Gas prices: Where's the outrage?

Larry Elder asks where the media is with their pitchforks this month:

Five dollars per gallon of gas by 2012! A former president of Shell Oil considers this likely. The average price on Christmas Day for a gallon of regular gas reached $3.28 in Los Angeles County, the highest price since October 2008. In one month, the price rose 13 cents, up 35 cents year to year.

Where are the calls to sic Obama's Justice Department on Big Oil to hold the oil companies accountable for "market manipulation"? Why aren't we hunting down the amoral "oil speculators" responsible for repealing the law of supply-and-demand in order to line their pockets?

Silly question, we know where they are.  They are hiding under their desks and hoping nobody remembers what they said two years ago.  Also hoping nobody publicly connects the dots from the gas pump price to Barry's ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  Or inflation.  Or the Treasury printing a trillion bucks this year.  That's not even hyperbole, they really printed a trillion with a "T".  MSM, hiding.

Well, how about Canuckistan?

Here in Canada, we are praying for three bucks a gallon.  Praying, I tell you.  Why?  Because the price right now in Toronto, the biggest city in Canada, is $1.14 a liter.  1 liter = 0.264 172 052 36  US gallons, thanks to the undead genius of Pierre Trudeau, we pay by the quart.  Canadian dollar is within 6 decimal points of perfect parity with the US dollar today, so apples to apples,  we pay $4.31 a US gallon for gas.  I paid $1.08/quart for diesel yesterday, that was $4.05 a gallon.  Wowzer, such a deal!
Canada is an oil -exporting- country.  We sell the stuff to you guys in the States.  Why does ours cost more than yours by by such a wide margin?  TAXES.  Plain and simple.  Some will quibble that formulations are different, that Canadian provinces add things that are not required in the US, and blah blah blah, but I have it on good authority that the blend they sell in Michigan and California is as expensive as Ontario's, due to ethanol and oxidizers and whatnot.  California may be more expensive.

Where's the outrage in Canada?  Where are the investigations into Big Oil and all that?  Same deal, the sonsabitches are hiding, praying nobody says anything.  Because if anyone -does- say anything, the finger will point to the Liberal Party of Canada, and the Liberal Party of Ontario.  They are the ones who did this.  And because they are the ones, all you hear from the media here in the Demented Dominion is the faint chirping of crickets.

May they all die of toe fungus.

Who's to blame here, really though?

Of late there has been some news about the Mohawk Warrior Smuggling Society. The smugglers are supposed to be getting an apology from the Canadian Forces.

The Canadian Forces is preparing an official apology for listing the Mohawk Warrior Society as a potentially violent insurgent group in a draft [of a counter insurgency] manual in 2006.

Given the observed facts about the Smuggling Society and their antics in Caledonia since they invaded the Douglas Creek Estates land, plus what's going down in Cornwall area, this seems insane. They -are- a violent insurgent group, there's no "potentially" about it.

I have an explanation of the insanity here. Recently the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy. was given permission to hunt deer in the Dundas Conservation Area and a couple more conservation areas near Hamilton, after being caught and unceremoniously booted off last year for "exercising their treaty rights". One guy made the call.

Hamilton Conservation Authority boss Steve Miazga says he believes Six Nations natives have a right to hunt deer on conservation lands, and that he alone made the decision to close public trails in the interest of public safety while native hunters "cull" deer until Dec. 31.

"My conclusion is that they have these treaty rights," Miazga, the conservation authority's chief administrative officer, said Monday.

As of a couple days ago Mr. Steve Miazga is in some serious hot water over this, since people discovered armed men hunting deer in the PARK. Its a park, y'know. Hikers, joggers, kids on toboggans, the usual park kinda stuff going on. One bureaucrat sticks his neck out? For an illegal deer hunt? Again, this seems insane.

