Phantom reviews Star Wars! (no spoilers!)

Went to Star Wars The Force Awakens last night, Christmas Eve.

It did not suck! Amazing! Worth the ticket price.

That said, there have been better movies. There were a few clunky bits, and poor old Harrison Ford was on-screen way more than he should have been. The guy just looked tired and sore, particularly compared to the bouncing ball of energy that is Daisy Ridley. That girl was on freaking fire in this flick.

My movie companion was moved to tears when Carrie Fisher came on the screen. It's really sad how old and busted that woman appeared. I hope it was all movie magic, because damn. She moves like it hurts. A lot. Worse than watching Arnold Schwarzenegger try to run. Don't get me wrong, it works for the movie. But it'll make you cry if you're a Princess Leia fan.

Mark Hamill finally looks like a f-ing ancient Jedi ass-kicker ought to look. Age is better to some than others.

 Finally, Canadians will laugh when the bad guy takes off his helmet. No spoilers, but you're going to say "Don't I know that guy?"

All things considered, it was everything one expects from a Star Wars movie, without the lameness of George Lucas directing. JJ Abrams got a good performance out of all of them. Well done!

Merry Christmas!

This is the next Lefty scam: water scarcity.

USA Today: Oh Noes! We are running out of WATERZ!!!!

Time is running out for portions of the High Plains Aquifer, which lies beneath eight states from South Dakota to Texas and is the lifeblood of one of the world's most productive farming economies. The aquifer, also known as the Ogallala, makes possible about one-fifth of the country's output of corn, wheat and cattle. But its levels have been rapidly declining, and with each passing year more wells are going dry.
As less water pours from wells, some farmers are adapting by switching to different crops. Others are shutting down their drained wells and trying to scratch out a living as dryland farmers, relying only on the rains.
In parts of western Kansas, the groundwater has already been exhausted and very little can be extracted for irrigation. In other areas, the remaining water could be mostly used up within a decade.

Cue the Greenies, with their hair tearing and garment rending, their sack cloth and ashes, to blame Consumerism for this Crisis.

One question, what group thinks it's a good idea to burn corn as ethanol?

That's right kids, Greenies!

Look for this one to start getting pushed good and hard, as Glowball Warmening begins to falter after the 2016 election.

The Phantom Forecaster

Obama "Is my face red?" dept.

Yesterday, Obama gave a speech saying that Americans should not be able to buy gun if they are on the "No-Fly" list.

Today, we discover 72 Department of Homeland Security employees are on the "No-Fly" list.

Really. I couldn't make something like that up.

The Phantom

My comment on the San Bernadino attack.

1) I'm very sorry that people died and were badly hurt because California liberals are afraid of guns. Perhaps if gun-free zones were outlawed this kind of atrocity would be a thing of the past.

2) From Market Watch:

"Shares of the two publicly traded gun makers rallied on Monday, a day after President Barack Obama gave a prime-time address calling for a modest reduction in the availability of firearms."

That is about all there is to say, I do believe.

The Phantom

Told you: FBI reveals depth of information requests.

Further to the SHUT UP!!! they explained post , the FBI 'requests' for information amount to the complete internet history of any named individual, no warrant required.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual's complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing released Monday shows.

The documents are believed to be the first time the government has provided details of its so-called national security letters, which are used by the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance without the need for court approval.

The filing made public Monday was the result of an 11-year-old legal battle waged by Nicholas Merrill, founder of Calyx Internet Access, a hosted service provider, who refused to comply with a national security letter (NSL) he received in 2004.

Merrill told Reuters the release was significant "because the public deserves to know how the government is gathering information without warrants on Americans who are not even suspected of a crime."

What's bullshit about this is not that the FBI can get all that without a warrant. No, the true bullshit, the real lie, is that they need to ask. ALL that data plus a lot more is already in NSA databases, and they do share it with the FBI.

The FBI sends these letters to provide a fig-leaf for use in court, not because they require the cooperation of the ISPs and the phone company. They already have your complete web history on call, on a whim. The letters are so they can admit in court to knowing things they are not supposed to be able to know.

Anyone not wondering how big the FBI porn stash of sexy selfies has grown is an idiot. I will bet dollars against donuts that any good-looking woman who thinks her 'secret' photos remain secret is dreaming in technicolor. My advice, if you want to take sexy selfies, use a Polaroid camera.

