Chicago beats Baltimore.

Chi-town holiday weekend: 12 dead (so far), 43 shot.

Need more gun control, obviously.

In other news, you're 45% more likely to get murdered in DiBlasio's NYC.

I'll take the bikers, thanks.

The Phantom

SJWs eating their own.

Game of Thrones apparently had a rape scene. I wouldn't know, I don't watch it because its fans include many SJW lunatics. Good enough reason to skip it right there.

However now all the Trigger Warning people are all in a rage and frothing and stuff. Kate McMillan reports this -awesome- smack down from Ace of Spades.

The Mary-Sue, fangirl comic book nerd site:

Editor's Note: Trigger warnings for sexual assault. To find out more about support options available for survivors of sexual abuse, visit the official website for RAINN, the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization...

Those hopes crumbled into a million pieces last night, when Sansa was raped by Ramsey as Theon/Reek was forced to watch...

Using rape as the impetus for character motivations is one of the most problematic tropes in fiction. Rarely is it ever afforded the careful consideration it deserves. Was there more gravity given to the act on Game of Thrones than in the past on the series? I would say yes; however, it took Sansa from her growing place of power, cut her off at the knees, and put the focus on Theo''s ordeal, instead.

And now coming to you direct from Reality (TM)

The Daily Mail, a journal about things that actually happened in the real world:

[no trigger warning included]

Stripped naked and sold to the highest bidder: How ISIS is sending the 'prettiest Yazidi virgins' it abducts to slave markets in Syria

ISIS committing horrific sex crimes against girls, United Nations has found

'They are sold naked to Islamic State leaders and soldiers at slave markets'

Terror group is targeting young girls from Iraq's minority Yazidi community

It has previously abducted hundreds of Yazidis from across northern Iraq

Oddly the MarySue has no posts regarding actual girls being sold into slavery, but they sure are hell on blocking out posts from white men.

Read the whole Ace post, its awesome.

Dear SJWs, this is why Sad Puppies mocks you.

Where's the 170 arrested dudes then, hmmmm? Memorial Day weekend in Baltimore.

As I was saying, and why the hell do I only see this comment being made at Taki Magazine by the way, :

Much was made of a photo depicting white bikers calmly assembled under the supervision of a gun-wielding cop. The inference we were instructed to draw from this photo is that cops enjoy wearing riot armor and spraying innocent black protestors with tear gas, while they treat murderous white criminals with kid gloves. An alternate inference one could draw from this photo is that white arrestees are less likely to resist arrest than newly canonized black criminal-saints such as Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray. But that would be racist, so sweep all traces of that thought from your mind.

There was also wailing and gnashing of teeth over the fact that "the media" didn't make a big stink about the "root causes"—such as poverty and single-mother families—of such lawlessness. Again, this was trotted out as evidence that the media is racist against black people, rather than the more likely explanation, which is that the media is constantly making excuses for black people.

Previously I said that you could tell the race of the rioters in Waco by the arrest count.

Then, noticing the AP story carrying the media tooth gnashing Jim Goad is going on about in Taki Mag, I opined that at least the bikers were rioting on their on dime and not getting paid like the Ferguson rioters.

Jim Goad goes on to grind some salt in:

What's intensely unclear at the moment is exactly who did most of the killing. Some biker-friendly witnesses claim that cops killed every last biker. Other estimates lowball it, asserting that police killed four out of the nine victims.

That's right—even by a low estimate, cops killed four presumably white gang members. And yet no whites rioted. To my knowledge, the last group of reckless arsonists who tried to burn Waco down was the ATF in 1993.

Hey, that's right! Where are the Al Sharptons decrying the shameful deaths of those four Gentle Giants, where are the marches and the burning 7-11 stores commemorating those four completely innocent mother's sons who were only going home from buying Skittles? Where are the grade 8 graduation pictures cut from Facebook and pasted on the front page of the New York Times?

Not going to happen. Because they're the wrong colour. No traction for the demonstrators and politicians, no money being made.

But we knew that. Its silly to even talk about it, there's no point.

Here's something its not silly to talk about. Memorial Day Weekend in Baltimore MA this year.

It's the deadliest month Baltimore has seen in more than 15 years. More than two dozen shootings over the holiday weekend alone have city police working around the clock.

Now, leaders hope community members come forward to help stop the violence.

From West Baltimore, to the East Side, Govans, to Reservoir Hill–a spike in weekend violence is plaguing all parts of the city. Over the Memorial Day Weekend alone– city police report 28 shootings and 9 homicides.

Baltimore Police say they responded to 6 shootings on Friday night, 7 on Saturday, 5 on Sunday and 10 by night fall on Monday.