The explanation is, Miazga grasped at the only straw available to him to fix a problem that threatens all the Conservation Authority lands in the Hamilton area: deer.
The fur covered piranha have eaten every green stick in the Conservation Area less than 6 feet off the ground. In the suburbs of Ancaster, deer have gone from the occasional charming midnight visitor to an invading horde of landscaping destroyers. I lived there, the overpopulation is obvious and extreme.
Why? Hunting regulations, obviously. You kill one, you go to jail.
What can the conservation authority's chief administrative officer do about it? NOTHING!!! Regulations. Catch 22.
Meanwhile deer are eating the place. His blather about "poachers" is hilarious. He should be so lucky to have poachers, he needs to cull 100+ animals before spring.
A bunch of race-shakedown artists, members of which have been charged with extortion, make him an offer he can't refuse. "Six Nations Indians" with "treaty rights", this he can sell. He takes the deal! Hence the appearance of insanity.

Who's to blame here?

Pretty much every bureaucrat who has anything to do with regulating hunting in the Hamilton area, that's who. A long list, because it involves city, regional, provincial and federal levels and tax funded NGOs too. They've created a situation where only ORGANIZED CRIME can cut the Gordian Knot for them.
I can't really blame the thugs for taking advantage of the situation. Its like putting a pail full of money beside the road every morning, sooner or later somebody is going to take it.
Without knowing the details of the Canadian Forces apology situation, one can pretty reliably predict that some military desk pilot is grasping at the only straw he's got, just like Miazga.

What we need therefore is a tax cut.
I'm not talking a Laffer Curve, stimulate-the-economy tax cut. I am talking the Four Horsemen of the freakin' Apocalypse kinda tax cut. I'm talking about a famine here. I'm talking about a tax cut so big, so deep, so wide, so all-encompassing that it STARVES OUT the hundreds of thousands of chair-polishing asses who keep this Catch 22 clown circus stumbling along. A tax cut that reduces government employee head counts like the Black Death in 12th C. Europe.
That is the only way out. We do not need better regulation, better oversight, better control. We need -less- of it. A lot less.

Thoughts to think about in the New Year, my friends.

The Phantom

Update: Greetings to Five Feet of Fury readers! Kathy Shaidle is Da Bomb!

Merry Christmas!!!

Gee, ya think?

From our bulging, groaning, over flowing "No DUH!" file, we have this "study" today.

According to a new study conducted by the Parents Television Council (PTC), Hollywood is shockingly obsessed with sexualizing teen girls, to the point where underage female characters are shown participating in an even higher percentage of sexual situations than their adult counterparts: 47 percent to 29 percent respectively.

PTC’s report, entitled “New Target: A Study of Teen Female Sexualization on Primetime

TV” is based on a content analysis drawn from the 25 most popular shows in the 12-17 demographic throughout the 2009-2010 television season.

It's been my humble opinion for quite a while now that most of what passes for prime time TV these days would have got these Hollyweirdos arrested 30 years ago even if shown in a theater. Bettie Page would have stormed off the set of Glee in moral outrage.

I'd say that anyone leaving a child alone in front of a TV these days is crazy. Even things billed as "kid's" shows are far too adult. Anybody see Toy Story 3? Worse than a Schwarzenegger action flick. Kids are less scared of the Terminator than Toy Story.

My response is: I don't get cable. Don't have a TV antenna. Don't watch at all, ever.

I should pay to have my brain waves assaulted?

Texas skeet shooting.

Everything is bigger in Texas. Bigger guns, bigger clays.

Pull!

A Mexican drone crashed in El Paso's Lower Valley, sparking a federal investigation and raising questions about why the aircraft was in U.S. airspace.

YEEEEEHAW!!!!

Don't stand in front of it!

Special delivery for the ancient denizens of The Arms Chest, from our bulging "Reach out and touch someone" file The Phantom Soapbox brings you: US Navy Rail Gun!