The Phantom

SHUT UP!!! they explained.

The process -is- the punishment. Government appealed a court decision to lift a gag order for 11 years, lost every single time. Kept it up anyway. No particular reason, just because they could.

For years after receiving a national security letter from the FBI, he was an anonymous litigant and unnamed op-ed writer, barred by a gag order from revealing that he had received a warrantless demand for customer information. Now, Nicholas Merrill's gag order has been lifted in full, and – apparently for the first time – an NSL recipient can speak openly without fear of punishment.

Merrill, owner of now-defunct Calyx Internet Access, provided Internet service to about 200 customers when he received the order in February 2004. He refused to turn over the records of the targeted customer and went to court with American Civil Liberties Union representation. 

Merrill won the right to identify himself in 2010, but could not say what the ultimately withdrawn letter said. In August, a federal judge ordered the associated gag order lifted, with a 90-day pause to allow the Justice Department time to appeal, which it chose not to do.

I'd be fascinated to know how much that cost, and exactly who thought that expenditure was reasonable. Like, with names and faces.

The Phantom

This is where 'eat me last' gets you.

The remarkably socialist, one might even say pinko-led Church of England has received an extraordinary rebuke. From the Left!

They can't run a PAID advertisement featuring the Lord's Prayer in English movie theaters the week before Christmas. No, really.

The advert, produced by JustPray.uk, shows the Lord's Prayer being recited by a members of the public ranging from bodybuilders to children, and also features the Most Rev Justin Welby.
A CoE spokesman said it was initially believed that their minute-long advert had been approved and would be played before showings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens from December 18.
They were later informed that, due to a DCM policy not to run adverts which could potentially cause offence, the video would not be shown.
When asked for a copy of that policy, CoE was told there is no formal policy document but that it had been agreed with the DCM's members.
There is now a formal policy on the DCM's website, which states: "To be approved, an advertisement must ... not in the reasonable opinion of DCM constitute political or religious advertising."

Please note this is not a PSA or some other free donated-time thing. This is a bought-and-paid-for advertisement. A one minute spot of people reciting the Lord's Prayer. Can't show it. Too offensive. Running with scissors.

The delicious irony for me is that this kind of thing is exactly what the Lefty minions of the Church of England have been working toward since World War Two ended. The notion that secular theaters SHOULD NOT feature religion in any way, shape or form is one that CoE upper management embraces wholeheartedly.

We have a similar situation in Canada with the United Church of Canada. If you go to certain UCC churches in Toronto, you may be able to go through an entire service and not hear anything overtly Christian the whole time. The gay minister may not even mention Jesus. Because it wouldn't do to OFFEND anyone, y'know. It's all about Social Justice and doing Good Works and all that great lefty stuff.

All of which boils down to a corporation that defines itself as a church but acts like a retail store, changing it's wares to appeal to new customers and begging the ever-more-rapaciaous taxman regulators to eat them last.

The trouble with eat-me-last as a strategy is that eventually, if you wait long enough, you get eaten.

The other thing is that the movie chains are not banning the ad out of some SJW yearning to make everything fair for everyone and Kumbaya. Nuh uh. They're banning it because they are terrified of having their theaters burnt down by hordes of militant Mooselimbs being offended at the very existence of the Church of England in... England.

The movie chain guys are not wrong of course. Their know their audience. If that ad gets shown, theaters in some parts of England will probably get burnt down. At the very least there will be "unrest", as Monty Python says.

More delicious irony, which denomination is number one for "outreach" these days? Church of England! They just love that multi-cultural exchange stuff, makes 'em feel all warm and fuzzy, and keeps the government grants flowing through their coffers. Gotta keep the roofs patched on all those ancient church buildings y'know.

This is why I don't like churches as a general thing. They behave a lot more like a retail real estate investment trust (REIT) than a religious organization that believes in stuff. If I want to see wishy-washy salesmanship I'll go to the mall, thanks.

The Retail Religion Phantom.

Instant update! Superblogger and fabulous short person Kathy Shaidle sent this in a minute ago: Famous Atheist (and all-round dick, IMHO) Richard Dawkins comes out in support of the Church of England.

