Humor at Yale? Yes!

I noticed the other day that the SJW brigade at Yale was having a "hunger strike" out in front of some building there for some (presumably idiotic) reason that only an SJW would understand.

Yale University graduate students are holding a tag-team hunger strike to demand a union contract, with plans to send in fresh strikers to replace members who become too hungry.

Eight members of Local 33—UNITE HERE, a newly formed union representing graduate student-teachers, started the hunger strike Tuesday after preparing their stomachs for several days beforehand by only eating vegetables, fruits, and eventually, just liquids.

Now, the words "hunger strike" are in quotes because this is a tag-team hunger strike. When you get hungry you can tap out, and somebody else will step in to not-eat while you go get a burger.

But none of the four student-teachers the Independent interviewed said they were willing to risk hospitalization. If not eating endangers a student's health, that individual will sub out and another union member will assume their place in renouncing meals — a moveable fast, if you will.

That in and of itself is funny. But the Yale Republicans club found comedy GOLD among the humorless snowflakes:

I don't know what's more shocking to me. That Yale has Republicans or that someone at Yale has a sense of humor.

Who knew?

The guy who tweeted this out was hard-pressed to find the funny.

But I find it all manner of hilarious.

They set up a real barbecue fundraiser in front of the fake hunger strike.

You're welcome!  ~:D

The Laughing Phantom

Yes, the media IS all the same.

You are not imagining it, the media really is a solid, unified, monolithic lump.

But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there's another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming "bias" and "conspiracy," or counting D's and R's. That's to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn't true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you're a working journalist, odds aren't just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation's most pro-Clinton counties. And you've got company: If you're a typical reader of Politico, chances are you're a citizen of bubbleville, too.

Publishing of books particularly is centered in New York City and Chicago. Mostly NY. So if you want to get your book published, you have to write to a New Yorker sensibility. That means Liberal, irreverent and snarky, pretty much. Lots of conservative sacred cows getting gored, a little creative religion bashing, and of course the pieties of Social Justice must be observed.

Which is exactly what all the Science Fiction and Fantasy books on the shelf at the bookstore look like. That's why we had Sad Puppies 1-4, because a whole huge section of the population has nothing fun to read. We don't share the tastes of the TOR editorial board, or the Random Penguin, and so forth.

There is one place I disagree with the article:

Resist—if you can—the conservative reflex to absorb this data and conclude that the media deliberately twists the news in favor of Democrats. Instead, take it the way a social scientist would take it: The people who report, edit, produce and publish news can't help being affected—deeply affected—by the environment around them.

This is known by the social sciences as Ethnocentrism, and it does account for a lot of the cluelessness of modern reporting. The stuff where they're tone-deaf, or they don't bother telling you things, or they deliberately conceal certain details because they think its rude to mention. That's all down to them not noticing the cultural water they're swimming in.

But we have all seen the NY Times lie, deny and "squirrel!!!" too many times in the last few years to discount corruption as part of the picture. Hillary got the debate questions ahead of time, the Obama administration had a say in stories being published at the NY Times, Google execs visited the White House every day, Facebook caught red-handed cooking their news feed... that kind of evidence can't be ignored.

So yes it is a bubble, AND they're deliberately propagandizing the nation on top of that.

Canada of course is a small town in comparison. We barely have a publishing industry to begin with, and ALL of it is in Toronto for English and Montreal for French. You write to the Canadian Urbanite taste here, or you don't get picked up.

The Phantom

SJW fantasy oppression vs. real oppression

Every once in a while, a couple of things crop up on Drudge that have to be put next to each other.

College Puts White People in Separate Room For 'Privilege Workshop'

vs.

Facing death for being gay, men flee Russia's Chechnya

There you go.

The Phantom

Robots replace entire warehouse staff.

This is a rather stupid article about a pretty amazing robot implementation in China.

THIS army of tiny orange robots which can sort up to 200,000 packages every DAY in a Chinese warehouse are providing an alarming glimpse of what the future could hold in factories around the world.

These miniature machines, each just 7.5 inches, follow a set route and transport parcels from the assembly line to the departure gates where they are then dispatched.

In the STO Express building in Liny, Shandong Province, the 300 robots can get through 20,000 parcels every hour.

The self-charging workers have saved the company, which has 300,000 employees, a staggering 70 per cent of manpower.

I can hear the boys at CUPE headquarters melting down from here.

The Phantom

Expect police overreactions to increase.

From the "running with scissors" file, CBC discovers that comic book conventions have cosplayers in costumes.

Fan Expo got underway at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre Thursday, and with it came an array of excited, costumed fans.
One of those fans apparently startled some GO transit passengers this morning: Toronto police got a call at about 10 a.m. with reports of a person with a gun. It turned out to be part of someone's outfit.
"As with any type of call like this we treat it as a real threat, and then we work our way back down to ensure that there's no threat," Const. Victor Kwong told CBC News.

