Wondering how a bunch of punks took over a US embassy?

Tuesday night, 9/11, we were treated to the sight of Egyptian "youths" burning the US flag and hoisting some black rag in its place. First question I had was, how do these unarmed, untrained, unpracticed assholes always seem to overwhelm the embassy guards? Well, now I know the answer.

U.S. Marines defending the American embassy in Egypt were not permitted by the State Department to carry live ammunition, limiting their ability to respond to attacks like those this week on the U.S. consulate in Cairo.

Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson "did not permit U.S. Marine guards to carry live ammunition," according to multiple reports on U.S. Marine Corps blogs spotted by Nightwatch. "She neutralized any U.S. military capability that was dedicated to preserve her life and protect the US Embassy."

But wait, didn't Barry say that the Egyptian government was supposed to protect the US embassy?  Well he sure did, but:

Egypt-US: The day after the storming of the US Embassy, all day and night on 12 and 13 September, mainstream media aired footage of obviously unemployed Egyptian young men gathering and milling near the US Embassy in Cairo. A single security vehicle was imaged making an occasional and completely feckless foray through the gathering area, during the early morning of 13 September  in Cairo. No Egyptian police or military or other security personnel were present.

Comment: The normal time for organized, violent Muslim protests is Friday afternoon, after prayers. Muslim Brotherhood leaders already have called for "non-violent", anti-US protests on Friday after prayers. Readers should expect more anti-US protests and no Egyptian security forces.

So no Egyptian cops and no live ammo for the Marines. Rumor has it that the ambassador has also refused to open the Strong Language locker, so Marines are left to defend the embassy with hope and change. That would be spare change tied up in a sock.

This is why I'm not cut out for the military. I'd have busted open the armory sooner than follow those orders.

The Non-military Phantom

Yes we guessed right, they are crazy as a bag of weasels.

Earlier we were treated to news that a British rural home owner was arrested after he shot two men out of the four that were robbing his house. Didn't kill them mind you, just gave them a buttload of bird shot which encouraged them to run away.

The couple were arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after the legally-owned shotgun was fired.

Yep, he got robbed, middle of the night, middle of nowhere, police response time probably half an hour on a good day, four of them. Oh, and the couple has been robbed several times previously, by the way. So much that they were going to move to Australia to escape it. Cops arrested and charged the HOME OWNERS. Awesome eh?

That's what we here at Chez Phantom like to call batshit crazy. Because it is. By the way that "legally owned shotgun" thing in there is the newspaper boilerplate/dog whistle thing for "EVIL GUNS MUST BE BANNED!!!"

Well today there's an update! The victim's names are now given as Andy and Tracey Ferrie, from Welby, Leicestershire. The Crown has decided in it's infinite wisdom to drop the charges. Most likely because the tidal wave of phone calls and email from the local MPs office down to the local street sweeper convinced them that pursuing such a prosecution would be bad for their health.

The question of sanity however has been answered. British judges and Crown officials ARE batshit crazy, just like we've all been saying. Check this out:

A judge [pictured here looking fully like the idiot he clearly is] praised burglars for their 'courage' and claimed prison 'very rarely does anybody any good' as he allowed a serial intruder to walk free from court.

Judge Peter Bowers said burglar Richard Rochford deserved to be jailed for two-and-a-half years but he decided to take an 'extraordinary chance' by not locking him up.

Recognising the controversy he was causing, the judge added: 'I might get pilloried for it.'

So just in case anyone out there was wondering why Andy and Tracey got tossed in the slammer for not allowing the nice burglars men to take their TV, that's why. Burglars are an officially sanctioned protected group. Message received.

As Kathy Shaidle says," Dear Luftwaffe: Come back, all is forgiven."

War on freedom: should government decide if you can spank your kid?

Lately there have been several cases of Canadians and Brits getting arrested and charged for repelling home invasions, robberies, vandals and thieves. Here's a case this week.  Commentary at Small Dead Animals is here.

It seems to have been decided that all matters involving force were police business only, that self defense was to be sternly discouraged, and that Her Majesty's loyal subjects were no longer fit to decide such things as who to hit or how hard in a home invasion or other criminal act. It was my opinion that I'd REALLY like to know who decided that, since I didn't get asked.

Well here's a chance to know who's deciding something for you. Your betters have decided that you are not smart enough to decide about spanking your own child. Its one more step down the same path that's getting your underwear checked at the airport in case you might have a Swiss army knife stuffed up where the sun don't shine.  Pay close attention to the who and where.

A medical journal's call to do away with Canada's so-called spanking law is something Manitoba daycare advocates say they've been demanding for nearly a decade.

"We, along with many other provincial and national organizations concerned with the well-being of children, have long held the belief that hitting children is not an acceptable form of guiding children's behaviour," said Pat Wege, executive director of the Manitoba Child Care Association Inc.

In 2003, the Manitoba association endorsed a cross-Canada coalition's joint statement on physical punishment of children and youth, said Wege.

Now, a strongly worded editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal has called for the repeal of Section 43 of the Criminal Code, which gives parents and teachers a legal defence when they physically discipline children.

"It is time for Canada to remove this anachronistic excuse for poor parenting from the statute book," editor-in-chief John Fletcher wrote in a signed editorial Tuesday.

The editorial will likely re-ignite debate on a controversial topic that has inflamed opinion for decades.

The Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Criminal Code provision by a 6-3 margin in a landmark 2004 ruling.

The high court ruled the provision doesn't infringe a child's right to security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

You'll find Canadian Medical Association fingerprints all over gun control legislation in Canada too.

Let the bastards know what you think.  Personally I think they should F- OFF out of my business, but that's just me.

The Phantom

Oopsie! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Apple caught with their hand down -your- pants. Again.

Apple faced a major embarrassment on the eve of the launch of its new iPhone when hackers published a trove of sensitive information about 1m Apple devices online.

The hacker group AntiSec, an offshoot of the Anonymous and Lulzsec collectives which last year targeted Sony, News International and others in a high-profile wave of attacks, said it had obtained the database of Apple device-identifiers from an FBI agent's laptop. The FBI's long-running international investigation into Anonymous and its associates resulted in several arrests earlier this year.

FBI didn't have much to say about it. I guess they get embarrassed when you know they're watching.

The Phantom

"Sending a message" union style.

Public Employees Union head put the Dem twist on the empty chair gag.

The newly-elected president of the giant public workers' union AFSCME, Lee Saunders, took a page out of Clint Eastwood's book at an Ohio delegation Labor Day breakfast on Monday, speaking to an empty chair that he pretended was occupied by Eastwood. At first it was just a lark.

[snippage]

Suddenly, the tone changed: Saunders, finishing his speech, began to kick the chair, threw it, and yelled "Dirty Harry, make my day! We're gonna kick ass in November!"

The crowd was cheering, and the humor had gained a palpable edge. "We wanted to respond to the nonsense that he did last week," Saunders said later. "We're here to have fun but we're here to work, too, so we thought we were sending a message."

Message reads: SHUT UP old man or we'll bust you up!

