ICE releases new guidelines for transgender illegals.

Here's an example of your government bureaucrats working hard to make the USA a better place.

The agency will start tracking data for transgender detainees, train detention staff and draft individual detention plans for transgender detainees to deal with issues ranging from hormone therapy to safety, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, ICE's deputy assistant director of custody programs.

"ICE will allow for the placement of a transgender woman consistent with their gender identity, meaning that a transgender woman could be with biological females," said Lorenzen-Strait, who was also appointed as a national coordinator for issues related to gay, lesbian and transgender detainees.

I read "The agency will start tracking data for transgender detainees..." and my first though was "What, both of them?" Then I read on to find this gem here"

ICE currently has about 60 transgender detainees. About 25 are housed in a special unit in Santa Ana, California, for transgender women and gay men. The rest are housed in different facilities across the country, mostly with the general population and consistent with their biological sex, Lorenzen-Strait said.

The agency currently houses about 31,000 detainees a day, he said.

See, this is where money goes when you pay taxes.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement department has 31,000 people in jail any given day. 60 is 0.19% of 31,000. So, for 0.19% of the JAIL population, of illegal immigrants who aren't supposed to be there in the first place, and are supposed to be corralled and then deported ASAP...

...the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department has a "national coordinator" and a whole freaking department of professional bureaucrats. They have a budget, and offices, and computers, and servers, and a Twitter account, and all sorts of super duper Federal government stuff that costs a -fortune-.

By the way, is it not hilarious that the guy who's national coordinator for issues related to gay, lesbian and transgender detainees is named "Strait"? Where do they get these people?
 

Anyway, for the price of an entire department in the Federal government, ICE could literally buy every transgender detainee a house and supply them with a cook and a gardener for the full length of their stay. Probably throw in a car and a driver.

Just remember my friends, government is where money goes to die.

The Phantom

The stupid that we face.

I could not let this one go past unremarked. In the middle of the media disinformation campaign that has morons burning the American flag in New York City, morons calling for a ban on the Battle Flag of the Confederacy, morons calling for the removal of the Jefferson monument in DC, morons generally howling and screaming because some freak shot up a church, we get this:

Macon Wal-Mart mob wanted to see how much damage it could do

Surveillance video of a wee-hours ruckus at a Macon Wal-Mart on Sunday shows a teenager race inside flashing gang signs ahead of a mob of four dozen or so people who burst in and smashed merchandise.

The commotion, which caused an estimated $2,000 in damage, appears to have been planned.

Some in the crowd also snatched a man, apparently a shopper at the Zebulon Road store, from a motorized shopping cart and dragged him to the floor, Bibb County sheriff's officials said Monday.

The vandals, said to number between 40 and 50, sprinted down the store's main aisle about 1:50 a.m. Sunday, "destroying merchandise displays and items," a sheriff's deputy's report of the incident noted.

Now, the cynical and jaded individual such as myself has seen this kind of thing reported on Drudge about every week,  and it has become part of the background noise of our society.

We here in Canada don't see this kind of thing happening on the news, not because it never happens here but more because it never gets reported. It never gets reported because the perpetrators are ALWAYS from one "protected group" or another, members of any one of several Holy Visible Minorities that the Canadian media simply will not report on. Ever. Unless there's juicy video or somebody dies, it doesn't get mentioned. Almost like a news blackout, but more insidious because the people not-reporting on these "high spirited youthful hijinks" really don't think it is news when ten kids knock over a 7/11 and punch out the guy behind the counter.

Unless they are WHITE kids punching out a MINORITY counter guy. Then its news. But oddly, that never happens. Like, really never. So swarmings are never seen in Canada.

We watch them on the American news instead. All the friggin' time. Weekly. Its become the water we swim in. Tuesday rolls around, another Wal-Mart in East Shitkicker Missouri gets swarmed and trashed, ho hum.

But I have to report on this one in Macon Georgia. I do. Because of this bit here:

The teenager seen leading the rushing horde of young men and women told a Wal-Mart employee "that this was a planned event ... to see how much damage they could cause," the sheriff's report said.

The teen, identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green, of Ashton Drive in northwest Bibb County, was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone.

Arrested when he went back to the freaking store because he forgot his cell phone in the middle of pulling a flash-riot. For realz.