This time, the gun call didn't end badly. But, then there was this other call:

Call the cops, Martha! Its a ALIEN!

It was almost game over in Grande Prairie this week for a cosplay enthusiast.
Dressed as a character from Fallout, a popular post-apocalyptic video game series, the man walked down a street wearing a gas mask, helmet, armour and bullet belt.
RCMP Cpl. Shawn Graham told CBC News that police received calls just before 5 p.m. Tuesday from citizens concerned the man was wearing what looked like a bomb on his back.
At least eight officers responded with their long guns drawn. Photos show them crouched behind vehicles and bushes.

Emphasis mine. Now, what we have here is a full rollout with rifles on a guy wearing an obvious costume, down the street from the comic convention. Why? Standard Operating Procedure.

SOP response to kid in costume. GUN HIM!!!

"We have to believe everything is real until proven otherwise," said Graham. "In the end you've got a good feeling after going, 'OK, there wasn't a bomb, there was no intent to do anything criminal, it's just someone with their costume."
Graham thinks it should serve as a warning to others who enjoy cosplay that police will assume fake weapons are real.
"There's a time and a place for it," he said, pointing out that costumes are OK at conventions and similar events.
"Wandering around downtown [is] maybe not the place to do it."

That's right nerds. You'd best not show up on the street, 'less you wanna feel the heat. They arrested this guy, took his stuff, and took him away. Why? Standard Operating Procedure. Two seconds of looking told them everything was legit. They busted this kid for wearing a costume.

Cops stealing obvious costume before transporting dangerous nerd.

I'm surprised they didn't beat the shit out of him and drag him around a bit, like United Airlines.

My single question: how long before they shoot somebody for cosplay in public?

The Phantom

FN-FAL variants from Imbel.

These are extremely cool. 7.62x51 carbines on a modified FAL platform. Sweet!

The Phantom

university = wedding? Yes!

This is one of the greatest pieces of wisdom I have seen lately.

Why is it so hard for millennials NOT to go to college?

With college tuition being literally unaffordable, stories after stories about the plight of un/underemployed college graduates, horror stories of the same with crippling student loans, and it no longer being a secret that college is a bubble, why is it so hard for 18 year olds to say, "screw this, I'm going home?"

Its a big question, given that even an engineering degree doesn't necessarily get you a job these days. Why are people still forking over the price of a detached suburban house for a -worthless- degree?

So what possible consumer good exists, that people can't afford, will go into debt for, that doesn't offer anything of tangible financial value afterwards, and has this societal push, borderline obssession to buy it regardless?

Then it hit me.

Weddings.

Weddings are the identical twin sibling of college. 

The reason why can be summarized in one simple phrase:

"It's my day."

However, whereas "my day" is the exclusive preserve of women on their wedding day, there is a similar sense of entitlement to having "my day" FOR BOTH SEXES when it comes to college.  And the reason why is that college is NOT sold to young kids today as the education it was supposed to be, but the "college experience" it is has successfully and falsely been propagated and inflated to what it is now (an industry that is more than TEN TIMES THE SIZE OF THE WEDDING INDUSTRY).

That makes perfect sense. Here's the killer part:

To have this birthright, to have this entitlement, nobody cares about logic, reason, evidence, finances, or math.  College, just like "her day," is worth any price because up to this point in these kids' lives, we as a society have given them nothing else to live for.  We get divorced, we mock nuclear families, we value things over friends, we cripple the economy, we load up on debt, we hate our own country, we criminalize success - precisely, what do these kids have to look forward to after they graduate from college?  As far as they're concerned life is over at 22 and then they lead the lives you do, which, sadly, for the most part is pretty pathetic in their eyes.  Worse, you've made their childhoods so painful with the craptastic public prisons schools, any childlike idealism or hope has been squash and the only light at the end of that tunnel is college.  The price of tuition could go up another 300%, it won't matter, they'll still pay it because these kids have nothing else to live for.

 That, my friends, is wisdom. Read the whole thing.

The Phantom

More robots: stupid, or annoying?

The Guardian, for a wonder, asks the question: do we really want big Roombas cluttering up the sidewalks?

Sharing a sidewalk with one of DoorDash's delivery robots is a bit like getting stuck behind someone playing Pokémon Go on his smartphone. The robot moves a little bit slower than you want to; every few meters it pauses, jerking to the left or right, perhaps turning around, then turning again before continuing on its way.

These are the sidewalks of the future, technology evangelists promise. Autonomous delivery robots, once the exclusive purview of 1980s sci-fi movies, are coming to a city near you, with promises of reduced labor costs, increased efficiency and the reduction of cars.

