable, right?

Its ok to be a peeping tom in NYC, so long as the price of the pictures is high enough.

A Manhattan judge ruled this week that artistic freedom trumps the rights of parents who don't want their kids secretly photographed through the windows of their homes.
Judge Eileen Rakower tossed a lawsuit brought by two parents against a Tribeca artist who snapped pictures of their children through their apartment windows as part of a controversial exhibition this year.

Why? Because some weirdo selling pictures of kids should be open and shut, right? Wrongo! This is Liberal New York, otherwise known as Backwards Land!

Arguing that his behavior "shocks the conscience and is so out of keeping with the standards of morality in the community," the couple asked the court to bar him from showing or selling the images.
They also demanded that he turn over all of the images not being used in the exhibit.
But Rakower ruled Monday that Svenson's artistic freedom superseded their privacy concerns, and dismissed the case outright.
"The value of artistic expression outweighs any sale that stems from the published photos," Rakower wrote.

Just in case anyone was wondering, the pictures were selling for ten thousand dollars a piece.

Here's a picture of the "artist". If you see him, take a picture of yourself punching him in the face. I'll post them all here. Because hippy punching  Art is never wrong.

Squares are the new rebels. Saddle up.

Its official. Hetero-norm relationships, traditional nuclear families and personal honor are the new "edgy". Homo-fruitbat erotica just hit the bottom and bounced like a dead cat. Behold the end:

The whispers about Gotham City's masked crime-fighter are confirmed in Erotic Lives of the Superheroes, which depicts Batman and Robin as a  bickering gay couple whose sex life has gone flat.

Written by the Italian author Marco Mancassola, the novel imagines the erotic obsessions of Superman, Mister Fantastic and Mystique as their heroic abilities are dulled by the ageing process. Acclaimed upon its publication in Italy, the book, which centres on a murder mystery, arrives in the UK this week.

By portraying Batman as openly gay, Mancassola has made explicit leanings which have been tacit throughout the character's comic book and screen history.

Grant Morrison, who wrote Batman stories for DC Comics, claimed that "he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay".

This is a bridge too far for the Gay Brigade that's marching through our social institutions these days. If your average plaid fedora wearing hipster (and Grant Morrison is extremely average) can't see a man and a boy next to each other without thinking "fags!", then the die is indeed cast for a new social revolution. These artsie turd brains can't even entertain the possibility of a hetero mentoring relationship. Doesn't even occur to them. Why would two males be together for anything other than kink? What are young boys for if not... that?

Gay kink is now artistic normal. Meaning its all over, Nancy. You're not the rebel anymore. Now you're The Man.

From here on an artist won't be able to step outside the mainstream culture of the art world, not in print, video, audio or painting, without challenging the Left/Gay hegemony. Young starving artists, the next generation of Grand Masters, will be forced to eschew Modernism, Post Modernism, and the current Post Post Post Gay Post Modernism Irony schlock being served up to depict the one thing that's completely socially unacceptable: the WASP Christian nuclear family.

To my mind about the most transgressive thing you could come up with right now would be The Pietà. Or maybe Norman Rockwell. Look for it coming soon to a riot near you. Hint, it'll be what the Lefties are going apeshit about.

The Square Phantom

DEA busted with NSA data.

This is the other shoe we've been waiting for, a federal agency caught red handed using NSA data to bust other-than-terrorist knobs, and then lying about where their intel came from. In court, no less.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

Shock and surprise? No. Because there was never any chance the NSA would have a record of EVERY PHONE CALL IN AMERICA but the DEA and the FBI and the CIA and every son of a beeotch down to the Forest Service and the Dept. of Education wouldn't be getting their noses in the trough too.

Same for Canada, my friends. Time to unplug yourself while conducting important business is -now-. No more email, Facebook, Twitter to the mistress, no more leaving the battery in your cellphone while visiting anyplace you don't want Big Brother and all his friends to know you went. No more credit cards or cellphone transactions once you get there. This may not be only for clandestine visits to the local strip club, but may include visits to the mall, the supermarket and McDonalds.