Navy scientists set a world record Friday during a test of an electromagnetic railgun, a tractor-trailer sized weapon that sends a 20-pound projectile rocketing through the air at seven times the speed of sound.
The futuristic gun was tested twice at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., and the first shot generated 33 megajoules of force out of the barrel, a world record for muzzle energy, the scientists said.

Their motto: velocitas eradico.

Oh yeah, baby.  Sign me up for one of these.  It won't fit in my truck, but I could tow it...

Photonic lifting device demonstrated.

That's right, photonic lifting, as in you shine a light on it and it produces lift.  And you can STEER it.

...until now, no one thought to use [photon] pressure in an analogue of an aerofoil, said Grover Swarzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

"Here at RIT we have a group that... do ray tracing through objects to render computer graphics stuff all the time," he told BBC News.

"So I said let's just turn this problem onto one of these ray-tracing programs and see what happens."

The team ran computer simulations based on a semi-cylindrical glass rod to see what would happen when a beam of unfocused light was shone on it.

They discovered not only that the rods experienced "lift", but that there were several angles that the rod tended to align itself to.

"The surprising thing from our model shows it has different positions of rotational equilibrium, so it will roll to a given position, stay there, and continue to undergo lift," Dr Swarzlander said.

The team went on to design tiny glass rods, less than a hair's breadth across, to prove the principle.

The rods were floated in water, through which a laser was shone. They behaved just as the simulations had predicted.

Major point of interest here is that the force generated by the glass shapes is directional.  Meaning if you turn the shape, the direction of the force changes.
Steerable light sails equals free trips to the planets and the outer system for robots.  Really BIG ones, if we want.

The Steerable Phantom.

Classic D'OH! moment for DemocRats everywhere.

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer introduced a bill Sunday that calls for punishing anyone who misuses. They could also face fines of up to $100,000.

But gee,  were we not told by Chuckie and Barry and Nancy and Barbie and everybody that those naked body scanners DID NOT STORE THE SCANS?!!!  Why yes, I do indeed recall being told that.  I didn't believe it of course, Democrats being the lowest form of lying scum yet discovered on Earth or off it.  But they did tell us that.

So today UpChuck Schumer, senior Senator for Noo Yawk and biggest lying scum of all of them, introduces a bill to prevent what we were all told could never happen?

D'OH!!!

Big Brother's competition, Big Advertising.

For your "I always feel like somebody's watching meeee!" file, you're not wrong.  They really ARE friggin' watching you. Like a hawk watches a mouse.

David Norris wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world.

He's off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris's start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world's estimated 10 billion devices.

Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people. So, Mr. Norris is building a "credit bureau for devices" in which every computer or cellphone will have a "reputation" based on its user's online behavior, shopping habits and demographics. He plans to sell this information to advertisers willing to pay top dollar for granular data about people's interests and activities.

Device fingerprinting is a powerful emerging tool in this trade. It's "the next generation of online advertising," Mr. Norris says.

FYI, this includes cars, cell phones, routers, laptops, ipods, game consoles, anything that uses WiFi, ethernet or cell phone technology.  This method lets the snooper identify your specific computer behind a firewall, so doing your downloading at McDonald's is no defense.

To me this sounds like the beautiful hammering of opportunity on the front door, demanding to be let in. 
As soon as people find out about this fingerprinting/tracking bullshit, there will be a thriving market in "fingerprint randomization" software.  If I'm any judge of human nature, millions of people will pay real money to jam a wrench in this Norris guy's gears. 
For one thing, we know that somewhere between a quarter and a half of all web traffic is porn sites.  Do those people want unseen advertisers (or the government!) to know they spend X minutes per day at Hot Chicks.com?  Because if unseen advertisers know it, how long before that info is for sale?
Besides, do we really want these jerks targeting ads on an individual basis?  For one thing, you'd never find out about anything new by accident, just the same old crap you've been ignoring all along.

Anonymity is the grease that makes the Internet glide.  Money waiting to be made, my friends!