Now, without wanting to seem a racist here, its pretty obvious that this is a black kid. The reason it is obvious is NOT because he's dumber than a bag of hammers. It is NOT because he has a friggin' idiotic made-up name. It is NOT because the cops busted him. It is NOT because only blacks swarm stores. I'm sure a determined researcher could dig up a news report about a non-black store-swarming, with enough work.

No, its obvious he's black and indeed all the 50 little shithead rioters are black, because we are reading this report in the Macon Telegraph and not in an hourly report on CNN. If it was white kids did this, it would be international news 24/7 for two weeks.

Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog, that's news.

For the reading challenged Leftists among my potential readers, let me translate all that wordz above for you: I'm not criticizing black people. I'm telling you the media are a bunch of lying liars. Turn off the TV and your IQ will immediately gain 40 points.

The Phantom

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-The mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

The teenager seen leading the rushing horde of young men and women told a Wal-Mart employee "that this was a planned event ... to see how much damage they could cause," the sheriff's report said.

The teen, identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green, of Ashton Drive in northwest Bibb County, was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2015/06/29/3821075_report-macon-wal-mart-mob-wanted.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Overflight report.

Reporting overflight by Douglas DC3, North American Harvard and Westland Lysander this AM.

So yeah. Life could be worse, my friends. ~:)

The Spoiled Phantom.

Facial recognition tracking, now in churches!

According to this article, there are now 30 or more "mega-churches" in the USA using facial recognition software to identify people for purposes ranging from fundraising to... whatever the hell they want to do with it.

We know that Facebook has a vast facial recognition database so good that it can recognize you when your face is hidden, that the FBI has built a millions-strong criminal facial recognition system, and that Google's new Photos app is so effective at face recognition that it can identify now-adults in photos from their childhood. But now facial recognition is starting to pop up in weird and unexpected places: at music festivals (to identify criminals); at stadiums (to weed out "sports troublemakers") and at churches. Yes, churches.

Moshe Greenshpan, the CEO of Israel- and Las Vegas-based facial recognition software company Face-Six, says there are 30 churches around the world using his Churchix technology. He launched the service just four months ago and says churches are already using it to scan congregants' earthly visages to keep track of attendance at events in order to know who wasn't there so they can check up on them, or who attends most frequently so they can ask those people for donations. He declined to name any of the churches using the technology citing the controversy around facial recognition. I asked him if any of the churches are based in Texas or Illinois, the only two U.S. states that have laws on the books about getting permission to collect peoples' faceprints. "I prefer not to say," said Greenshpan.

(If a facial expression-detecting camera were trained on my own face, it would read "skeptical." Without being able to talk to one of the churches using this technology, it's impossible to verify Greenshpan's claims.)

Ok, granted it may be a smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch. However the reporter, Kashmir Hill, seems more concerned that there is "no controlling legal authority" than the fact of this software's existence.

"There are no federal laws that specifically govern the use of facial recognition technology," wrote Ben Sobel in a Washington Post editorial that discussed the only two states with relevant laws on the books. In lieu of a law, the Department of Commerce has been trying to establish facial recognition industry standards in a "privacy multistakeholder process." For more than a year, industrial representatives and privacy advocates have been taking part in negotiations to come up with standards for how facial recognition should be deployed by businesses in the U.S. Last week, those negotiations broke down. Privacy groups involved in the process, including the ACLU and EFF, withdrew, saying in a letter that companies refused to agree to core principles of privacy.

Me, I don't worry so much that there's no controlling legal authority.  For me, having been brought up in a town where we all knew each other, the question is more about if this is going to increase or decrease the stress in my life, and damage my already rapidly eroding personal freedom.

We know two things about government and private surveillance in general. The first thing is that the amount of information available to authorities and large companies on any individual's movements and personal habits is virtually complete. They can know every place you have been and everything you have bought for the trouble of doing a quick database search. Target Inc. can know if your daughter is pregnant before you do.

The second thing we know is that IT DOESN'T REDUCE CRIME. At all. In the slightest. Britain literally has a CCD camera on every street corner and half the fence posts in the country. Their crime "clear-up" rate is complete crap and getting worse every year despite the fact that they really do know every goddamn thing you do every day.

The thing we know about government and data privacy is that they suck at it. Any data on you that the government has is most likely going to leak in the next ten years or less by my seat-of-the-pants prognostication. That means tax records, medical records, criminal records, phone records, you name it.

