Oh look, Leftists paying people to lie.

From the "This Is Not Surprising" file and Small Dead Animals, it looks like a US mega foundation has actually admitted doing what we all know they did.

In a stunning admission, Lee Wasserman, Director of the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), today openly admitted that the Rockefellers are pouring millions of dollars into "media" organizations like InsideClimate News (ICN) and projects at Columbia University School of Journalism with a specific mission and outcome in mind.

In an interview with Reuters responding to questions about the RFF climate agenda and mission, Wasserman flatly states:

"No specific company was targeted in our push to drive better public understanding and better climate policy…..We supported public interest journalism to better understand how the fossil fuel industry was dealing with the reality of climate science internally and publicly," Wasserman said. (emphasis added)

Since the Columbia School of Journalism began partnering with RFF, the school has insisted that the Rockefeller foundations – both RFF and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation (RBF) – had nothing to do with the content of the series making erroneous claims about ExxonMobil.

Usually these guys don't admit this type of thing, you have to dig it out of billing records and tax receipts.

The Phantom.

Batman vs. Superman, worth seeing.

Just got back from seeing Batman vs. Superman tonight. As usual, the critics panned it, and as usual they're a pack of idiots. This is a better movie than the latest Star Wars, in my opinion. Worth the ticket.

Why it is a good movie is because they followed the very successful comic book story line. There have been a few movies lately to do this, mostly Marvel Universe ones. Avengers, Captain America, on TV the very successful Daredevil, and Agent Carter. Deadpool is doing well, mostly because of the video game homage in the movie. From DC, the recent Batman movies were about the only ones to even acknowledge the comics, and surprise, they made the most money.

Movies that sucked, there have been a few. From Marvel Universe, the latest Fantastic Four reboot retreading Johnny Storm as a black kid crashed and burned. Mostly because it had nothing to do with the FF comic. The took a fairly pedestrian script, slapped an FF name on it and called it done. Stupid. DC Universe, Green Lantern was rubbish, much the same sort of reason.

Why do they do stuff like that? Here's why:

Yes, I am proposing that a major comic book institution change the race of one of its popular characters as it transitions to a new form of media. In this case, I want Marvel Studios to cast an Asian American actor to play the lead in the upcoming Iron Fist show it is developing for Netflix. It seems logical enough to me, though as always, there are fans who are urging Marvel to resist changing his race.

Yet another idiot is demanding yet another comic book character should be chopped and channeled to satisfy their pretentious racist/anti-racist/SJW horseshit of the moment. This clown has a petition going, apparently.

Is it important to cast a white guy as Iron Fist? No. It's a fucking TV show, nobody cares.

Will it suck if they stray off the story to satisfy some SJWs racist demands? Oh yes, it will most certainly suck. Because if you're going to change the races of the characters to satisfy whining idiots who don't even have any money at stake in the production, you're going to twist the whole story into A DIFFERENT STORY. But somebody already wrote the thing for you, and set up how it's supposed to be, and it WORKED that way. Iron Fist is a long running comic. We're not talking about something like Tigra that lasted a couple years, Iron Fist has been around since the 1970's.

Good on Marvel for ignoring the SJWs. May they continue to do so.

The Phantom

Tuberculosis. Just like I said.

CDC says TB cases are up this year, for the first time in 25 years.

Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia each had more cases in 2015 than 2014, raising questions -- but no definitive answers -- about a possible resurgence of one of the world's deadliest diseases.

The overall increase was relatively small: 157 more cases, bringing the 2015 total to 9,563. Two-thirds of the total were among people born abroad, with Asians accounting for the most cases (3,007) and the highest rate (28.2 cases per 100,000 persons). By comparison, there were only .5 cases per 100,000 whites last year.

Remember I said this was coming? I hate being right.

But pay attention to this part of the statement. This is the good part:

"After two decades of declining incidence, progress toward TB elimination in the United States appears to have stalled," the CDC report said. The causes are unclear, it said, and the data need further evaluation if the reasons behind the trend are to be identified.

And...
 

 More than half of cases reported in 2015 were clustered in four states — California, Florida, New York and Texas — which have one-third of the U.S. population.

 To be clear, 2015 did not have the most cases of TB in 25 years. The number of cases has been declining for 25 years. 2015 is the first year it increased over the year before.

Meaning, despite everything the American public health establishment and their billions of dollars of funding could do, the number of cases increased. In border states. Which are being flooded with illegal immigrants from places where TB is endemic. Plus NY, which is a destination state because of its generous welfare and medicare programs.

The CDC very, very carefully does not connect those dots.

But I will. TB will continue to increase as long as people get across the US border without being tested for TB. Guaranteed.

The Phantom

Brussels attack.

It's all over Drudge and everywhere else today, a terrorist attack in Brussels. Bombs blew up and killed people.

My opinions haven't changed. I'm very sad for the people who were killed and maimed in this ACT OF WAR.

I am very angry with the Canadian, American and European authorities whose insane immigration policies made this attack possible. The frightening thing is that we can be confident there is a similar cell of killers here in Canada planning the same thing.

You get what you vote for, my friends. Belgians voted for this. Canadians voted for this. Americans voted for this.

Somebody tell me again how eeeevile Donald Trump is for criticizing American immigration policy. Go ahead, I want to hear it.

My problem with Trump is not what he says, it is that I don't think he will actually do anything he's promising. He's a limousine liberal from New York City, and to date he has not walked his talk.

