Your gayness will not save you.

Oh look, another Hollywood Lefty is getting thrown under the bus because he didn't hate Trump supporters enough.

A star of the Netflix show "Queer Eye," Jonathan Van Ness, is getting heat from the left after he sent out a tweet calling for Democrats to stop demonizing Trump supporters.

Yep, a member of a sacred protected group, gay men, is being ShirtStormed for daring to suggest that not all Republicans are Eeeeevile incarnate. Really, that's all he said, and they're hating on him like a house on fire.

I'm all for it, myself. Rage on, dipsticks. Next thing you're going to hear is that this Van Ness dude has deleted his Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and he's added his name to the #WalkAway list.

I've been saying this for a long time now, white gays and lesbians are going to be the first under the Lefty bus, then all East Asians, closely followed by straight black men and all Hispanics. After that, things will start to get interesting.

The Phantom

The Left is not happy with weed!

They wanted legal weed, they got legal weed. And now, a few months later, they are complaining about legal weed. I kid you not.

SEATTLE - Washington state's penchant for getting high is trashing the place.
Plastic "doob tubes" and small Mylar bags used to package pot are moldering in gutters, bleaching out in landfills and bobbing in waterways.
Concentrated nutrients and fertilizers left over from cannabis growing operations are being dumped in public sewers and making their way past wastewater treatment plants into Puget Sound. And millions of pounds of weed harvest waste that could be composted are instead getting trucked to landfills.
This, in a part of the country that prides itself on being environmentally friendly.
"We're seeing a lot of marijuana packaging in our public spaces," said Heather Trim, executive director of Zero Waste Washington, which organizes litter cleanups. "Cannabis packaging is adding to our load, which then gets washed into our lakes and Puget Sound."

Oh, the humanity! Plastic packaging! Oh noes, plant waste! Quell horreur, FERTILIZERS!!!!! [boo, hissss!] Make it stop!

Really, these people are absolutely shameless. Is there anything more objectionable than a Lefty enviroNazi?

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapunditeers!
Upperdate: Welcome Kate McMillan's monkeys! Small dead animals!

Those Peaceful Europeans!

Here's some news you won't find on the CBC, The German Federal Police are shopping for 7.62x51mm machine guns and remote vehicle turrets to put them in. That's .308 fer y'all Americans. ~:D

If you ever wondered what the World is coming to, the German Federal Police has some clues for you.

As a part of modernizing and expanding their fleet of armored vehicles they have ordered 42 pcs. of the Krauss-Maffei Wegmann FLW100 remote-controlled weapon stations.

The turrets will include the Heckler & Koch MG5 A1 machine gun, and will be mounted on their MOWAG Eagle IV and LAPV Enok 6.1 protected vehicles.

The MOWAG Eagle IV is a wheeled armored vehicle, designed by the Swiss MOWAG corporation.

The LAPV Enok 6.1 is a Light Armoured Patrol Vehicle, which is also used by the Bundeswehr.

The project is planned to happen around mid-2019, which also includes an additional amount of ENOK 6.1 protected vehicles.

To my knowledge this is the first time a German Police force, in modern time perhaps I should add, have commissioned a Machine Gun. The use is said to be mainly for Airport Security, but the ENOK 6.1 is also to be used in serious situations like terrorist attacks.

You can find more information about the FLW turret here. The FLW 100 can take 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm NATO MGs, like the Heckler & Koch MG4 and MG5 A1.

The FLW 200 can also take 12.7 mm Heavy Machine Guns and 40 mm Grenade Launchers, but this is not the case for now. Not yet anyway, perhaps I should add.

I will add again, for emphasis purposes because some people are living in denial, that this is the Federal German Police we're talking about here, not the Army. They've decided that spending a LOT of money on what is basically an armored Mercedes G-Wagen with a machine gun turret is something they want to do. The MOWAG Eagle is similar to an American MRAP armored truck.

These are the kind of things you use in open warfare against large numbers of enemies armed with rifles. No use if there are RPGs or mines, but just the thing for mowing down tightly packed rioters in the middle of a German city.

That's what they're buying in Angela Merkel's Germany. Forty two (42) of them. M'kay?

The Phantom

Liberalism is a crippling mental disease.

"Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own." Jay Austin

Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan were run over by a car in Tajikistan, deliberately.

A grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men's Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back, and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Mr. Austin, Ms. Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill "disbelievers."

This Austin guy was a type I've met before. Very committed to "loving the world," very devoted to all kinds of trendy notions like the Tiny House Movement, very eager to abandon any kind of common sense behavior, like locking his bicycle. If (when) it got stolen he'd probably say something like "they needed it more than I did" and shrug off the loss as "karma." I never met the man, but I've met plenty like him. They're doves, energy thieves. Fake Buddhists, I like to call them.

Its a pattern with Liberals. This is a telling quote, from the PJ Media story:

"With...vulnerability," he wrote, "comes immense generosity: good folks who will recognize your helplessness and recognize that you need assistance in one form or another and offer it in spades."

Jay Austin, from this story, appears to be one of those people who moved through the world employing an aggressive, even ostentatious vulnerability to blackmail those around him into behaving generously. Moral judo of the most questionable sort. Like a beggar making himself as pitiful as he can, to get more sympathy.

But then he met up with ISIS, and they killed him and his girlfriend for being White. I bet his last thought was "Are you kidding me? Can't you see what a good person I am?!"

Fake Buddhists will deny the existence of Evil, capital E, literally to their dying breaths. Which leaves them easy meat for evil men. Like the guy who ran over four people for being White, and then made a video bragging about it.

That wouldn't be so bad, but part of their belief system is that it isn't enough for -them- to be vulnerable. Everybody else has to be vulnerable too. Then the violent people will have no reason to attack, and we'll all live together in Love and Peace in our Tiny Houses.

The problem is that Evil is fairly rare. Most people, 95% of them, really will behave themselves and be extremely generous. You can see it happening every time there's a hurricane in the USA. People step up and fix everything without even being asked. So Fake Buddhists can breeze through life like everywhere in the world is Sunny Southern California, every night's a Friday Night and every day is Saturday.

But sometimes the Fake Buddhist finds the one evil man in the remote mountain town, and dies from it.

Because Evil, capital E, really does exist. So if we take nothing more from Jay Austin's stupid story, we at least should be assured of that.

First seen at Small Dead Animals.

The Phantom

Fireside is at it again. #BlackSpecFic 2017

Yes friends, it is that time of year again when SJWs once again demonstrate that they don't understand how statistics works.

