Finally, the assault weapon boilerplate for Quebec City.

I think the media is slipping. Normally, this would have shared the news about Quebec City's mosque shooting on the day-of, Sunday. But this is the first I've seen, and it's three days later already.

Way to go, Global News:

Quebec City mosque shooting: Despite strict Canadian laws, illegal guns still within reach

Wow, what an amazing observation. Yes, -criminals- can still get guns despite there being laws against thing like that. There's laws against murder, but we have a bunch of people shot dead. Gee, who could have foreseen that? You can buy weed at the local high school too.

Canada's gun control laws ban dozens of assault rifles, but some permitted firearms are easily modified for greater damage, and more lax regulations in the United States make smuggled weapons accessible, experts said after a rare Canadian mass shooting on Sunday.

Damn those Americans. It is totally their fault that some random asshole in another country decided a bunch of people needed to die. Donald Trump is a Nazi!

Police have not commented on the type of gun used, but sources said it was a semi-automatic weapon.

Yeah, "police have not commented" is the interesting part of this sentence. Three days after the Sandy Hook shooting, everybody knew the make/model/serial numbers of the firearms involved. But in Canada, the matter of what kind of firearm was used is a state secret. It is more important to stage-manage the rubes than to let us know what happened, so we can plan accordingly. Global News seems totally fine with that.

Now we get to the part where they start making shit up from whole cloth.

Semi-automatic guns can legally hold magazines up to five rounds in Canada, but many military-style semi-automatics are easily modified to 30 rounds, said A.J. Somerset, an author on gun issues.

And while some rifles are banned by name, knock-offs are allowed, he said.

"Canada's classification system is a mess," Somerset said. "If someone wants to do the shooting at the mosque, they can obtain a non-restricted firearm in Canada that is functionally the same as an AK-47, illegally modify it, and they have exactly the rifle we don't want them to have."

That's nice, AJ. Yes, a guy with a bunch of metalworking tools and knowledge can modify a firearm illegally. See above for laws against killing people and selling weed in the local high-school.

Who's this A.J. Somerset guy, that he gets quoted as an "expert" though? He's a block captain who wrote a book, that's who he is. He thinks, because he has a really swelled head I suppose, that he is so smart he can decide for you how things should be in your life. You run into these guys every so often in the military, the cops, the fire department. He's the "Use your common sense, man!" guy, the guy who never saw a law he didn't think was justified. Law and order, hell yeah! Support the authorities, first last and always!

Freedom? Well, no. Freedom is for your betters, rube. You can't be trusted with freedom. Get back to work.

My complete rebuttal to Mr. A.J. Somerset is Ivan the Drunk Russian. This is what gun control and laws get you, AJ baby: A semi-auto AK-47, built out of a shovel. Note the lack of precision machine tools used in construction. Add a Bridgeport mill and a four foot long metal lathe, under $8K bought new from the store, and Ivan has himself a little factory. He can make as many as he wants.

Imagine what a Scottish engineer could do, without the vodka. But that's not the real argument. The utter futility of a regulation is no impediment to a guy like AJ.

Here's the rebuttal part, AJ. I made a car once. All by myself. Frame and everything. Should you be worried I might take my car that I built and drive it up on the sidewalk to kill people with it? No, but I bet you are. Block captains worry about shit like that. They face the nagging fear that somebody, somewhere is stepping out of line without proper authorization.

So, to recap: Angry White Men are to blame, and the Americans of course, how dare you question authority?! Nothing to see here, get back to work your taxes are due.

The Deplorable Basket of Phantom

More Liberal tolerance: beatings at airports.

Week Two of the Trump Apocalypse, and Liberals are behaving as usual: beating anybody who dares to disagree.

It the video you can tell it was ten on four… Ten thugs against four Trump supporters.
You can see them CHASE DOWN and BEAT the Trump Supporters.

The leftist mob start screaming at the man has he lay unconscious on the ground!

They were screaming, "That's right Nazi boy!" as the man lay on the ground!

This is getting to be pretty standard procedure lately. Guy shows up someplace wearing the wrong hat, a bunch of self-righteous assholes beat him unconscious. Also as usual, the 'security' personnel on hand seem singularly useless. Almost as if they weren't trying very hard, you know?

Now, this will lead to one of two outcomes. The unlikely outcome, Trump supporters and other, regular people will stop wearing Trump hats, and will hide from the edgelord SJW retards in public.