Stay classy, Dems.

It's Labor Day! Do you know where your chair is?

Work for idle hands: federal government vs. local... government!

Stupid project dreamed up by government officials with more budget than brains gets shut down by other government officials with a MUCH bigger budget and even less brains.  You have to read this thing to understand the nested layers of utter stupidity on display here.

The U.S. Justice Department says it has reached a settlement with the Sacramento (California) Public Library over a trial program the library was conducting that let patrons borrow Barnes and Noble NOOK e-book readers.

DOJ and the National Federation of the Blind objected to the program on grounds that blind people could not use the NOOK e-readers for technological reasons.

The Justice Department said the settlement is aimed at stopping discrimination: "Emerging technologies like e-readers are changing the way we interact with the world around us and we need to ensure that people with disabilities are not excluded from the programs where these devices are used," said Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez in a news release.

Restating the above for effect, the US Department of Justice has shut down the Sacramento Library pilot program for lending e-books, because blind people can't read them. That the blind people can't read NORMAL books either seems not to have been a problem for the DOJ. Perhaps they're saving that one for a rainy day.

At any rate, this lawsuit which cost untold amounts of tax money,  federal state and city, was instigated on behalf of... wait for it...  this is golden, right here...

A DOJ official told CNSNews.com it interviewed a woman who could not participate in the library's e-reader program due to her disability and concluded that the program had violated the ADA.

Yes friends, one (1) person was interviewed, which launched a million dollars worth of dueling government lawyers and apparatchiks. Meetings were held, faxes were sent, email boiled forth in a foaming cornucopia of expensive waste motion, which no doubt kept quite a few six figure incomes busy for quite some time. This is the true meaning of the Obamanation: your money spent on very well paid union workers doing nothing whatsoever.

This is the kind of thing which makes me scream TAX CUT!!!! at anyone who stands still long enough to listen. If these people have time to f- around with such petty minutia, then they need to be put somewhere that their talents will be more productive. Like a fish packing plant assembly line, or a job shoveling shit from one place to another.

The Phantom

Bleeding update the third: Never bet against The Phantom.

My instincts have not failed me.  All the casualties at the Empire State Building were shot by the dumb-ass NYPD cops.

NEW YORK -- Authorities are confirming that all nine bystanders caught in the crossfire of a shooting outside the Empire State Building were wounded by two veteran patrolmen who had never fired their weapons on duty.

Officer Craig Matthews fired seven times and Officer Robert Sinishtaj fired nine times at Jeffrey Johnson on bustling midtown block Friday morning after Johnson, who'd shot a former co-worker to death, brazenly pointed his pistol at the officers.

Police had said that nine others were wounded likely by stray or ricocheting police bullets, and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly confirmed that Saturday. He says that based on ballistic tests and other evidence, "it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police.

I love this "brazenly pointed his pistol at the officers" crap, considering the cops then hosed down the whole frigging street. I'm sorry, one guy fires nine rounds into the crowd and the other fires seven? What the hell is that?

Its panic, is what. Its total locked-up tunnel vision by two supposedly "trained" cops.

I guarantee they didn't even -see- the people behind that shooter. All they saw was the big black hole in the end of that Colt .45, and that's what they were shooting at, the gun.  No controlled draw-aim-fire, no sight picture, no check your down-range for collateral damage, no tactical movement to bracket the bad guy, no frig-all. Just "Oh shit!" BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM "I think I got him!"

Why did this happen? Because those two meat heads shoot for qualification once a year, at most. Because NYPD qualification is fifty rounds at a static paper silhouette target, anything inside the 8-ring counts to score, you have to do 75% or better. Timed fire at ranges from five yards to twenty five yards. I've seen kids shoot this course. Its a cake walk.

To retain trained responses, humans have to PRACTICE THEM. You have to practice almost every day to be awesome, you have to practice every week to be good. Twice a month is about the bare minimum to retain learned skills and muscle memory. Once a year? Joke territory. Most cops shoot once a year.

Truly, I don't have a problem with the cops shooting this guy. It was a righteous shoot, and there's no reason they would have done anything else BUT shoot him.

Shooting nine innocent pedestrians in the process? That I've got a problem with.

The Phantom

UH-oh, Barry's gotta prooooooblem.

Well, this doesn't look good for someone. ~:D Emphasis (and pretty colours) mine.

FRIDAY 2 PM: The anti-Obama movie 2016 Obama's America went into wider release around America today and is opening right now in first place at the domestic box office. That's quite a feat since the Rocky Mountain Pictures political documentary is still playing in only 1,090 North American theaters – or about 1/3 as many theaters as actioner The Expendables 2 (3,355 theaters). But these political documentaries like faith-based films are frontloaded. The Stallone pic from Millenium/Lionsgate still will end Friday and the weekend #1. Exhibitors are reporting busloads arriving at theaters around the country in pre-organized trips. It also employed much of the same marketing techniques used to garner attention and support for faith-based films, understandable since the audience is overlapping. Its campaign included advertising nationally over the past two weeks on talk radio and cable news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC.

Maybe this explains why Debbie Wasserman-Shultz is so bitchy on CNN these days. She's watching the Hope'nChange Express derail off the side of a cliff in a slow motion train wreck, and that's her meal ticket. D'oh!

Better start polishing that resume Debbie baby. Chick-fil-A: its not a fluke, its a trend!

The Happy Phantom

Bleeding Update two: See?

Well now, here's CNN making my point for me. Additions in parenthesis by me, The Phantom

A disgruntled [WHITE] former employee of a business inside the Empire State Building shot a former [WHITE] coworker in the head in a dispute outside the building, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

As suspect Jeffrey Johnson tried to flee the scene, he pulled a .45 caliber pistol on two approaching [WHITE] police officers, who opened fire on him. Nine [probably WHITE] people were wounded or grazed by gunfire in the crossfire, Kelly said.

"Some may have been accidentally shot by police officers," Kelly said.

We will no doubt discover that most (if not all) of the people shot today, with the exception of the first victim obviously, were shot by the two police officers. I'm familiar with the marksmanship training NYPD officers get, from my observations "spray and pray" pretty much covers it.  NYPD are a bunch of freakin' punks who can't hit a barn from the inside, in my very well researched and not at all humble opinion.  Exceptions to the rule do exist, but they prove the rule.

Please note that if some black guy in Harlem had walked up to some other black guy and popped him in the head, was then shot by the cops and a few bystanders got hit... it wouldn't be a headline on CNN and Drudge, and Bloomberg wouldn't have made a nationally televised speech about it. True? True. Probably wouldn't have even made the papers, except for the local section.

And we wonder why the black population in America riots.

The RAAAAACIST!!! Phantom.

Bleeding update!

I just googled "13 shot" and "19 shot" to make sure I'm not blowing smoke here. Turns out... I'm not blowing smoke. Which is really quite disgusting, you ask me.

Google "13 shot" and on the first page you get the Tribune article from yesterday, and that's it. No more.