“My immediate response was to tweet that it was a violation of freedom of speech,” Dawkins told the Guardian. “But I deleted it when respondents convinced me that it was a matter of commercial judgment on the part of the cinemas, not so much a free speech issue.”

“I still strongly object to suppressing the ads on the grounds that they might ‘offend’ people,” he said. “If anybody is ‘offended’ by something so trivial as a prayer, they deserve to be offended.”

Yeah, the "commercial judgement" was that they didn't want their theaters burnt down, and between the lines Dawkins knows it.

Mr. Dawkins, dick though he may be, realizes that an Islamic England is going to be one where he gets hanged, or possibly stoned to death, drawn, quartered, burnt at the stake or suffers some other medieval atrocity simply for being an atheist. He, unlike the CoE, realizes eat-me-last is not a winning strategy. 

Even a blind pig finds the odd acorn.

Paris

I suppose I have to comment on this, it isn't like if we all ignore it it'll go away.

First, my condolences to everybody who lost someone on Friday night, or who got wounded.

Second, this is all down to policy decisions made back in the 1950s or even earlier. Disarm the average citizen, propagandize them to be passive in the face of violence, make them believe that only police have the moral right to use force.

That mindset is what got us where we are today. The official policy of Western governments is that citizens shall wait for the police, and the police will do the shooting. Any citizen who does not wait for the police will be subjected to The Process, which will be long, arduous and ultimately pointless.

It's credentialism, basically. The idea that if you want the best job, you get the experts who have been trained and tested. Like a doctor or a plumber. The industrial model of social justice.

Now, this model has it's advantages. It makes everything very convenient for police forces and governments, it creates very large budgets for police forces and justice bureaucracies, and it gives politicians something to campaign on. Lefties run on Compassion, righties run on Law and Order. Two sides of the same coin, credentialism. No one questions the model, because the model is their iron rice bowl.

In Western societies where there basically is no crime to speak of, it works well enough to get by. Meaning it doesn't work at all for the victims of crime, but they are few and don't have a platform to make a fuss. The wealthy and powerful get a special deal from police forces, and the rest of us get by ok. Mostly.

Places where crime is high of course it doesn't work at all, but again nobody cares about non-white ghettos or the poor. Those People don't matter, what can you expect from them anyway. Liberals like to -say- they care, but when you turn the sound off, they act like they don't care.

Now we add one more variable, the politically motivated Mass Migration.

In America back when cotton was king, they imported slaves. In their hundreds of thousands, Africans were purchased from Arab slavers and brought to North America. The one reason this was done, they wanted Cheap Labor.

Fast forward to 2015, South Americans and Mooselimbs from the Middle East are being imported in their millions. Same reason, Cheap Labor. And gee whiz, it's working about the same as slavery did. As in, not well.

Suddenly, the credentialist model isn't working and it can't be swept under the carpet anymore. Cops aren't there when the trouble happens, nobody can do anything about it except run away. People die.

This Paris attack was inevitable. The French imported people from a region where they are having a religious war. Surprise, they continued the war, except now it's in France. Inevitably terrorists are going to attack anyplace where more than three people are gathered and unarmed. It's like magnetism, they'll always go there. In a disarmed population, five shooters can kill a lot of people.

In an armed population, they may not manage to kill anyone. That's why the Palestinians switched to suicide bombs in Israel, their rifle squads were getting eliminated by the intended victims before they could get a round off. Mohamed pulls out an AK-47 at the grocery store, and before he's finished yelling Allah Akbar some old lady shoots him in the  head. That's how it goes in an armed population.

Of two things we can be certain, therefore. There will be terror attacks. They will grow in number and intensity, because it's like a popular movement. All the cool kids are doing it. The official response will be to rearrange the deck chairs on their ship of fools. More cops,bigger guns, security checks, the whole Police State trip. That's what they're going to do. For sure. And more gun control, because police states like gun control, it makes everything more neat and tidy for the police.

The other thing is, people will ignore the police state and arm themselves when it starts to get bad. Already there are no guns available in European stores and ammo is on back order because it has all been bought up. Europeans are arming themselves, the same Europeans that vote for more-bigger-better gun control every year. Right now they are buying shotguns and keeping them in the closet. After a few more Paris attacks they will be carrying shotguns, and the cops will be looking the other way.

If the Liberal Party of Canada does what they're saying they will right now, that's what our future in Canada will be as well. I'm not looking forward to it.

