Found: Cthulhu's dead city.

Some guy on the interwebz claims to have found a pyramid in the deep ocean.

The structure, estimated as being between 3.5 and 11 miles across, was spotted on Google Earth in the Pacific Ocean just west of Mexico.
A video about the discovery uploaded to YouTube has drawn vast speculation about what it could be, including an ancient sunken city, a bizarre UFO, or even an alien base.
The "discovery" was made by Argentinian Marcelo Igazusta.

Clearly the End Times are upon us. This MUST BE the lost city of R'lyeh!

What? That was fiction, you say?

Never mind then. As you were.

The Phantom

Conservatives are Evil, scientific proof!

Okay fine, they didn't come right out and say "evil".

Abstract

Physical attractiveness is an important social factor in our daily interactions. Scholars in social psychology provide evidence that attractiveness stereotypes and the "halo effect" are prominent in affecting the traits we attribute to others. However, the interest in attractiveness has not directly filtered down to questions of political behavior beyond candidates and elites. Utilizing measures of attractiveness across multiple surveys, we examine the relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs. Controlling for socioeconomic status, we find that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. These findings suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications for understanding how the body intertwines with the social nature of politics.

What lies beneath the gobbledygook?

The scholars said hot people lean towards the right because they grow to develop a blind spot that leads them to not see the need for more government support or aid in society - a core liberal value.

They add that attractive people don't face the same hurdles as others as their attractiveness gains them more attention and they are more successful in social situations. Their lives are generally "easier," the pair claim.

Yes that's right. These scholars assert that because life is easier if you're pretty, the pretty people have no conception that anyone might need government support.

Published by the Cambridge University Press, no less.

The Phantom

Pro-life protest at the Grammys!

"Good. At last one of them has understood." Lord Raiden, Mortal Kombat 1995

The way to be edgy now is to be a loud, proud Conservative.

#MeToo: What goes around, comes around.

As of today, Canada has this week lost the leader of the Ontario PC party, a Federal Liberal cabinet minister, AND a CTV newsman.

I view this as a hopeful sign that -many- of our smug, self-satisfied socialist "leaders" will have their past sins come back to haunt them.

They've been getting a free pass for a very long time from the Canadian Press, but now the Ghost of Christmas Past has come even for the journalists and media icons. And because they've been so secure and so safe for so long, there are many, many skeletons all set to fall out of their closets.

I have a very large bowl of popcorn now, salted with delicious Liberal tears.

The Phantom

More floppy cameltron antics.

Today in our soap opera "As The Turd Whirls," Floppy Cameltron again scrapes the comments of somebody else's blog for something to write about. Normally I don't care what Floppy says, but he's taking one of my comments out of context, again, so I'm putting the context back in.

Robin Munn | August 23, 2016 at 11:35 am |

As I said in a comment at Mad Genius… actually, I'll just copy and paste the comment over here.
The worst insult I can think of giving to someone is to tell them "You are a liar, and the truth is not in you." (Which comes from the Bible, in 1 John 2:4). Which is what I have had to conclude about both Damian Walter and Mike Glyer — and I have recently had to add Camestros to that list as well, having finally seen first-hand what he writes when he's not trying to hide his opinion of the Puppy movement.

thephantom182 | August 23, 2016 at 8:39 pm |

I suspect Flopatron of being some sort of lawyer/law student. He argues by misdirection, nitpick, mangling words, redefining things in his favor. Currently he is arguing the "quality not politics" angle. Badly, be it said, as he merely dances around the issue and cannot back anything up.
Business as usual, in other words.

accordingtohoyt | August 23, 2016 at 8:58 pm |

Nah, he's a writer in Australia. Dave Freer knows him by sight.

RES | August 23, 2016 at 9:02 pm |

Dave Freer had him in his sights and didn't fire? Admirable restraint.

• Donald Campbell | August 23, 2016 at 9:15 pm |

  Nah, he should have cut him into little pieces and used them for bait.

  • RES | August 23, 2016 at 9:24 pm |

    Bait?!? Wouldn't that constitute cruelty to fishes? (Or whatever animule you're trying to dee-bait.)

    • pohjalainen | August 24, 2016 at 2:37 am |

      Would you care to eat the fish you got with that bait?

    • overgrownhobbit | August 24, 2016 at 2:46 am |

      Chum?

    • Joe Wooten | August 24, 2016 at 7:35 am |

      So he's a master baiter then?

      • Bibliotheca Servare | August 31, 2016 at 1:56 pm |

        Ah, but is he a cunning linguist as well…?

bearcat | August 23, 2016 at 9:14 pm |

So he an Australian law school dropout?

bearcat | August 23, 2016 at 9:15 pm |

IS, there should be an is in that sentence.