But you also get this very interesting thing that happened in Tempe Arizona waaaaay back on March 3rd. 13 people shot at a Nipsey Hustle rap concert. I'm pretty

Nipsey Hussle, who didn't go on stage, used his Twitter account to express his displeasure with the shooting at his show.

"(Arizona) ... y'all gotta be cool man," he wrote.

Guess what race all those people were. Yep.  Did we hear about it? Nope. We heard about Traaaaayvon and his Skittles instead, and the eeeevile White-Hispanic Zimmerman who shot the poor boy.

You know how we paranoid Phantom types sometimes say "there's going to be blood in the streets!" if anything goes wrong with the US Election in November? Going by this non-reportage of mass-casualty black-on-black shootings, I guess it means some WHITE people will START acting like these black people have been acting all along.

I guess noticing this makes me a racist though. Oh well, there goes my Order of Canada.

The RAAAAACIST! Phantom

If it bleeds it don't necessarily lead.

Drudge headline: CHICAGOLAND: 13 shot in 30-minute span...

From the Chicago Tribune article:

Nineteen people were shot in attacks across the South and West sides between about 5:20 p.m. Thursday and 1:30 a.m. Friday - including 13 people during a single 30-minute period - according to the Chicago Police Department.

The shootings peaked between about 9:15 and 9:45 p.m. Thursday when 13 people were shot, including eight in a single incident at 79th Street and Essex Avenue about 9:30 p.m.

That's interesting isn't it? I mean, eight people get shot all at the same time and it ISN'T all over the US national news, and Sarah Brady ISN'T on CNN crying for more gun control, and Barak Obama ISN'T making a speech.

Could there be something about the people who got shot that is less newsworthy than, oh, let's say some random movie watchers in Aurora Colorado, or the building manager of a certain Christian lobbying outfit in Washington DC? 

Like, that they're all Black perhaps? Or that they live in the not-so-nice part of Chicago maybe? Or that they got whacked in what "everybody knows" is an obvious drug gang drive-by hit? Or that Some Important DemocRat is mayor of the city they got shot in, and doesn't want any national press coverage of this penny-ante gang crap?

None of that is in the Tribune, but I'm not sticking my neck out very far when I prophesy that all the victims AND all the shooters are black, they all have criminal records, and most if not all will have gang tattoos all over them. I can make that prophecy because the Mainstream Media -didn't- pick it up.

Open season declared on the South Side of Chi-town and it ain't news. Now get back to work, you've got taxes to pay.

The Phantom

Kewl new thing being done with common cellulose.

Nanocellulose! Who'd a thunk it?

US government ammunition controversy explained: they're burning your money.

Lately there has been a lot of noise about non-police agencies of the US government buying up jacketed hollow point (JHP) pistol ammunition. Many people have said, including myself, that it seems very ominous that these agencies are stocking up on combat pistol ammo right before what could be a very fractious Federal election in November.

Well, Uncle Sam has an explanation.

The agency [SSA] said it has 295 special agents across 66 offices in the country. "These investigators have full law enforcement authority, including executing search warrants and making arrests," the statement said. 

As for concern about the type of bullets -- hollow points, which expand upon impact -- the statement said the type is "standard issue" and is used during "mandatory quarterly firearms qualifications and other training sessions."

The explanation is that contrary to basic economics and common bloody sense, the truth is (or so they claim) that Federal agencies really do give their officers the expensive combat ammo for range practice, instead of the more usual full metal jacket (FMJ) bullets, otherwise known as "hardball". That would be the kind of combat ammo that goes for more than a dollar a round at the store.

50 rounds of Federal HydraShok (JHP) in .40 S&W, 165 grain bullet costs $67.00 at the first store I googled. Same store, 1000 rounds of CCI hardball in .40 S&W, 165 grain bullet, $400.00. Which is $20.00 for 50 rounds. Buying in large quantity, US government agencies will probably be able to get their JHP combat ammo much cheaper, perhaps only DOUBLE what they'd pay for FMJ at -retail-.

Sadly, I believe this explanation. It fits their pattern of "price no object" behavior perfectly. I didn't think they'd be wasteful enough to burn JHP at the range, nobody does that. But it seems I was wrong. D'oh.

Still no word on why Dept.s of Agriculture, Education and Housing need their own SWAT teams though. Same reason probably, mission creep and too big a budget.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Robert J. Hanlon

"... but don't rule out malice." Robert A. Heinlein

The Phantom

Hipster meta-ironic violence.

The Batman shooter showed up armed to the teeth with a plan, gas grenades and body armor. The Sikh temple shooter was a typical "suicide-by-cop" wanker but at least knew to go after old men and women.

But Mr. Floyd Lee Corkins II, loving liberal, LGBT volunteer and all-round DemocRat party useful idiot, what does he do? He walks in with a 9mm Sig and a bag from Chick-fil-A, then launches into a monolog! He stands there and runs his mouth, then after the security guards have gotten right up to him he suddenly realizes they aren't going to run away like little girls. So he starts shooting. I bet his ex-military old man Floyd Lee Corkins I is proud today, eh?

To my (admittedly non-expert) eye, this is not a mentally ill person. This is a person who's been fulminating about this eeeevile FRC for a long while, the major fail of LGBT Chick-fil-A Kiss In Day torqued him off harshly, and he just can't take it anymore. He has to do something to show the Bad People that there's at least one proud gay out there who's going to stop their evil once and for all.

Why would this genius be convinced the FRC is a wretched hive of scum and villainy?

Southern Poverty Law Center and the Human Rights Campaign give us a clue. Or you could just go to pretty much any Lefty blog or news aggregator and be stunned by the violent rhetoric getting tossed about. Liberals have finally decided all Conservatives need to die, and now they're nerving themselves up for it.

But.

Floydie wasn't really -serious- about killing these FRC people. He's making a meta-ironic statement with the the bag of chicken, he's making the pop-culture "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" statement with the gun, and he's trying to claim the moral high ground by not actually killing anyone. All at the same time. He even said "its not personal, its policy" when he shot the guard guy. Who then KICKED HIS ASS, which was -awesome- by the way, and of course makes yet another recursively meta statement about gays being the victims of The Man.

In other words, Little Floyd baby is a typical hipster. A college English major, gay-activist pussy for whom symbolism is more important than reality. This shooting was not the act of an insane person, it was a calculated political statement being made by a mainstream fag with daddy issues who's just following the narrative.

Note to other hipster gay activist types: You people suck at this violence stuff. You should probably try to hate Conservatives a little more quietly, or there's a chance you might piss us off.

The Phantom

Meta-updates!

Kathy Shaidle has a superpower, she can read minds!
So can Kate McMillan!
Robins111 in the comments: "... shall be hereafter known as the Tellatubby shooter. " Now -that- is meta. Choke on that, hipsters.

Meta-meta update with ironic pop-culture reference!

Mark Steyn sends a shout-out!!! I'm still geekin' out about it!

Remember liberals, what goes around, comes around.

Sometimes the -right- person gets robbed. Spends twenty years letting scumbags walk, finally she reaps what she has sown.