Summary & Conclusions

Key facts:

• 2017 saw a Black-authored publication rate of about 4.5%, which is essentially double what it was two years before

• Half of 2017's authors are new to this set of magazines

• More debut stories by Black writers were published in this set of magazines than in 2015 and 2016 combined

• Fiyah Magazine published close to the same number of debuts (10) as the pro magazines in this dataset (12) in 2017, despite being significantly smaller in number of stories published (22 versus 1,112; about 2%)

• 5 of the 23 pro-rate magazines in this dataset are publishing Black writers at rates approximating U.S. population levels or greater

• 9 of these 23 magazines published over 80% of the field's stories by Black authors (when adding Fiyah Magazine, it's over 90%)

• These same 9 magazines collectively published Black authors at rates approximating U.S. population levels

• These 9 magazines constitute 26% of the field by number of stories published

The fact that the top quartile of pro-rate magazines is currently publishing Black writers at levels approximating U.S. population figures strongly suggests that it is perfectly possible for the field as a whole to do so.

The field is segregated¹⁶, and whether that's due to variable submission rates, variable acceptance rates, and/or other factors, the data expose a clear instance of structural racism.

In order to assist Black writers navigating¹⁷ the submissions process and to measure magazines' progress according to parameters that aren't available in this report, Fiyah Magazine has created the Presence of Blackness score; see L.D. Lewis' upcoming "POB Score: Growth and Accountability" for a retrospective on creating this metric.

Once again this year, I'm left asking these same questions:

• How is it not the most purulent racism to tally up science fiction authors by skin colour?
• Once again, there's no baseline, no real information here. Its all self-report. How do you get meaningful information out of that?
• How many of these authors self-identify as conservative, or had conservative themes in their work?
  

But now there's something new, as mentioned in the report there are a few magazines actively seeking new black authors, and those magazines were responsible for most of the increase in black authors getting published this year. My new question is:

• Is it selling? Did those magazines do well with their new push?

Because the authors of the study made this conclusion: "The fact that the top quartile of pro-rate magazines is currently publishing Black writers at levels approximating U.S. population figures strongly suggests that it is perfectly possible for the field as a whole to do so."

To which I must add, yes it is perfectly possible for the field as a whole to do so, but only if it sells. Fiction magazines are not charities, you know. So if those magazines with lots of new Black authors did well, awesome. Go you guys. But if they didn't, then they won't be around long. Too bad so sad, but that's how Capitalism works, kids.

The Phantom

The Real Left: scooter vandals.

You know how the SJW/EcoFreak/Femminazi Left is always demanding "community based solutions" and "think global act local" and "reduce/reuse/recycle" and all that happy horseshit? And every time some new initiative comes, we all roll our eyes because we really don't believe anything they say?

Well, all that eye-rolling was justified my friends. They do not mean a single goddamn word of it.

They've been crammed into toilets, tossed off balconies and set on fire. They've even been adorned with dangling bags of dog droppings.

As cities from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills struggle to control a rapid proliferation of electric pay-per-mile scooters, some residents are taking matters into their own hands and waging a guerrilla war against the devices. These vandals are destroying or desecrating the vehicles in disturbingly imaginative ways, and celebrating their illegal deeds on social media — in full view of authorities and the public.

"They throw them everywhere: in the ocean, in the sand, in the trash can," said Robert Johnson Bey, a Venice Beach maintenance worker who regularly comes across scooter parts on the Venice Beach boardwalk, Speedway and adjoining alleys.

"Sunday I was finding kickstands everywhere," Bey said. "Looked like they were snapped off."

A pay-per-mile electric scooter you can take from the side of the road where its lying, slide your credit card, and ride for as far as you want, then leave it at your destination. That is a hell of a fine service. I have a bad knee, getting around in a city is hell for me. One of those scooters would be amazing.

But people are smashing them, setting them on fire, driving their cars over them. Hundreds of them. Seems unreasonable, doesn't it?

When Hassan Galedary of Culver City sees a Bird scooter, a knot in his stomach begins to twist and his teeth clench, he said. The 32-year-old film producer describes the sensation as one of "violent bitterness."

"I hate Birds more than anyone," Galedary said. "They suck. People who ride them suck."

He loathes the scooters so much that he waged what he calls an "insurgency" against them, tossing the contraptions into trash cans on Abbott Kinney Boulevard and down the Culver City Stairs. He even designed a T-shirt of a chick perched on a scooter being shot in the head. Many of his anti-scooter antics have been featured on the Bird Graveyard account.

So where does all this scooter scorn come from?

Galedary grew up on the Westside and said he hates how kids there are paying to ride scooters instead of honoring the local traditions of surfing and skateboarding. He hates the traffic accidents they cause — "Bird on Bird," "Bird on person" and "Bird on car"— and he hates how they can be left anywhere for pedestrians to trip over.

"The city is already losing so much culture due to gentrification," Galedary said.

Yes, those goddamn rich people with their goddamn money, GENTRIFYING everything, and those goddamn kids having fun the wrong way. There oughta be a law!

Clean, cheap transportation, available to all, getting people out of their cars and back into Nature, all that exercise and fresh air for the poor and needy who can't buy their own scooters? Yeah, screw that! Because GENTRIFYING and SURFING!!!

They're insane. They're fucking well insane. You give them -exactly- what they want, I mean perfectly what they said they wanted, every single parameter met, and they freak out and burn it down like a bunch of rabid chimpanzees.

So let this be a warning to any of y'all Moderates who are doing the "feed the crocodile so he eats you last" plan. They'll lose their shit and eat you first. That's who they are. Mentally ill destroyers of life.

The Phantom

Update! Already an update from Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury, this is too perfect. In Toronto's formerly crappy but now trendy area of Parkdale, its Lefties protesting against... wait for it... Vegans!

Parkdale, a rapidly gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood, was the scene of a protest Saturday against its latest interlopers—vegans.
Around 250 people turned out to the meeting, called Parkdale Isn’t Vegandale, to express their concerns over the branding of a cluster of vegan shops and restaurants that have dubbed themselves Vegandale around Queen and Brock streets. Their issues centred on capitalism, gentrification, and a perceived moral self-righteousness on the part of the vegan businesses.

Yep. They're all crazy. Every single one.

One guy got Alex Jones kicked off the internet? Maybe so.

That's what this news story wants us to believe.

The timing isn't random. In recent weeks, a group of progressive activists has dialed up efforts to pressure these distribution platforms to drop Infowars. That pressure, which comes at a time when court proceedings against Jones have finally begun in earnest, created the momentum that led to this decision. This has been mentioned in passing in much of the coverage, but these folks deserve much more credit and recognition for the work they've been doing in trying to fight right-wing disinformation campaigns.

Salon spoke recently with Jared Holt, a researcher from Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way. Holt's work has been instrumental in getting social media and other internet platforms to give Infowars the boot. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This is my favorite part right here:

You work at Right Wing Watch and People for the American Way by tracking right-wing misinformation sites. Why is it so important to go after these guys? What danger do they present to the public?

It's in the name of Infowars. It's not an attempt at legitimate reporting. It's a, quote, "war" for your mind.

Unfortunately, their war for the American mind is to stuff it full of conspiracy theories. That ultimately debases people from reality and polarizes them to the extremes of right-wing politics. Historically, we've seen that can be very harmful for the vision of America as a free and open democracy.