The report says polices are "pleading" with witnesses to come forward.

So, the score is now 9 honkeys dead in Texas and 170 arrested, 28 shot and nine dead race unspecified in Baltimore with nobody arrested as far as the paper was concerned. Because not important, I guess.

DemocRats love crime and want more of it. Everything they do f-s over minorities and makes more criminals. Just keep that ion mind the next time you see some DemocRat going off about gun control.

The Phantom

FBI admits ubiquitous surveillance useless for catching terrorists.

As I have been saying:

FBI agents can't point to any major terrorism cases they've cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department's inspector general said in a report Thursday that could complicate efforts to keep key parts of the law operating.

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said that between 2004 and 2009, the FBI tripled its use of bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to compel businesses to turn over records and documents, and increasingly scooped up records of Americans who had no ties to official terrorism investigations.

The FBI did finally come up with procedures to try to minimize the information it was gathering on nontargets, but it took far too long, Mr. Horowitz said in the 77-page report, which comes just as Congress is trying to decide whether to extend, rewrite or entirely nix Section 215.

Its useless to do signals surveillance on an entire country unless you already know who the bad guys are and you're just trying to find them. Without specific targets all you do is generate watch lists, then sit and watch them as they do absolutely nothing illegal. Until they decide to kill Pamella Geller. Then, after the attack takes place, the FBI looks into their watch list files and discovers "oh yeah, we've been watching those two assholes for years. So they finally did it. Huh."

This is because in a free country, talking revolutionary shit with your friends and hanging out with sketchy people is  LEGAL. Freedom of expression, freedom of assembly! Owning a gun is LEGAL. Freedom to keep and bear arms!

Watch lists are 100% useless for catching criminals because they aren't criminals until they DO something.

If you want to make surveillance effective, you have to make talking about stuff illegal. You have to go arrest and jail guys for just talking about terrorist actions when they haven't actually done anything at all.

Which I'm sure lots of FBI types would very much like to do.

Be afraid.

The Phantom

Hugo Awards: Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal

Downloaded my Hugo voters packet today. First thing I read was Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal by Wilson, Alphona and Wyatt.

Plot synopsis: Little 16 year old Pakistani Mooselimb girl who lives in New Jersey gets magic powers by non-explained magic, spends most of the book fighting with Mom and Dad because they won't let her go out at night to parties and stuff. (At 16. In New Jersey. What squares!) Oh and she does some super hero stuff in there somewheres. Grrrls Rule!

Morals of the story: 1) Mooselimbs are nice. 2) White American people are mean and stoopid. 3) Its totally kewl for 16 year old girls to ignore their parents, keep secrets, sneak out to have adventures and everyth9ing like that because Grownups are all lame an stoopid.

My take: Reading this boring-ass morality play with really average art and absolutely predictable plot has confirmed for me the mental and moral vacuity of the Social Justice set. Take this -exact- book and substitute a 16 year old white Catholic girl for the Pakistani Mooselimb girl, leaving everything else exactly the same, there's no way in hell it gets a Hugo nomination.

Except there's no way Marvel would have told this story about a Catholic white girl, their printing press would have burst into flames at presenting Catholicism in such a sympathetic way.

One good thing did come of this though. I finally realize something about SJWs. They're naive idiots. They really think that presenting Islam in this soft-focus, down-home Mom and Apple Pie light reflects the reality of Islam. These same SJWs would -puke- at a presentation  of Southern Baptists done in the same light.

SJWs really believe that there is no Muslim equivalent to Jimmy Swaggart. No equivalent to the boozing Irish priest with an eye for the little boys. No equivalent of the coldly calculating Selectman sizing up some grieving widow for a contribution to the building fund.

HEY SJWs! For all the lying, cheating, tacky scumbag that Jimmy Swaggart may have been for all these years, so far he and his entire Southern Baptist Bible Thumping branch of Christianity has a body count of ZERO.

This is why I never buy comics anymore. Because they are boring, preachy and written by imbeciles. No Hugo for you, benches.

The Phantom

CBC discovers their cell phones have been p0ned by Big Brother.

Day late and a dollar short, as usual, the CBC "discovers" that lots of spy agencies, Canadian AND American, AND Russian, AND Chinese, are busy hacking cell phones all over the place.

Electronic intelligence agencies began targeting UC Browser — a massively popular app in China and India with growing use in North America — in late 2011 after discovering it leaked revealing details about its half-billion users.

Their goal, in tapping into UC Browser and also looking for larger app store vulnerabilities, was to collect data on suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets — and, in some cases, implant spyware on targeted smartphones.