A D.C. Superior Court judge, who recently presided over a high-profile murder case, was robbed at gunpoint last Friday while walking with two others through an upper Northwest D.C. neighborhood.

Judge Ronna Beck was walking with her law clerk and the clerk's boyfriend when two men with guns approached from behind and announced a robbery.

Judge Beck, who recently presided over the trial of five men convicted in the South Capitol Street drive-by murders, did what the robbers wanted and was not hurt in the holdup.

In fact, all three turned over their valuables, telling police the men jumped into a car and fled east toward 16th Street.

So Ronna baby, how you feel about root causes of crime now, eh? Or ubiquitous surveillance and its power to prevent crime? Yeah, that's a good one.

How about gun control? Staring down the barrel of some punk's heater make you think about that at all? Maybe wish you had a .45 to pull, or more likely did you wish that MAN with you had one? Instead you got the unarmed metrosexual defense-through-abject-supination.

How about when they took your stuff?  Did you feel all grateful that your buddies in the justice system were going to let them off with a slap on the wrist, or at most stick them in a halfway house rehabilitation program?

How about that huh? You frickin' liberal DC Beltway BEEOTCH!!!!

Justice is served!

The Phantom

Something we may be seeing more of in a year or two: gigantic blimps.

Test flight of the latest semi-rigid airship in New Jersey.

A next-generation airborne spy ship as long as a football field made a successful maiden test flight over New Jersey on Tuesday, according to Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command headquarters on Redstone Arsenal.

The Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle is sort of a digital-age dirigible under development by SMDC and prime contractor Northrop Grumman. LEMV is designed to keep a 2,500-pound Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance payload aloft up to three weeks at a time, staring at an area or enemies from 20,000 feet with an "unblinking eye," according to company materials.

Here's some more background on recent heavy lift airships from Defense Industry Daily.

Video from WIRED here.

As usual, the big brains at Northrop Grumman have created the super duper version of a military airship. This thing can haul a total of seven tons, that being 14,000 pounds of fuel, payload and pilots. It can in principle stay in the air for weeks, particularly if they arrange for mid-air refueling. Its full of helium so it will be very difficult to shoot down. Helium doesn't burn. Its also designed so it can fly with no humans on board, land, drop payloads, pick things up, whatever, all under remote control or even under its own local control like a robot vacuum cleaner. World's biggest Roomba.

As airships go this one is very interesting, it has a unique double-hull design that makes it much more aerodynamic and the hull apparently generates lift too when the machine is moving forward. Very, very cool.

Northrop Grumman says they are going to fly it around for a while before sending it on to Afghanistan to get shot at. Probably wise.

Now, this machine is like the ultimate Cadillac Eldorado with the mega tailfins, turbo-nitrous 500 cubic inch engine and the ten thousand watt stereo. Its got everything including a kitchen sink. Its -huge-. But, and this is where the real fun for us "citizens" comes in, compared to a drone or a spyplane, measured by flight hours per dollar, this thing is dirt cheap. I mean super duper give-it-away cheap. Assuming this machine makes itself useful in Ashcanistan, every city in the USA will want at least one for their cops.

There's a reason Goodyear still flies those ancient blimps at the Superbowl.  Its because they offer a rock-steady camera platform and they cost almost nothing compared to a helicopter. Oh, and they can't actually crash either. If you shoot a missile into one the most you can do is make it come down rrrreeeaallllyyy slow, because the gas is held in many small compartments inside the big bag. You can't rip them all at once and the gas itself will put out any fire you can get started. Its helium. If you want you can use your airship to carry and launch smaller drones. Or cruise missiles. Or smart-bombs. Or even put a gun on it and drop artillery shells on things. With deadly accuracy, because it doesn't wiggle as it flies.

Take your crash-proof high tech airship, scale it down. Make it a drone. Stick a FLIR pod on it, maybe some side-looking radar.  Now you've got every official peeping Tom's dream, the eye in the sky that sees in the dark, and they can afford to run it twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

Yeah, I think we should get used to seeing something like this floating around big cities real soon. Just remember the Batman movie in Aurora Colorado and the Gurudwara in Oak Creek Wisconsin when they fire up the hype machine to sell this new surveillance toy. Big Brother watching you doesn't make -you- safer. It makes Big Brother safer.

Time to invest in some mylar window blinds and thick drapes. Tinfoil works too, so they tell me.

The Phantom

Kirpan update II: Heart of a lion!

So they can go down fighting!

OAK CREEK, Wis., Aug. 7 (UPI) -- The president of the Sikh temple in Wisconsin where six members were killed tried to stop the gunman before he was gunned down, his son says.

Amardeep Kaleka told WTMJ, CNN affiliate in Milwaukee, that his father, Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, used the ceremonial dagger all Sikhs carry.

"It's an amazing act of heroism, but it's also exactly who he was," Amardeep Kaleka said. "There was no way in God's green Earth that he would allow somebody to come in and do that without trying his best to stop it."

There you go. Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, went after a punk who was half his age and armed with two pistols. Mr. Kaleka had what amounts to a butter knife at a gun fight, and he went anyway. Light a candle for that guy tonight.

Probably some of the other men went after the shooter too. Hell, probably some of the women went after him. Maybe that's why he was -outside- the Gurudwara when the cops showed up instead of inside shooting kids.

HEY OBAMA!!! HEY BLOOMBERG!!! You think maybe Mr. Kaleka could have accomplished more with a Walther .380 than a blunt ceremonial dagger?

Anti-gunners make me sick to the stomach, they really do.

Oh and by the way, for our no-less full of it Canadian politicians, why are Sikhs the only ones who get a knife? Where's MY right to carry MY national blade? Where's my Skean Dhu? Where's my dirk?

The Phantom

Kirpan update: cops knew about the Batman guy too!

Firstly, Kathy Shaidle rocks! Thanks for the linkage Kathy.

On Drudge today we find a report from ABC that the "Joker's" psychiatrist called the cops WEEKS before he finally slipped a gear and shot up the theater in Aurora.

The psychiatrist who treated suspected movie-theater shooter James Holmes made contact with a University of Colorado police officer to express concerns about her patient's behavior several weeks before Holmes' alleged rampage, sources told ABC News.

The sources did not know what the officer approached by Dr. Lynne Fenton did with the information she passed along. They said, however, that the officer was recently interviewed, with an attorney present, by the Aurora Police Department as a part of the ongoing investigation of the shooting.

Fenton would have had to have serious concerns to break confidentiality with her patient to reach out to the police officer or others, the sources said.

Serious concerns, no duh. Concerns like "Hey, this guy is crazier than a bag of weasels, he has a bunch of guns in his house and says he's going to kill a bunch of people!!!"  What do the cops do? Nuttin'. Why? Because they -can't-. Also because they probably can't be bothered to buck the paperwork blizzard just because somebody -might- die.

And really, thank God for that. Because if they had the power they'd be pulling everybody who was even the least bit odd and chucking them in the slammer "just in case". Because you never know, right? We call that kind of thing "North Korea". Speaking as someone who has been considered slightly odd,

Again, Big Brother is not  there to protect you. Big Brother is there to protect Big Brother.

