When 'banned' isn't, and 'invasion' isn't either.

Once upon a time, The Phantom started getting his comments deleted on a blog. This is not surprising, I get my comments deleted all the time. Always on Lefty sites like Ms., Vile770, or The Mary Sue. They just love them some censorship, those kids.

This time it was Camestros Felpatron, mostly famous for being banned at According to Hoyt and Mad Genius Club for idiotic trolling. MGC usually lets him have a few free ones before they shut him down, but he's been sent to sit in the corner quite a few times.

Anyway, because I dared suggest the Holy Temperature Record might be a bit dodgy, good old Floppy started deleting me. Which is fine, its his blog.

Every once in a while, he posts something so egregious that I drop a comment in his spam filter, because I know he reads them. This is where 'banned' isn't really banned. Sometimes he makes blog posts out of them.

I don't blame him, really, the Leftosphere is all Trump all the time these days. There's only so many post you can make out of astrologers portending Trumpian doom before is all begins to seem a little pointless.

This brings us to the 'invasion.' It seems it has become populat in certain Lefty circles to refer to the settlement of Australia as an "Invasion." The Floppy One posted about it here.

This is the typical Leftist wordplay, when they substitute the word for "invasion" for "settlement" because it makes victims out of the Aborigines, or the Indians, or whatever group they are trying to claim victim status for.

This balderdash culminates with:

"To accept that the events 1770 and 1788 amounted to an invasion would require them to accept that modern Australia owes a debt to the people whose land was taken."

My comment, which was of course deleted because inconvenient:

“Australia owes a debt to the people whose land was taken.”

Those people died a long time ago. Nobody stole from the ones alive today.

By the way, where are my reparations for the Highland Clearances? I’m sure somebody owes me a bundle, by your reckoning.

For those not up on their history, the Highland Clearances were land seizures, where they basically took farms and kicked off the people living there. The Scottish people were dispossessed and scattered across the world.

I'm pure blood Scots on both sides of the family. I've never seen Scotland. As a mater of both moral and legal principle, nobody owes me any money for the Highland Clearances. The End. Any effort top cast -me- as a victim of that two hundred and someth9ing year ago crap would be farcical.

What happened in Australia (and Canada, New Zealand, most of the USA except the West, and other places,) wasn't a war. It was a migration. Europeans moved to North America and started farming.

Where is something like that happening right now... oh yeah. Europe! People from the Middle East are "migrating" to Europe in their millions. You don't dare call that an invasion, do you?

But now Mr. Flopatron needs something to talk about, so he uses my deleted comment to generate an entire new post:

When Conservatives Accidentally Destroy Capitalism

Wherein Mr. Floppy tries to make a case that the British Crown owes money to the Aborigines of Australia because the British Crown stole their land, which somehow destroys capitalism.

Really, it is idiotic. He's got the magic of inherited blood in there, Capitalism, inheritance taxes, some Scottish tenant farmer guy killed himself, and Conservatives are stoopid. At the end he comes out with Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice:

Agrarian Justice essentially argued for a kind of Universal Basic Income funded by inheritance tax. The moral justification being one based on notions of property and justice.

Having not read the book I can't say for certain, but I think Mr. Paine was more concerned that people not die of starvation from the Crown selling off the common land they were grazing their sheep on. If the land is in use by the subjects of the Crown, then the Crown should bloody well look after them when the land gets sold. In Feudalism, the Crown has -responsibilities- to its subjects, right?

Essentially, "The Rich" of Britain should pay me, The Phantom Foreigner, by way of inheritance tax. Because my ancestors lost a war to the English. (It wasn't a war, but never mind.)

But then, shouldn't the French be paying for the Norman Conquest? And shouldn't the Swedes be paying for the Viking raids? Shouldn't the Spanish be paying South America and Mexico? And shouldn't the Italians be paying EVERYBODY because Rome took over the whole of Europe? (I should be getting bucks from Italy because Hadrian's Wall!!!) Japan should be forking over large for World War Two, right? That was practically last week.

Oh, and shouldn't the Russian and Chinese Communists be paying a shitlocker full of money for killing a hundred million people in the 20th Century and taking over everything behind the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain.

Yes, they should. Or, you know, not.

Because there is a place on Earth where this kind of accounting has been taken to a high art. The Balkans. Those guys remember every goddamn sheep that was stolen for a thousand years. They've been doing war on each other off and on since Rome left. The Mooselimbs invaded at some point and got sucked into the maelstrom, as we saw from the most recent Balkan War. Ethnic cleansing from a three sided triangle of hatred that never dies.

There's another place on Earth where they keep score, the Middle East. You've got two kinds of Mooselimbs killing each other over ancestral grievances, Christians getting killed because they're those pain in the ass minority types (who were there first, but never mind) and then the Jews, of course, who are "invaders" despite having been there longer than the Xtians or the Mooselimbs. (The Jews are bad because shooting back is cheating!)