The 2012 document shows that the surveillance agencies exploited the weaknesses in certain mobile apps in pursuit of their national security interests, but it appears they didn't alert the companies or the public to these weaknesses. That potentially put millions of users in danger of their data being accessed by other governments' agencies, hackers or criminals.

As always, CBC continues to ignore the fact that the Canadian government has no need to put apps on people's phones to find out what those people are doing. They have full 100% access to and control of the internet backbone, they can get any record from any server with a search warrant, and the government keeps all the metadata from every single internet/telephone/whatever packet in the country. They also give all that data to the NSA. Recent revelations make plain that the government also keeps speech-to-text records of EVERY F-ING PHONE CONVERSATION in the country.

CBC, late to the party by almost a decade. No reason to watch.

The Phantom

Yesterday was "Everybody Draw Mohamed Day." Did you notice?

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Everybody Draw Mohamed Day.

Molly Norris, the artist who originated Everybody Draw Mohamed Day, remains in hiding due to the threats on her life by Islamic dickheads. Kathy Shaidle reports that Mark Steyn is not amused.

Five years ago, a cartoonist with The Seattle Weekly, shocked by the way Comedy Central had censored "South Park" after the usual threats from violent Muslims, proclaimed May 20th as "Everybody Draw Mohammed" Day. What was novel about this particular promotion was that the cartoonist, Molly Norris, was not a "right-wing" "Islamophobe" but a liberal progressive, and therefore a rare if not all but unique example of a feminist leftie recognizing that the Islamic enforcers were a threat to her way of life. This was a very welcome development.
Unfortunately, Miss Norris was not so much recognizing reality as blissfully unaware of it. When the backlash against her idea began, she disassociated herself from it and signed off with - Lord help us - a peace symbol.

Five years ago might as well be the Jurassic in interwebz time. What happened yesterday?

Well, nothing. That's the issue. Something was supposed to happen, but Mark Steyn reports it got cancelled.

So I was heartened to see in my own country this event scheduled for today in Ottawa:

Come and join us in drawing Muhammed, the Pope's Mother, Buddha with headphones and or any other religious/political figure!
Let's exercise our freedom to blaspheme — while we still can!!!
We will meet by the East entrance of The Hill Where the October 22nd shooter entered The Hill) at 1 pm and walk to the North-East corner of the lawn, so we are very close to the route the shooter took. There, I will set up the table (and tent, if it rains) and we can get down to some blasphemous art!
Please, spread the word as far and wide as you can.
Alexandra

Can you guess what happened next, boys and girls?

After having been given (last week) the go ahead with the Draw Muhammed Day on Parliament Hill for tomorrow, 20th of May, by the RCMP security people, I have just received a phone call (at 5:25 pm) from Canadian Heritage cancelling the event due to 'security concerns'.

And to reprise Laura Rosen Cohen's line "security concerns" are the new shut-up. As a commenter at Vlad Tepes' blog writes:

This is exactly the modus operandi employed by France's government – to kill off any initiative by our friends at Riposte Laique – they give the permission for a demonstration, assembly etc. and then, when everything is organised, like 5 minutes before the event is supposed to start, they cancel it for "security reasons".

So don't worry, you still have freedom of speech - until five minutes before you're scheduled to exercise it.

Of course this is all by design. Anybody who draws Mohamed is a RAAAAACIST!!!! Just ask any media outlet.

Now, any Mooselimbs reading this should be cautioned. This is not about you. The Canadian/US Media has not chosen Mooselimbs to be their Special Friends. They have not selected Islam to be their pet religion. To the contrary, they are -using- Mooselimbs and Islam as a tool to bash their true enemies over the head with. The instant that Mooselimbs are no longer useful tools, y'all will be under the bus so quick your heads will spin.

Here's a reminder of what being tossed under the bus by Leftists looks like. Just remember what you're screwing with, all I'm sayin'.

Interesting AP spin on Waco biker massacre.

Well well well. AP has an "interesting" take on the biker/cop shootout in Waco.

The prevailing images of protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, over police killings of black men were of police in riot gear, handcuffed protesters, tear gas and mass arrests. The main images of a fatal gun battle between armed bikers and police in Waco, Texas, also showed mass arrests - carried out by nonchalant-looking officers sitting around calm bikers on cellphones.

The firefight in Waco is raising questions about perceptions and portrayals of crime in America, considering the vehement reaction that the earlier protests got from police, politicians and some members of the public.

It seems the media coverage was RAAAACIST according to some.

There were no deaths during the Baltimore and Ferguson protests, yet people immediately stereotyped all of the protesters as criminals, said Nicole Lee, a human rights lawyer who worked with protesters in both cities.