So friends remember that, and remember that a knife is not what you bring to a gun fight. Kirpans are good, but nothing beats five aces like a Colt 1911.

The Phantom

Why do Sikhs carry the kirpan?

Because this kind of thing right here used to happen to them about every week, is why. As it turns out, government was no better at protecting people 500 years ago in India than it is in AMERICA RIGHT NOW. Check this out:

Federal investigators had "looked at" Sikh temple gunman Wade Michael Page more than once because of his associations with right-wing extremists and the possibility that he was providing funding to a domestic terrorist group, but law enforcement officials at the time determined there was not enough evidence of a crime to open an investigation, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said.

Yes friends, the now properly dead Mr. Page was sufficiently an asshole that the FBI actually went looking for a reason to bust him. But of course they came up empty because the guy hadn't actually -done- anything other than mouth off. So total protective power of the FBI, zippo. As expected, right?

But wait there's more! It turns out that more people than just the FBI were COMPLETELY USELESS for stopping this piece of dirt.

Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center had tracked Page for several years. The nonprofit organizations collect publicly available information on hate groups from Web forums, pamphlets and other sources.

There you go, total preventative value of Leftie busybody orgs watching this guy and wringing their hands, zippo. Big Brother watching you doesn't make you safer, kids.

Which is a big DUH no kidding! Because you can't predict when one of these schmucks is going to finally work up the nerve to walk his talk. It is in fact the very definition of UN-predictable, isn't it?

What finally stopped this clown? Getting shot to death by a cop. What could have prevented this massacre? Clownboy getting shot right away before the cops showed up, preferably by the very first person he pointed a gun at.

My suggestion to Sikhs everywhere is keep the kirpan for backup and upgrade to .45ACP for your primary carry. If your local city/state/province morons won't let you, DEFEAT THEM by voting for somebody who will.

The Phantom

Media bias: Its getting so you can set your watch by them.

Weekly Standard notes that the Media Party didn't think record breaking crowds for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was newsy enough to merit mention.

There's no mention of Chick-fil-A on the front pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the Boston Globe. The front pages of USA Today, the Dallas Morning News, and the Houston Chronicle have small headlines about the restaurant, while Chick-fil-A's hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, fits in a story below the fold under the heading, "Chick-fil-A Controversy." And the front pages of major news websites are quiet in their coverage as well.

Several hundred thousand people all over the USA spontaneously turn up to tell Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama to shove it where the sun don't shine... that's not news.

Utterly predictable. Also predictable, the Kiss-off protest in front of Chick-fil-A today -will- be front page news and all over CNN. You will be seeing pictures of men kissing in your national news tonight. Probably the same two on every channel, because they will be the only two that showed up. If you read tomorrow morning's paper, when you are done you will be less informed than before you started it.

But not if you don't buy it. Or turn on the TV. Which I for one am all over. I don't even get TV or the papers at all. Ever.

Because why the hell would I pay money to be lied to? Especially when I get the truth for free on the web!

The Phantom

Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

Chick-fil-A appreciation day. Lined up around the block, baby. This here is what you call a spontaneous grass roots uprising. Happened in Chicago too.

Every DemocRat apparatchik in the USA is watching this and realizing that nobody is buying their hype. All they have in response is rent-a-mob and bussed in union thugs.

They are done like dinner.

The Phantom

Liberalism in action.

Were you wondering why you need that gun Barack Obama doesn't want you to have?

The Obama administration declined to try to deport more than 36,000 illegal immigrants that were arrested on other charges between 2008 and 2011, including some who went on to commit 19 murders, 3 attempted murders and 142 sex crimes, the House Judiciary Committee said Tuesday.

All told, the administration was alerted to nearly 160,000 immigrants — most of them here legally — who were arrested during the three-year period. They went on to be charged in nearly 60,000 more crimes, according to the committee and the Congressional Research Service, which issued a report on the matter.

Now, this does not mean guys who got arrested for a speeding ticket, right? This means guys busted for robbery, assault, all kinds of things one would normally send a -legal- immigrant packing for. These clowns who were allowed to remain in the USA were ILLEGAL immigrants who should have been sent home regardless, PLUS they did crime.

One would almost think Obama had shares in Cerberus Holdings or Smith & Wesson, he's creating the demand and threatening a shortage at the same time, driving the prices up and sending these stocks on a tear.

The Phantom

The Supreme Court Ain't Going To Save You.

Scalia just served warning to one and all, the Supreme Court AIN'T GONNA SAVE YOUR GUNS.

Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the Supreme Court's most vocal and conservative justices, said on Sunday that the Second Amendment leaves room for U.S. legislatures to regulate guns, including menacing hand-held weapons.

"It will have to be decided in future cases," Scalia said on Fox News Sunday. But there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers that banned frightening weapons which a constitutional originalist like himself must recognize. There were also "locational limitations" on where weapons could be carried, the justice noted.

Given that liberals find any weapon "frightening", I think you can pretty much kiss your whole gun cabinet good bye if any ownership case ever makes it to court.

Meaning, my friends, that this election is a lot more important to y'all than just the economy and getting rid of Barry the Saboteur.

In that vein, here's some more stuff on Drudge right now for your consideration.

DHS gears up for election "unrest". 150 new sets of riot armor, to go with the four million rounds of .40 caliber pistol ammo they bought back in March.

DHS plans some drone air support for those riot cops. "Surveillance drones have a new mission. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) they will be used for "public safety". Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the DHS, told a House Committee meeting on Homeland Security that the more than 30,000 drones that will be deployed into American skies are just arbitrarily watching out for US citizens."

Air National Guard establishes Predator practice range. "North Dakota's Air National Guard this fall will begin operating a practice range for drone aircraft, which will give pilots more practical training than they can get from simulators, the unit's commander said. The Federal Aviation Administration has established blocks of restricted airspace for the training, located up to 10,000 feet above a spot near Camp Grafton South, between Devils Lake and Jamestown. The airspace is above about 9,300 acres of ground area.

So, now would be the time to get busy and WIN THIS ELECTION. Defeating the DemocRats is Job One. Job Two starts right afterward, which is stiffening the spines of the RINO wankers that are inevitably going to get elected in some places.

Because the Blackbirds ain't going to save you. Everybody ready? PUSH!

The Phantom

Let's compare!

Chuck U. Schumer: "Never let a crisis go to waste."

Shortly after the Cybersecurity Act gained Senate approval to proceed to filing proposed amendments and a vote next week, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a sponsor of the gun control amendment, came to the floor to defend the idea of implementing some "reasonable" gun control measures.

Some random guy who happened to be in the front entrance of Smith's Marketplace: "DROP IT @SSH0LE!"

A citizen with a gun stopped a knife wielding man as he began stabbing people Thursday evening at the downtown Salt Lake City Smith's store.

One guy gets on national TV and makes millions, the other guy doesn't. To win the stuffed rabbit, guess which is which!