On the whole, I think keeping track of shit like the Highland Clearances and demanding restitution from the descendants of those armies is a really, really bad idea and we shouldn't do it. Otherwise we will get Syria and Sarajevo.

But practical matters aside, what this really is down to is racism. The Scots don't get reparations because we are White. We are successful.

We left the Highlands, moved to the howling wilderness of North America, and Australia, and every other Godforsaken shit hole the English could find to dump us, and now we OWN the place. Our people invented the entire Modern world. Name a modern device or product, 80% of the time it was a Scot that invented it.

What have the Mooselimbs invented lately? Suicide bombers. The Aborigines? I can't think of anything. The Indians? Nothing springs to mind.

Camestros Felpatron thinks that we, the White people, the ones who work our asses off and invent everything, make everything, do everything, should help the poor brown people because they are just helpless victims and can't make it on their own.

That is racism. They fucking well can make it on their own, and they do. All the time. The joke around here is that the richest people in Ontario live on the Indian reserve. There are at least five families there with ten-figure (billion) net worth. Oh yeah. Quite a few Lamborghinis on the Reserve these days.

Now, all of the above is based on Group Politics. The Flopatron Conjecture fails even at the group level, because Sarajevo, but where it really fails is when you cast aside these sweeping inclusions and get down to individuals.

Really, lets talk about who, in particular, should be paying me, in particular, for the Highland Clearances. Ultimately there is only one person alive today that could even remotely be considered inheritor of that action. That person is Queen Elizabeth. Did Liz order the Highland Clearance? Nope. Was it even one of her family? Nope. She's a Windsor.

Did the English crown even order the Clearances? Nope. It was economic forces.  (And, hilariously, anti-Celtic racism. Those Celts, they're LAZY y'know. Good for nothing. Not like good AngloSaxon stock.) The land owners went broke, sold out, and the newcomers changed the type of agriculture. Everybody forgets the same thing happened in England, just happened earlier.

So really, can we stick tottery, 91 year old Liz Windsor with this mess? No.

But she's rich! So lets stick her anyway. Make the rich pay. Hellz yeah.

What does the Queen owe me? I'm a Highland Scot! Family comes from the Highlands, for real. I've never seen the place of course, but my great-great-great- seven freaking generations ago Grandad had to leave the Homeland and break sod here in Canada, because of whatever nightmare was happening to him at the time. We don't even know what it was. I can't even remember his name. My mother does, if I need to know I can ask her. But I better hurry up, Mom's 90.

I have zero connection to that time, that land, those concerns. Can I legitimately demand restitution for those things that drove Great-to-the-7th Grandad to flee? No. I don't think so. If the Queen offered me some free money I wouldn't turn her down, but otherwise, I have zero claim. It wouldn't be much anyway, her whole fortune divided among every Scottish descendant nets me about a buck-fifty if I'm lucky.

Can some Indian guy here in Canada claim restitution from me for a transaction his Great-to-the-7th Grandadhad had with mine when the old Indian sold the farm to the old Highlander? Because money did change hands at the time, the deeds and papers still exist. My mother has the original deed for the family farm, duly signed off by the Indian chief of the time. Do I owe that guy money? Especially considering my Grandmother sold that farm when I was a tiny baby?

Because there are a bunch of "Indians" around here (some of them are almost as Scottish as I am) claiming exactly that. Every time they take it to court, they lose.  In 2006 they resorted to guns and burning shit down, and we had the Caledonia Unpleasantness. Eleven years later, there's still a busted hydro tower beside the road where there was supposed to be a suburban building project. Every time somebody sticks a shovel in the ground around here, the extortionists show up with a crowd and try to jack up the developers for money. Lately they aren't getting much play, since the Department of Highways evicted them from the bridge on Highway 3.

Probably they'll burn some more tires at some point, maybe torch the power station again, then more extortion money will flow for a little while.

Funny to see Australia has the same problem.

Oh, and by the way. Did the aboriginal inhabitants of these places that got 'invaded' by the horrible racist British Empire get any -benefits- from being 'invaded?' Things like the Germ Theory of Disease, or in the case of Australia, the wheel and agriculture? Indoor plumbing, and a life expectancy better than 40? Beer? Railways and steam engines? Mail? Email?

No, they still live in the Stone Age. Don't they? They don't have cars and stuff, right? Indians on the reserve still live in longhouses, right? Sure they do. I was just over there yesterday, I'm sure I saw a guy with feathers in his hair standing next to a longhouse. Oh wait, that was a cigar-store Indian standing next to an illegal cigarette shack. My mistake.

The Phantom

Scrub-update! Mr. Floppy has deleted the link to this rebuttal from his blog. Thereby showing the type of sportsmanship and fair play we have all come to expect from Puppy Kickers and Lefties in general. Classy!

Suddenly, guns are -good- at the NY Times.

Interesting what it takes for the NY Times to show guns in a good light. Black women buying guns to protect themselves.