"Nine people were killed in Waco, and yet you have not heard the level of disgust and dismay as you did over fires burning in Ferguson and in Baltimore," Lee said. "One of the things the protesters always said was that while many of them disagreed with the property destruction, that you can rebuild property. But you can't bring back people, and yet you're not hearing an equal amount of disgust from the media and from people over what happened in Waco."

Civil rights attorney Charles F. Coleman Jr. said only minority communities get blamed for violence, while no one blames white families or white communities for fatal violence by white men, characterizing such events instead as "isolated incidents."

Leaving aside the obvious rejoinder that 60+% of the crimes in America are done by less than 10% of the population, (all of whom are members of a single visible minority which shall remain nameless) I'd just like to make this one comment: Texas bikers didn't get paid to riot, they spent their own money. The same cannot be said of the bunch in Ferguson.

http://www.weaselzippers.us/223908-ferguson-protesters-protest-not-getting-their-checks-for-protesting-from-their-organizers-list-of-payouts-to-protesters/
http://www.weaselzippers.us/224034-more-proof-of-paid-protesters-ad-asking-for-protesters-to-travel-to-protest-list-of-payouts-to-ferguson-protest-organizers/

Just sayin'.

The Phantom

Taxman looooves him some self-driving cars.

Margaret Thatcher famously said: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

What's that got to do with self-driving cars? Well, taxes are easier to levy on self-driving cars because they are fully internet connected and they remember everywhere they've been. So its very easy to query the self-driving car's brain, find out how far it went in a given time and then charge a tax on that mileage.

Oregon is doing a test on exactly such a system.

Oregon is about to embark on a first-in-the-nation program that aims to charge car owners not for the fuel they use, but for the miles they drive.

The program is meant to help the state raise more revenue to pay for road and bridge projects at a time when money generated from gasoline taxes are declining across the country, in part, because of greater fuel efficiency and the increasing popularity of fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars.

Starting July 1, up to 5,000 volunteers in Oregon can sign up to drive with devices that collect data on how much they have driven and where. The volunteers will agree to pay 1.5 cents for each mile traveled on public roads within Oregon, instead of the tax now added when filling up at the pump.

Now, as we know the State of Oregon and many other jurisdictions around North America have been giving Special Deals to the buyers of "Green" vehicles for years and years. Everything from special access lanes for designated hybrid cars to outright grants of money for purchasing a hybrid or electric car. Gee, now their gas tax revenue is down. Didn't see that coming, right?

But this is the best part:

Some electric and hybrid car owners, however, say the new tax would be unfair to them and would discourage purchasing of green vehicles. "This program targets hybrid and electric vehicles, so it's discriminatory," said Patrick Connor, a Beaverton resident who has been driving an electric car since 2007.

If this isn't a perfect Lefty Voter response I've never seen one. "Yes, I'll take my goodies thank you very much. Oh wait, -I- have to pay for them? RAAAAAACIST!!!!!!!"

Mr. Patric Connor is entitled to his entitlements, and he will fight to the death to keep every penny of other people's money.

On the horizon? Look for lots more schemes and scams like "pay per mile" because 32 US states are looking at serious budget shortfalls this year.

Thirty-two states faced budget gaps in fiscal 2015 or 2016 or both, according to an April 27 report by Standard & Poors. The fiscal year ends June 30 in all but four states.
Spending on education, roads repair and other services is threatened. Some Kansas schools are closing early, while Alaska Governor Bill Walker on Monday threatened furloughing as many as 15,000 workers if lawmakers don't act on a $3 billion gap. Alabama Governor Robert Bentley has warned of impending cuts, including the closing of 15 of 22 state parks.

When states have money trouble, they jack up taxes. If it moves, they will tax it. If it stops moving they will subsidize it until it starts moving again, then tax it some more. When people inevitably try to leave they will build a wall to stop them and shoot anybody who tries to climb it. Please see North Korea, Cuba and the former East Germany for examples of the logical end-point of socialism.

One way to build a wall is the self driving car. They just program it so it won't drive certain places. Like, out of town, across the border, places like that.

The Phantom

White men rioting.

How can you tell it was White men rioting? 170 arrests and 9 fatalities.

Some of the dead and wounded may have been shot by officers responding to the bedlam at the Twin Peaks restaurant franchise, Waco police spokesman Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said.

Wow. So the cops lit them up? That never happens.

Swanton said 170 people had been charged with engaging in organized crime resulting in death — a capital offense that could bring the death penalty in Texas.