Bonus round, guess what happens if Mr. Random Guy stops a stabbing like that in Noo Yawk. Or Washington DC, or Aurora Colorado! Or -anyplace- in Canada.

The Phantom

Bloomberg doubles down.

Looks like Bloomie wants to be President of the USA and is going to get there on the backs of 19 dead people from Aurora Colorado. What an asshole.

How to Break NRA's Grip on Politics: Michael R. Bloomberg

Its deathless prose, as you can imagine. Buddy is going to get stomped on like a cockroach.

In other news, he's backpedaling like a clown on a unicycle about the cops going on strike thing.

The Phantom

As foretold, Big Brother will now be groping you at the bus station.

Predictably, starting first in California.

Footage shot at the Oceanside Transit Center in Southern California documents how the rollout of TSA workers is expanding out of the airports and into train stations and bus terminals. The clip shows TSA inspectors standing with police and drug-sniffing dogs. The TSA agents told the film maker that he was still allowed to take video and photos at the train station but may get "questioned" for doing so.

There were about six or seven TSA agents patrolling the station according to the uploader of the video.

The Transportation Security Administration was embarrassed earlier this year when Houstonians revolted over a program that would have seen TSA workers routinely ride city buses in the name of spotting terrorists and criminals.

Its going to be -really- interesting to see how TSA managers "handle" Phoenix Arizona, where every third person legally carries a big freakin' pistol. And/or a knife, taser or other stunner, pepper spray, New York reload for their main piece (that's another gun, for those of you not up on your self-defense slang), fold up baton, sword cane, ... the variations are many. And I've seen them all at the local supermarket hanging off some soccer mom's belt, one time or another.

Mr. Colt says "Don't touch my junk, man!"

The Phantom

Comments on Aurora coverage.

Just got back from Boston, where I was subjected to just a tiny bit of the media "coverage" of the atrocity at Aurora Colorado. Channel surfing yielded noting but wall-to-wall talking heads interviewing each other about how terrible it all was and how little information there was, plus the usual Food/HGTV/Discovery/History channel canned programs. And Nickelodeon. So I had my choice of massacre TV, "reality" TV on tape, or cartoons.

I chose cartoons.

Because:

A) Colorado is too far for me to drive over and lend a hand.
B) The "news" stations had exactly ZERO useful information for me beyond the bare fact that Something Bad happened in Aurora.
C) I have enough violent, tragic shit stored up in my poor old brain to last me a lifetime already, most of it from Hollywood movies and the mainstream "news" coverage. I totally don't need to subject my frayed last nerve to one more lunatic acting out his malfunctions in the real world.
D) I already know pretty much word-for-word what the talking heads are saying. They're blaming the Tea Party, Republicans and the NRA. Sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.
E) None of them are going to tell the truth. Which is that this kind of massacre only happens in liberal cities that are threat-free zones for criminals and lunatics.

We are never going to hear about the real fallout from this atrocity. It'll be off the radar as soon as the liberal politicians and the media figure they've wrung the last bit of propaganda juice out of it, or when the next shiny thing comes along.

My condolences and prayers to the wounded and the bereft. My offer of aid to any affected, should there be something my skills can provide.

A sneer and the back of my hand to the whinging media freaks and leftist propaganda chefs trying to conjure up support for their failed policies out of this preventable example of their policy, failing.

The Phantom

Boston.

I'm in Boston this week. Its crowded, the traffic is extremely heavy but somewhat orderly, despite the many places where cars exiting and merging have to go past each other in not enough space. Many intersections have streams of traffic crossing each other while all moving forward, as people entering from the right lane try to exit in the left, and people entering from the left try to exit right, while people in the middle try to stay in the middle.  Its completely nuts, pretty much.

Following along with the GPS has been... interesting. I find that about a third of the time there's no street signs at intersections, you're just supposed to know the street.  Trying to get around here without a GPS or a -competent- navigator with a good map would be pretty much impossible. 

Also, like New York all the roads and streets are basically tree-lined tunnels, or building-lined tunnels. You can't see the horizon, or a vista of the city, or even the sun half the time. I've been here three days and I still can't point toward Boston from my hotel parking lot. Completely lost, depending 100% on TomTom to get me through. If a solar flare knocks out the satelites I'll have to hire a native guide.

Things I've seen.

Peabody Museum was kind of a let-down after all the build-up. Anybody who studies Anthropology knows that the Peabody has EVERYTHING in it. Caveman stuff from France, Medieval stuff, weapons, skeletons, clothing, fossils, tools... they have every damn thing in their collection.  What's on display? Indians.  Man, I can see more and better Indian stuff at the ROM any time than what they have on display here.  Saving grace, they had two really nice Alaskan kayaks from the ~1890s and a very nice lady to tell me all about it as well. 

The Stata Center.  Super famous building opened in 2004. Right now its surrounded in scaffolding, as the (no doubt very expensive) brick veneer is rotting off in quite a few places. Somebody got suckered!

Harvard Museum of Natural History was everything the Peabody wasn't. They have some extremely kewl dinosaurs, They have a Great Moa skeleton which is ~10ft tall. They have the entire head of a really big trilobite, about as big as my fist. They have a forty foot seamonster skeleton, its as big as a city bus and has a head that could swallow a kayak whole. And really big freakin' teeth. But best of all, they have a pickled Coelecanth. I remember when I was a kid I was right into dinosaurs. They found one of these things and it was in the paper and in a book I had. The one I saw in the museum is that one. So cool.

Today I visit the MIT Museum, tomorrow maybe the Boston Museum of Science. And buck traffic like a big ol' mountain goat.

Onward!

The Phantom

Dark matter found!

Big times in science these days. First the Higg's Boson and now Dark Matter!

Scientists have, for the first time, directly detected part of the invisible dark matter skeleton of the universe, where more than half of all matter is believed to reside.

"We found the dark matter filaments. For the first time, we can see them," said Jörg Dietrich, a physics research fellow in the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts. Dietrich is first author of a paper on the findings published online in Nature and to appear in the July 12 print edition.

Dark matter, whose composition is still a mystery, doesn't emit or absorb light, so astronomers can't see it directly with telescopes. They deduce that it exists based on how its gravity affects visible matter. Scientists estimate that dark matter makes up more than 80 percent of the universe. To "see" the dark matter component of the filament that connects the clusters Abell 222 and 223, Dietrich and his colleagues took advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

Freaking cool stuff! Article is at Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11224.html  Costs money though. :(  Anybody know a free mirror?

The Phantom

Finally, a rescue plan for Detroit the whole population can take part in.

The plan? Zombie theme park.

Derelict areas of Detroit face being taken over by hordes of 'flesh and brain-eating zombies' if an ambitious business plan takes off.

Entrepreneur Mark Siwak wants to create live-action terror theme park 'Z World' on Motor City's run-down and abandoned streets.

Customers would pay to be chased by professional actors [or whoever they scraped off the street outside that morning] and try to seek shelter in ghostly homes, factories and businesses.

Shouldn't have much trouble getting actual zombies to stock the place with, Detroit's got thousands. No word if its going to be live-fire, but I wanna try out my Zombie Blaster shotshells. KaBOOM baby!