Because who the hell knows if the Ministry of Health is monitoring your eating habits, the better to decide if you get any treatment in our single-payer health system. With ubiquitous surveillance of cellphone data, license plate tracking and credit card information, they can do that. Really. And worst of all, they can do it -cheap-.

"So sorry Mr. Phantom, you have exceeded your monthly allowance of poly-unsaturated fats. No knee replacement surgery for you."

The poly-unsaturated Phantom

Mammoths may yet roam the plains.

But not if the liberals, animal rights whackos and general issue pussies of the Ivory Tower Left have anything to say about it.

The pioneering scientist who created Dolly the sheep has outlined how cells plucked from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses might one day help resurrect the ancient beasts.

The notional procedure – bringing with it echoes of the Jurassic Park films – was spelled out by Sir Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh-based stem-cell scientist, whose team unveiled Dolly as the world's first cloned mammal in 1996.

Though it is unlikely that a mammoth could be cloned in the same way as Dolly, more modern techniques that convert tissue cells into stem cells could potentially achieve the feat, Wilmut says in an article today for the academic journalism website, The Conversation.

"I've always been very sceptical about the whole idea, but it dawned on me that if you could clear the first hurdle of getting viable cells from mammoths, you might be able to do something useful and interesting," Wilmut told the Guardian.

"I think it should be done as long as we can provide great care for the animal. If there are reasonable prospects of them being healthy, we should do it. We can learn a lot about them," he added.

Because what would be the point of having a sick mammoth around, right? Who could object to that? Well its the Guardian, so they do:

Earlier this month, the most complete woolly mammoth carcass ever recovered from Russia was unveiled at an exhibition in Yokohama, Japan. The baby female, nicknamed Yuka, lived about 39,000 years ago, and is remarkable for the preservation of her fur and soft tissues, such as muscle.

Samples from Yuka have been sent to the laboratory of Hwang Woo-suk, the disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist, who, with Russian researchers, hopes to clone the mammoth.

Disgraced, you say? For what? Well, we don't know because the article doesn't say. I suppose I could go look it up, but the Guardian is counting on me to not bother. Long story short, he's an embezzling dick.  BUT, that doesn't mean he can't -do- it.

I say, full steam ahead baby! I want my woolly mammoth farm!

The (watch those road apples!) Phantom

Militarized cops are cowards.

Gutless wonders.

Something interesting happens when you put cops in body armor and helmets, give them assault rifles, shotguns, tasers and pepper spray. It turns them into pussies. Which makes them extremely dangerous. Case in point:

According to an e-mailed press release from Park Forest police, officers were sent to 101 Main Street in Park Forest about 8:42 p.m. Friday to help a private ambulance company with a "combative" resident of the home there -- Warna. The Victory Centre of Park Forest, a supportive living community for adults 65 and older according to its website, is at that address.
Warna was being "involuntarily" committed for medical treatment by staff at the Victory Centre, the release said.
When police arrived, Warna was threatening staff and paramedics with a metal cane and a 2-foot metal shoehorn, the release said.

Here we have a tactical situation with multiple cops on scene, facing down an old, OLD man who's got a cane and a friggin' shoehorn. Do you:

A) Remove all personel from the immediate area, shut the door and wait for the old geezer to get tired?
B) Take the cane and the shoehorn off him and slap him on the back of the head to wise him up?
C) Punch him in the face before taking away the cane and the shoehorn?
D) Smack him with your night stick until he falls down?
E) Taser him to the ground and then tackle, stomp and hogtie him?
F) Screw around shouting instructions at him until he drops the shoehorn and picks up a knife (how is there a knife handy?), then taser him, then shoot him in the guts with beanbags until he falls down, THEN tackle, stomp and hogtie him?

In Chicago, the policepussies chose F.

Police demanded that he drop the cane and shoehorn, but he did not comply and then picked up a "12-inch butcher type kitchen knife."
Police continued to demand that Warna surrender and follow their orders and eventually used a Taser on him. That failed to subdue him and he continued to threaten others, the release said. Police then fired bean bag rounds at the man to get him to drop the knife and surrender. He did so and was taken into custody.
The man was conscious and talking to officers and staff before being transported to St. James Hospital and Health Centers in Chicago, according to authorities.