The likely outcome, some serious asskickings as Trump supporters start taking the SJWs as more than a bad joke. That will spread, and pretty soon showing up with an anti-Trump hat will earn you an instant beating.

Neither outcome is desirable, nor civilized. I'd expect better, but this is the Left we're talking about, and their comeuppance is looooong overdue.

The Deplorable Phantom

Voter fraud study, Illegals did vote.

Trump famously said vote fraud was a thing, back in the debates, and was widely pooh-poohed by the media.

Well, it looks like vote fraud was a thing.

Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump's assertion.

Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.

Liberal media is still raging on that there is no vote fraud, of course. CNN is all over it. Trump is a racist/fascist/bigot/homophobe/pussy-grabber for even mentioning it.

I guess that shows what CNN is up to. Vote fraud takes Mrs. Clinton from 2.8 million to 2 million in one bite. Couple more bites like that, from dead voters and other shenanigans we have previously seen them doing, the Dem "lead" in popular vote starts looking pretty sad.

Just thought y'all ought to know. ~:)

The Helpful, yet oh-so Deplorable, Phantom

"The Geek Feminist Revolution" not a huge sales hit.

Kameron Hurley, Intellectual Badass (that's what it says on her blog, I'm not being a dick about it,) is upset. Her new book came out to critical acclaim, social media buzz and positive reviews. Sales, not so much.

There was a huge amount of buzz around the release of The Geek Feminist Revolution last year. More buzz than I'd seen for any book I'd ever written. People were telling me on Twitter that they'd bought three or four copies and were making all their friends read it. I heard from booksellers that the books were flying off the shelves. We went into a second printing almost immediately. I did a book signing in Chicago that sold a bunch of books. The reader response at BEA was surreal. It was magical.

This, I thought, is what it must feel like to have a book that's about to hit it big. This was it. This was going to be the big one. It was going to take off. I gnawed on my nails and watched as big magazines picked up articles from it and it got reviewed favorably in The New York Times, and I waited for first week sales numbers.

Sales for this august tome were... meh. About what she always does. Not a nightmare, but not a breakout, as she says. The stuff was not 'flying off the shelves" as some had said.

But what about all that positive buzz? What about those people crying when they said they loved the book? What about the New York Times?!!! Shouldn't that be good for something?

Well, no. That's because Kameron Hurley lives in a social bubble. There's a whole universe of people who see a title like Geek Feminist Revolution and think that is the cat's fricking whiskers. Kameron's big problem is, it isn't a very big universe. She's getting big PR push and good sales penetration in a pretty small population slice. She's got a Hugo Award

Her other problem is, she's done that by pissing the rest of us off. She's a big name Puppy Kicker and a Trump hater. She goes out of her way to reflect that in her work. Which is fine, it is her work after all, she can do what she wants.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of her work, of course. I have no idea how good or how bad it is, I've never read any of it. Because "Geek Feminist Revolution" is a title that evokes a healthy feeling of "I do not want to read that," as do the cover blurbs for a lot of her books. She brags about a book that has no male characters, for example. (Why is that good? Half the Human Race is male. We're not going away, either.)

But the publishers and the magazines LOVE her. Because they live in the bubble too.

Some years ago Larry Correia pointed this out with his now famous Sad Puppies campaign. There's a bubble, and if you're not in it, you don't get a Hugo Award. Since Sad Puppies 1, the people involved with the Hugo Awards have gone out of their way to prove him right. Kameron Hurley was certainly one of them.

Now, while it is entirely acceptable and proper to have political opinions, and I certainly have mine, it is generally not polite to accuse others who do not share them of being racist/bigot/homophobes. You can think it, but saying it out loud in a magazine article is generally considered to be in poor taste. Particularly when they aren't actually racist/bigot/homophobes.

Well, what happened in microcosm at the Hugos in Sad Puppies 1-4 happened this year in the election. Average working Americans were called a "basket of deplorables" by one of the most corrupt presidential candidates in American history, and they voted for Trump, the pussy-grabbing rodeo clown. Kameron is upset about it, as might be imagined.

Personally I am less upset, Trump hit the ground running hard in the right direction. HJe had the bust of Winston Churchill back in the Oval Office before the ink was dry on his Presidential transfer paperwork.