Justice of the Peace W.H. Peterson ordered all to be held on $1 million bonds, and about one third had been had been booked into the McLennan County Jail by Monday afternoon, KWTX-TV reported.

Swanton said police had intelligence that the gang recruiting event Sunday at Twin Peaks restaurant could grow violent. Eighteen Waco and four state officers were in the area when the violence began, he said.

Compare and contrast with every single case of non-White men rioting anywhere in the USA in the last ten years. THIS is how you take down a riot. You shoot anybody who's got a gun in their hand, and then you arrest every single mofo in the place. Rinse and repeat every single time they show up.

So you see my friends, cops DO know how to do this properly, and they are WILLING do it properly. Therefore, they are ordered not to -every-single-time-. Except this time. Because there is no media downside to shooting rioters who are -White-.

Note for the slow witted Leftists who may read this: I am -not- saying it was wrong of the cops to shoot the rioting White men. I'm saying the cops would most likely have been ordered to fall back and leave them to it if they were not White. THAT is what's wrong.

The Phantom

Let's play connect the dots: NSA and Bin Laden.

Here's a game I like to play called Connect the Dots. I play this game to find out just how much in the dark I really am, and who's keeping me there.

Dot number one, the death of Osama Bin Laden. Seymour Hersh has been making quite a splash lately with his alternative story of the Bin Laden affair.  To say this his version of events rings more true than the story from "No Easy Day" or "Zero Dark Thirty" is to understate the matter significantly. Hersh basically contests the Obama regime claims of CIA Super Spy Action and instead claims the Pakistani government gave up Bin Laden for "military aid", aka money.

The thing that bothered me all these years about Bin Laden was the burial at sea. There's no way that a properly run military mission would do that. There would be video, pictures, samples, there would be all kinds of PAPERWORK, and so forth. Some guy on a ship doesn't get to decide they'll just dump the body overboard. Particularly if its some kind of super freakin' spy mission with super duper stealth aircraft and super secret military assets that Mere Humans are not allowed to know.

But they might if the whole thing was a scummy assassination, which happened because some greedy Pakistani official dropped a dime and made a call to the CIA. Meaning it was NOT the result of using NSA phone intercepts, space based imaging and Super Secret Science to track some vast web of subtle terrorists and beard the lion in his very lair. It was shooting a crippled old geezer in a jail cell and then waiting around for a ride home.

But on the other hand the whole Hersh thing -could- be bullshit. Therefore I go with Occam's Razor, least complicated explanation wins. The least complicated explanation is Hersh is right, and Obama was lying his ass off to look good on TV, because Obama does that pretty much exclusively. If he came out and said the plain Truth about something his freakin' tongue would probably burst into flame.

Dot number two, NSA ubiquitous surveillance of the telephone and internet systems called into question by former NSA dude. 

The decision to keep secret the National Security Agency's collection of American calling records was a strategic blunder that set the stage for Edward Snowden's unauthorized disclosures and ultimately harmed U.S. national security, the agency's former inspector general told NSA employees in blunt remarks Friday.

"You now live in a glass house," Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006, said in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the congressional hearings into the intelligence scandals of the Watergate era. "How could anyone think the bulk collection program would remain secret?"

It's not that there no longer can be national security secrets, said Brenner, a lawyer who retired in 2009 after serving as the top U.S. counterintelligence official. But "the idea that the broad rules governing your activities -not specific operations, but the broad rules-can be kept secret is a delusion. And they should not be kept secret."

When stated in this way, it does seem idiotic. It seems doubly idiotic to me because WE KNOW ABOUT IT a long time before Snowden came out with his "bombshell". Cops have been using telephone records to catch people since the 1970's, how was there not a national level program to collect that stuff? We knew about the FBI's Carnivore, there's been a Wikipedia page about it since 2004. All Snowden did was make it impossible to ignore any longer.

Let's connect these two dots then, shall we?  Item one, Bin Laden was not found using Item two, the trillion dollar non-secret all-encompassing ubiquitous surveillance system that is the NSA. The NSA was pretty much on the sidelines and has been since probably the 1990's, because every crook and scumbag in the entire world knows the NSA is listening to their calls. This would include POLITICIANS, who I'm entirely certain do all their dirty or off-colour dealings face to face with a handshake.

Well, except the stupid ones or the truly arrogant like Hillary Clinton. The speed with which General Petraeus' emails to Paula Broadwell were revealed says much about the power of the NSA to find things. The NSA has copies of ALL those emails Hillary deleted off that private server. She just doesn't care because she's so Important no little clerk would dare disturb her by "finding" them. Note that all of official Washington is pretending its all over now, no hope of ever getting those emails back, nuh uh.