I think it's important to realize that people like Alex Jones are using these platforms in bad faith.

Yes, that's right. Alex Jones has an opinion, and him expressing his opinion is using the internet in bad faith. Because Jared Holt doesn't agree with Alex Jones, and that's what makes it bad faith. If Jared Holt agreed, then it would all be totally kewl, bro.

 I'm going to laugh my ass off if it turns out Jones is right about Sandy Hook. I don't think he is, but watching little bitchez like Jared Holt twist in the wind would be -awesome-.

But here's a question: who funds People For The American Way? From Wikipedia:

Major donors to PFAW include George Soros' Open Society Institute, the Miriam G. and Ira D. Wallach Foundation, the Bauman Foundation, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund.

So, I'm now speculating that George Soros made a phone call. That's maybe what happened.

The Phantom

How to not get a date.

First seen at Small Dead Animals (as usual because I'm lazy and Kate has all the thingz first anyway) an amazing scientific discovery.

New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People: A recent study attempts to quantify the extent of trans discrimination when it comes to romantic and sexual relationships.

Wow. What a discovery.

To be clear, for the army of outrage seeking dickheads out there, this is not posted for the purpose of mocking Trans people. Those people have enough trouble in their lives without me making fun of them. Leave the Trans people alone, ladies and gentlemen, it is the proper Christian thing to do. Being merciful is never wasted, as somebody besides me should have said a long time ago.

But I am most certainly mocking someone:

 Dr. Zhana Vrangalova is an NYC-based sex researcher, writer, and educator. She received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Cornell University.

Yes, I am mocking Dr. Zhana Vrangalova for being a fraud, and I am mocking Cornell University for giving this moron a PhD. Why? Behold:

Two Canadian researchers recently asked almost 1000 cisgender folks if they would date a trans person in a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. This is the first study to ever attempt to quantify the extent of trans discrimination when it comes to romantic and sexual relationships.
958 participants (all but seven cisgender, ranging in age from 18 to 81, with an average age of 26) were asked to indicate which genders they would consider dating. The options included cisgender man, cisgender woman, trans man, trans woman, or genderqueer, and participants could select as many genders as they wanted.

Only 12% of all participants selected "trans woman" and/or "trans man."

Shock and surprise, most people be they gay or straight won't date the Trans person. Here's what Dr. Zhana Vrangalova makes of that:

The high rates of trans exclusion from potential dating pools are undoubtedly due in part to cisnormativity, cissexism, and transphobia — all of which lead to lack of knowledge about transgender people and their bodies, discomfort with these unknowns, and fear of being discriminated against by proxy of one's romantic partner. It is also possible that at least some of the trans exclusion is due to the fact that for some people, sexual orientation might be not (just) about a partner's gender identity, but attraction to specific body types and/or judgment of reproductive capabilities.

Now, I've not bothered to look up the research. But, sight unseen, I would wager that the majority of people if given the choice of dating a person with one leg or two will pick the person with two legs. I do have some prior experience here, -very- attractive young women in wheelchairs have less luck with getting dates than they do without the wheelchair. Same girl, two different responses. That state of affairs remains constant across race, religion, ideology and gender. Nobody picks the wheelchair.

People like what they like. Generally they like whole, healthy, attractive members of the opposite sex. If you ask them what they want, most will choose that. Some will lie about their choice of course, and claim the virtue signal of Openness, which is probably why they got 12% open to dating a trans. The actual number is probably a lot less. A double-blind test would sort that out.

Why? Because that's how Humans are, not because of "lack of knowledge about transgender people." Knowledge of gay people hasn't changed the percentage of gays in the population in the last 30 years, and it hasn't made straights any more likely to date them. More "education", by which I actually mean browbeating and propaganda, will do nothing positive and will probably make things worse.

People like what they like. Fashions change, but the ground state of dating choices does not. Anybody tells you different, put a hand on your wallet and #walkaway.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome, tsunami of Instapundit readers! Sarah Hoyt linked me again! Woo hoo!

An Academic Woman-splains Free Speech.

I saw this at Small Dead Animals, and it is a beauty. "Do you remember Deborah MacLatchy? Wilfrid Laurier's President and Vice-Chancellor has penned a special message for all Canadians..."

Not merely free speech, but better speech needs to be protected on campus

Better than what, you ask? Good question, as it turns out. Rex Murphy asks that question.

Amid the vast waste of anodynes, platitudes and non-sequiturs, it was difficult to pick out a winner — the most tired, numb and vacant verbalism. But I struggled and chose, from her opening sentence, her claim that Laurier "has been at the centre of the campus free-speech conversation during the past year."

Just like there are two genders plus academic bullshit, there are two kinds of speech. There is free speech, and there is coerced speech. Otherwise known as shutting up if you know what's good for you.

The Phantom

Infowars ban not going well for the banners.

How does that old Star Wars line go? "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

The Infowars app is rising in the Apple store's rankings after a number of other major digital platforms cracked down on its content.

The app has surged in popularity in recent days from the 47th to the 4th most popular Apple store news app in the United States. That position places Inforwars over CNN, Fox News and The New York Times's apps, according to app analytics site, App Annie.

In Google Play's app store for Android, the Infowars app currently sits at the 11th spot for the most popular U.S. news app, up from its previous spot at 31st.

Everybody is getting on this bandwagon.  Spotify, Apple, Pinterest, MailChimp, are kicking Jones and Infowars off their platforms.

There's really only one thing to say to this: You want more Trump? Because this is how you get more Trump.

Exhibit A on getting more Trump, closely contested Ohio congressional seat went to the Repooplicans last night, even though they probably didn't deserve to win. The Republicans as a party SUCK these days. Its just that the DemocRats have gone far beyond sucking and passed into the "active enemy of the Republic" zone.

Seen first at Small Dead Animals.

The Phantom

Bringing a knife to a gunfight... in Nebraska.

Another nutcase ignores the age-old advice.

Lincoln police are looking for a man who exposed himself to another man while wielding a sword early Saturday morning.

The other man, 26, told police he was sitting in his car at West South and Southwest Ninth streets around 4:30 a.m., after walking his dog, when a naked man approached him with a sword.

The naked man tapped the driver's side window with the sword, and the 26-year-old grabbed his rifle from the vehicle, chasing the man into a wooded area nearby, Lincoln Police Officer Angela Sands said.

Here we have the typical thing that happens these days, a man who is clearly crazy and/or wasted on some sort of drug has a sword, and he's menacing people with it. A quick Google Maps reveals that the address is a suburban neighborhood next to a controlled-access highway.

Because I know that lots of anti-gun people read this type of thing, I'm going to point out a few items they'll miss.

First, some random 26 year old redneck scrub in Flyover Country, fricking Lincoln Nebraska, has a rifle in his car at 4:30 AM, and NOBODY DIED. Okay? What was the best possible outcome here? Armed crazy person, attempting assault with deadly weapon (and close in there is no weapon deadlier than a sword, my gentle flower children) and nobody died. It doesn't get better than that. A -cop- would have most definitely shot that guy. No question.