There we go, context changes the conversation considerably.
One thing does remain constant though. Floppy Cameltron still has fuck all to talk about besides Sad Puppies.
The Phantom

Update! Currently floppy cameltron is getting plenty of traffic from other people's efforts. I've dropped two replies in there today, and he's still playing spam filter. Such is the weakness of his backbone, I suppose.

The Cameltoe, REVEALED! [Dun dun duuuuun!]

It seems that the idiot blogger I've posted a few times about lately has pissed someone off and had his name dropped onto the Internet.

Yes friends, Camestros Felpatron in Real Life is actually....

... some guy. Maybe. I'm not going to link to it, because I don't care. Google it if you want to know. Its another piece of random FarceBook drama, and I do not FarceBook. (If Big Brother wants all my data, he'll have to work a little. I'm not going to type it all in myself.)

But it brings up something important. Lots of people say that if you can't put your name to something you say, you should shut up.

Well, being the shadowy figure that I am, I disagree. When you are anonymous, you can say things that other people would normally use against you  in Real Life.

Such as, your real opinion about the latest Star Wars movie. What you think of guns. Who you voted for. What's your take on pronouns.

All that stuff is like touching the third rail in the subway these days. If I'm The Phantom, I get to have a cost-free opinion, meaning I get to say what I truly think. If I have to be Mr. Real Me of RealStreet in Realville, I get to shut up. Unless I am unassailably wealthy, socially untouchable and morally perfect, I will be set upon by the ravening horde for voicing an improper opinion. Having an opinion will cost me time, money and social standing.

This is why we have secret ballots in our democracy. So people can vote for the unpopular candidate and not get their house burnt down. That used to happen.

So, all you Sad Puppies out there, lay off the doxxing. Let the friggin' Lefties do that stuff. That's their wheelhouse.

The Anonymous Phantom

Today in Nerd Hatred: Star Wars fan edit!

Some guy cut the Star Wars movie down to 47 minutes. That's a hell of a feat in and of itself, the movie is interminable. How did he do it? Took out all the female roles.

"Star Wars: The Last Jedi" has garnered both praise from critics who lauded its departure from the franchise's formula, and ire from long-time fans who say it missed the mark. Chief among the complaints, beyond the unbalanced pacing and needless subplots, concerned the movie's heavy-handed progressive messaging.

To that end, an anonymous user—a troll with too much time on their hands—created a 47-minute cut of the film with its female presence drastically cut down. It's a hundred minutes shorter than the actual movie, the cut is as linear as a bad dream and it focuses entirely on its male characters without any of the character development given to Rey—one of the The Last Jedi's finer elements.

Called "The Last Jedi: De-Feminized Fanedit (aka The Chauvinist Cut)," the cut-down version is clearly intended to satirize the complaints about the movie's heavy focus on Finn's aimless sidekick, Rose (who's referred to as "Asian chick" and "China girl), and the pink-haired admiral played by Laura Dern. Most of their scenes, along with Leia's and Rey's, are significantly reduced.

At 47 minutes with no female dialogue, this cut is mostly explosions I'm sure. As a joke, perhaps a bit amusing. Taking the piss out of Hollywood never gets old.

What's interesting today is the widespread media condemnation. The usual suspect SJW got their knickers in the expected twist, but in the wider media this thing made it to Univision, Fast Company, Buzzfeed, and so forth. Extremely hostile is an understatement.

Media is very invested in their feminism project, and they are going to slap down anybody who mocks or questions it. Hard.

The Phantom

#MeToo: the sharks are jumping.

I called it when they went after Stan Lee, a 95 year old guy who just lost his wife. Other people's mileage differs, the NY Post calls it today.

Men — even decent, sensitive, feminist men — be afraid. This could happen to you.
The hit on Ansari, 34, was posted on Babe.net with someone who identified herself as a now-23-year-old photographer from Brooklyn using the name “Grace.” In a long and anatomically detailed piece, Grace described flirting with the actor, comedian and filmmaker at a Los Angeles Emmys afterparty in September, when she was 22, even though she came with another date and Ansari initially tried to blow her off.

Mr. Ansari's crime, ultimately, was an inability to read this woman's mind. While she was giving him a BJ. The bastard.

And this is the point where it gets tricky. Because Grace apparently believes that Ansari should have been able to read her mind, when a simple “Stop!” would have promptly ended the activities.
“Throughout the course of her short time in the apartment, she says she used verbal and non-verbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was,” Babe reported.
Grace said, “Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling. I know that my hand stopped moving at some points.
“I stopped moving my lips and turned cold.”
But Grace couldn’t say if Ansari didn’t notice her reticence or if he ignored it. Only, after she said an unequivocal “No,” he stopped trying to have sexual intercourse with her. He called her an Uber to take her home to Brooklyn.