The thing we know about computer technology is that it always only ever gets cheaper and cheaper. Twenty years ago speech recognition was a fantastically expensive lab toy, now its on your phone. Facial recognition is a very expensive data-mining tool this year, in ten years or less it will be a phone ap. You'll be able to take a picture of a crowd and have names for every face in it, and probably comments and credit scores too. Everybody will know your business.

Or nobody will, because Very Important People may not like having random strangers identifying them and buttonholing them at Starbucks first thing in the morning.

In the mean time I predict a new fashion trend: masks and hoods.

The Phantom

I am not a robot. Or a Nazi, for that matter.

 tom.doherty@tor.com
andrew.weber@macmillan.com
rhonda.brown@macmillan.com

 

Dear Mr. Doherty, Mr. Weber and Ms. Brown,

I hope this letter finds you all well.

Just thought you should know that as a Hugo voter and SF fan I did not appreciate Irene Gallo's statements on her Facebook page, nor have I appreciated the ongoing abuse being served up by some other TOR employees online. Mr. Doherty's apology for Ms Gallo's comments was appreciated and I accept it in the spirit it was intended.

However there has been talk on the web in various places that objections emailed to TOR regarding Ms. Gallo et al are being written off by some among TOR upper management as a DDOS attack being put on by bots.

This is not the case.

I have a basement full of SF, many of those hundreds of books are published by TOR. If my custom is not wanted because TOR management feels I'm unworthy, or unclean, or robotic, I'm sure I can make arrangements to buy the works of other publishers. No doubt they will be happy to take my money.

Please excuse the pseudonym, I'm sure you understand I'm not wild about the idea of identifying myself to a company whose employees like to denounce people as Nazis.

Sincerely,

The Phantom

http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/

Tim Hunt, another culture war casualty.

That SHIRT!!!

Scientist tells stupid joke at a meeting, gets fired from everything in his life. And his wife gets fired too. Because Twitter.

As jokes go, Sir Tim Hunt's brief standup routine about women in science last week must rank as one of the worst acts of academic self-harm in history. As he reveals to the Observer, reaction to his remarks about the alleged lachrymose tendencies of female researchers has virtually finished off the 72-year-old Nobel laureate's career as a senior scientific adviser.
What he said was wrong, he acknowledges, but the price he and his wife have had to pay for his mistakes has been extreme and unfair. "I have been hung out to dry," says Hunt.
His wife, Professor Mary Collins, one of Britain's most senior immunologists, is similarly indignant. She believes that University College London – where both scientists had posts – has acted in "an utterly unacceptable" way in pressuring both researchers and in failing to support their causes.
Certainly the speed of the dispatch of Hunt – who won the 2001 Nobel prize in physiology for his work on cell division – from his various academic posts is startling. In many cases this was done without him even being asked for his version of events, he says. The story shows, if nothing else, that the world of science can be every bit as brutal as that of politics.

Stupid joke? Sure.  Career ending catastrophic scandal? No. Really not. Shirtstorm redux. Example. Catherine Bennett was SHOCKED, simply SHOCKED I tell you.

Catherine Bennett, boring shirt wearer who could have a lucrative career frightening small children.

At some point institutions and private companies are going to have to start backing up their people when old geezers like Tim Hunt make stupid jokes. Or all these old geezers are just going stop contributing. At which point those institutions and companies are all going to have a pretty insurmountable problem.

Nobody -has- to be a scientist, y'know.`

The Phantom

Can the Spokane WA NAACP leader be a White person?

I'd have to say that if the President of the United States can be a Communist, then the leader of the NAACP chapter can be a White chick. Its a Post-Racial Nation, y'all. Sing Kumbaya with me.

The question is, can she be a white chick who makes up fake racial incidents and pretends to be Black? Oh, and who arbitrarily cancels meetings after getting found out.

Amid unanswered questions about her ethnic identity and continued leadership, local NAACP acting president Rachel Dolezal on Sunday canceled a Monday meeting of the chapter.

"Due to the need to continue discussion with regional and national NAACP leaders, tomorrow's meeting is postponed and will be rescheduled for a later date," Dolezal said in an announcement emailed to media on Sunday.

Dolezal, who is also chairwoman of a police oversight committee, said Friday that she and her executive board would be making a statement at the Monday meeting about claims she misled people about her race.

On balance... one would hope not. Maybe the NAACP can have a White person be the Chapter leader, just not this particular White person. Speaking as a White person myself, I wouldn't trust this Dolezal broad as far as I could throw her by the ear. I promise I won't march in protest or burn cars if Ms. Dolezal gets booted out in disgrace.