Second, despite everything the government does at all levels from top to bottom in the name of public safety, there's an insane person with a sword. Was the random 26 year old hopelessly paranoid to keep a gun in the car? No, apparently not. Because insane naked man with sword, tapping on his window. The chances of winning the lottery are very small, but somebody always wins it.

Third, how does this turn out if 26 year old doesn't have a gun? Hmm? Maybe he gets away clean in the car, or maybe he has to use the car on this guy. Chances of casualty are much higher. So he gets away, crazy guy still has his sword, now he's on the hunt for a new victim. Again, chances of injury or death are higher.

Fourth, how does this all turn out if the victim is less robust and less aggressive that a 26 year old male? Badly, right? Very, very badly. Even if nobody dies, lifetime PTSD for the victim.

And that, dear socialists, is why we mock you.

The Phantom

Update: Sarah Hoyt Instalanche!!!

Apple, Farcebook, Pootube ban Alex Jones.

This is California culture asserting itself. Restrain, regulate, ban.

Apple, Facebook and YouTube clamped down on content by Alex Jones Monday.
Apple confirmed on Monday that it had removed five out of six podcasts, which includes Jones' infamous "The Alex Jones Show" as well as a number of other InfoWars audio streams. The news was originally reported by BuzzFeed News.
Facebook and Google made similar decisions later on Monday. Facebook removed four pages controlled by him, while Google removed the official "Alex Jones Channel" on its platform. The YouTube channel for InfoWars, the media company owned by Alex Jones, still remains live.

I'm not going to defend Alex Jones here, because that's not the point. He has an opinion that differs from the management of three big California tech companies, and they are using the power of their platforms to shut him down.

Lots of people have opinions that Big Silicon Valley technocrats don't like. For instance, every single American who voted for Donald Trump.

That they would even consider taking this sort of step now, against a small fry like Alex Jones, speaks volumes about their arrogance and their mindset.

Imagine what they're going to do in October, when the election determines whether Trump will be impeached or not. Imagine 2020.

Possibilities: How about every iPhone and Android device suddenly won't play Republican election ads? How about if all the data that Facebook has been scraping from the web for years suddenly becomes available to Antifa? Names, addresses, phone numbers, relatives, workplace, etc. They could actually do that. Its physically possible. Probably pretty easy. Couple of hours work, I would think.

And the political will is clearly there, they -want- to do it. Strike down the Nazi-voting Trumpers in one blow, a high-tech Kristalnacht.

I strongly think we are nowhere near paranoid enough, my friends.

The Phantom

Update:  https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/08/are-tech-giants-working-together-to-ban-conservatives-apple-and-facebook-ban-infowars-on-same-day/

The answer is quite obviously yes, they are working together. Possibly without even formally doing so. Same culture, same goals, they're all going to be on the same page pretty much.

Excessive tattoos and mental health: Zombie Boy dies.

We have sad news today, which I am now going to exploit to make a point. The artist and model known as Zombie Boy died yesterday of an apparent suicide. RIP Rick Genest.

Montreal model and artist Rick Genest, also known as Zombie Boy, has died, police sources have told Radio-Canada. Genest was 32.
Genest came to the public's attention after tattooing his body from head to toe, including images of a skull and brain on his head. He holds a Guinness World Record for most insect tattoos (176) and another for most human bone tattoos (139).
His body-art attracted fashion designers and he modelled at high-end shows in Paris and Berlin. In 2011, he appeared in Lady Gaga's music video for the song Born This Way.
Police sources told Radio-Canada that Genest died in Montreal's Plateau–Mont Royal borough around 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. They are classifying his death as a suicide.

When an otherwise healthy man commits suicide at age 32, that is a very sad thing. It is, apart from being a tragedy, a failure of the mental health establishment as well, to help this man find his way through his illness. That's their job, and they didn't get it done. This is not to sit in harsh judgement of the individuals involved in this man's care, if he was even getting any care. It is merely a statement of fact. Whatever measures were taken, it didn't work.

But for the greater community, it is also a failure. When a handsome man has every inch of his body covered in -painful- tattooing, furthermore depicting images of rot and death, it is a sign that he's having a problem. This man had a biohazard emblem a foot tall on his chest and a skull tattooed on his face, that's not something a healthy, well-adjusted person does. They get "Mom" on a shoulder, or a tribal arm band. Maybe a heart on their butt or something.

Yes, I'm actually saying that his body art was a manifestation of a dangerous illness. Which killed him by the way, making it a -fatal- illness.
Again, I'm not sitting in harsh judgement on the individuals involved in that art. They didn't make him that way, it isn't their fault. But, the bald facts are: fatal mental illness.

My harsh judgement is reserved for the people screaming at their computers right now because I dared mention excessive tattoos and mental illness in the same sentence. Radical body modification is strongly correlated with suicide, and y'all need to pull your heads out of your asses. There's some guy out there getting surgical modifications to make him look like a Ken doll. He's got a problem, which might very well kill him.

It isn't cosplay, people.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundid, and thanks for the comments!

Woman crashes into man's car because TRUMP!!!

Today in our "random acts of kindness and senseless beauty" file, some liberal woman road-raged a complete stranger over a Trump bumper sticker on his car. Drove into his car stopped at a stoplight, with his girlfriend inside at the time, and took off.

Chloe Wright is charged with driving offenses, vandalism and assault with a dangerous weapon. No word if hate crime charges are pending. If not, they should be.

And here we thought it was going to be Republicans shipping black people off in cattle cars, right?

The Ironic Phantom

Britain blinks: Tommy Robinson freed on bail.

Her Majesty's government has blinked. It appears that between the hordes of protesters in the streets and the upcoming Brexit debacle, somebody decided it would be smart to let Tommy Robinson out.

This is probably a good decision. Jailing a guy for literally standing on the corner minding his own business with a phone in his hand was not a good look for Britain.

Because you know what? If the government is doing something in public that they can't afford to have live-streamed, they shouldn't be doing it. Taking a video of public employees doing something is a public service to the nation, not a crime.

As well, it is not a good sign for British democracy that they have vast mobs of 25,000+ taking to the streets over political issues. Rule by mob is not what you want to see in a democracy. Its more what you expect in a South American banana republic, where forming a mob is the only power common people have over government.

The Phantom

Kewl mathematics may explain Standard Model. Maybe.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-peculiar-math-that-could-underlie-the-laws-of-nature/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsmxUuD5ZdOGittaeosXMA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BR8tK-LuB0

The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called "octonions."

This is so cool.

"Amsterdam 'lawless jungle' at night"

Amsterdam, the super Progressive Dutch center of Do Your Own Thing, with legal prostitution and legal drugs, has a problem. The problem is that people from all over Europe are coming to Amsterdam to get wasted, visit prostitutes, and do their own thing.