New hotness. This is the actual picture in the Times article.

The phenomenon was explained firsthand this week in an Op-Ed for The New York Times by Antonia Okafor, a graduate student at the University of Texas, Dallas. In her piece, titled "Why I Bring My Gun To School," Okafor, who's one of the foremost and youngest Second Amendment advocates in the nation, details why she supports Texas' recent conceal carry law for college campuses and carries her Ruger LC9 pistol with her almost every where she goes. Okafor writes that when she began advocating for the passage of the conceal carry law, she was not a "gun enthusiast." But after a scare from a cyberstalker, she writes, she learned to shoot a gun and felt a new sense of empowerment.
"I felt empowered to be holding a tool that could protect me physically, and I was determined to learn how to use it responsibly. It was a relief to know that I could shoot if I had to, even though I would never use my gun unless it was a last means of self-defense. I got my concealed carry license a year ago," she writes, before going on to explain why "there is a place for young, pro-Second Amendment women in modern feminism."

This is practically a love letter from the NY Times to gun owners. Why? Because they are BLACK, WOMEN gun owners.

Up to 59 percent of African-American households now view owning a gun as a "necessity," according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center released this month, and African-American women have outpaced all other races and genders in terms of securing concealed carry permits in Texas between 2000 and 2016, according to demographic information released by the state.

See, according to the Times, for the last 40 years at least, guns are bad. They are super duper bad. White men owning guns is bad. White women owning guns is slightly less bad, but still bad. Black men owning guns, still kinda bad.

But black women owning guns? That's awesome! You go, girl!

How long before the Times goes out of business? Please let it be soon.

Inevitably, OJ gets let out.

People wonder why the USA is so fucked these days.



Just remember the whole OJ thing, and you'll have an example of why.

The Phantom

Oh Noes, Dr. Who is WHITE!

Further to the trolling of Dr. Who fans by the BBC or whoever runs the show, not everyone is happy that the new Doctor Who is a woman.

SJW Anita Sarkesian for one.

Variety Magazine for another.

The last thing I wanted to write today was an angry screed about "Doctor Who." I've been watching the show loyally for four decades; I've been through every up and down and alien invasion. No matter how much it may frustrate me in a given episode or a season, I love it so much. It's about people without guns who roam around trying to do good and save people. With a screwdriver. At its best, "Doctor Who" irreverent, whip-smart and deeply humane.

So I was going to be disappointed and not a little furious if the Thirteenth Doctor was yet another white man.

For more than 50 years, every Doctor has been from that demographic, and of course, some versatile actors have done wonderful work in the role. I'd have a tough time picking my favorite: Is it Tom Baker? Peter Davison? David Tennant? Peter Capaldi? Matt Smith? Jon Pertwee?

(It's Baker. They're all fantastic, but of course, it's Baker.)

The fact is, we're living in a time in which a lot of people feel frustrated and fearful about the state of the world. Women, people of color and the LGBT community feel especially under siege. The daily headlines are like something out of a "Doctor Who" (or "Black Mirror") dystopia. 

So if women were once again going to be asked to go to the back of the line and wait their turn when it came to the idea of seeing themselves as one of the iconic interstellar heroes — well, many people would have been upset. Even some white guys. 

But no one had to wake up to that disappointment, thank Gallifrey. Coming from one of the biggest media franchises on the planet, the news that the new "Doctor Who" is female is huge — and almost completely delightful. 

Some might be disappointed that this makes for the thirteenth white Doctor in a row. I do want to see a woman of color, or a non-white man, as the Doctor, of course. Those fans are still being asked to wait, and it would be hypocritical not to note that that is still not ideal.

Yes that's right. Having been handed the exact thing they've been screeching for, on a platter, the SJWs are now complaining that Jodie Whittaker is White.

The Phantom

Dr. Who will be a woman.

Dr. Who is one of those TV shows that have been on forever, and the people who write it have been continually pushing the envelope of what is acceptable on British TV the whole time. Very, very progressive for a crappy low-budget TV show.

Now we hear that the 13th Doctor will be Jodie Whittaker. A woman.

Now, why would a successful TV show take the risk of recasting the main, signature character from male to female? Knowing that it will endlessly complicate things?

Mostly for the opportunity to tell their fans off, apparently.

Writer and avid fan Jenny Colgan - who has written several Doctor Who novels and audio dramas - said she was "absolutely delighted" that Whittaker was the new Doctor, describing her as "brilliant and bold and brave".

She said: "When I was a little girl I thought I was the only female Doctor Who fan in the world. Now Jodie Whittaker is taking it to a whole new place, and I am absolutely delighted for all of us wee Whoviennes, old and new."
Asked what she would say to anyone unhappy that the new Doctor is a woman, she said: "People are always unhappy when there's a new Doctor, that's just the way of it.
"Then new stuff happens and it's brilliant and everyone loves them and they have to leave and then everyone gets sad again.