Because while the nation may be post racial, it isn't post-rational.

The Phantom

"But we carefully secure ALL your data..."

The depth of the US government employee files hack is revealed.

When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate's wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government.

The disclosure last week that hackers had penetrated a database containing such intimate and possibly damaging facts about millions of government and private employees has shaken Washington.

The hacking of the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) could provide a treasure trove for foreign spies.

Shorter Reuters: "They got -everything-."

And really, given my personal views I can't see this as a bad thing. If you've got creepers hiding in the shadows of the most powerful government in the world, and they surely do, sooner or later those creepers will do what creepers always do: explode.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But really, if this isn't the biggest fail of all time in Information Technology and Security history I'd be surprised. Looks like those back doors the American government have been building into things came around and bit them on the ass.

If its on-line, the Bad Guys can read it. Let that be a lesson to you all. Your bank and medical records are not secure, your tax records are not secure, your phone is not secure, even the US government is not secure. Meaning all those NSA files containing every phone call ever made from about 1985 on... is not secure.

Hope you have nothing to hide, because if you do it probably won't stay hidden much longer. I give it ten years at the outside, all these things will get hacked and Wikileaked. Keep some cash on hand for when the banks all go down the same day.

The Phantom

"But we carefully screen ALL immigrants..."

Moving from the "Canada WTF?!" file to the "You assholes better fix this Right F-ing Now!!!" file, Immigration in Canada. This is just one step too far, my friends. The headline:

Lindhout thanks Mounties for arresting Somalian man accused in her kidnapping

This is a nice headline, cops in Canada doing their job

Just one problem, Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped and held for ransom in Somalia.

Lindhout and photographer Nigel Brennan were seized by young gunmen near strife-torn Mogadishu, Somalia, in August 2008. Both were released on Nov. 25, 2009.

So she's captured and held by these Mooselimb assholes in Somalia for around 15 months. No word on how that went for her, and I probably really really really don't want to know. Here's a picture of Amanda from 2010, I guess she recovered.

Amanda Lindhout, taken in 2010.

 Meanwhile, the RCMP make an arrest? How's that? Did they fly down to Somalia and nab this cretin in Mogadishu?

Nope. They nabbed him in Ottawa.

Gun banners getting strident again.

Two things with the same theme struck me today. First is a Rebel Media webcast by Brian Lilley I saw over at Five Feet of Fury, regarding a new bill being floated by Liberal Senator Celine Herviex-Payette to ban all guns in Canada except those "specifically designed for hunting".  The second is a New York Times piece by Gail Collins entitled "Guns in Your Face."

The theme is, "How DARE you appear armed in my presence!!!" Quoth Ms. Collins:

Life in America requires a lot of advance preparation. For instance, when you're getting ready for a plane trip you imagine what you'll do if a problem arises — flight delay, long lines at security. But I bet you haven't considered the best way to react if the man in front of you on the airport escalator has a gun dangling from his shoulder.

Yes, the very sight of an otherwise unremarkable and unthreatening individual in possession of a gun is enough to get Ms. Collins up on her high horse. She didn't witness this scene, incidentally. Her issue is that the guy didn't have his neck stepped on by forty SWAT cops.

That very thing happened recently in Atlanta, when a Georgia resident named Jim Cooley came strutting through the airport lobby with a loaded assault rifle.

Cooley — who was taping the whole encounter and posted it on YouTube — corrected the police officer who stopped him. ("It's not an automatic! It's a semi-automatic!") Then he declined to respond when she asked if he had a permit. ("Am I being detained? … If you're detaining me then I'm going to have to file a lawsuit.") And, in the end, he walked away in triumph.

We've moved from the right to bear arms to the right to flaunt arms.

Oh but wait, there's so much more.

While the airport setting gives the incident a particular flair, this kind of thing has been happening quite a bit. In Michigan, the City of Grand Rapids has been in a legal battle with a man who took umbrage when police stopped him while he was walking down a residential street on a Sunday morning wearing camouflage, with a pistol strapped to his leg and singing "Hakuna Matata" from "The Lion King."

I guess the singing makes it worse.

In other words, the exercise of legal rights by private citizens is a huge problem and MUST BE STOPPED!!!!  Because.... well somebody might lose an eye! Or something!