Those two things are 100% lead-pipe certain. Likely but not guaranteed, a civil war and ethnic cleansing of Europe. Every two or three generations Europe has one of these events throughout history. They're about due. Maybe they'll manage to skip it this time, so far it's not looking good.

The Phantom

November 11th, 2015.

We do not forget.

Wait, I thought casting didn't matter!

This is confusing.

The casting of a white actor as Martin Luther King in an Ohio university production of Katori Hall's acclaimed play The Mountaintop was "a disservice to not just Dr King but an entire community", the playwright has said.

Hall wrote an essay for the African American cultural website the Root on Monday about Kent State University's production of her play, which dramatizes the night before King was assassinated in 1968.

Hall told the Guardian that director Michael Oatman's decision to double-cast the six-show production with a black actor and a white actor as King went "deeper than just casting a white man in the role of MLK".

"I just really feel as though it echoes this pervasive erasure of the black body and the silencing of a black community – theatrically and also, literally, in the world," she said.

Oatman, who like Hall is black, said in a statement in August promoting the play that he chose a white actor for the production "to explore the issue of racial ownership and authenticity".

So casting a historical character who is black with a white actor is racism? But wait! Don't I recall that merely objecting to the casting of a white character with a black actor was racism?

Yes I do recall that. That post is one of the most-read things I've ever written. Every week it gets hits. Objecting that they cast Johnny Storm with a black actor is nerd racism my friends. Lots of people say so.

And you know, they cast a black guy in the movie to play the white character, then amazingly enough, Stan Lee did NOT write an essay for some white culture website complaining that the switch was "a disservice to not just the Fantastic Four but an entire community!"

You know what happened instead? All us comic fans got told to shut up.

I decided shutting up would be boring, so I went out on a limb and said any movie that casts a white character with a black actor to get PC points is going to suck. Behold, it did suck. The FF movie came out and dropped off the face of the Earth two weeks later. Because, of course, it sucked hard.

Casting does matter. Duh. Casting Martin Luther King with a white actor is stupid. The play will suck. It will suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

I'm waiting for J.F. Sargent to call Katori Hall a racist, in keeping with his thesis that objections to race switching in movies is racism. Got my popcorn right here.

The Phantom.

Death marches in Europe. Toldja.

No one. Ever. Listens.

But having encouraged people to move, the Europeans are now pulling up the drawbridge because they have found dealing with the influx overwhelming. Where were the preparations? Why were fleets of buses and trains and boats not laid on at the borders of the EU to bring people safely to Germany, which is, after all, where most people are headed?

Why were arrangements not made? Two reasons, the first being practicality. It is politically and economically unfeasible to do what is currently being done in Europe. If anyone saw their government making arrangements to do it gracefully, they would find out how much it is going to cost, and they would stop it. The cost of trucking that many migrants to Germany is, on the grand scale of government spending, not high. The cost of feeding and housing them, reachable.

The cost of funding their welfare payments in perpetuity? It's not going to happen, is how high that is. Because it will cost more money than there is in Europe. They aren't going to get jobs in Germany and become productive German citizens, because THERE AREN'T THAT MANY JOBS available. And there never, ever will be. And everybody knows it.

But that's not the real reason there are no buses or trains. The real reason is that this is a -spectacle-. This is a circus act! The Great and the Good of the German intelligentsia are putting on a show featuring other people's pain, paid for with other people's money, for political gain. They are happy to have thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of itinerant Mooselimbs DIE this winter, so that they can run pictures of the corpses in all the newspapers. Then presumably they get the thing that they want, which probably boils down to money.

How many guys had heart attacks so the EU could take this picture?

They are doing this deliberately, because they want that picture. The picture is the reason.

Somebody please tell me again how the socialists are the friends of the Little Guy. And remind me when the socialists INEVITABLY start machine-gunning columns of people in front of hastily dug trenches.

They do it because they care, right?

The Phantom

Tiny House sales job: making poverty cool.

The Cognoscenti have decided you shall live in a refrigerator box on wheels, and you shall be grateful for the opportunity. If you really do well, they will give you a shipping container. You filthy peasant.

Looks like Architectural Digest, don't it?