Tourist hotspot Amsterdam turns into a "lawless jungle" after dark with the police powerless to intervene against crime and violence, the city's ombudsman warned in an interview Saturday.
"The city centre becomes an urban jungle at night," Amsterdam's official ombudsman Arre Zuurmond told Dutch daily Trouw, warning of illegal car and bike races zooming through the streets, open drugs sales and general mayhem.

It seems that just as in Toronto Canada and London England, the cops have stopped arresting people for committing crimes in the street in broad daylight.

Zuurmond paints a painful picture of the city centre's nightlife after previously setting up three cameras in the busy Leidseplein square ringed by bars and clubs.
"One night we counted 900 offences, mainly between the hours of 2:00am and 4:00am. The atmosphere is grim, and there is an air of lawlessness," he said.
"Scooters race through the pedestrian areas. There is a lot of shouting. Drugs are being bought. There is stealing. People pee and even poop on the streets," he said.
"There is violence but no action. You can even pee on the van of a mobile (police) unit and the driver won't say anything."

Yep. When cops stop arresting people for doing crime, the people do more crime. And they keep doing more and more and more. Crime pays, unless you arrest the people doing it.

Its funny that Leftists and community organizers never seem to be able to grasp this basic reality of human behavior. Then they are all shocked and surprised when their city gets over run by drunken assholes and panderers.

The Phantom.

Update: Here's a contrary opinion.

Sorry, but this is all the purest of nonsense. I'm in Amsterdam quite frequently – most recently in June, when, as it happened, on several days in a row, I walked a great deal around parts of the city center, including Leidseplein and the fringes of the Red Light District. I did much if not most of my walking during the hours between midnight and six A.M. I like walking, and after forty years in New York City I know how to keep my eyes open – and I know Amsterdam well enough to know where I'm likely to be safe.

In downtown Amsterdam, with a few exceptions, you're safe. That's not the dangerous part of the city.

...

Why, then, did Arre Zuurmond give such a dishonest interview? I don't know the man, but when I read AFP's story (before I saw Moran's), my first thought was that this silliness was part of a desperate attempt at deflection – an effort to draw attention away from Amsterdam's real problem. And that problem has nothing whatsoever to do with young guys from Britain, let alone from the Dutch provinces, roaming the inner city at night. No, it's about the Islamic communities on the fringes of downtown and in the city suburbs. Hand me a map of Amsterdam and I'll show you just how far you can go in any direction from the center of the city before you start risking real trouble. It's not that far – heading west, it's only a matter of four or five tram stops.

Canadian Media pushing gun control this week. Hard.

The National Post, which is the -least- socialist newspaper in Canada, printed this today:

Actually, guns do kill people, according to a new study

A new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open underscores an often overlooked factor in gun-policy debates: When it comes to lethality, not all guns are created equal.

Analyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality than those with a smaller-caliber gun. Caliber is a measure of the diameter of the bullets fired by a particular gun.

The study analyzed data on 221 gun homicides and 1,012 nonfatal shootings that happened in Boston between 2010 and 2014. On first glance, the numbers provided a confirmation of the depressing demographics of shooting cases: "Most gunshot victims and survivors were young minority men with prior court arraignments," Braga and Cook found. "Most attacks occurred in circumstances where gangs or drugs played an important role." Most occurred outdoors in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

I like that, "on first glance" thing, because now they're going to tell you how its the gun that is at fault.

They controlled for a number of other factors, such as circumstances of shootings and the number of times victims were shot. They then found that all else being equal, a person shot with a medium-caliber weapon, such as a common 9mm handgun, were roughly 2.3 times as likely to die of their wounds than someone shot with a small-caliber gun. Large-caliber gunshots were even more deadly, resulting in odds of death 4.5 times that of small-caliber gunshots.

This is fricking Earth-shaking science here, right? Note that there's no mention of them controlling for the type of bullet, as in hardball vs. hollow point. Because its the GUN that did it.

 "The implication," they write, "is that if the medium- and large-caliber guns had been replaced with small caliber (assuming everything else unchanged) the result would have been a 39.5% reduction in gun homicides" in Boston during the study period.

You know what galls me here? Those assholes got PAID to write that paper. National Post goes on to say:

The results undercut the idea that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That catchy turn of phrase is often used by gun rights supporters to emphasize the human role in gun violence rather than the gun itself. The idea is that the gun matters a lot less than the murderous intent of the person pulling the trigger. If the person matters more than the gun, in other words, it's better to focus policy on people than to regulate guns.

This view is widespread among experts who take a permissive attitude toward gun regulation. A Rand Corp. study published earlier this year, for instance, surveyed a group of gun experts who generally favored fewer gun restrictions, asking what would happen if a given gun policy was successful at reducing gun homicides. On average, those experts believed that about 90 percent of the prevented gun homicides would simply end up as homicides by other means. That reflects a belief that homicidal intent is the key factor driving the lethality of gun violence.

But National Post knows better! Some guns are MOAR LEEEETHAL!!!!

Yeah. They are. Rifles are much more powerful than handguns. You get shot with a .308 hunting rifle, or a shotgun slug, chances are you are going to die no matter where you get hit. You get shot with a 9mm pistol, unless they get you in the brain or the heart, you'll probably live. It'll suck, but you'll live.

What guns are going to be banned by the Federal Liberals if they have their way?

Pistols. You know, the smallest and least powerful guns you can get.

This is what passes for journalism in Canada. For fuck sakes.

The Phantom

 

Ottawa floats handgun ban.

Well now, that didn't take long, did it?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will decide in mid-August whether to pursue a ban on handguns as part of a new legislative agenda he would outline in a fall Throne Speech, a senior official says.

Mr. Trudeau has asked a team of advisers to examine the pros and cons of proroguing Parliament and starting over with a fresh policies and priorities for the period leading to the election in October, 2019. The official said the Prime Minister wants them to report in time for the Liberal cabinet retreat on Aug. 22 in Nanaimo, B.C.

Y'all wanted to know why the government is so determined to make us think this shooting isn't terrorism? This is why. This is what they want. They want a blanket pistol ban. Then they want a blanket semi-auto ban after the next shooting. Then they'll want a blanket, all encompassing gun ban the shooting after that.

That's the plan.

Of course, after that comes the knife ban, which I wish I was joking about, but I'm not. They really will go there. Britain is, right now.

The Phantom

Update: Oh, and while Toronto is still wondering what the hell happened on Sunday night, Justin Trudeau has been paddle-boarding all week in BC. Nice!

Gun control a topic in Canada again. Inevitably.

I posted this comment at Small Dead Animals, and include it here for y'all's edification and enjoyment.