This could be construed as a watershed moment in American political discourse. The People, as a whole, appear to be divided into two, geographically isolated factions. One wants European Socialism, the other wants American Freedom. As in, less government, lower taxes. The socialists rule in the little ribbon of cities on the East and West coasts, pretty much. The freedom types rule everywhere else.

As a writer, that's the reality of how things are. Social Justice Warriors are now officially not driving the narrative. I predict this Trup election will be the last time a DemocRat politician runs on Global Warming, the Ecology generally, Feminism, gun control, gay rights, and transgender bathrooms in government buildings. It is over. The next battle will be fought over something else, probably some scandal dug up about Donald Trump peeing on a bed.

So if you are writing exclusively for that SJW/Worldcon/boys in the girl's bathroom crowd, you shouldn't be surprised if your sales numbers are meh. Writing is hard enough without deliberately making yourself unpopular with regular people.

To that end, I would love to see writers abandoning one simple premise: "You are bad!"

Humans are bad, straights are bad, men are bad, Americans are bad, Army men are bad. Let me see something where the plot doesn't hinge on how bad society is to some guy or girl or whatever. Show me something where Humans are not the destroyers, the Bad Guys come to wreck everything. Write me something where the wonderful aliens are not coming to show us all how to do it right.

You know, just for a change.

The Deplorable Phantom

Trump proposes 75% cut in regulation.

This is almost as if he'd been reading The Phantom Soapbox. Trump wants to cut business regulations by 75% or more, he says.

President Donald Trump told business leaders on Monday he believes he can cut regulations by 75 percent or "maybe more."

At the White House with 10 senior executives, he repeated his campaign pledges to roll back corporate rules, arguing that they have "gotten out of control."

Now, saying you want to do something is a long way from getting it done. But everything starts with expressing the goal. This is the right goal. CUTTING GOVERNMENT INFLUENCE.

This puts the pussy-hatted minions of George Soros into a rather stark perspective. Here's Trump The Scoundrel, and what he's talking about is cutting the size and scope of the US federal government. Increasing personal freedom.

That's what the pussy-hats are afraid of. They do not want you to have more personal freedom. You are an idiot. You must be controlled. That's their message.

Message received.

The Phantom

Very cool infrared scope.

This is an infrared monocular seen at the SHOT show that can be hand held, helmet mounted or used as a gunsight. It also records video. Very, very cool.

Reposted from The Firearm Blog.

Trump Day

I see from the MSM dorks that today the End Of The World has come. Eeeeeevile Donald Trump has vanquished the Powers of Goodness and is set to ascend his throne of skulls at noon today.

This is YUUUUGE!

This is why I don't pay for cable TV, I don't subscribe to any newspapers or news magazines, and I don't listen to the radio. All is quiet and beautiful here at Chez Phantom. Even the aligators in the mote are content, happily gnawing on the bones of unfortunate postal workers who didn't read the signs.

Just to rub a little more salt in the wound, dear SJWs and fat-headed Libtards, I will observe that if the government were smaller and less all-encompasing, if it didn't take more than half your income every year, if so many able bodied people didn't depend on it for their livelihoods...

...it wouldn't matter a damn who the President is.

Just sayin'. Maybe we should all work on that together, hmmm?

The Helpful, Yet Deplorable Phantom

USA: Is treason now legal?

Obama just commuted Bradley "Chelsea" Manning and outright pardoned  General James Cartwright.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday commuted the 35-year sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who was convicted of leaking classified material, and pardoned Marine General James Cartwright.

Manning, who was convicted in 2013, will be released in May 2017. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI in connection with a leak investigation. The retired general will have his crime forgiven, according to a statement from the White House.

Who cares?

Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, criticized the decision.

"When I was leading soldiers in Afghanistan, Private Manning was undermining us by leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks," Cotton said in a statement. "I don't understand why the president would feel special compassion for someone who endangered the lives of our troops, diplomats, intelligence officers, and allies. We ought not treat a traitor like a martyr."

Um, yeah. And maybe the media should ease back on the whole "Chelsea" thing, which BRADLEY started up with -after- he was convicted. Because gee, anybody think he might have been trying to get some attention from the MEDIA and an easier billet?

Just sayin'.

The Deplorable Phantom

Legal Insurrection kicked off YouTube.

Looks like the Silicon Valey types are taking the election hard.

The YouTube channel of influential conservative politics and law website Legal Insurrection has been removed by the video sharing service, citing copyright infringement claims.