For San Franciscans, the rent refuge is here in Oakland, where the rates are increasing as well — so much so that young professionals are living in repurposed shipping containers while the homeless are lugging around coffinlike sleeping boxes on wheels.

These two improvised housing arrangements have emerged in an industrial pocket of Oakland where the median rent has gone up by 20 percent over the past year. One, in a warehouse, is called Containertopia, a community of young people who have set up a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers like ones used in the Port of Oakland. Each resident pays $600 a month to live in a container, which can be modified with things like insulation, glass doors, electrical outlets, solar panels and a self-contained shower and toilet.

Container "which can be modified" sounds pretty crappy. Could it be worse? Yes it could!

The artist, with one of his "tiny houses". Note the bucket. It's not for champagne.

Just outside the warehouse doors is another community, residing, too, in containers of a sort. Here, the homeless live in dwellings made by a local artist named Gregory Kloehn, set on wheels and made for the streets. Each is about eight feet long and tall enough for a person to sit up in.

"It doesn't fit our mind-set of what a home is," said Mr. Kloehn, 44, who began creating and giving away the portable homes, which are made of recycled material, in 2011.

Imagine yourself walking out the door of your lovely container, with it's "self contained" toilet that you have to empty by hand. Because no plumbing, my friends! So here you are, walking out the door of your container with a bucket of toilet leavings (don't spill it!!!) and you hump this fifty pound thing down the FIVE FLIGHTS of stairs to chuck it in the communal poo disposal (which you pay for, don't forget, because no plumbing!)

And on the curb, in front of the beautiful, multicolored container stack you call home, is some bum with a brightly painted hand cart. He's setting up camp on the sidewalk and emptying his own poo bucket into the gutter. Where it will stink for all eternity, because this is California and it never rains, therefore the poo will never be washed away.

Sounds like an awesome place to raise your kids, doesn't it?

It isn't recycled material. It's junk. You're living in a makeshift pile of junk that other people threw out.

It's not a tiny house. Its a shack, or possibly a hand-cart.

You're not a hipster. You're a bum.

It isn't an alternative lifestyle. It's SQUALOR, and it isn't good for you.

Oh, and by the way. Mr. Kloehn isn't an artist. He's a would-be aristo with no visible means of support. I'd be fascinated to find out where his money comes from.

The Phantom

Shipping Containers the New Hotness in Architecture

Architecture is yet another field of endeavor hopelessly ruined by Marxism and the shadow of Central Planning. Evidence for today, they would very much like to replace proper apartment buildings with stacks of shipping containers.

Advocates for shipping container homes say speed of installation, cost savings on materials and the capacity to re-use units in new locations make it a serious option for urban housing. The latest exhibition at The Building Centre in central London captures the trend. Designers are offering lunchtime tours of a model shipping container home, asking whether these "highly adaptable and move-able" objects might play a much bigger role in easing the housing crisis.

Instant slums, designed to hide away the excess unemployed and unwanted "migrants" as cheaply as possible. They aren't even pretending otherwise, a somewhat refreshing change from the usual housing project bullroar. They're attempting to hitch on to the tail of the "Tiny House" hipster thing, but that seems to be burning out as more and more hipsters realize "Tiny House" = shack.

I want you to imagine a stack of shipping containers, five high. Each one filled with combustible rug, furniture, bedding. Inhabited by drunks and drug addicts... and you. Because Big Brother said this is where you get to live.

Drug addict Bob is making hash oil out of "medical marijuana"  in his "kitchen" using butane. He lives on the ground floor. Oops, Bob lights his container on fire because he is a brain damaged dumb-ass.

A fire in a stack of shipping containers. Be a hell of a thing, wouldn't it?

The Phantom.

The new war on biceps.

Yes, apparently having muscles is now bad. Who knew?

Political correctness has value, Katz said. Supporters of presidential candidate Donald Trump say like they him for "not being politically correct," but what they really mean is they like him "for saying racist and sexist comments," Katz added.

Pop culture also has an insidious effect on masculinity, Katz continued, imploring the audience not to "check your brain and moral conscience when you go to the movies."

He showed clips from his film Tough Guise, in which Katz claims "there has been a ratcheting up of what it takes to be considered menacing in the 1980s and 90s."

As evidence, Katz noted that G.I. Joe's biceps have gotten larger over the years and that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone use bigger guns for their iconic roles as the Terminator and Rambo than did Humphrey Bogart in his 1930s and 1940s film roles.