So, to sum up, when a woman says "Yes! I will do oral with you! And, I will give you a BJ too!" actually means "NO! I do not want to have any sexy things! Stop harrassing me, man!"

And we men are supposed to be able to do this feat of mind reading in the middle of said BJ. Okay? Okay! Good thing we cleared that up. Seems totally reasonable, right? Right? Yeah, no.

Or, we could all admit that there are some women that are flatly out of their damn minds, who hate men, and will do pretty well anything to hurt them. Because if I ever saw an example of a fruitcake hell-bent to hurt a guy, this is it.

The Hurtful Phantom

N. and S. Korea run -one- Olympic team.

In a historic first since the Korean War, North and South Korea have agreed to UNIFY their Olympic teams and compete as Korea. Holy. Crap.

North and South Korea have agreed to form their first joint Olympic team and will march together under a unified flag during the opening ceremony, South Korea has announced. 

The two Koreas agreed to form a combined women's ice hockey team to take part in next month's Winter Olympics in PyeongChang in the South next month. 

Seoul's Unification Ministry says the agreement was during talks on Wednesday at the border village of Panmunjom.

It said athletes from the two Koreas will march together under a 'unification flag' depicting their peninsula during the opening ceremony.

Wow, that Trump guy with his "My red launch button is bigger than your red launch button!" and calling Kim Jong Ill "Rocket Man," what an IDIOT that guy is. Amiright?

The Phantom

The unbearable thickness of camels.

The Floppy Cameltoe is at it again, fucking around playing spam filter while ripping off my comments to provide grist for his blog.

My reply to his idiotic bleating is as follows:

Have -you- read the article, Floppy? Its classic de-platforming based on the "but QUALITY!!!1!" argument so beloved of Hugo gatekeepers. Just eliminate all those poorly written tacky books, and concentrate on the Good Ones. Which he gets to decide on, of course.

There's a saying attributed to the son of a bitch that burnt the Great Library of Alexandria. "If it agrees with the Koran, it is superfluous. If it disagrees, it is blasphemous." Same thing, just faster.

Essentially what they're doing on Twitter, Facebook and Google right now, but without the lying, sneaking and weaseling.

Somebody tell me again how far it is from San Jose to Mountainview.

 Jeasus, Floppy. What is wrong with you man?

Update: Incidentally for others reading, the bit regarding the library of  Alexandria originated with Dr. Locketopus, an inspired comment indeed. Credit where credit is due.

Stan Lee accused of #MeToo

Let this stand as the moment when #MeToo officially jumped the shark. Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame is 95 years old. He has full-time nursing staff at his house looking after him.

The un-named owner of an un-named company is claiming through some kind of media rumor mill connection that Stan sexually harassed the nurses.

Now, I have some home-care experience. One of the things that is simply Not Done in homecare is discussing clients. Patient confidentiality is a moral imperative, and a legal one as well. Nurses are bound by it. If your client is behaving badly, you can quit but you can't talk about it.

Second, inappropriate sexual conduct by a 95 year old man is often a sign of stroke or other malign brain disease process. You don't usually see that in a guy with no previous history of it.

Third, Stan just lost his wife in July. Making this shit officially Not Funny.

Really, I don't care if the old bastard grabbed every one of them. This is not about him. This is about professional conduct and the duty owed a patient. Even if he did it, he's the victim. If he did not do it, as I find likely, he's doubly the victim. No, we should not "believe the women."

Bringing us quickly to the point. Even Harvey Weinstein is due his day in court, and due his presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Because for every mad dog, there are a hundred Stan Lees out there.

I've been laughing about #MeToo because after a lifetime of watching Hollywood/DemocRat snakes skate way scott free, now, finally they all got nailed. But it seems the fun is over, and the wolves are out hunting juicy sheep.

Didn't take long, did it? Just since October.

The Phantom

WorldCon and the Google lawsuit.

Today word was received that James Damore of "That Memo!" fame is suing Google.

James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired after arguing that the gender gap in tech may be partially explained by sex differences among men and women, just filed a class-action lawsuit against Google in the Santa Clara, Calif., Superior Court.

Damore came to fame after he wrote the now-infamous "Google Manifesto," where he pointed out that "differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech."

Despite being attacked as sexist by many left-wingers, many academics and researchers also came to his defense, including Toronto-based sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh and Geoffrey Miller, a evolutionary psychology professor at the University of New Mexico.

Filed Monday morning, the class-action lawsuit argues that Google discriminates against white conservative men on the basis of their "male gender" and "Caucasian race," further alleging that there is "open hostility for conservative thought" in the Google workplace.

To which we all chorus: "No kidding!"