Now, that's an American view. And as we never stop being told up here in Canada, Americans are a bunch of knuckle-dragging trogs. Liberal Party of Canada Senator Celine Herviex-Payette positively exudes outrage at the very concept of armed resistance, to the point where she has a big problem with armed police in the Parliament buildings. According to Brian Lilly, who merely quotes the good Senator's published words, following the murder of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo on Parliament Hill at the National War Memorial the good Senator began complaining about her treatment by police during the crisis, and complaining about the presence of armed police in the Parliament buildings generally.

The more nuanced, more Progressive view of the ever so much more refined Liberal Party of Canada Senator Celine Herviex-Payette, is that firearms must never be seen in public under any circumstances, up to and including an active terrorist attack. Brian Lilley dubs her "Senator Crazy Pants", I think Brian may be taking it a little easy on her because she's an old lady.

The solution to all this is of course to vastly increase the every day open carry of firearms in every single place that it is legal to do so, while at the same time pressuring governments to repeal laws against carrying a firearm in those places where it remains illegal. A vast wave of guys and gals openly strutting about and flaunting their guns in the terrified faces of pin-headed, busybody, ninnynanny Liberals.

By the way ladies, there are very few fashion accessories hotter than a fine assault rifle or a well-holstered Colt 1911. Guaranteed, you will be the center of attention.

That's not a gun. This here, THIS is a gun!

Waco biker massacre update: protests!

Hundreds of criminals arrived at the Waco Texas courthouse the other day. Nothing happened.

Several hundred bikers protested Sunday outside a courthouse in Waco over the continued jailing of more than 100 bikers, friends and family members three weeks after a deadly shootout at a restaurant.

Bikers proclaimed their constitutional rights and held signs outside the McLennan County courthouse. Before they parked in front of the court building, they circled the jail and detention center twice.

Yes, despite the several HUNDRED biker scum who showed up for this thing, absolutely nobody died. Other criminal groups seem to be unable to hold so much as a wedding or a funeral without multiple gunshot casualties, much less a protest. Or a kegger.  But this group of career criminals managed to hold it together.

I maintain this is because they know the Waco Police Department will -kill- them if they get out of line. Like, shoot them in their fat criminal heads. Because nobody gives -white- criminals a free ride, and nine of the sons of beeotches are already dead.

I approve of this situation. I think criminals should fear for their lives when they do violent shit.

What I want to know is, how does one justify cracking down on the White criminal element with massive deadly force, while letting any and all non-White criminals do whatever the hell they want, without admitting oneself to be a truly objectionable racist?

Inquiring minds want to know.

The Phantom

Totally unexpected: More school districts report chaos after ‘white privilege’ theory influences discipline rules.

Another Lefty theory tested, another bonfire created as it crashes and burns.

Last week we were stunned to learn that chaos has been the norm in the St. Paul, Minnesota school district, due to a student disciplinary policy that replaces suspensions with time-outs, counseling and other less punitive measures.

We also learned that the controversial policy was influenced by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG), a radical San Francisco-based consulting firm that claims black students lag behind academically, and tend to have more disciplinary problems, because American K-12 education is designed to benefit white students – aka "white privilege."

Now it's becoming obvious that several other large school districts around the nation are in the same situation as St. Paul.

They've all instituted radical disciplinary policies to reduce the number of black student suspensions, they've all experienced serious behavioral problems as a result, and they're all included on a recent list of PEG client school districts.

That begs a simple, disturbing question – is PEG making a lot of money by promoting policies in public schools that lead to chaos and danger for students and staff?

In St. Paul, the media directly connected PEG to the radical new disciplinary policies that have teachers, parents and union officials complaining about a lack of safety in hallways and classrooms.

Yes friends, another work of genius by Leftist academics meets the real world, is crushed, and then goes on fire. Because no one could have predicted that rewarding bad behavior gets you more of it.

The Phantom

US government proposes to shut down gun blogs and fan sites.

"SHUT UP!!!" they explained.

Y'all might want to show up for this riot.

Commonly used and unregulated internet discussions and videos about guns and ammo could be closed down under rules proposed by the State Department, amounting to a "gag order on firearm-related speech," the National Rifle Association is warning.
In updating regulations governing international arms sales, State is demanding that anyone who puts technical details about arms and ammo on the web first get the OK from the federal government — or face a fine of up to $1 million and 20 years in jail.