"Why are they blaming legal shooters and not the obvious?"
That is a legit question. I've wondered about that for a long time. Here's your answer.
The Rebel has a video up of a Toronto teacher going off on one of their reporters at the memorial for the slain on Danforth. You watch the video, and the teacher ranting wildly (at what is essentially a funeral, to be sure) is the reason for Ottawa blaming shooters. There's a huge number of her clones out there, all doing the same thing. You've all seen the type, you know a bunch yourselves.
Politicians go where the votes are. There's a BIG constituency of people in Canadian cities who HATE and FEAR other people. Politicians are pandering to that hate and fear.
What's easier for John Tory, really? To start jailing all the gang pukes selling drugs in Toronto? To run stings on murderous @$$h0le$ like Mr. Hussein the Danforth shooter? To shut down all the illegal stuff being done by immigrants, that leads to them knifing and shooting each other? (White people are not getting knifed and shot. Same as the USA, the victims and the shooters are pretty much all black. Nobody gives a !@#% about black people at City Hall, for realz.)
There's no political will out there for him to do that. He'll get called a racist/bigot/homophobe. So Tory blathers about guns instead. It doesn't impact his budget, his poll numbers go up, and after the speech he doesn't have to -do- anything. The mayor of Toronto cannot institute a gun ban, he has no power to do so. But he can SAY he's going to, and all the moronic school teachers will scream approval, and then… nothing happens. Just saying it is sufficient. That's why the crime keeps getting worse.
The people who will be affected negatively by the new law, if there is one, all live OUTSIDE TORONTO. They don't vote for John Tory, or the Liberals generally. Liberals lose nothing by angering the entire rest of Canada outside the three big cities, and they know it.
There you go. That's why. So, either we all get together and change that equation to one where John Tory is terrified to mention guns or gun control in public because he'll lose his next election, or it just keeps getting worse.
You don't have to look far to see how its going to go, either. Just consider Buffalo and Detroit, those two places are the model for where this is all headed.

The Phantom

Update: Instalanche!!!

Toronto Danforth shooter, Wednesday update.

Ezra Levant at The Rebel has been busy this week, asking questions that the Metro Toronto Police and the CBC have been very slow to answer. This video encapsulates his efforts, and their results. Thanks to Kathy Shaidle from Five Feet of Fury for the video.

Ezra Levant: Canadian media hides Toronto shooter's links to Islamic terror

Mr. Levant observes that it is interesting the CBC released the letter alegedly from the shooter's parents, at exactly the same time that Metro Police released his name. Meaning, among other things, that CBC certainly had a heads-up on the name before the release, and also meaning that somebody had time to draft the letter CBC reported. CBC to date has not provided any information on the provenance of the letter, or said how they got it, or when. He noticed, as I did, that the shooter seemed very well trained for a depressed mental health patient, and wondered where the gun came from..
Mr. Levant also mentions he's being chastised on Twitter by establishment media people for daring to raise questions about the shooter, and the letter. Nobody appears to care much that two girls died, or that this may have been a terror attack, or that there may be more people planning terror attacks. What they really want is for Ezra Levant and The Rebel to shut the hell up.
My question here is, why the focus on getting people to shut up and stop asking questions? Why the obvious media stick handling to obscure the facts of the case? Two kids are dead here, we need to know what the hell happened, and as soon as possible. The only concrete news is on blog sites like The Rebel and Small Dead Animals.  (Surprising no one, the gun was illegal and Canadian legal gun owners are to blame. The answer is more gun control, and that will be coming down the pipe from Ottawa with unseemly speed.)
The answer is, Liberals as a group are much, much more afraid of Canadians than they are of criminals and terrorists.
Here's the proof, another Rebel video courtesy of Kathy Shaidle in my inbox.

Apparently, bringing up the fact that media outside of Canada are reporting that the killer, Faisal Hussain, may have had an ISIS connection is "racist".
WATCH as a teacher attending the memorial with her children, berates The Rebel for doing journalism by asking uncomfortable questions about the murderer's motivation.

Now, I've never met the woman in the video. Let's be clear about that, I don't know her from Adam.

But I've met clones of her a thousand times in Canadian schools, hospitals, government institutions, Toronto street corners and businesses. She's a Liberal voter, or maybe NDP, and she's representative of the reason our media and our government are the way they are. They are trying to get her vote and her readership. She's the target demographic. So watch the video, if you can, and get a load of what's running our institutions.

At this point, I've come to my own conclusions and they're different than what the woman in the video and obviously my government want me to think. Clearly, the shooter was a trained man. Clearly, he didn't get his training in Canada. This was a straight-up terrorist attack, his goal was to kill as many people as he could. I don't really care what his political or religious affiliation was beyond that, but given reports from American news it seems obvious this was an Islamic State deal, that explains the training, the gun etc.

But even if he really was a lone nutcase, as a practical matter it doesn't really make any difference. There's shooters running around Toronto, and the government's main thrust of effort is to make sure I don't get out of line. The propaganda, the official speeches, the existing policy, the police protocols and tactics, all pointed at keeping people in line and quiet.
People are literally dying in the street, and the government is afraid of me. I'm their biggest problem.

It is the official policy of Canadian governance, and it has been for a very long time indeed if you look at how the laws are written, that the general citizenry is largely composed of unreasoning brutes. Peasants who must be corralled, fenced, directed and occasionally culled for the good of the herd. People who are too stupid to be trusted with their own money or their own freedom.

The reason Liberals love tax increases is that they view ever dollar in private hands as WASTED. If only that dollar was the propery of government at some level, then it could be more surely directed to the betterment of all men, instead of the mere enrichment of a few greedy scum. The reason Liberals love gun control is because while they, Liberals might be trustworthy enough to have a gun (maybe), surely all those OTHER people out there, those [shudder] Doug Ford voters, those Trump and Brexit voters, they're crazy! They're NAZIS!!! They'll kill everyone!

Too much? You think I overstate the case? Go back and watch that video again. That woman fears the danger of "demented Doug Ford voters" soooo much more than an actual killer really killing people in her neighborhood. Hey, only two kids died, her kids were okay, its all good, right? Gotta make sure those white supremacist racists don't start death marching brown people into Lake Ontario, that's the real danger here.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is where we are right now.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapundit tribe! Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the linkage!

Nanoscale images of the entire fruit-fly brain!

This is huge.

Researchers can now trace the path of any one neuron to any other neuron throughout the whole brain, says neuroscientist Davi Bock, a group leader at Janelia who reported the work along with his colleagues on July 19 in the journal Cell.
"The entire fly brain has never been imaged before at this resolution that lets you see connections between neurons," he says. That detail is key for mapping out the brain's circuitry — the precise webs of neuronal connections that underpin specific fly behaviors.

They took over 7,000 slices of the brain, and made 21 million electron microscope images of the slices, allowing them to trace each neuron and synapse in the brain. This is nothing less than a nanoscale 3D model of the fruit fly brain, made slice by slice.

Suck it, David Suzuki. ~:D

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Instapunditeers! This brain did not belong to Ms. Ocassio-Cortez, but if it had, it might have been the right size to fit in her solid bone cranium.

Toronto shooter named.

Toronto Danforth shooter was named today.