The Phantom

Rob Ford, RIP

Today we lost the former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford at the age of 46, due to cancer. Not much of a run for his money, poor guy.

I was always impressed by the way he dealt with political attacks. Just took it and kept on keeping on.

Godspeed, Rob Ford.

The Phantom

Sylvia Anderson of Thunderbirds fame has died.

Sylvia Anderson, age 88, after a short illness.

Godspeed, Sylvia. You were the voice of some of my favorite childhood characters.  Lady Penelope, Dr. Venus.

I remember.

The Phantom

Gut bacteria can affect skin cancer.

This is pretty cool.

Take your probiotics, kids. ~:D

By-the-mile US car tax proposed by CBO

And there it is, ladies and gentlemen. The tax we've all been waiting for, the pay-by-the-mile tax.

An economist at the Congressional Budget Office suggested on Monday that the federal government could start charging people based on how far they drive in order to generate more government revenues to spend on highway projects.

Chad Shirley, CBO's deputy assistant director for microeconomic studies, gave a presentation that says federal gas tax revenues are falling short of federal spending on highway programs. But to resolve that problem, Shirley didn't propose less federal spending, and instead offered three suggestions.

The first is simply, "charging drivers" more the more they drive on roads.

Shirley said that one way to charge drivers more is to implement "vehicle-miles traveled charges.

CBO's presentation also said the government could get more money from drivers by charging them more when traffic is bad. Shirley calls that "congestion pricing.

A third option, Shirley said, would be "allowing tolling on additional existing interstates."

Side benefit of pay-by-the-mile, a 24/7/365 Panopticon view of the location of every single vehicle in the USA. Just imagine the datamining you could do on a thing like that.

They are going to do this.

War on men opens a new front at Harvard.

SJW's have decided that men's social clubs are the Root Of All Evil at Harvard U, and must be destroyed.

A task force charged with examining sexual assault at Harvard University is recommending that the school bar students from joining its all-male final clubs, blaming the single-sex organizations for perpetuating a "harmful sexual culture" on campus.

The task force argued in a new report that the all-male organizations, which have no formal relationship with the university, should be forced to accept women in order to fix the problem of sexual assault on Harvard's campus. The report, published this week, followed attempts by the Harvard administration to compel the all-male final clubs to accept women, an effort that the Washington Free Beacon previously reported has angered graduate members of the organizations and made current student members fear for their reputations.

The report from the Harvard Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault was accompanied by several appendices, including one from the task force's so-called "outreach and communications subcommittee" that presented a set of "ideas" for the administration to deal with the final clubs. One of the proposals suggested that the school threaten students with expulsion if they join an all-male final club.

Apparently a "final club" is a social club that one attends in one's final undergrad year.

Apparently the "Harvard Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault" has no would-be lawyers in it, it seems they don't understand the magnitude of legal risk that would fall upon the university if they actually expelled a paying student for membership in an off-campus club.

Apparently the SJW's at large have no appreciation of the irony that expelling people for belonging to an all-male club represents, given their commitment to "diversity."

The Apparent Phantom

White men: go kill yourself!

Arthur Chu reaches deep into the Cracker Barrel of Crazy for this one.

It's not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males

Blaming "mental illness" is a cop-out -- and one that lets us avoid talking about race, guns, hatred and terrorism

"I get really really tired of hearing the phrase "mental illness" thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like "toxic masculinity," "white supremacy," "misogyny" or "racism."

You know what I get tired of, dicks like Arthur Chu running around pretending that everything from mass shootings and murder down to mild unpleasantness at the checkout in Walgreen's is due to VIOLENT WHITE CONSERVATIVE MALES WITH GUNS!!!1!

Because when you look at mass shootings, assassinations and murder over the last twenty years, socialists, communists and non-whites outnumber white males. By a lot. The number of "terrorist" actions by specifically white male conservatives can be counted on your fingers.

But in fairness, this is Arthur Chu and Salon.com we're talking about. Arty doesn't have a very strong connection to Reality, generally. So expecting reason isn't... reasonable, I suppose.

Bang, white man!

5 qubit quantum computer at MIT.

Factoring large numbers may become much easier very soon indeed.

In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or "qubits," that can be simultaneously 0 and 1—a state known as a superposition that's far more efficient. It typically takes about 12 qubits to factor the number 15, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria have found a way to pare that down to five qubits, each represented by a single atom, they said this week.

Using laser pulses to keep the quantum system stable by holding the atoms in an ion trap, the new system promises scalability as well, as more atoms and lasers can be added to build a bigger and faster quantum computer able to factor much larger numbers. That, in turn, presents new risks for factorization-based methods such as RSA, used for protecting credit cards, state secrets and other confidential data.

The development is in many ways an answer to a challenge posed back in 1994, when MIT professor Peter Shor came up with a quantum algorithm that calculates the prime factors of a large number with much better efficiency than a classical computer.

Fifteen is the smallest number that can meaningfully demonstrate Shor's algorithm. Without any prior knowledge of the answers, the new system returned the correct factors with a confidence better than 99 percent.

"We show that Shor's algorithm, the most complex quantum algorithm known to date, is realizable in a way where, yes, all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer," said Isaac Chuang, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

"It might still cost an enormous amount of money to build—you won't be building a quantum computer and putting it on your desktop anytime soon—but now it's much more an engineering effort, and not a basic physics question," Chuang added.

Meaning, if you throw money at it you could decrypt pretty much anything, no matter how big the number of bits used.

The Phantom