I want to ask this guy, if biceps and and six-pack abs are bad, how about beard stubble and a beer gut?

The Phantom

The problem with back doors in computers.

My previous post dealt with the possibility that your hard drive my not be deleting things when you tell it to. This is not to your benefit, it is to someone else's. Probably the FBI/DHS/ABCDEFG branch of the US government. They can do things like that, and we know they have been.

Now, there is a problem with this kind of thing, and it is that doors open for whoever has the key. They can also be kicked open.

There's still "only" 21.5-million federal employees whose personnel data have been stolen, but the Office of Personnel Management now admits that they've found that the number of individuals whose fingerprints were swiped is up to 5.6 million.

This is of course the much under-publicized hack of the United States government Office of Personnel Management. Criminals and/or enemy foreign governments have the complete, searchable, exhaustive list of US government employees. With pictures and all sorts of personal info that people are not supposed to know about.

Its a disaster. I don't mean a disaster like a house burnt down, or a storm. I mean a disaster like the Great Chicago Fire, or the San Francisco Earthquake. Foreign governments know -exactly- who works for the US government. It's literally the largest breach of confidentiality in human history. No government has ever fucked up this badly anywhere else, ever.

Question arises, how can something like this happen? How can the government keep their Crown Jewel of digital information on something so crappy that people can steal it?

Well, if hard drives keep secret copies of things that can only be accessed by people with the proper codes, and if iPhones keep track of your movements whether you like it or not and transmit that data to Apple, and if the government has built back doors into popular processors so that they can defeat an air gap if they want, what if somebody else got hold of those codes?

What if somebody reverse engineered those government mandated back doors? Somebody like the manufacturer for example, who resides in China?

The US government runs on computers made in China. Because that's where computers are made these days.

Gee, I wonder how they hacked the OPM? Well, no, actually I wonder wheat else they hacked that nobody told us about.

The Phantom

On the subject of wiping hard drives.

Most of us have a box of old hard drives kicking around. Here's something rather alarming pointed out at Small Dead Animals today by Lance.

From the article on the WIPE utility:

NOTE ABOUT JOURNALING FILESYSTEMS AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS (JUNE 2004)

Journaling filesystems (such as Ext3 or ReiserFS) are now being used by default by most Linux distributions. No secure deletion program that does filesystem-level calls can sanitize files on such filesystems, because sensitive data and metadata can be written to the journal, which cannot be readily accessed. Per-file secure deletion is better implemented in the operating system.

Encrypting a whole partition with cryptoloop, for example, does not help very much either, since there is a single key for all the partition.

Therefore wipe is best used to sanitize a harddisk before giving it to untrusted parties (i.e. sending your laptop for repair, or selling your disk). Wiping size issues have been hopefully fixed (I apologize for the long delay).

Be aware that harddisks are quite intelligent beasts those days. They transparently remap defective blocks. This means that the disk can keep an albeit corrupted (maybe slightly) but inaccessible and unerasable copy of some of your data. Modern disks are said to have about 100% transparent remapping capacity. You can have a look at recent discussions on Slashdot.

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.

Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU, and so on. I guess there are also "traps" in the CPU and, in fact, in every sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip. Wealthy nations can find those. Therefore these are mainly used for criminal investigation and "control of public dissent".

People should better think of their computing devices as facilities lended by the DHS.

Emphasis mine. Please note, this is a very informed opinion, but still only speculation.

For no particular reason, I will now link to an article on how to build a forge. Please note, this article has you building something quite permanent and complicated. I've seen good results with a used brake drum, a length of flexible ducting and a hair dryer.

Interesting random science note, did you know that striking a piece of metal with a hammer changes the crystal structure of the metal, and moves its magnetic properties around as well?

Interesting random link to an old article of mine.

Toldja. Templehof airport = new refugee camp.

Even a cursory reading of history, plus the most passing acquaintance with almost any German, tells you that the one thing Germans can't stand is things being untidy. Drives them nuts. They see something out of place, and they go fix it.

What's more untidy than a million Syrians trying to get on German welfare all at the same time? Nothing.

Germans have to fix it. They have to, its a cultural imperative perhaps on the same level as procreation.

Therefore, we are presented with a shiny new CAMP, in Berlin.