"This account has been terminated because we received multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement regarding material the user posted," explains YouTube, in a notice posted to channel's page.

Legal Insurrection founder and publisher and Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson voiced his anger and astonishment at the channel's removal. "It's very frustrating, it's very scary, to have 8 years of content removed without a chance to defend yourself," he told FoxNews.com.

Hope you kept backups, dude.

Let that be a lesson to all of us out here in Non-PC Land. Google can pull your plug, and there's f-all you can do about it.

This site, for example, is hosted on Google Blogspot, listed on Google Search, and posted using GMail. They can put me out of business ten seconds from now, and I have -zero- recourse.

If the Phantom Soapbox disappears from the web with no warning some day, without an announcement or a final place-holder post saying what happened, assume foul play.

May I suggest there is now an opening in the market for a web service provider that is not run by shrieking SJW assholes?

The Phantom

Warm socks and a fire = RAAAACIST!!!!

This is so perfectly SJW I had to repost it. Originally seen at Small Dead Animals: I give you Slate, jumping the shark, turbo-nitrous version.

... Helen Russell, in The Year of Living Danishly, calls hygge a "complete absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming." Hygge is against conflict and discomfort, distrustful of newness or challenging viewpoints. It is a closed system. Or, as Charlotte Abrahams, author of Hygge: A Celebration of Simple Pleasures, Living the Danish Way has it: "Hygge is very gentle. There is no discussion of politics or anything controversial that makes you feel uptight."

Hygge's turning inward against the world outside comes with a more sinister edge, however. As Charlotte Higgins pointed out in her deep dive for the Guardian last month, hygge's ties to the far-right in Denmark are remarkably strong. Pia Kjærsgaard, the leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Danish People's Party, has publicly extolled the virtues of the lifestyle, insisting that her office remain cozy and hyggelig at all times. Denmark's welfare state and reputation for tolerance may be admired by progressives in the U.K. and U.S., but, as Higgins points out, the country's love of hyggefied thatched cottages with closed doors suggests a conservative undercurrent. "Anything that threatens that safe community, including alien values and ideologies, cannot be tolerated," she writes.

There you have it. Socializing over hot chocolate in front of the fire with close friends and family, staying home with your fuzzy slippers and snuggling with your honey, or even leaning back in the easy chair with your feet up and a good book. All hopelessly RACIST.

And those morons at Slate are still wondering why people voted for the Cheeto-coloured rodeo clown, Donald Trump.

SJWs: People who's defining trait is the crippling fear that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves.

The Phantom

SJW breakthrough: Superhero Culture is bad for kids!

Yes friends, you heard it here first. "Superhero Culture," meaning Saturday morning cartoons and so forth, is bad for your kids.

BYU family life professor Sarah M. Coyne decided to study what it was, exactly, that preschool-aged boys and girls took away from exposure to superhero culture, and it wasn't the many positive traits that shone through.
"So many preschoolers are into superheroes and so many parents think that the superhero culture will help their kids defend others and be nicer to their peers," Coyne said, "but our study shows the exact opposite. Kids pick up on the aggressive themes and not the defending ones."
Coyne found that children who frequently engage with superhero culture are more likely to be physically and relationally aggressive one year later. She even found the children were not more likely to be defenders of kids being picked on by bullies and were not more likely to be prosocial.

The article goes on to note:

Last spring, Coyne authored a study on the effects of Disney Princess culture on young children, finding the perpetuation of stereotypes that could have damaging effects.

I'm having a flashback to the Comics Code. These retards never give up.

Adobe Arcrobat update has a spy in it.

According to Slashdot, the latest Adobe Acrobat update contains a Google Chrome extension AND a nice little thing that phones your data home to Adobe.

From the article:

The extension requests the following permissions: Read and change all your data on the websites you visit; Manage your downloads; Communicate with cooperating native applications. According to Adobe, extension users 'share information with Adobe about how [they] use the application. The information is anonymous and will help us improve product quality and features,' Adobe also says. 'Since no personally identifiable information is collected, the anonymous data will not be meaningful to anyone outside of Adobe.'"

Otherwise known as a trojan virus. At some point these large data companies are going to need to be made aware that this kind of secret data collection is theft. They're not entitled to know anything about my computer, particularly when they don't ask first.

The Phantom

Happy New Year!

From Phantom Southern Command in rainy, wet Arizona, Happy New Year!