A 29-year-old man opened fire with a handgun in Toronto's busy Greektown neighbourhood Sunday night, according to Ontario's police watchdog, leaving at least two dead, and injuring 13 others.
On Monday afternoon, Ontario's police watchdog named the suspect as Faisal Hussain, of Toronto.
The Special Investigations Unit said the shooting began around 10 p.m., when the gunman began firing at groups of several people as he made his way down Danforth Avenue in the city's east end.

Apparently the man had unspecified mental health issues, according to his parents.

Just like the last guy who killed a bunch of random people on a Toronto sidewalk. That guy is amazingly absent from the news lately.

This one is another "incel", no doubt. (That sound is my eyes rolling.)

I'm not going to say anything more about that, except to note that this guy was moving and shooting pretty good for a depressed psychotic. Somebody taught him how to do it, given the video.

On a completely unrelated note, did y'all Americans know that it is massively illegal for a person diagnosed with a serious mental illness to buy or own any gun in this country? Did you know that there is a special pistol permit and course that you have to go through to get a pistol here? Did you know that there is ANOTHER permit you have to get to allow you to transport your pistol to the shooting range to practice? Did you know you can't get any of those permits or take any of the required courses if you have a diagnosis of mental illness?

I'm just wondering, where did this murderer learn to shoot? Inquiring minds want to know.

Update: Welcome, unruly Instapundit horde!

Update 2: 

Canadian authorities said Wednesday they have no evidence to substantiate a claim by the Islamic State group that the gunman who killed two people in a Toronto rampage was an IS soldier.

The group's Amaq news agency said the gunman, identified by police as 29-year-old Faisal Hussain, was an IS "soldier" responding to its calls for attacks on nationals from countries fighting the group in Iraq and Syria.

"At this stage, we have no evidence to support these claims," Toronto police said in a statement.

They do though. Video of him moving like a trained guy. People with no training do not move like that.

Is something rotten in the State of Denmark Canada? 

Shooting in Toronto, dead suspect still not named.

Last night there was a shooting attack on Danforth Avenue at Logan, out in front of Mr. Greek and The Big Carrot. Two victims died so far, twelve more were wounded. Wounded means shot, by the way. Wounded means they'll never be right again. One of them is a 9 year old girl.

Here's what the Mayor of Toronto, John Tory, has to say about it:

Toronto Mayor John Tory called the shooting "a despicable act" and expressed outrage that someone had "unleashed such a terrible attack on our city and people innocently enjoying a Sunday evening."

At a sombre gathering of Toronto council Monday morning, Toronto Mayor John Tory renewed his call for tougher gun laws, wondering aloud "why would anyone need a gun in this city at all?"

"There are far too many people carrying around guns in our city and our region who should not have them," Tory said as he addressed council in the wake of Sunday night's mass shooting before council was adjourned until later Monday out of respect for the shooting victims.

"You've heard me ask the question of why anyone would need to buy 10 or 20 guns, which they can lawfully do under the present laws," Tory said.

"And that leads to another question we need to discuss: why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?"

People in Toronto need guns because there are assholes walking down Danforth Avenue shooting random passers-by, John. Wake up and smell the fucking gunpowder.

iCloud data in China stored by government servers

Everybody loves that little cloud backup thing. All your crap, backed up in one, supposedly really safe, place.

A state-owned telecommunications company in China now stores the iCloud data for Apple's China-based users. This is really bad news for dissidents and critics of the government.

In February, Apple caused an uproar when it announced it would be moving Chinese users' iCloud accounts — and their encryption keys — to a China-based server company Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. Human rights advocates warned this move would be dangerous, especially so for Chinese dissidents. Apple's response was that it simply had no choice but to comply if it wanted to continue providing its iCloud service to Chinese customers.

But then it got worse.

Fast forward to today: China Telecom, a government owned telco, is taking over the iCloud data from Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. This essentially means that  a state-owned firm now has access to all the iCloud data China-based users store, such as photos, notes, emails, and text messages.

Yeah. The Chinese Stazi has full control and access to all the shit your iPhone does if you live in China. What are the main differences between the present day Chinese Stazi and the old East German Stazi? The original was smaller and therefore less evil. On the other hand, the Chinese knock-off has much better press coverage from the American media.

Here's a question you should consider before pushing that cloud button: Who, exactly, has access to all your iPhone shit here in North America? The answer is:
YOU DON'T KNOW.

There's literally no way for us to know, for sure, who has access to all that stuff on those remote servers.

Hmmmm.....

The Phantom

Another Lefty documents his fall from Grace.

Seen at Instapundit, another Soyboy takes the fall for being insufficiently soyfull.

I drive food delivery for an online app to make rent and support myself and my young family. This is my new life. I once had a well paid job in what might be described as the social justice industry. Then I upset the wrong person, and within a short window of time, I was considered too toxic for my employer's taste. I was publicly shamed, mobbed, and reduced to a symbol of male privilege. I was cast out of my career and my professional community. Writing anything under my own byline now would invite a renewal of this mobbing—which is why, with my editor's permission, I am writing this under a pseudonym. He knows who I am.
In my previous life, I was a self-righteous social justice crusader. I would use my mid-sized Twitter and Facebook platforms to signal my wokeness on topics such as LGBT rights, rape culture, and racial injustice. Many of the opinions I held then are still opinions that I hold today. But I now realize that my social-media hyperactivity was, in reality, doing more harm than good.

What happened? He got called out for some miniscule (or imaginary) deviation from the Straight And Narrow Path. (I use that bible allusion advisedly, it is always fun to see the SJWs behaving like a bunch of Puritan spinsters.)

Here's the money quote from this guy, its is an excellent observation:

Social justice is a surveillance culture, a snitch culture. The constant vigilance on the part of my colleagues and friends did me in. That's why I'm delivering sushi and pizza.

He means its the Stazi. And it totally is. Ask yourself, when the Stazi came knocking, would a grovelling apology have saved the one they came for? Nope. By then its too late.

When the Stazi comes, all there is left to choose is the manner of your death. You can die well, on your feet like a Man, or like a dog in a ditch. Metaphorically speaking of course. They can't -really- come for you.

Yet.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome tsunami of Instapunditeers coming in over the transom! Surf that wave, baby!

Me too = #YouToo!

Professor at Canadian university.

Seen first at Small Dead Animals, this is the perfect example of Leftists and effete literary snobs behaving like a pack of rabid dogs.

In an exclusive account, author Steven Galloway reveals for the first time how shocking accusations of sexual assault devastated his career — and his life. In the fall of 2015, Galloway was suspended as chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia for unspecified "serious allegations." By the summer of 2016, he had been fired over what the university called an "irreparable breach of trust." But last month, an arbitrator awarded Galloway $167,000, ruling that UBC violated his privacy rights and damaged his reputation. Now, in his own words, the celebrated novelist says he will no longer be silent.

What follows is a big long tale of woe, about how all his Ivory Tower friends JUMPED at the chance to believe the accusations, piled on, and generally acted like insane weasels. He was shocked by this.