The Phantom Zombie Hunter

"Don't be evil" turns out not to mean what one would think.

Google famously has as its unofficial motto: "Don't be evil". Key word being "evil", there is a quote from The Princess Bride which applies here. Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Dear Merchant,

We're writing to let you know about some upcoming changes to the product listings you submit to Google. As we recently announced, we are starting to transition our shopping experience to a commercial model that builds on Product Listing Ads. This new shopping experience is called Google Shopping. As part of this transition, we'll begin to enforce a set of new policies for Google Shopping in the coming weeks. A new list of the allowed, restricted, and prohibited products on Google Shopping is available on our new policy page – http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/ApI7UWRj6OCZpd.

Based on a review of the products you're currently submitting, it appears that some of the content in your Merchant Center account, HamLund Tactical, will be affected by these policy changes. In particular we found that your products may violate the following policies:

Weapons

When we make this change, Google will disapprove all of the products identified as being in violation of policies. We ask that you make any necessary changes to your feeds and/or site to comply, so that your products can continue to appear on Google Shopping.

"Weapons" of course means "guns" and any/all accoutrements there of. Comments to the article indicate things like swords and knives are also banned. Presently one can still search for information and web pages about weapons, guns etc. but the Google Shopping deal is closed off. Please note, the most important word in that sentence is "presently", Google having essentially served us all notice that they can and are happy to censor anything they like whenever they like. So tomorrow you might want to search "Mauser 98" on Google and come up with "no match found".

No word if restaurant equipment like chef's knives are also banned. I guess it depends on this week's definition of "evil" .


The "I'm using Bing now" Phantom.

This is what gets Republicans/Conservatives beat every time.

Broad category of "enforcing moral behavior", here's a Republican pursuing the time honored tradition of nuisance regulations. In this case its the regulation that's the nuisance, not the behaviour.

A former city councilwoman in Asbury Park is admonishing beachgoers to put on a shirt when they're on the boardwalk.

Louise Murray says it's the law.

A Monmouth County ordinance banning people from wearing bathing suits on the boardwalk was passed more than 40 years ago but has largely been forgotten. It says: "No person clad in bathing attire shall be on the boardwalk or the public sidewalks adjacent thereto."

And for what reason is the EX-council harpy banging on this?

"Do you really want to be sitting in a restaurant and seeing somebody come up half-dressed? We all can't be Sports Illustrated and we all can't be GQ's," Murray said. "I had my day, the window's obviously closed, but even at my best day I never walked in a bar in a bathing suit."

This appears to be somewhat disingenuous of Ms. Murray. From the comments:

I love a nice bikini on a young lady just as much as the next guy but, the ban is needed in this cesspool of moral decay!  We went to the Stoned Pony last summer for a concert and was repulsed by all the queers walking around in speedos and string bikinis.  They think they look so hot but they are nothing but side show freaks.  Asbury Park has become a disgusting town.  It's a damn shame.  And these self-degrading, soulless beings have the nerve to talk about pride!  They've ruined Asbury Park and want the same for the rest of the country.  You want to walk around half naked open a private pool.

Or, somewhat more pointedly:

Man strolling into restaurant at lunchtime wearing only a 'banana hammock' = BIG APPETITE KILLER!

In other words, you can't take your kid to the beach in Asbury Park because you're going to hear her say "Daddy, what's that man doing to that other man?"

Now, normally a restaurant/bar will just post a sign that says "No shirt, No Shoes, No Service" and maybe post a muscular young man or two at the door to point out the sign to the more persistently blind unclad patrons.  But in this case they all phoned up Harpy Murray so she could make some noise and save them the cost of hiring a bouncer.

The problem with this is that it is EXACTLY THE SAME THING DEMOCRATS DO. Republicans repudiate their claim to believe in a free country when they do this kind of thing. If there's only a choice between two flavors of tyrant, obviously most people are going to vote for the one that gives away free stuff and promotes sex on the beach. They want the fun boss, not the grinch. Duh, right?

Conservatives win with SMALLER GOVERNMENT. Conservatives win by backing up the right of an outraged parent to chastise lewd behavior on the beach in front of his/her kids. They don't win with Nanny regulations. That's the DemocRat's schtick.

The Phantom

Droid Army of the Republic: New map of bases. There's more of them than you thought.

Wired has a new map of US drone bases. 64 of them. Public Intelligence blog has a nice listing of what's where.

Here's a site where you can compare the names on the list to pictures of the UAVs: Unmanned Warfare.

Can't tell the players without a program.

From our bulging, groaning, "How Far Will They Go?" file...

The board hand-picked by Mayor Michael Bloomberg that must approve his ban of selling large sugar-filled drinks at restaurants might be looking at other targets.

The New York City Board of Health showed support for limiting sizes of sugary drinks at a Tuesday meeting in Queens.  They agreed to start the process to formalize the large-drink ban by agreeing to start a six-week public comment period.

At the meeting, some of the members of board said they should be considering other limits on high-calorie foods.

One member, Bruce Vladeck, thinks limiting the sizes for movie theater popcorn should be considered.

"The popcorn isn't a whole lot better than the soda," Vladeck said.

Another board member thinks milk drinks should fall under the size limits.

"There are certainly milkshakes and milk-coffee beverages that have monstrous amounts of calories," said board member Dr. Joel Forman.

Mayor Bloomberg says the drink rules are an attempt to fight obesity in the city.  It would limit food service establishments in the city from serving drinks bigger than 16 ounces but would allow refills.

The New York City Restaurant Association is fighting the proposal and is considering legal action of it goes into effect.

New York City voters oppose 51 - 46 percent Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed ban on the sale of over-sized sugary soft drinks, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

History not being well taught in our schools these days, I should mention that Adolph Hitler didn't start out with cattle cars full of Jews and Gypsies. Old Adolph got his start in HEALTH POLICY, and one of his first restrictions was where people could smoke. After that he branched out into healthy food and exercise, camping groups for boys (the Hitler Youth) and other wholesome pursuits.

How far will they go? As far as we'll let them. Really.

The Phantom

Droid army of the Republic: new drones!

First, this gigantic flying thing from Boeing that's supposed to be able to stay up for four days.

A massive experimental drone designed by Boeing Co. engineers to fly for up to four days at a time completed its first test flight above the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base.

The drone, called Phantom Eye, and its hydrogen-fueled propulsion system have the potential to vastly expand the reach of military spy craft. The longest that reconnaissance planes can stay in the air now is about 30 hours.

With a 150-foot wingspan and an egg-shaped fuselage, the drone was built at Boeing's Phantom Works complex in St. Louis with engineering support from its facilities in Huntington Beach. The drone is designed to spy over vast areas at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet.

There's the Pirate Bay's answer to how they can keep their server locations secret. Three of these aircraft could cover seven days a week, keeping a mobile server truck/boat/tardis hooked up to the Internet with untraceable tight beam communications. That's what Boeing wants to sell it to the Army to do as well no doubt, instant battlefield wi-fi hookup. Or just to look in some guy's bedroom window for four days straight, it could do that too.