"If you really would stop watching Doctor Who because it was a woman, I don't think you really understand the entire ethos the last 55 years of The Doctor has been about."

Twitter has been savage since the announcement, a few people saying they didn't like it and being dog-piled by feminists screeching at them to get over it.

Do I care? No. I don't watch Dr. Who, its already so unbearably preachy, this "change" won't change anything. Just more red meat for the screechers.

The Phantom

 Welcome to all you camel toes from Crapestros Flopatron's blog. Or both of you, anyway.

The Purity Spiral in organizations and Hugos.

Seen today at SDA and David Thompson's blog, a piece by Uri Harris on the "purity spiral" in the social sciences.

A couple of years ago, six social scientists published a paper describing a disquieting occurrence in academic psychology: the loss of almost all its political diversity. As Jonathan Haidt, one of the authors of the paper, wrote in a commentary:

Before the 1990s, academic psychology only LEANED left. Liberals and Democrats outnumbered Conservatives and Republican by 4 to 1 or less. But as the "greatest generation" retired in the 1990s and was replaced by baby boomers, the ratio skyrocketed to something more like 12 to 1. In just 20 years. Few psychologists realize just how quickly or completely the field has become a political monoculture.

While the paper focuses on psychology, it briefly mentions that the rest of the social sciences are not far behind:

[R]ecent surveys find that 58–66 per cent of social science professors in the United States identify as liberals, while only 5–8 per cent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons 2007; Klein & Stern 2009; Rothman & Lichter 2008).

As these studies are now approximately ten years old, it's quite plausible that the gap has widened further over the past decade (as it has in psychology) meaning that these figures most likely underestimate the current left-to-right ratio across the social sciences.

But wait, there's more.

In fact, Haidt recently reported on a remarkable survey that was conducted among the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, which, as Haidt notes, is:

… a professional society composed of the most active researchers in the field who are at least five years post-PhD. It's very selective—you must be nominated by a current member and approved by a committee before you can join.

As part of the survey, members were asked to identify their political affiliation on an eleven-point scale, from 'very liberal' to 'very conservative'. (One point in the centre and five on each side.) The results are telling. Only 2.5 per cent of respondents chose a conservative point, and only 8.3 per cent chose the centre-point, meaning that 89.3 per cent identified as left-of-centre.

Social psychologists' self-ratings of their political orientation. Taken from Bill von Hippel and David Buss's survey of the membership of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, 2016.

Intriguingly, the least popular point among the left-of-centre points was the most moderate one (5.8 per cent), and the second-least popular was the second-most moderate one (15.6 per cent). More than two thirds (67.8 per cent) chose one of the three points furthest to the left on an eleven-point scale, and more than a third (38 per cent) chose one of the two points furthest to the left. And 16 per cent chose the furthest possible point to the left on an eleven-point scale.

This means that there were almost as many people who chose the furthest possible point to the left as there were who chose all the conservative points, the centre-point and the most moderate left-of-centre point combined (16.6 per cent).

Now, this all comes as no surprise to anyone who's gone to university in the last 25 years, or was in any way paying attention. The state of affairs is as Harris says, there's no doubt. The problems inherent in a monoculture of one politicaly acceptable view are manifold, and obvious.

What's interesting is how they got there. The author suggests a "purity spiral" of unguided selection, rather than some kind of deliberate program.

It seems likely to me that there are self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. As the ratio of liberals to conservatives increased, a tipping-point was reached where conservatives were actively excluded from the social sciences, and as they have disappeared the more radical liberals are now outnumbering the moderates to the point where they too are being gradually excluded. In other words, it appears that social science is undergoing a purity spiral towards an increasingly radical left-wing ideology.

This seems a likely mechanism to explain the Hugo awards, the SFF. Liberals in the universities join literary clubs like WorldCon and go to work for the major publishers, -all- of whom are based in New York City.

Liberalism is the culture of the New York City intellectual elite, among whom are counted publishers, editors, etc. As the years wear on and more old guys retire, the people who replace them are very keen to show they are serious and On The Right Side. Zero new Conservatives are hired, of course, because Conservatives are yucky. Who wants one of Them around? As Harris says, you keep that kind of osmotic pressure going for 40 years, you end up with the present situation. No Conservatives working in publishing, no Conservatives joining the literature clubs, no conservatives voting for awards.

As well, advancement depends on looking like a Team Player. So, everybody crowds Left and virtue signals all over the place. "Advancement" in a club setting is different, but similar. In a club it is all about the signalling and fitting in, as there is not any "work" to be accomplished.

You can see the machinery working in the Hugo nominations of the last 40 years. A gradual increase in "literary" SF, the kind of gray goo best exemplified by "When the World Turned Upside Down" from 2015. Pointlessly evil people doing pointlessly evil things in a vaguely science-fictiony post-apocalyptic environment, where Man's Inhumanity To Man is the primary theme.

People are Bad, is the basic take home from most things these days. That's what gets awards, and that's what gets published because publishers chase awards. Liberal themes, Liberal stories.