"Taken into custody" is a euphemism for being tackled to the floor, stomped on and hog-tied with handcuffs.

The Cook County medical examiner's office said that the cause of death of John Warna was hemoperitoneum – bleeding in the stomach area from blunt force trauma of the abdomen after he was shot with a bean bag gun.

They did a Rodney King on a 95 year old demented man in an old folks home, is what they did. He bled out and died from ruptured internal organs before his heart could pack up from the taser.

Beanbag.

For the non-initiated, a beanbag gun is a large bore shotgun that fires a Kevlar bag full of lead shot. The blunt force involved is comparable to getting hit by a swing from Babe Ruth. They seem to have shot this guy more than once, making it kind of like smashing the guy in the gut with a baseball bat until he fell down.

Beanbag wound.

What a friggin' disgrace to the uniform. Every man in that squad should be suspended and put on hand-to-hand training and physical exercise for six months, at no pay. The officer in charge of the squad should be charged with manslaughter. But it'll never happen.

Random deputy Dawg with beanbag gun. Feel safer now?

Let this be a warning to anyone who has to deal with the elderly or with mentally disabled people. If you let one of them get out of hand and call the cops, there's an excellent chance the cops will just kill him like a mad dog. Because they are cowardly scum with guns.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Blazing Cat Fur readers!

The Phantom Returns!

Yes my friends, The Phantom has returned to Northern Command after a week's trip to Noo Yawk.  Its exactly as frigged up as I remember it from the Old Days. In fact I went down to the place I used to live and got a PTSD flashback just from driving by. wugh!

Many thanks to the Arms Chest Denizens for making it an awesome trip (trip down PTSD memory lane aside, it was awesome.)

Shout out to the Kry Havoc crew, I've got pictures of y'all with your mouths full. Bwaha!

Obama unhappy with Traaaaayvon rioters.

As in there's not near enough guys out there rioting, so he's out there trying to kick things up a notch.

"You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son.  Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away," he said.

Yes, we know. Because thirty five years ago Barry was just one more useless stoner gliding through life on a combination of parental indulgence and affirmative action, just like Traaaaayvon.

So could little Traaaaaayvon have become President? Barry did, so I suppose with thirty more years or so of the Progressive March Forward its entirely possible that "youthful indiscretions" like assault, robbery and drug thuggery could become resume enhancements for a DemocRat candidate. "I be from the hood Yo, vote fo' me, yo get the free-bee. Word!"

I can hardly wait for three piece suits with droopy pants and matching Everlast drawers to start showing up in US board rooms.

In the mean time, its really something to watch the Commander in Chief of the biggest military machine in the entire world trying to gin up riots in his own cities. Go get the gas can Holder, Barry wants a full-on zombie apocalypse.  BAM baby!

The Phantom (channeling Emeril Lagasse)

Cops are tracking your car too. Punks rioting anyway.

New revelation on Drudge today, police forces in the USA are tracking everybody's car.

Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.

As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge's approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver's location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a "single, high-resolution image of our lives."

ACLU publication here.

I guess the New York liberals who make up the ACLU finally clued that their beloved DemocRat party is set on crushing the ACLU under thumb along with the rest of us proles.

Now while the cops are busy recording every damn thing you do, they don't have time to arrest actual criminals.

At least 14 people were taken into custody Tuesday night and many more remained at large after marauding bands of young people conducted a string of robberies, assaults and acts of vandalism along Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles police said late Tuesday.

Incident commander Dennis Kato said police were inundated with phone calls beginning about 9 p.m., reporting that packs of young people were roaming along Hollywood and attacking people. Public information officer Rosario Herrera said at least one of the attacks was near Hollywood and Highland. 

The robbers knocked down tourists and grabbed their phones, Kato said. In at least one incident, they hauled off a cash register from a business. There were no reports of weapons involved in the attacks.