Next, CBS Los Angeles has some news weenie who looked into the drone thing a bit. He says he has evidence that the US Air Force has been doing drone operations and sharing information with federal state and local law enforcement.

What has critics alarmed is that data collected by drones accidentally, under the guidelines, can be kept by the military up to three months before being purged and can also be turned over to "another Department of Defense or government agency to whose function it pertains."

The Air Force guidelines permit using drones domestically to assist law enforcement in "investigating or preventing clandestine intelligence activities by foreign powers, international narcotics activities , or international terrorist activities." More vague is language that also allows military cooperation with local law enforcement for the purposes of "preventing, detecting, or investigating other violations of law."

All that means that if some flying eyeball "accidentally" sees something in your yard, the cops don't need a warrant to get it and use it in court. Fun, eh?
Oh, and the same article has this bit of news:

Drone manufacturers are gearing up to pitch an estimated 18,000 police departments in the U.S. on the benefits of flying drones.

Many law enforcement agencies in Southern California — including the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department — are evaluating the usefulness of drones in the greatly restricted and highly congested airspace that surrounds the L.A. basin.

Because California is broke, and helicopters are expensive, guess what the decision is going to be? Go ahead, guess.

Next, the EPA has been using drone aircraft to spy on... wait for IT... cows. No shit, they're spying on cows.

Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is using aerial drones to spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. The surveillance came under scrutiny last week when Nebraska's congressional delegation sent a joint letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

This revelation elucidates something I wrote about last month, that the listed drone sites in the continental USA are not where one would think they'd be. Because there's a lot of them in big, flat farm states. Like there's two in Kansas, where nothing ever happens. Well, this apparently is one reason why those sites are out there in Flyover Country. So the EPA can troll the countryside looking for farmers to bust. Isn't that an awesome use of tax money? Because you know, farmers are like totally rolling in dough the EPA can fine out of them, right?

Finally, the Daily Mail wants to know what the mother of all frickin' drones, the X-37B unmanned space plane has been doing in orbit for almost a year.

The U.S Air Force's highly secret unmanned space plane will land in June - ending a year-long mission in orbit.

The experimental Boeing X37-B has been circling Earth at 17,000 miles per hour and was due to land in California in December. It is now expected to land in mid to late June.

Last May, amateur astronomers were able to detect the orbital pattern of the first X-37B which included flyovers of North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, heightening the suspicion that the vehicle was being used for surveillance.

Other industry analysts have speculated that the Air Force is just making use of the X-37B's amazing fuel efficiency and keeping it in space for as long as possible to show off its credentials and protect it from budget cuts.

My guess: with Obama calling the shots they've been spying on cows in Nebraska. From orbit.

The Phantom

Propaganda has become strange in the new Millennium.

Given this SUN article from Britain, it appears that the deaths of tens of thousands is simply not enough to get the public's dander up against a murder regime. What you really need is pictures of the North Koreans being mean to bears. The OUTRAGE! Oh the Humanity!

The Sun's shocking pictures expose the despotic regime's everyday cruelty that will outrage animal lovers.

Glum muzzled bears are put through humiliating routines walking on two legs or on skates for an audience of mostly soldiers.

Baboons wearing co-ordinating outfits perform faultless slam-dunks in strictly choreographed basketball games.

Secretly filmed during our week-long stay in the Communist state, the show highlighted the brutal mindset of the ruling classes.

Because pictures of starving women and kids are so last century, know what I mean? You want to make the Norks look BAD, you gotta use fuzzy animals.

The Phantom

Deathless prose of the day.

Over at Small Dead Animals, commenter ET utters a gem of sparkling intellectual beauty.

"Read, if you can stand it, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze. You'll probably like them; I don't. It has nothing to do with skepticism but with the location of the power to define reality. Postmodernism rejects realism and inserts man as the agential power of defining reality. I prefer Aristotle and Peirce."

Now that my friends is what I call a cluebat. That is the best single sentence encapsulation of PoMo I've ever seen. Commenters are encouraged to try and top it, but your work is cut out for you.

ET, your kung-fu is strong.

The Phantom

Empire strikes back, unmanned drone makers plan propaganda campaign.

Looks like Big Drone is having its profit margin cut into by all the uproar from us stoopids who don't want the Eye In The Sky staring in our windows. They say they're going to have a propaganda campaign to counter all the bad publicity.

In the aftermath of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer's observation that the first person to shoot down a surveillance drone on U.S. soil will be a "folk hero," the drone industry has committed itself to launching a propaganda blitz aimed at bombarding the public with positive messages about the technology.

That's from Infowars, a pretty right wing site. But he's quoting a piece from Salon, a major Left-wing site. Here's what they said:

Stung by mounting hostility from the left and right, America's drone industry is fighting back.

"We're going to do a much better job of educating people about unmanned aviation, the good and the bad," said Michael Toscano, president of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the industry's trade group in Washington. "We're working on drafting the right message and how to get it out there."

The P.R. blitz comes after drones suffered a round of negative attention last week. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called for a ban on drones in U.S. airspace, and two other conservative commentators endorsed the idea of shooting down unmanned aircraft flown by U.S. law enforcement agencies. (Opposition to the U.S. government's deployment of unmanned vehicles had previously come from left-liberal groups concerned about civilian casualties in the drone war in Pakistan and potential threats to civil liberties at home.) The nation also witnessed drone "scares": An unidentified flying object nearly collided with a plane over Denver, and rumors circulated of a surveillance drone flying near the NATO summit in Illinois.

I think UAVs are an awesome thing for soldiers to have on hand when fighting a war. The ability to fly into heavy air defenses, inside buildings, to loiter all day until your target appears, these are excellent things for soldiers.

Weapons of war being used by police to keep civilian populations in line, that's a different story. That never turns out well.  If the cops want to fly over things, use cameras to snoop, hand out traffic fines, shoot missiles at things, let them use a frickin' airplane.

The Phantom

1984 now the official public policy manual for Britain.

In Communist Britain, TV watches you.

The U.K. Home Office stresses it won't be reading the content of every Britons' communications, saying the data it seeks "is NOT the content of any communication." It is, however, looking for information about who's sending the message and to whom, where it's sent from and other details, including a message's length and its format.

The proposal, unveiled last week as part of the government's annual legislative program, is just a draft bill, so it could be modified or scrapped. But if passed in its current form, it would put a huge amount of personal data at the government's disposal, which it could use to deduce a startling amount about Britons' private lives - from sleep patterns to driving habits or even infidelity.

Because the new proposed rules require telecoms and ISPs to record and store all your on-line and telephone activity. The message itself is not recorded, but the sender, receiver, time and location are. Target stores can figure out if your teenage daughter is pregnant just from what she bought at their store, so there's really nothing at all about you that a determined data mining of ALL your online activity couldn't turn up.

Which is utterly useless for catching criminals/terrorists before they do something. But it is awesome for rounding up all the friends and relatives of somebody who pissed you off.

The Phantom