Some of you are now shouting and throwing things at your monitors. You want to know what happened to all the "Conservatives."

We are still here. Nothing happened to us, we didn't go anywhere. We still hold the same set of principles and beliefs we always did. We still pay money for stories we like, we still work for a living, we still do science and study history and literature.

What changed is, we don't get published. Reverse Osmotic pressure. Our stories are impurities that get filtered by the semi-permeable membrane of publishing selection.

The joke of course is that all this is fairly mechanistic. The average Liberals don't deliberately set out to exclude Conservatives, they just don't see good reason to include them.

Where the problem with this shows up is when the "out-group" wildly outnumbers the "in-group." Then you get four years of the Sad Puppies campaign, set up as a joke to demonstrate the Liberal bias in the awards system of the SF/F genre. What started as a science fiction nerd squabble ended up as a Big Deal in the culture wars.

Those damn Conservatives intruded! How dare they?!

This year the Sad Puppies have stopped intruding, and the Hugo Faithful are still reacting to what we did two years ago. With no one to introduce anything different into the mix, the SF/F awards season is looking extremely Lefty/SJW this year, as it always does.

The problem with monocultures is fragility. If one thing changes in the environment the whole crop can catch leaf rot or root fungus. Traditional publishing and SF cons are dwindling in size and sales, as more and more of their audience gets filtered out by the semi-permeable membrane. Unlike the usual "victim group" dynamic, Conservatives and the politically uninterested are wandering off and abandoning traditional publishing completely. They're all on Amazon, writing to e-book.

The Phantom

 

Oh look, scientists caught lying again.

Golly gosh friends, looks like that globe ain't warming much after you delete all the adjustification done by NOAA and such.

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years "are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data."

"Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming," according to a study published June 27 by two scientists and a veteran statistician.

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK's Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

As seen first at Small Dead Animals.

The Phantom

3.3 million = 12 arrested = 0 charges

Big Brother American style:

The wiretap order authorized an unknown government agency to carry out real-time intercepts of 3.29 million cell phone conversations over a two-month period at some point during 2016, after the order was applied for in late 2015.

The order was signed to help authorities track 26 individuals suspected of involvement with illegal drug and narcotic-related activities in Pennsylvania.

The wiretap cost the authorities $335,000 to conduct and led to a dozen arrests.

But the authorities noted that the surveillance effort led to no incriminating intercepts, and none of the handful of those arrested have been brought to trial or convicted.

Three hundred grand and three million calls recorded, for -zero- results. But you did not hear about it on CNN, right?

The revelation was buried in the US Courts' annual wiretap report, published earlier this week but largely overlooked.

Now, normally one would write that off as the usual governmental over reach and unionized public employee incompetence. It isn't like they don't burn money by the bushel every damn day.

But, wouldn't a bullshit drug investigation be a really great way to "accidentally" record conversations between people somebody who lives in a big white house might be interested in?

2016, right?  Just sayin'.

The Phantom

Big Brother lives in China.

Why are we still doing business with these assholes?

According to this story at Slashdot, the Chicoms are rolling out facial recognition scanning and iris scans all over the country, all at once.

Their goal: to influence behavior and identify lawbreakers.

Lawbreakers. Yeah. Meaning everybody.

By 2020, the government hopes to implement a national "social credit" system that would assign every citizen a rating based on how they behave at work, in public venues and in their financial dealings.

See if you can guess what happens to the people with lower "social credit" scores.

See if you can imagine Communist Party members being bothered with their bad social credit scores.

The Phantom

The Intelligentsia: Trust us! We're experts!

Here's a beautiful article that explains exactly why your money is worth nothing and you can't get a job, my friends.

For years, economists, mayors, and urbanists believed that high-tech development was an unalloyed good thing, and that more high-tech startups and more venture capital investment would "lift all boats." But the reality is that high-tech development has ushered in a new phase of what I call winner-take-all urbanism, where a relatively small number of metro areas, and a small number of neighborhoods within them, capture most of the benefits.

Middle-class neighborhoods have been hollowed out in the process. In 1970, roughly two-thirds of Americans lived in middle-class neighborhoods; today less than 40 percent of us do. The middle-­class share of the population shrank in a whopping 203 out of 229 U.S. metro areas between 2000 and 2014. And places where the middle class is smallest include such superstar cities and tech hubs as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington, D.C.

Yes, the problem in places like Toronto and San Francisco is that all the houses cost over $800,000 and the taxes are astronomical. That has been the situation in New Your City for a very long time, New York City policemen and firemen haven't lived in NYC proper for 30 years. They commute. Some of them come more than 60 miles, usually by train.

Now, there is a reason for that, and the reason is that the -only- place an individual has left to shelter his money is in his house. The more money people have that they must shelter, the bigger the house. There are some big goddamn houses in Toronto these days.

So, this author is a biiiig expert! He knows what has to be done. Here's his list:

1) More housing must be built. In a city, that means apartment buildings. Big, tall, apartment buildings.

