Phantom update, so far so good.

Update from Chez Phantom, We are observing the Get Off My Lawn protocol for the next two weeks. Drawbridge is up.

For mental health, I am staying off the news pages as much as possible. The amount of conflicting information out there on the official channels is sufficient that I'm assuming nobody has a clue out there. The numbers will tell the tale soon enough, I can wait.

Everybody stay safe, stay home, and wash your hands.

The Phantom

New Rules: Chris Matthew's Last Tingle.

Big news tonight is that in the biggest election year since Regan beat Carter, Chris Matthews of MSNBC Hardball fame is "retiring."

Word is, Chris maybe made one too many jokes to the wrong women, and he's been "#MeToo-ed right out the door. Hasta la vista, baby.

Now, most other guys I'd have some sympathy. A joke is a joke, guys play around and say stupid stuff all the time, it is no big deal. We're not talking about rape here, right? This isn't sexual assault, ass-grabbing, using a position of power to get sexual favors from a subordinate. This is -talking,- allegedly anyway. Free country, a man should be able to talk, right?

But Chris Mathews has been on the cutting edge of the PC movement and pushing the DemocRats for a very long time. He was all over letting Bill Clinton off the hook when the Monica Lewinsky thing broke. If any one guy contributed more to the current political climate than Chris Matthews, I don't know who that might be.

New Rules, Chris. Live by #MeToo, die by #MeToo. Matthews has thrown his last softball, but Rush Limbaugh is still on at noon tomorrow, lung cancer and all.

New bedside MRI for $50K

This is an amazing machine. A magnetic resonance imaging scanner that fits on a trolley like an ultrasound machine, can be wheeled around the hospital by one or two people, and costs $50,000. Price of a car. Wow.

Magnetic resonance imaging is no longer confined to radiology departments. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday that it has provided clearance to the "world's first" bedside MRI system, according to an announcement.

Hyperfine said it will begin shipping its portable, low-field modalities this summer. It's 510(k) clearance falls on the same day that Yale researchers reported the device can accurately and safely image patient's brains for stroke. Those preliminary results are set to be presented next week at the American Stroke Association's International conference in Los Angeles, the group announced.

"We've flipped the concept from having to get patients to the MRI to bringing the MRI to the patients," said Kevin Sheth, MD, senior author and a chief physician at Yale School of Medicine. "This early work suggests our approach is safe and viable in a complex clinical care environment."

If this pans out, a lot of people will have their lives saved by cheap and easy MRI scans.

In the United States, anyway. Look for Canadian approval to be decades away. A diagnosis means you have to treat the patient. Better not to have a scanner handy. #Rationing.

The Phantom has published!!!

Yes, the long awaited day is finally here!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0848PX3TC/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Edward+Thomas+Unfair+Advantage&qid=1580166769&s=books&sr=1-1

That's the live link to Amazon.com where my first book is now available!

And yes, Edward Thomas is very much a pen name.

A little background, this book started off as a tiny little idea in my head in 1993. I wrote down things from then until about 2012, when a friend of mine read the collected scribblings, pronounced them good, and told me "You have to finish this right now!"

So I did finish it, around 2014. Then I kept going and going, until now I have five in the can and two more in the oven, as it were.

This year it was decided I needed to get busy and PUBLISH it, so a cover was constructed and here we are. Published.

I'm not sure how I feel about it right now. I pulled the trigger at 3:15 this afternoon, and now I have a stomach ache. 😓

The Phantom

Geography is racist!

As I've been saying for some time now, if you break crimes by geography, you find some very interesting things. Such as if you map shootings and murders on a map, you very rapidly see that more than half the shootings are concentrated in two or three areas of a city, and some areas have no murders at all.

Here's a guy who did that for the continental United States.

We hear a lot of banter from the "anti-gun" media that these problems are gun problems, and they've concocted this "gun deaths" number in order to lump these into the same problem and gloss over the differences. But if the problem were "guns," then the hot spots on the suicide map and the hot spots on the homicide map would coincide, and would be related to gun ownership rates. There are only a few places where they overlap. Most of the hot zones for suicide have low homicide rates, and most of the hot zones for homicide have low suicide rates. The difference is stark.

Gun ownership rates, as far as such a thing can be determined, generally are inverse to crime and suicide rates from the studies I've seen. But its kind of hard to tell, because people generally lie like bastards when asked if they have any guns.

At any rate, there are some very interesting graphs here that tell a very non-PC story about who is getting shot by who, and where.

Map website here. You can do your own research.

The Phantom.

Austrailan bush fires are arson?

Apparently the extensive brush fires burning up Australia this year are largely arson.

Overall, across Australia police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months.
The link between arsonists and the deadly fires that devastate Australia every summer is well known and well documented, with the rate of deliberately lit fires escalating rapidly during the school holiday period.

The Conversation reports experts estimate about 85 percent of bushfires are caused by humans. A person may accidentally or carelessly start a fire, such as leaving a campfire unattended or using machinery which creates sparks.
Research has shown about 8 percent of officially recorded vegetation fires were attributed to malicious lighting, and another 22 percent as suspicious. However, about 40 percent of officially recorded vegetation fires did not have an assigned cause.
When unassigned bushfires were investigated by fire investigators, the majority were found to be maliciously lit, the Conversation added.

Meanwhile, Prophetess Greta Thunberg is screeching that its all global warming to blame. It'll be interesting to see how many Lefty eco-wingnuts end up convicted of arson over the coming year. My wild guess, more than a few.

Its 2020!

Happy New Year!