According to the NRA, that would include blogs and web forums discussing technical details of common guns and ammunition, the type of info gun owners and ammo reloaders trade all the time.
"Gunsmiths, manufacturers, reloaders, and do-it-yourselfers could all find themselves muzzled under the rule and unable to distribute or obtain the information they rely on to conduct these activities," said the NRA in a blog posting.

There are some days when I'm happy that I live in Canada. Should this gag order come to pass I'm sure the number of gun posts to The Phantom Soap Box will go up substantially.

Boeing patents drone that can fly forever: a zeppelin.

In other drone news, the US patent office is run by -morons-.

This week the US Patent and Trademark Office approved an application from Boeing's James J. Childress and John J. Viniotis for an autonomous drone that can be recharged without landing.

Today the amount of time a drone can spend in the air is limited by the amount of fuel or electricity the unmanned aircraft can carry.

But those limitations could soon be a thing of the past.

According to the patent, the system involves battery-powered dirigibles or drones that can deploy a retractable tether. The tether will be able to connect to a power source as the craft hovers. When fully charged, the drone will automatically fly off to complete its programmed task while another drone will fly in and take its place at the charging point.

Yeah, patentable? Its a ZEPPELIN, complete with ZEPPELIN docking mast. They built one on the top of the Empire State Building so they could dock airships in downtown NYC. Turned out to be a little too windy for safe docking up there, but this is not new technology.

Next someone will patent the tethered kite/drone.

NASA would like to create SkyNet for real.

A cell-tower mediated network of centrally authorized and controlled commercial drone aircraft, that's what they want to do. Not self aware Terminators perhaps, but its a net and its in the freakin' sky.

This latest report is based on documents released to The Guardian through a Freedom of Information request, and reveal deep industry ties to the project. Verizon's near-ubiquitous cell network will be the sole host for early tests, though all carriers would be required to adopt any system the FAA did decide to endorse. Amazon and Google are also on board to help government develop their Unmanned aerial systems Traffic Management (UTM) system, which could make commercial drone services more likely while making unfettered personal use more difficult. The system would not only track drones with cell towers, but use those towers to provide drones with data about their environment and the placement of other flyers. This would allow them to not only watch, but control the behavior of drones; NASA wants the system to be able to "geo-fence" areas like airports and political centers so drones simply cannot go there. They could decide which drones should take precedence in congested areas, or force drones to land during bad weather. Though it isn't mentioned in the documents, this would likely also allow authorities to ground participating drones they believe to be involved in illegal activity.

Looks a lot like the plans for the self-driving car, doesn't it? Because its the same plan. Ubiquitous surveillance,  centralized command and control, distributing the system cost across the whole population in tax, concentrating the profit in the hands of Friends.  By which I mean guys who contribute to certain political campaigns.

Otherwise know as a police state scam.

Aren't there any delivery driver's unions anymore? Shouldn't they be raising all kinds of Hell over this?

The Phantom

Ontario legislates mental health treatment away.

With great approval from the Toronto (Red) Star, the province of Ontario bans "Conversion Therapy" for children.

Ontario has passed a landmark law banning so-called "conversion therapy" on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children and preventing medical practitioners from billing OHIP for it. The legislation proposed by New Democrat MPP Cheri DiNovo won unanimous support from all three parties at Queen's Park on Thursday, in time for Pride week, which begins June 19.  It's the first law of its kind in Canada and goes further than conversion therapy bans in several U.S. states by including protection for the transgender community.

Just to make this clear, if your little boy at some point decides he is a girl, the government has declared he IS a girl and there's nothing you will be allowed to do about it so long as you live in Ontario. The child can have his dick cut off at government expense, but having a professional therapist try to talk him out of it is now officially illegal.

Might want to sit and let that sink in for a second.

Kate McMillan has the ultimate bon mot on this subject: "Transgender surgery is the lobotomy of our generation." 

It has been noted that transgender patients kill themselves at a much greater rate than gays do, and gays kill themselves much more often than straights. It must be pointed out that the victims of gender reassignment surgery kill themselves at DOUBLE the rate of pre-op transsexuals. That's what your provincial government has decided is acceptable and shall be the policy going forward. I think it would be cheaper to issue a pistol with one bullet in it to every kid who thinks they're the opposite sex.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that Conversion Therapy is all that. Being charitable it has a spotty record of success and has been known to degenerate into simple torture in the hands of a few practitioners who were clearly mental themselves. But not always. Sometimes it works.