So what's the NSA for then? Is it for overthrowing the US Constitution and starting a New Empire like frickin' Star Wars?

Does it seem like the bunch of sad-sacks portrayed in Seymour Hersh's piece could dream of pulling something like that off? Does it seem like an Edward Snowden wouldn't squeal on them if they did?

No. If we connect all this shit up, it seems very likely that the NSA isn't FOR anything at all. It just grew, and grew, and grew until it was what we see today. The titanic, all-encompassing and entirely useless-for-security Peeping Tom to end all Peeping Toms. It staggers along under its own weight, soaking up money like a sponge and rewarding all sorts of cronies and faithful servants. Its like a Golden Calf, it doesn't do anything useful but it has its worshipers all the same.

We know from Mr. Snowden that many of the little dickless hipsters who work there use the system to collect amateur porn pics and video as young women take pictures of themselves with their phones. Cops do the same thing in LA, two of them got busted for it lately.

Driverless cars: why would I be suspicious?

Big Brother says "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

Four of the nearly 50 self-driving cars now rolling around California have gotten into accidents since September, when the state began issuing permits for companies to test them on public roads.

In and of itself, four fender benders on 50 cars in six months is no big deal. Its probably pretty good for a fleet of 50 taxis, would be my unsupported guess. Here's what's interesting though:

The fact that neither the companies nor the state have revealed the accidents troubles some who say the public should have information to monitor the rollout of technology that its own developers acknowledge is imperfect.

The state and the companies seem extremely interested in the Great Unwashed not finding out any information about these robots having accidents. Because if you're turning a two ton car with 300 hp loose on the road, you don't want people thinking a Terminator is driving it.

John Simpson, a longtime critic of Google as privacy project director of the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, pointed out that the company's ultimate goal is a car without a steering wheel or pedals. That would mean a person has no power to intervene if a car lost control, making it "even more important that the details of any accidents be made public — so people know what the heck's going on."

Uhm, yeah.

So when we all get treated to exactly the opposite of being told what's going on, such as why I would even -want- a car with no steering wheel or even a brake pedal in it, my suspicions are aroused.

The government interest here is also very suspicious. Why is the State of California actively protecting Google from inquiries about accidents that happened on public roads? That information is supposed to be a matter of public record.

One might almost suspect money might be involved.

Here's the thing. While a robot car would be fabulously useful for a taxi company or a bus company or a trucking company, to the private individual it isn't that attractive a thing. There are individuals whose driving is so bad they would benefit from a robot car, and of course there are disabled individuals for whom the robot car would be extremely helpful to their mobility. But NOT VERY MANY, so providing robots to the disabled would not be a money maker.

The risk involved in providing them to taxi services, bus and trucking companies would be astronomical, because the manufacturer would be assuming the blame for every accident any of their cars was ever in. You can't tell me a jury isn't going to find against the giant multi-national corporation almost every time.

So why do it at all?

Because the automobile is more important to the individual freedom of people than the printing press or even the internet. Talk is cheap, getting in your car and driving away is a much more powerful statement. I think there's a lot of intellectuals, social planners and politicians who are interested in restricting the mobility of Joe Average. For Joe's own good of course.

People are stupid, y'know. They have to be controlled.

The Phantom

Big Brother watches Baltimore, lets it burn.

Since the FBI and DHS are not protecting Pamella Geller from Islamists who actually shoot people at her events, what are they doing?

They're flying surveillance over Baltimore.

Not so obvious was a single engine Cessna and a small Cessna jet–both were conducting aerial surveillance for the FBI.

The website www.flightradar24.com tracked them circling Baltimore–not during the riot–the FBI was watching last weekend when peaceful demonstrations were held.

The ACLU has filed a request with the FBI to learn what video and cell phone data was collected during the flights.

Baltimore police referred questions about the flights to the FBI.

At first, the local FBI field headquarters declined to comment, but in a statement to WJZ, it said:

"The aircraft were specifically used to assist in providing high altitude observation of potential criminal activity to enable rapid response by police officers on the ground. The FBI aircraft were not there to monitor lawfully protected first amendment activity."

It's not known just how much aid police on the ground received from the FBI's planes.

Emphasis mine.

What they were doing was collecting video and cellphone data. If you showed up at any of those demonstrations or even drove around those days, the FBI has a complete record of who you are and where you went.

They also have a complete record of all the looters, burners and other assholes who were out looting, burning and being assholes. Like, they've got VIDEO of it with helpful captions identifying who everybody in the pictures are thanks to cellphone data. Because looters are stupid, they took pictures of themselves looting and carried their phones everywhere.