2) Public transit. That means trains, so that the serfs can commute the long distances from their shitty apartments to  the place where their job is.

Third, they can engage the wider business community and government to upgrade the jobs of low-wage service workers—who now make up more than 45 percent of the national workforce—into higher-paying, family-supporting work.

Translation: $15/hr minimum wage for everybody.

Yep, that's the big plan. Shitty apartments, subways, and a massive minimum wage hike.

(Want to know what McDonald's is doing about the new, too-high minimum wage laws being introduced all over North America? They are replacing workers with ROBOTS. Obviously.)

Who is this scholar, you ask?

Richard Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, and the cofounder and editor-at-large of the Atlantic's CityLab. His books include The Rise of the Creative Class and the just-released The New Urban Crisis.

And that is why your money is worth nothing, and you can't get a job. Because geniuses like this Richard Florida guy teach Management.

The Phantom

Doc-in-a-box, next level.

Popping up all over the place are mini-clinics, where people with minor ailments go to see a doctor. In the industry they are referred to as doc-in-a-box clinics. The operational notion is that -any- doc is as good as any other doc for a first visit. Industrial medical model in all its glory.

Next step, put the patient in a box and take the doc out.

But the most radical bit of the concept is the self-driving car. What may appear to be a gimmick is actually a carefully designed space. "The vehicle provides an in-between space," says Jordan. It's like a CVS Minute Clinic on wheels, with a patient self-directed as to what to do next via software–cutting down on the staffing costs behind routine measurements often gathered by nurses. "You can take the model of a patient going to Walgreens and doing the automated pressure cuff," says Jordan.The floor automatically weighs you when you walk in. Its pressure sensitivity can measure BMI, and posture, too. The chair has built-in acoustic sensors, which hear your respiration like a stethoscope. And a wraparound screen provides augmented reality interactions, to guide the patient through the experience. They may even be asked to literally point to where it hurts.

No doctor. Not even a nurse. Just a fully automated diagnostic suite that will (presumably) be able to tell if you are actually sick, and put a band-aid on your booboo.

You are not a human being, you are a billable unit. Shut up and get in the box.

They are going to build this. You can tell, there's such excitement over the notion of a hands-free diagnostic service where they can bill you and they don't have to talk to you. Most important, they don't have to pay a doctor.

I suggest you all resist. Hard.

The Phantom

Dems still stunned when they lose.

This piece in the Daily Beast is like a cry to the Gods: where did we go wrong?!!!

On the Democratic side, the combined efforts of the Ossoff campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee help build a monster operation unprecedented in Georgia Democratic politics. By the end of the race, they had knocked on more than 500,000 doors, hired 100 staffers, recruited 12,000 active volunteers and spent more than $11 million on ads on everything from the Today show to Korean newspapers and gospel stations.But, and this is the part that will sting Democrats for a long time: It still wasn't enough.

But gee, they still lost. How can this be?!!!

But after $23 million, a candidate who genuinely ignited the grassroots, and a Republican president who may or may not be (but probably is) under FBI investigation and can't stop talking about it, the real question Democrats need to answer is: What's it going to take to win an election in the era of Trump?As of Tuesday night, they still have no idea.

Well, it might just be that people are tired of tax-and-spend Liberalism, where a new regulation or a new policy that comes along to scrape away a little more of your money, time and freedom every goddamn week.

It might be that Trump is not the fool the Dems think he is, and that putting Americans first in their own country is what they really want.

It might be that world-wide Apology Tours and their president BOWING to the execrable king of a shit-hole desert nation (that still has slavery!) pissed them off.

I'm just saying, that might be a thing. Y'know?

The Phantom

Ben and Jerry's gets picketed by the Left.

Ben and Jerry's ice cream in Vermont is one of the most devotedly Lefty companies out there. They are SUPER SJW, all the time. Have been since the thing was two hippies in a shack making artisanal ice cream.

I don't buy their stuff because of that. They're dicks.

So, this piece of news is so sweet, I had to share.

Scores of dairy farm workers and activists marched Saturday on a Ben & Jerry's factory to push for better pay and living conditions on farms that provide milk for the ice cream maker that takes pride in its social activism.

Protesters said Ben & Jerry's agreed two years ago to participate in the so-called Milk with Dignity program, but the company and worker representatives have yet to reach an agreement.

"We can't wait any more. We are going to pressure them and see what happens," said Victor Diaz, a Mexican immigrant now working on a farm in Vergennes.

Ben and Jerry's is getting rolled by the Entitlement Industry just the same as if they were General Motors or Colgate.

Awesome.

The Phantom

Corbyn: "Eat the rich and take their stuff."

The headline of this post is a translation of what he actually said, which in some ways was worse:

"The ward where this fire took place is, I think, the poorest ward in the whole country and properties must be found - requisitioned if necessary - to make sure those residents do get re-housed locally.