As many as 40 robbers were believed to be involved in the attacks. Kato said the robbers splintered into smaller groups of 10 to 15 people and spread through the area, regrouping at times. 

Police say the attackers appeared to be an organized group who knew one another. Officers swarmed the Hollywood area as helicopters for both police and news media circled.

Think the super-spy surveillance crap is going to help catch these pukes? Unlikely, right? But then it isn't meant to keep track of them. Its meant to keep track of YOU.

The Phantom

Revisiting Heidi Yewman: now with VIDEO!

Huffpoo has a video interview with Heidi Yewman about her Ms. Magazine blog article, My Month With A Gun.  I wrote about it here.  Ms. Magazine cancelled the rest of little Heidi's series after getting boiled alive by commenters, but then their "loyal fans" started in boiling them alive as well. So they released this statement here.

The Huff-and-Puff video is classic liberal. The gist of the conversation is that Heidi Yewman feels she is incapable of managing a firearm, but there is no legal entity (in her state) that will prevent her from owning and carrying a firearm. Plus it made her feel bad. :(

Also included, some pop-psychology misuse of science and some goof who used to be a cop.

Bottom line, she's complaining that some jackboot didn't march up and demand her papers.

Enjoy the barfalicious video.

The Phantom

Microsoft researchers can predict your physical location in the future.

We know that our phones constantly broadcast their (our!) location to cell towers, 24/7. We know that both the phone company AND the phone manufacturers (Apple/Google) keep this information. For a long time. Like, forever most likely. So they know where you've been to a very high degree of accuracy. Well now there's a paper by two guys who took all that data and wrote a program to predict where you are GOING to be at any given time on any given day.

Using information from a pool of 300 volunteers in the Seattle metro area, Sadilek and Krumm gathered a mountain of location data. As the volunteers went about their daily lives--going to work, to the grocery store, out for a jog, even for transcontinental travel--each carried a GPS device much the same way they carried a cell phone. To further ensure accuracy, the researchers also installed GPS devices in commercial shuttles and transit vans that the volunteers used regularly, and the volunteers' own vehicles. After collecting over 150 million location points, the researchers then had Far Out, the first system of its kind to predict long-term human mobility in a unified way, parse the data. Far Out didn't even need to be told exactly what to look for--it automatically discovered regularities in the data.

"For example, it might notice that Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually about the same and fairly consistent from week to week," the researchers told us. "Then when we ask about a future Tuesday or Thursday, the algorithm automatically produces a typical Tuesday/Thursday as a prediction."

Salidek and Krumm were pleasantly surprised with the results. It turns out that no matter how spontaneous we think we are, humans are actually quite predictable in our movements, even over extended periods of time. Not only did Far Out predict with high accuracy the correct location of a wide variety of individuals, but it did so even years into the future.

This does not seem like much of a problem for a computer. Comparing data is what they're for. The real problem is collecting the location points, in the research solved by a GPS unit. In our non-research real lives, this data is available from Apple and Google for a small fee. Also available to the NSA because they archive ALL OF IT. In fact, I would be shocked if the NSA doesn't already do exactly this type of prediction on an on-demand basis. Its obvious.

Well, apart from spying, what could such a system be used for?

For now Far Out is strictly a research project not yet available in commercial products or services. And although its focus currently is on the future whereabouts of single individuals, eventually, the researchers' hope is that it can be applied to larger populations. This could be a boon to urban planners by leading to more accurate predictions about the spread of disease, traffic congestion, and the demand for electricity.

On the social side, there could even be something like a Foursquare of the Future.

Marketers and advertisers, too, would relish the opportunity to target our future selves with ads like, "Need a haircut? In four days, you'll be 100 yards from a salon that will have a $15 special." On the social side, there could even be something like a Foursquare of the Future--who wouldn't want to know where their friends (and enemies) will be for the rest of their lives…or at least for the next 285 days?

Because that's what we all need and want in our lives. More planning and regulation, more ads on our phones, and people either stalking or dodging us with ever increasing accuracy.

I'm increasingly thinking that a portable phone may be a hell of a lot more of a millstone than a help, given that the Stazi would have all happily sacrificed a limb to get this level of surveillance on East Germany. Its a tyrant's wet dream.