Given that the cops were specifically ordered to let the looters loot, its difficult to see how all this surveillance was of any use.

What's that you say? They can go pick them up later you say? Well no, that's not going to happen because the FBI is going to very great lengths making sure this technology does not show up in court.

Well then, if they weren't protecting the city from looters, and they weren't collecting evidence for catching criminals later, what were they doing?

They were tracking the peaceful demonstrators, obviously. Looters are not a threat to Big Brother. Intelligent and dedicated political activists are. The fact that in this particular case those activists are all Full-Moron Lefties doesn't mean the FBI isn't following their every freaking move.

The Phantom

New York Times: "She was asking for it."

Shorter New York Times: "Well if you didn't want to get raped maybe you shouldn't have been wearing that mini-skirt, you slut!"  Via National Review.  Quoth The Times Editorial Board:

Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.

Yep, Pamella Geller is a hatey hating hater, and She Was Asking For It. The bitch.

This is Pam not giving a shit what the NY Slimes Editorial Board thinks.

So its really no surprise that the FBI and DHS have cut her loose.

"They have not contacted me," Geller said about the FBI. "But of course we've now increased my team. I have a team now, private security, and NYPD counterterror has been in touch with me."

She said that in the same interview with Sean Hannity during which Anjem Choudary said she should be put to death for insulting Mo.

But hey, she was asking for it. Right?

My comment is this:

 

Pamella should do her next event in this dress.

 

The Phantom

License plate readers disguised as saguaro cacti.

You can always tell which town in Arizona have the most liberals in them by the stuff they spend their money on. Town of Paradise Valley decided they needed to have license plate readers all over the place.

The City of Paradise Valley has added cactus with cameras in them over the past few days, but residents have no idea why, and the city doesn't want to talk about them.

About two dozen fake cactus already serve as cover for cell towers, but some people were alarmed to see cameras being place in cactus around town.

Fake cacti, obviously. However the town apparatchiki did not answer questions regarding these stealth cameras. So the journalists DID THEIR JOBS for a change and found out.

FOX 10 asked Paradise Valley Police about the cameras, but they said they were not prepared to make a statement at this time. At City Hall people were also hesitant to talk with FOX 10 about the cameras, saying they wanted to wait until all the cameras were installed, but eventually the Town Manager answered some of the questions.

"The town is embarking on the installation of license plate readers," said Kevin Burke, Paradise Valley Town Manager.

Burke says the cameras run license plates of cars against a hot list database. If the car is stolen, or the subject of an amber alert, the police will be notified.

FOX 10 did a story in February about the same technology being installed on traffic lights, the city also declined to talk publicly then too.

Now, the city manager spun some nice sounding BS about why this thing was all done sub rosa, but the truth of the matter is they wanted the thing in place before they told anybody what it was. I expect they'd very much like to have their system up and fully functional with all the money already spent before they share with the peons what all that money was for.

Mr. Burke is also being less than fully forthcoming when he says " the cameras run license plates of cars against a hot list database". Its true that the system does do that. Eventually.

What it actually does is photograph the entire intersection. Usually every time a car is  in its field of view, plus I'm sure at other times. Then it stores the pictures. Potentially forever because as I've said many times, storage is cheap. Then a computer somewhere, possibly in the camera itself or possibly somewhere else, scans the photo of your car and identifies the license plate, making note of the day and time, which camera it came from etc. Then it stores this information, now associated with your license plate. Again, potentially forever. THEN it runs your plate against the hot list.

So really what they've got is a virtual real-time record of every car that goes by those cameras. Given enough cameras they can track who goes where and when. They may not end up doing that, but they -can- do it.

Time to start asking yourself, is it your town/state/federal government's business where you are at any moment of the day? Is it in your best interests that they know that?

And please, don't forget that these town police/road safety people SUCK AT SECURITY. Those cameras are begging to be hijacked, probably completely insecure. Who else might want to know your exact whereabouts that shouldn't be allowed to know that?

The Phantom

Monday morning quarterbacks vs. Pamela Geller

Ace of Spades, (via Small Dead Animals):

Are we here to talk about ideas and principles, or are we here to secure position and advantage?

A woman spoke.

Men with guns shot at her for speaking.

Do we really need to take an "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach here.

And we need not talk about "tone" or whether Ms. Gellar speaks for us on all things.

One does not award Style Points on a battlefield.

Worth reading the whole thing, as Kate says.

My two cents worth: Pam Geller is the fricking BOMB, and anybody who says otherwise is a useless, cowardly collaborator with murderers. If all you Canadian Mooselimbs out there are smart you'll be boosting Pamela Geller and contributing money to her as fast as you can.