That is why the LGBQTCIAFBI lobby hates it. You take a perfectly good potential gay sex partner and turn them straight so they can have a family like all the other straight breeder types, that's just horrible. You take a boy who thinks he's a girl and convince him that no, he's actually a boy, and he grows up and gets married and has his own family... this is a crime against Nature.

One more medical service you have to drive to Buffalo to get, ho hum.

By the way, just like every other week, this week a huge massive breakthrough about the function and anatomy of the brain was revealed. The brain has lymphatic vessels.

"All the textbooks said there were not supposed to be any lymphatic vessels in that area," said Louveau, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Virginia. But after he and UVA neuroscientist Jonathan Kipnis ran a battery of tests, they discovered Louveau had been right. "It was exactly what we thought it couldn't be," Louveau said. The elusive lymphatic vessel hid in plain sight, throughout decades of research, because it was very small and tucked behind a major blood vessel.

IF this is true and IF the brain really does have lymphatic vessels, it opens an entire new universe of possible causation for mental illness among other things. Given a complete lymphatic system in the brain, which science to this point has said didn't exist, the transexual condition could be a virus.

The Phantom

Your Reality Update for today: Politicians Lie, NSA expanding.

In the unlikely even that any of y'all were persuaded by all the "end of the Patriot Act" talk going on the last few days, lets just say it was more bullshit from the Great Washington Bullshit Factory.

The NSA has been -expanding- their warrant less data collecting.

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans' international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and "cybersignatures" — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the N.S.A. sought to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

 

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks reveals that Obamatrade contains provisions for GLOBAL data hoovering by the USA.

Wikileaks has released 17 different documents relating to the so-called 'secret' negotiations for a massive global trade deal known as the Trade in Services Agreement, a lesser known cousin of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that US President Barack Obama has been campaigning heavily for in Washington.

The leak has been timed to coincide with a meeting of leaders for the Trade in Services Agreement in Paris. TiSA is one of three trade treaties that global political leaders have been trying to agree on, alongside TTP and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

...

Wikileaks published a draft financial services annex of the TISA negotiations a year ago, containing plans to deregulate the financial sector. It said the new document confirms these plans, while also revealing new information about air traffic, maritime, professional services, e-commerce and domestic regulation.

Another article shows that Open Source software is being traded away.

There's been a fair share of leaked trade deals raising hackles in recent memory, but the latest could have some big repercussions for your data privacy. WikiLeaks has slipped out details of the in-progress Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), and one of its clauses would prevent the US, European Union and 23 other nations from controlling both where your data is stored as well as whether or not it's accessible from outside of the country. Germany, for example, couldn't demand that Facebook and Google store residents' account information on local servers.

The pact might also be bad news if you're a big fan of open source programs. One article would ban countries from requiring access to the code of "mass-market" software in order to provide services related to that software. A TISA partner could still use Linux, OpenOffice and other software with easy-to-dissect code, but it couldn't require that kind of software.

Negotiations for TISA are happening behind closed doors, and it's not clear whether or not these measures would make the final cut. However, they're definitely problematic. The restrictions on exports would prevent Russia-like control over data that makes it easier to censor and snoop on your communications, but they'd also make it hard to stop your info from traveling overseas. Likewise, while the open source clause would allow for more flexibility in software, it also risks weakening security by making it harder to check for spy agency back doors. As a whole, the agreement's tech-related elements favor businesses over privacy rights and transparency.

Forbes reports more about the "cloud" issue, countries will not be able to dictate where their data is physically located.

And the contents of TISA make interesting reading, particularly for anybody concerned about privacy. Under the draft agreement, the EU would be barred from requiring the personal data of its citizens to be held within European borders, an idea currently under discussion in Germany.

"No Party may require a service supplier, as a condition for supplying a service or investing in its territory, to: (a) use computing facilities located in the Party's territory," the leaked draft stipulates.

"No Party may require a service supplier, as a condition for supplying a service or investing in its territory, to: (a) use computing facilities located in the Party's territory."

Canadians will be interested in the Health Tourism section:

One proposal from Turkey that came to light following a previous leak of documents would endorse health tourism across all the countries covered by the deal. Under the Turkish plan, people with health problems in the US and Europe would be encouraged to visit neighbouring countries for cheaper treatment, with the cost being reimbursed by their own health service or insurance provider. The plan implied that Turkey hopes to become a major provider of health services to Europe's ageing population, paid for by European taxpayers.

Money goes in, bullshit comes out.