"It can't be acceptable that in London we have luxury buildings and luxury flats left empty as land banking for the future while the homeless and the poor look for somewhere to live. We have to address these issues."

This is the true face of the Left. If you are wealthy enough to afford a town house in London, as it seems many are, your property may be "requisitioned" at the whim of some bureaucrat and pressed into service as a flop for displaced poor people. (Well, unless you're a big donor and friend to the Labor party anyway. They could probably work something out for you in that case.)

Displaced by a government who put POLYSTYRENE on the outside of an apartment building to increase insulation. I'm sure an engineer somewhere left memo after memo that this was a Bad Idea, but the government machinery made the call. Because it is a Green Initiative, you see.

There is also some talk that the refrigerators in Europe use a "new" refrigerant. Replacing freon is propane. Yes, the stuff you burn in your barbecue, because it is a fuel, is being used as a refrigerant. It works great, as long as there isn't a leak. But sadly there are always leaks somewhere, and so there have been -many- refrigerators exploding in Europe lately. And by explode I mean fuel-air incendiary bomb, not firecracker.

Just thought you ought to know.

NYT: blames Sarah Palin. Again.

Just in case you were wondering if the media does this Republican hating thing on purpose.

The New York Times used the attempted assassination of dozens of Republican congressmen by a left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter to attack former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with a baseless conspiracy theory blaming Palin for inciting mentally ill Jared Loughner to shoot Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011.
"In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs," the editors wrote.
They added later: "Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right."

Yes, they really do want more nutjobs to run out and shoot up more Republican baseball games. They are BEGGING the nutjobs.

More proof needed?

and let's not forget

You will be smarter and better informed about everything if you stop looking at the mainstream media.

The Phantom

First round of US civil war?

The cops have released the name of the guy who shot up the Republican baseball practice this morning. James T. Hodgkinson, appears to be a full-on Bernie-bot and all 'round SJW thug.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jthodgkinson

Social media of course is blowing up with all kinds of people praising this guy for bravely shooting a bunch of unarmed fat politicians trying to play baseball.

As of right now, I'd say you've got a problem, America. There's a tone of assholes like this guy out there.

On the bright side, it isn't that big a problem. This moron fired multiple mags out of a rifle on a baseball field and only hit five people. No gun control there.

The Unimpressed Phantom

Wonder Woman vs. the SJWs!

Sadly, only the movie vs. the whinging of the SJWs. Diana curling her lip at them would be a scene for the ages, but I digress.

Complaints about the movie have been many. I covered it here, I had only a couple about Hollyweird boilerplate. But I found something truly hillarious.

I didn't expect to have anything more to say about Wonder Woman after publishing my short review of it.  But in the week that followed, the film has stayed with me, particularly the ways in which it complicates (and fails to complicate) the conventions of the superhero narrative.

There's a world of comedy right there. "complicates the conventions of the superhero narrative", forsooth. Or doesn't, as the case may be. The pretentious gas-bagery right there simply screams Wasted Ivy League Education.

But, against all odds, it gets funnier. These are a few of my favorite things:

"In particular, I've been struck by discussions of the film's visual language, and of its avoidance of typically male-gaze-ish approaches to depicting powerful women.  And, in the other direction, there have been some trenchant critiques of the whiteness of the film's feminism..."

"How does Diana's bemusement at the concept of marriage face up to the discovery that almost all of the people she meets in 1918 would consider it acceptable for a man to beat his wife?"

"How does her decision to engage in heterosexual intercourse change in light of the fact that she is moving through a rape culture?"

"How does her joy at seeing a baby withstand the knowledge that most women in that period have no choice in when or whether to have children, and that many of them die in childbirth?"

"...women of color are mostly relegated to the background, and in the WWI segments, they are almost entirely absent..."

"... how does Diana know what a slave is?"

"...when what she should be decrying as slavery is the very notion that one should have to work to earn the means of survival."

"The more I think about it, the more it feels like the biggest flaw in Wonder Woman, not just as a feminist work but as a film trying to establish Diana as her own unique kind of hero, is the near-total absence of women after Diana leaves Themyscira."

I remind one and all that this is not a historical film, or a documentary, or a biography. This is a movie made from a COMIC BOOK.

This is what is meant when a Leftist says "everything is political". They're going to stick their claws into anything within reach and suck all the fun out of it, then wear its empty shriveled skin as a costume while they sell socialism.

Sense8: no wonder it got cancelled!

I'm binge-watching Sense8 the TV show on Snotflix this week. All the SJWs were crying that it had been cancelled, so I decided to see what all the crying was about.

The first thing I'll say is, its pretty. They had good people running the cameras and picking the locations. Visually it looks like a big budget movie. The actors are pretty. OMG, they are pretty. The music is beautiful. Tons of effort on the music.

The plot? There isn't one, not really. More of a framework for the pretty scenes and pretty music. Eight people spend the whole first season bumping into each other in psychic encounters, then a bad guy comes to capture them all. He works for an eeeevile corporation. That's it. Sorry if the eeeevile corporation thing is a spoiler.