The Phantom

and speaking of propaganda...

... the US government just repealed a very interesting law at a very interesting time.

For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It's viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran; self-immolation in Tibet; human trafficking across Asia; and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq.

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 70s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright's amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity."

Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn't be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public's last defense against domestic propaganda?

Yes! Yes they did. Because clearly the mainstream media has been getting crushed by the internet fact-checking monster, and lately events are breaking on Twitter faster than CNN. So offhand I'd say the US Government just authorized a nice government funded propaganda machine in case the existing, 100% DemocRat owned media conglomerate collapses under the weight of its own bullshit.  Besides, now they can TELL guys what to print instead of just asking them to go along with the gag.

America, welcome to the wonderful world of the CBC. It will suck more than you are expecting.

The Phantom

Dear Media Party: The love affair is over, we want our keys back.

George Zimmerman show trial over, Zimmerman innocent. Duh.

But some guys just can't leave it alone, can they?

President Obama called on the nation to honor Trayvon Martin a day after George Zimmerman was acquitted of his murder by asking "ourselves if we're doing all we can to stem the tide of gun violence."

His comments came as family members of Zimmerman and Martin, as well as pundits, celebrities, and court observers had strong reactions to Saturday's not guilty verdict, with those reactions taking various forms — from joy and outrage to Shakespearean references and calls for peace.

This is an amazing thing. The very President of the United States of America is calling on his citizens to honor a drug-addled gang banger who was killed BY HIS VICTIM during his effort to break said victim's skull on the pavement. Said victim was shorter, lighter and weaker than "little Traaaaayvon", and would either be dead right now or living with serious brain damage if it wasn't for his Glock pistol.  Just so we are all clear what's being said here.

Barry is a DemocRat, and a "community organizer", plus his Justice department orchestrated this whole farce and bussed in "protesters" to make it happen. Time may well reveal further machinations within the Florida prosecutor's office were aided/abetted/paid for by the feds as well. We shall see. Therefore we expect Barry to come out with this kind of self-serving horeshit, because that's just how he rolls. Its not a surprise with this guy, its a well established pattern. You can set your watch by it.

Equally expected and established is the American (and Canadian!) media in full support mode, touting Obama's words.  Now, I use the term "touting" here for a reason. It means something important.

From Wikipedia:

In British English, a tout is any person who solicits business or employment in a persistent and annoying manner (generally equivalent to a solicitor or barker in American English, or a spruiker in Australian English). According to the American Bar Association, touting occurs when a person advertises, promotes, or otherwise describes a security for sale without disclosing that the person is being paid to do so.

An example would be a person who frequents heavily touristed areas and presents himself as a tour guide (particularly towards those who do not speak the local language) but operates on behalf of local bars, restaurant, or hotels, being paid to direct tourists towards certain establishments.

That describes to a T the behavior of the established Big Name media regarding this case. Obama wanted a prosecution, the media pushed and pushed and pushed. Obama wanted his name kept out of it, nobody mentioned  the DOJ organizing the astroturfing "protests" in Florida. Astroturf is that synthetic carpeting that famously looks like grass on TV, but isn't. An astroturf protester is somebody who looks like a regular guy on TV, but really he's an employee of the DemocRat party or possibly the Department of Justice. Or both!

Any of that mentioned in the linked NBC article? Nuh uh! Lots of fluffly kittens and rainbows, not much on the real facts of the matter. 

Except this little gem right at the very, very bottom. In italics:

George Zimmerman has sued NBC Universal for defamation. The company strongly denies the allegation.

I'm not a lawyer by any means, but just offhand I'd say Zimmerman has a pretty good shot at getting a royal payday out of NBC News. Because they frickin' edited audio, baby. They lied, denied, disinformed, demonized, misdirected and at the moment are reporting on riots against that little White Hispanic with breathless excitement. 

My hope is he scores a payout so enormous that he breaks the company. Like, BILLION$. Maybe the complete destruction of a major media network will wake up some shareholders. It could happen, right?

The Phantom