I encourage everyone to envision what life would be like if we only cut down government by half. Just 50% less tax, 50% fewer government employees.  Just think about it.

The Phantom

FBI surveillance of entire cities continues.

Toldja.

The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned.
The planes' surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge's approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period, the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found.
Aerial surveillance represents a changing frontier for law enforcement, providing what the government maintains is an important tool in criminal, terrorism or intelligence probes. But the program raises questions about whether there should be updated policies protecting civil liberties as new technologies pose intrusive opportunities for government spying.
U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services. Even basic aspects of the program are withheld from the public in censored versions of official reports from the Justice Department's inspector general.

The FBI can seeeeee you. This is one of their airplanes.

What this means is that when the aircraft is flying, the FBI has a -complete- record of where every cellphone in range is, second by second. They have a matching video record. They can track the comings and goings of vehicles for hours, even days depending on how long they had aircraft overhead. Most important, they are trying very hard to stonewall any inquiry into this effort.

We have seen this before.

But now, -finally- the Associated Press has decided This Is A Story, so now of course its Important and not the tinfoil hatted ravings of some random blogger asshole called The Phantom.

Ask yourselves this question, my friends: What kind of government feels the need to know the exact whereabouts and activities of every single goddamn person in a large city, 24/7/365?

Answer is, obviously: A nervous one.

More to the point my American friends, YOUR government feels the need to know exactly where you are at all times, and they are spending stupendous amounts of money to do so. They track your phone calls, your cell-phone location, they do aerial surveillance, they track every single piece of mail that gets delivered to you, they have full unfettered access to your financial transactions, they have license plate readers on cop cars and static locations to track your vehicle. Plus I'm sure there's much more we don't know about yet.

Question two, what does the US government have to be so nervous about? Offhand, I'd say the bureaucracy is run by career psychopaths who know how precarious their sinecures really are, and who really want to crush any overt move to downsize their budgets. They are focusing on their true natural enemies, the Conservatives.

What makes me say that? I keep seeing stuff like this popping up.

The Department of Justice is concentrating on "far-right" groups in a new study of social media usage aimed at combating violent extremism.
The Justice Department's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) awarded Michigan State University $585,719 for the study, which was praised by Eric Holder, the former attorney general, earlier this year.
"There is currently limited knowledge of the role of technology and computer mediated communications (CMCs), such as Facebook and Twitter, in the dissemination of messages that promote extremist agendas and radicalize individuals to violence," according to the NIJ grant. "The proposed study will address this gap through a series of qualitative and quantitative analyses of posts from various forms of CMC used by members of both the far-right and Islamic extremist movements."
The study draws more upon right-wing forums than upon the corners of the web inhabited by Islamist extremists.

As much as they are hell on blowing shit up and killing people randomly, the Mooslimb jihadinis are exactly zero threat to the Government Establishment of the USA. Some "little people" may get killed, but ISIS and all the other head choppers are no big deal to the USA. The Tea Party though, that's some serious business. The Tea Party could easily f- things up for all kinds of power brokers, sponge artists and other parasites of the American government just by cutting taxes.

Another clue is that even the FBI itself said in testimony that their ubiquitous surveillance systems are useless for catching jihadini weenies.

But if you want to keep track of 100,000 Tea Party types who show up for a rally on a Sunday afternoon, those systems are exactly what you need.

Western governments have decided that their own citizens are the biggest threat they face.

Take that thought under advisement, and consider it for the next little while.

robot made of origami.

Yes, a robot, that does things, made out of a single sheet of "paper".

The device, which measures just two thirds of an inch (1.7cm) in length, was developed by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Technische Universität München. 

The researchers have been working on origami-inspired machines since 2012. 

Their latest tiny robot is made from sheets of PVC and laser-cut layers of polystyrene and paper with a magnet inside it. 

Once heated, it folds into an origami shape in less than a minute.

In a video, the robot can be seen zipping around at speeds of one-and-a-half inches (between three and four centimetres) per second, swimming, climbing slopes and pushing double its weight, by vibrating.

This is due to an external magnetic field, which is projected from four coils in a box beneath it, without the need for a battery in the robot itself.

The magnetic field doesn't simply drag the device along but causes the magnet inside it to oscillate backwards and forwards.

This means its front and back 'legs' make contact with the ground, which when combined with the bot being slightly heavier at the front, make it walk along.

The origami shape also means it's more efficient at moving objects and digging than using a simple magnet.

Genius!

The Phantom