The hatred and gleeful malice I have seen directed at me, my family, and anyone with the temerity to suggest I am not a monster has shattered me. I have watched as individuals who have never met me spent the past few years relentlessly attacking me, treating it all like some sort of game, a way to carve out a name for themselves. They display their false virtue like the tail feathers of a peacock. One University of Alberta professor puts her hatred of me in her official bio, and when I wrote to her asking that she take into account that I am a human being with feelings, and that my children read what she says about me, she responded by hosting a live-tweeted "academic" conference in which I was called a rapist and compared to Robert Pickton.

Later on, we get this gem:

When my first novel was accepted for publication I was 23 years old and encountered nothing but supportive people in the world of Canadian writing. That changed overnight. Recently, "CanLit" has been described as a dumpster fire. Though juvenile, the description is apt. I've watched what I always imagined to be a kind, inclusive, supportive community turn against itself. The cruelty some people have displayed has been shocking. There have always been those who seek to build themselves up by tearing others down, but I'd never seen so much of it until recently. We have been taken over by a bloodlust in a search for targets of indignation.

Yeah. Shocking.

I wonder if Steven Galloway still thinks that Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a Nazi?

The Wondering Phantom

Update: Welcome huge flood of Instapundit readers!

Always-on listening devices, everywhere.

An interesting thing is happening in the tech world. Little tiny microphones have gotten -really- fricking cheap.

I believe that is a dime the microphone is sitting on.

Startups such as Boston-based Vesper Technologies, Inc.—which has received money from Baidu, Bose and Amazon's Alexa Fund—are meeting the challenge with even tinier, yet more capable designs built around minuscule flaps of silicon that generate electric current when bent by sound waves. Vesper claims this gives their microphone unique capabilities, like understanding your voice even in windy conditions, and drawing zero power when awaiting a "wake word," since sound itself generates the power the microphone needs.

The total cost to equip a gadget with an array of these tiny microphones and the electronics to interpret simple commands is approaching $10 or less, says Matt Crowley, Vesper's chief executive. Individual microphones now cost between 20 cents and 60 cents, says Mike Rosa, an analyst and marketing chief at Applied Materials Inc., which supplies manufacturing equipment to makers of microchips.

You know what else is cheap and small? WiFi and Bluetooth modules, cameras, system-on-chip computers, and batteries. That zero power draw in sleep mode is a very big deal, it makes possible all sorts of applications that would otherwise bee much too power hungry.

The little thing on the end is the whole camera.

Full wireless transmitter/receiver for a cell phone type application.

Essentially it will be possible to have wireless video and sound capability in pretty much anything you can imagine, cheaply. I'm sure if a clever lad sat down and designed a dedicated silicon package, he could get it under ten bucks a unit. That means toy drones with full video/audio AND wireless AND processing on board. That means video/audio enabled glasses/brooches/rings/watches etc. Car sun visors with video/audio. Literally anything that plugs into a wall socket can be a full-on Alexa-style device.

But not in the future. I mean right now. They can do it right now. In the future it will only get smaller, cheaper and easier.

Just so you know.

The Phantom

California University Racism

A major California -technical- university is choosing students based on skin colour.

In keeping with the diversity and inclusion movement sweeping campuses across the country, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo recently released a 30-page report outlining plans to "improve diversity" via a series of initiatives.

One goal is to increase the number of people of color on campus beyond the increases that have already occurred over the past few years, as "applications from underrepresented minority students doubled between 2008 and 2018."

"In 2011, the campus was 63 percent Caucasian," the May 2 report informs readers, "in fall of 2017, it was less than 55 percent … but there is still much work to do."

That this is precisely the reverse of "diversity and inclusion" seems to have escaped the administrators. One wonders what the hell is in their heads besides sand.

The end point of this will be the same situation that used to apply before WWII, when "people of colour" had their own universities and major institutions were Whites Only. I would not view that as progress.

The Phantom

Dinosaur media finally notices cities are being hollowed out.

Here we have a liberal bemoaning "The Death of a Once Great City".  He's whining about gentrification in NYC, and naturally blaming it all on Trump. A sample:

We have been almost a parody of multiculturalism on our little street. Black and white, Hispanic and Asian; straight, gay, and transgender; families of all kinds—extended, adopted, arranged by convenience or design. Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist. I would come home and see the daughters of our Sikh mailman, before they grew up, playing baseball in the halls. In the evening, I sat at my desk in a little space, in this building cubbyholed with other little spaces and held together by what was once described as "a hundred years of spit and dust," and felt as though I were poised over the center of the world. Beneath me I could hear a hive of dinnertime conversations carried on in half a dozen languages, smell cooking that came from all over the world, hear someone ringing a gong and repeating a Buddhist chant.

To me, that sounds like my worst nightmare. The sound of "a hive of dinnertime conversations carried on in half a dozen languages" means the building is an ancient firetrap with no insulation and no privacy. What I hear at my house at dinner time is frogs chirping in the pond. At noon it is so quiet here, you can literally hear a hawk glide by overhead. Shhhwsh. So I can already tell this person has zero conception of what life is like outside his teensy experience. He'd probably lose his little liberal mind here in Hooterville.

It is through all these interactions, multiplied a million times, that a truly great city is made.

No, don't think so. A truly great city is a place you can find food, shelter and a job, live peacefully and raise your family safely. NYC hasn't been that since the 1960s. Toronto stopped being that in the 1980s.

The street life—the warrens of little shops and businesses that once sustained our neighborhood in the sort of "exuberant diversity" that Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite for a successful city—is being eradicated as well: the botanica on 96th Street that Susan, my sister-in-law, always visited to buy her healing herbs when she was in town; the Indian spice shop next to it, with the protective elephant-headed idol of Ganesh mounted outside.

This is the actual meat of the conversation, that retail stores are fleeing downtown and semi-downtown areas of large American cities, driven out by rent hikes.

These stores, like so many others in my neighborhood, have not been replaced. They are simply . . . gone. In an informal survey of Broadway, from 93rd Street to 103rd, I recently counted twenty-four vacant storefronts—many of them very large spaces, enough to account for roughly one third of the street frontage. Nearly all of them have been empty now for months or even years.

The truth is that most of the buildings in NYC are so expensive that no retail operation in existence can afford to rent them. Retail of anything doesn't produce enough income to pay for the space.  In Toronto the price of a detached house, even a falling down one, is north of a million bucks. Stores are sitting empty all over Toronto, the only ones still going are big chains who can afford the obscene rents. Which means it is a bubble. In-city prices all over North America for retail space and for housing are in a bubble.

Of course the liberal author, Mr. Kevin Baker, blames racism and the Republicans. Racists are everywhere for Mr. Baker it seems, hiding in ever closet and sewer grating, waiting to jump out. He also, hilariously, blames foreigners for buying $20 million dollar apartments downtown and not living in them most of the year. Which somehow isn't racist, because... well never mind, it just isn't.

Worth a read.