The Phantom has published!!!

Yes, the long awaited day is finally here!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0848PX3TC/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Edward+Thomas+Unfair+Advantage&qid=1580166769&s=books&sr=1-1

That's the live link to Amazon.com where my first book is now available!

And yes, Edward Thomas is very much a pen name.

A little background, this book started off as a tiny little idea in my head in 1993. I wrote down things from then until about 2012, when a friend of mine read the collected scribblings, pronounced them good, and told me "You have to finish this right now!"

So I did finish it, around 2014. Then I kept going and going, until now I have five in the can and two more in the oven, as it were.

This year it was decided I needed to get busy and PUBLISH it, so a cover was constructed and here we are. Published.

I'm not sure how I feel about it right now. I pulled the trigger at 3:15 this afternoon, and now I have a stomach ache. 😓

The Phantom

Geography is racist!

As I've been saying for some time now, if you break crimes by geography, you find some very interesting things. Such as if you map shootings and murders on a map, you very rapidly see that more than half the shootings are concentrated in two or three areas of a city, and some areas have no murders at all.

Here's a guy who did that for the continental United States.

We hear a lot of banter from the "anti-gun" media that these problems are gun problems, and they've concocted this "gun deaths" number in order to lump these into the same problem and gloss over the differences. But if the problem were "guns," then the hot spots on the suicide map and the hot spots on the homicide map would coincide, and would be related to gun ownership rates. There are only a few places where they overlap. Most of the hot zones for suicide have low homicide rates, and most of the hot zones for homicide have low suicide rates. The difference is stark.

Gun ownership rates, as far as such a thing can be determined, generally are inverse to crime and suicide rates from the studies I've seen. But its kind of hard to tell, because people generally lie like bastards when asked if they have any guns.

At any rate, there are some very interesting graphs here that tell a very non-PC story about who is getting shot by who, and where.

Map website here. You can do your own research.

The Phantom.

Austrailan bush fires are arson?

Apparently the extensive brush fires burning up Australia this year are largely arson.

Overall, across Australia police arrested 183 people for lighting bushfires across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania in the past few months.
The link between arsonists and the deadly fires that devastate Australia every summer is well known and well documented, with the rate of deliberately lit fires escalating rapidly during the school holiday period.

The Conversation reports experts estimate about 85 percent of bushfires are caused by humans. A person may accidentally or carelessly start a fire, such as leaving a campfire unattended or using machinery which creates sparks.
Research has shown about 8 percent of officially recorded vegetation fires were attributed to malicious lighting, and another 22 percent as suspicious. However, about 40 percent of officially recorded vegetation fires did not have an assigned cause.
When unassigned bushfires were investigated by fire investigators, the majority were found to be maliciously lit, the Conversation added.

Meanwhile, Prophetess Greta Thunberg is screeching that its all global warming to blame. It'll be interesting to see how many Lefty eco-wingnuts end up convicted of arson over the coming year. My wild guess, more than a few.

Its 2020!

Happy New Year!