Now, the old airport at Tempelhof is about to find yet another incarnation: sheltering some among the massive surge of the migrants and refugees flooding into Germany. Berlin's mayor, Michael Mueller, told the RBB broadcaster over the weekend that one of the airfield's former hangars will be used to provide a roof – a lofty one at that - over the heads of about 800 asylum-seekers, as early as this week.
The need is great. Since the start of the current influx, the German capital has been receiving about 1,000 newcomers a day. More than 65,000 people have arrived in Germany this month, and the yearly tally may run to 1 million or more, officials now acknowledge. With winter fast approaching, housing is a crucial concern, with venues like a disused convention center and former military barracks being pressed into service.

Also mentioned in the article, a new camp on the grounds of the former Spandau prison.

The question that remains is this: How many times can the average German see some random Syrian taking a dump in the gutter before he starts voting for the National Socialist German Workers Party again?

I give it six months.

The Phantom

Big Socialism tightening its grip on your car. You WILL be paying by the mile, and soon.

New York City announces pilot program to track your car 100% of the time.

It's a new city pilot program to track how you drive, when you drive, how fast your drive and how much gas you use.

The Department of Transportation says it will help fix street problems. Others say its like Big Brother is watching you, CBS2's Marcia Kramer reported Friday.

It's a tiny black box about the size of a pack of gum that is installed right under the steering wheel. It will allow city officials under a program called "Drive Smart" to collect and access data about how you drive — if you drive like a maniac, or if you're Mr. or Mrs. Slow Poke.

"It can tell the g-force of hard stopping or hard acceleration and a hard turn," DOT senior project manager Alex Keating said. "So the driver, as well as the service provider, are able to look at speeds, hard-breaking events, time of day and basic GPS."

City officials say they'll use to information to make the streets safer, but drivers can also allow various DOT partners to use the information. Allstate, for example, will give you insurance discounts of 10-30 percent, and Metropia will get you home faster with less congested routes — all of it hooked up to smartphone apps.

I've been over this ad nauseam. I'll spare you the histrionics this time.

What I will say is a word to all you smug idiots out there who don't have a car. You're sitting there thinking you are safe, nobody can get you. Right?

That's because you are stupid. If there is going to be a system in place capable of tracking every car in the city and assessing taxes on them for road usage:

• How long before that system gets extended to track your dog? Dog poo is an issue in NYC.
• How long before that system gets used to track your beloved bicycle? Hmm? Why should you frigging hipster dicks get a free ride?
• How long before you pay a pedestrian tax? Signals cost money, sidewalks are expensive. Water ain't free. Pay to breathe, maybe? We could live to see it.
  

If local governments are allowed to put a black box in your car, you will be wearing an ankle bracelet transmitter within twenty years at the most, all in the name of public safety. Except it will be a non-removable implant, probably stuck in your enormously fat ass so as to make it hard for you to sit down. Gotta lose that weight, citizen.

What is America's overall response to their government at this time? August gun sales hit another new record.

This is not a good thing, because if people feel strongly enough to -use- those guns, life will be hell for a really long time. Please see Syria for elucidation on the issue of what happens when an all-seeing, all controlling totalitarian regime finally comes apart.

"Migrants" now marching through Hungary.

Refugees begin marching to the border of Germany through Hungary, because there are no trains. That didn't take long.

BUDAPEST — After a day of defiance by increasingly desperate refugees, the government of Hungary metaphorically threw up its hands Friday and said it was offering to bus thousands of migrants to the Austrian border, sending the crisis spinning closer to the heart of the Continent.

An aide to Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in a statement that the buses would transport the thousands still thronging the Keleti railroad station in Budapest and the approximately 1,200 people who stormed out of the train station earlier on Friday and set off on foot toward the Austrian border.

Now we have a large number of people with zero equipment, zero supplies and zero clue what they're doing, walking from Budapest to Austria. Where they may or may not be allowed in. Let it rain or be cold for just two days, and this little stroll through the countryside will be a death march.

People will die from exposure. At first just the very old and the very young, but soon the middle aged, anyone who needs medication, anyone whose shoes are too tight, and so forth.

This is the socialism in action I've been talking about these many years. As the day follows the night, it always comes to this. You were warned. Don't come crying to me when it all comes unglued.

The Phantom