Oh noooes, DRONES!!!!! Yes they can spoof wifi. Duh.

NBC Chicago comes up with the Big News that you can stick a wifi router on a drone and have your drone pose as an "open" wifi point.

Drones are inexpensive, small and hard to detect when flying several hundred feet in the air. And security researchers warn the remote devices can also be outfitted to gather private information.

In a controlled environment, penetration tester Parker Schmitt and robot expert David Jordan attached a tiny computer to a drone to show how the device could be used for nefarious purposes. While in the sky, the drone poses as an open Wi-Fi network and tricks other devices to connect to it. Once the connection is made, any information that passes through -- credit card information, home addresses, and telephone numbers -- can be obtained.

What they don't tell you is that this is -trivial- and the $5 chip which does it is the size of your baby fingernail.

This is a big one that is a wifi enabled micro-controller/embedded computer.

This is the WiFi part out of a pair of wifi headphones. Get it?

If you put one in a can and nailed it to a fence post it would do the same thing. Put one of those small solar panels on it, the ones the size of half a sheet of paper, give it a cell-phone battery, and you've got a permanent pirate wifi hotspot. Put a decent antenna on it and it can have a range of hundreds of feet.

The real danger is when these guys pose as cell-phone towers. They can do that too. Less trivial, a bit more power involved, but can still be mounted on a drone. Or a fence post, or in a street light, or you put it in a matchbox and throw dozens of them out the window of your car, one every half mile...etc.

This is more complicated and larger than a throw-away wifi pirate.

Notice that the largest part of the Twitter Fridge Magnet is the 9V battery? It could be a hell of a lot smaller. Those are Sparkfun Arduino boards made for hobby prototypes, not Secret Sam Spy Stuff.

This technology is getting ridiculously small and -cheap-, its going to be freakin' -everywhere- in the next five years.

Don't do your banking on your phone.

The Insufficiently Paranoid Phantom

Sad Puppies: Oh the Humanity-ing.

The worst has happened my friends. The eeeeevile Brad Torgersen, Puppy in Chief, has admitted, on Twitter, that he's not too sure about that John Scalzi guy. Just not too sure which way that guy swings, if you know what I'm saying.

Needless to say, there is a Kerfuffle on the Interwebz. Its just as lame as one might expect, I'm not linking to any of it.  Becausezz soo sleepyzzzzzz....

Well, I'm sure its an understandable confusion, Scalzi being kind of a Hollywood stereotype in his internet interactions. Not that there's anything -wrong- with being a yappy pomeranian one minute and a supercilious dick the next, I suppose. If you're into that sort of thing.

John Scalzi explaining something.

Personally I think there are more important things to know about somebody, particularly an author, than which way they swing. Such as, are their books worth buying?

Early Scalzi, I'd say yes. Lately? I think his editor hates him, and is letting him get preachy and intemperate. Kind of a professional hazard when you're a bitchy SJW, eh John?

The Phantom

Quantum teleportation on a chip.

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-quantum-teleportation-chip.html

Yes. Quantum teleportation IS a thing, and now somebody put it on silicon.

Holy. Freaking. Freak.

Social Justice Benches.

By which, I do not mean park benches. Exhibit A, the puppy fearing Vonda N. McIntyre

I'm distressed to see that some folks who were planning to come to Sasquan are thinking of skipping Worldcon this year.

Because they're frightened.

I understand why people are frightened, given the racist, misogynistic, and dishonest screeds they've been subjected to. It isn't — alas — unusual for verbal abuse to escalate into physical abuse; and anyway verbal abuse is no fun to begin with.

Yes friends, the Huns are coming to WorldCon.  They will be armed, dangerous and hunting for Truefans to kill and then eat.

So you're asking yourself, how much use is Vonda going to be, given RACIST/BIGOT/MISOGYNISTIC CANNIBAL KILLERS FROM HELL are going to be roaming the halls at will?

But I'm thinking that maybe it would make folks who feel threatened feel a little safer to have someone at their side, maybe even someone with a bunch o' fancy ribbons fluttering from her name badge, even if that person is shorter, smaller, and older than they are, white-haired and not physically prepossessing. It's another person's presence.

It might cause some abuse not to happen.

Yeah, because ABUSE is what going to happen if we don't all band together and face down those RACIST/BIGOT/MISOGYNISTIC CANNIBAL KILLERS FROM HELL in solidarity.

Or, you know, not. Somebody might look at them funny, I guess.

Yep, that convention is going to be SO much fun, uh huh. Fearful old ladies traveling in packs to make sure the Sad Puppies don't get 'em.  Big, big fun.

The Phantom