The characters? Mostly they're sort of annoying cardboard cut-outs. The Korean tough chick is fun, for all that she's cardboard. I actually like the trans character, that one they spent some time and energy on. The characters all read "White Liberal", even the black guy, even the Korean woman. The relationships all read "WASP Normal". Particularly the gay relationships, they are 100% colossally loyal, committed and monogamous. Except for the sex scenes, of course. Then its an orgy. A loyal, committed, monogamous, orgy. They practically hit you upside the head with a bat, the relationship thing is that unsubtle.

The story goes along pretty slowly, with all kinds of scenes that don't forward the action at all. They preach. So much preaching. Any "good cause" you an imagine some Hollywood dickweed getting all spun-up about, its in there with the kitchen sink. I'm fast-forwarding past a lot of ten-minute stretches of the show, where nothing happens but many speeches and lots of gay porn. There's M/M, F/F, TF/F, M/M/F, M/M/TF/M/M, F/M/F/M/M/M, and so forth. There's also a bit of M/F normal, but one barely notices after all the other stuff.

I understand from the entertainment news that this series cost $100 million dollars per season. That's two hundred million bucks for a gay love letter to Hollywood from Hollywood. As anyone with a brain could have predicted, there is not an audience out there big enough to pay off a show with this subject matter.

Bottom line, this is soft-core gay porn loosely hung on a kinda/sorta SF action framework, designed with the purpose of showing gay and trans people in the most positive possible light. There are some good parts, but you have to swoop past an awful lot of Liberal Gay Mafia propaganda to find them.

I have only one question: who the hell thought it would be a good idea to spend that much money on something like this? I want to find that guy and talk him into spending $200,000,000 on my pet project.

The Phantom

This is why I don't TV anymore: CNN caught creating fake protest in London.

CNN caught stone cold creating a propaganda "protest".

A video released a day after the Islamic terror attacks in London show a CNN crew staging a scene with Muslims holding signs saying "ISIS Will Lose".

According to the article, BBC and AP also used footage and pictures from the staged event.

This is following young girls being killed in Manchester and yesterday's knife attack in London, where the brave jihadinis again targeted women. Because they're smaller and easier to kill.

There is no Mooselimb protest against ISIS in London. If there had been , CNN et al would have been all over it. They had to literally stage one.

Just so you know who is who and what is what.

The Phantom

Wonder Woman movie: Phantom thumbs up!

Saw Wonder Woman last night, and I must say they avoided all the things I complained might potentially ruin the performance.

Contrary to my previous fears, they managed to make Gal Gadot look big and powerful physically.

Contrary to every other DC movie since forever, the producers and the director etc. had some respect for the source material. They looked at Wonder Woman in the comics, and they gave us a real, no kidding Amazon warrior fighting for peace, justice and humanity. Just like Wonder Woman does in the comics.

Contrary to expectations, they did not pursue the usual SJW BS that the Twitterati were loudly demanding all this time. Wonder Woman is not gay, or bi, or trans, or any other such nonsense in this movie. She's an Amazon. Just like she ought to be.

Lots of -excellent- fight scenes, a couple of the usual political correctness moments and weak writing problems that seen inevitable in Hollywood productions (why does there need to be an American-Indian character going on about the eeeevile white man? Why do they need to spend time on making a fool of Victorian values again? Why is the writing always full of plot holes? Why are the Germans always the bad guys?) On the whole, I enjoyed it.

Well worth the ticket, particularly compared to what else is on offer.

The Phantom

Government: how much is too much?

When your government cuts off the entire internet for two weeks, and the reason they give is that a high school exam has been stolen and they don't want any cheating, you know you have too much government.

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopia has cut off internet access nationwide until at least June 8 to try to stop cheats from posting high school exam papers on social media, a government official said on Thursday.

...

"The shutdown is aimed at preventing a repeat of leaks that occurred last year," Mohammed Seid, public relations director of Ethiopia's Office for Government Communications Affairs, told Reuters.

"We are being proactive. We want our students to concentrate and be free of the psychological pressure and distractions that this brings."

Mohammed did not give a precise date regarding when the shutdown would be lifted, but added it would last throughout the exam period.

Note to all you puppy kicking, Republican-hating Obama voters out there. Thanks your hero Barry, the President of the United Stated has what Barry called an "Internet Kill Switch."

Meaning, you idiots, that Donald Trump has his finger on a button that can shut off the whole fricking Internet. Whenever he wants. Legally.

Yeah, the rodeo clown. The one with a bird on his head. The one that you're all cheering Kathy Griffin over. The one who's Worse Than Hitler!!! The one you were "literally shaking" over when he got elected. Putin's c**k holster. That guy.

One of you tools please call me a racist for objecting to Barrack Obama's eight year reign of stupid. Come on, you know you want to.

The Phantom