What does this have to do with WorldCon? Well, this year's WorldCon and Hugo award ceremony will be held in San Francisco.That's where Google's headquarters is, and where all the computer nerds who work at Google live. Nerds who work in tech are big into SF/F books and movies, if I may be permitted to state the stereotype. It is reasonable to assume that many WorldCon volunteers and board members, factotums and apparatchicks either have history working at Google or similar company, and form part of the Silicon Valley culture. That would be the one hostile to James Damore.

It is therefore no surprise that Jon del Arroz, loudly Conservative author, Sad Puppy and all 'round SFWA/WorldCon gadfly, had his paid-up membership revoked and was banned from attending the San Francisco WorldCon.

These two things, Damore losing his job and del Arroz being banned are actually the same thing. West Coast Liberalism has progressed to the point where they are using their power against anyone who puts a foot wrong. Transgressions against Wokeness will be punished to the greatest degree possible.

In other words, the little bitchez are losing the Culture War despite having 100% control of education, publishing, Hollywood, Big Media, and Big Internet. Despite having all that, and they really do have all that, they lost the election. A guy they despise beat them all, and he's been mercilessly trolling them every day since November 2016.

They are angry, and they are lashing out with every weapon at their disposal. The Secret Masters of Liberal Fandom (SMOLFs) have decided it is better to burn the Church down than accept any impure Conservative Puppies into their holy precincts. Just as Google opened themselves to a potentially enterprise-destroying lawsuit rather than let a single memo stand.

Since they have decided to burn it all down to keep me from participating, I have brought hot dogs to roast. Mmmm, yummy. ~:D

The Phantom Hot Dog Chef.

Update! I am told China Mike of Vile 666 fame linked to this post. I can't tell. There's zero difference in traffic. Dear Mike, aka anonymous coward, you nitpick like a troll. Beware, lest the Iron Finger take you.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi review.

Finally broke down and went to see Star Wars last night, and I can see why this thing is faltering in the box-office.

Spoiler free review has to not discus the plot. Luckily, there is no plot to discuss. Really. There's a couple of surprises in there that build the suspense (a little) but apart from the over-all pacifist, anti-organized religion message being soft-pedaled, the whole plot is in the trailer.

Being Hollywood, there's an overt anti-Capitalist message to go with the pacifism, that is also, thankfully, a subtext. They didn't ruin the movie by banging us in the face with it a hundred times, they only brought it up once.

There is a more subtle message on view throughout the movie, which is more interesting. The message is that you, the viewer, are a child. An idiot child. Someone who needs their food pre-chewed and delivered in nice bite-sized spoonfuls.
.

In this movie, space weapons have a ballistic arc. In space. The bullets leave the gun, arch up, then fall down onto the target.

Space weapons have projectiles moreover, that travel like bullets do. These are energy weapons that none the less fire discrete bullet-ish blobs of energy that move and shine like artillery rounds.

Space ships fly like airplanes. In space. They bank, they turn using aerodynamic forces, they have wings for this purpose.

There is air in space, most of the time. When bombers open their bomb-bay doors, all the air does not rush out of the spacecraft.  Except one time in an explosion, -then- all the air rushed out. Oh, and bombs fall down by gravity too.

There are a few more space things things like that, one really glaring one central to the plot, you'll know it when you see it.

Animals are always good. They're nice. Pet the nice funky alien animals and they will save you from the bad guys.

Storm Troopers still can't hit the broad side of a barn. From the inside.

Despite being old, scarred and bitter, Luke Skywalker is still a cocky dumbass who doesn't understand anything.

Hope will see us through. No matter how many people die stupidly, no matter how idiotic the plan is, no matter how much people NEVER EVER follow orders, Hope will see you through.

And more in that vein.

Now, it has to be said that this is a beautifully photographed movie. The CGI is flawless, the cinematography is smooth and accomplished. There are no shots of characters standing stiffly, saying their lines. Everything moves, everything is fluid.

Unlike last time, this time they managed to make me believe Carrie Fischer was Princess Fricking Leia, galaxy scouring bad-ass and admiral of the Republic. Carrie Fischer does not look like a wee sick old lady this time. It was sweet that her last part was as well done as this.

Kylo Ren still looks like Justin Trudeau, and he's still a whiny bitch.

Rey gets lost this time, her character spends a lot of time dithering and fiddling about. Strong female lead = not.

The token black dude actually gets some good screen time, and he gets a token Asian chick to riff off. The two of them form a really nice sub-plot. I don't know why it needed to be in the amazingly long movie, but it is really nice.

Lots of stuff blows up in a very satisfying fashion, even though it is very, very long. And did I mention, holy crap is this thing long.

Nice in 3D. Go see it if you're bored stiff, you will feel like you got your money's worth on length alone.

The Phantom