If you've ever seen one of these things in action, they are dumber than shit. No human could tolerate being stuck behind one. You'd kick it out of the way after thirty seconds, for sure.

So far we hear nothing but cheerful happy-sappy propaganda from the techies who just LOVE these things. They're salivating over the billions of dollars they're going to make.

But here's the thing. One dumber-than-shit robot is a novelty at best, an ignore-able obstruction at worst. The town pizzeria gets a couple for in-town delivery, no big deal.

Hundreds of the damn things, from UPS to the pizza guy to the government delivering welfare checks to some other dumb service/scam we haven't thought of yet, you are not going to be able to ignore that.

They have to cross the street, right? They take longer than a crippled old drunk with a walker to do it. They have to wait for traffic lights. But if there's only a stop sign, then what? You're going to see ten of them waiting at a stop sign when its busy. They're going to get stuck. They're going to get lost. They're going to get rolled upside down and broken open by kids. They're going to wander into your driveway and be attacked by the dog. They're going to end up in the middle of an intersection blowing their tiny annoying horn and blinking their distress light because they had a nervous breakdown. They'll run out of battery. They'll end up busted on your front lawn, and the cops will give -you- a ticket.

The problem, as usual, is greed. The robots suck, but they are super cheap, and they are almost good enough. So, look for your delivery job to go to a Coleman cooler on wheels in the next five years.

The Cooler Phantom

Marvel comics explained.

Marvel head boy of sales was complaining his sales were down. He blamed his customers. Nerd racism, y'know.

Some other idiot chimed in. Yes, the crap comics that weren't selling got a Hugo nomination. Shocking, right?

Then we find some schmuck in Indonesia has included secret antisemitism in X-Men.

But now I think I have the answer. The Marvel comics dilemma is what happens when you let no-talent hipster douchebags play in your sandbox. The link is to an iO9 round-up of what's been happening to Captain America since they made him a Nazi.

If you're reading Marvel comics right now, then you're probably aware that while Steve Rogers has taken up the Captain America mantle once more, something is... very off. Like, "he's secretly a fascist agent of Hydra planning to get space aliens to invade the world" off. Confused? We're here to get you caught up on "Stevil" Rogers.

If, like me, you gave up on Marvel in the 1990's before Northstar was gay, I will save you some trouble with Captain America 2017: It is a confused mess of Leftist propaganda, and the art is crap. Don't spend your money, and don't bother with the i09 link.

So, if the Big Wheels at the House of Mouse want to know what to do about tanking Marvel Comic sales, it is the following:

Your VP of sales thinks his customers are a bunch of racist nerds. You should fix that.

Offshoring your artwork to third world countries will not make you any friends in the US art world, and it has more liabilities than you thought.

Contrary to your VP of Sales (did you fire that guy yet?) what your customers don't want is Captain America Agent of Hydra. Whoever green-lighted that tomfoolery is an assassin trying to poison your company.

You're welcome.

The Comic Phantom

Found out why Marvel has been sucking.

Marvel managers have been listening to these morons here.

On Tuesday morning, the finalists for the 2017 Hugo Awards (the Oscars of sci-fi and fantasy writing) were announced by the World Science Fiction. Unsurprisingly, collected volumes of Marvel's critically acclaimed Black Panther and Ms. Marvel series were both nominated for Best Graphic Story.

These nominations come just days after Marvel's Vice President of Sales, David Gabriel, went out of his way to blame Marvel's lagging sales on comics—like Black Panther and Ms. Marvel—starring people of color and women. Suffice it to say that the optics of this whole thing don't reflect well on the publisher, but the Hugo nominations send a telling message to Marvel about just how the public actually feels about its "diverse books."

I'll repeat that last bit because it is just too sweet: "...the Hugo nominations send a telling message to Marvel about just how the public actually feels about its "diverse books."

That is actually true. It does send a telling message. And the message is "Ghostbusters got a Hugo nomination too."

The Hugo's new role in SF/F is the Kiss of Death. When you have completely jumped the shark, abandoned your morals, your values, your common sense and your audience, when your sales are tanking hard because you have been producing nothing but Lefty propaganda, you will be nominated for a Hugo.

These days a Hugo nomination is not an achievement. It is a warning.

Note to Marvel board of directors: fire everyone, start over.

The Phantom

Hugo Award Nominations are up.

I did not pay money to Worldcon this year, having been scorned and smeared two years running as some form of Nazi off-scouring by the stinking SJW Horde. You don't hand out a wooden Assterisk to commemorate my participation and expect me to buy another membership.

Therefore I will again use the Hugos as a warning label not a recommendation.

The reason why can be summed in this example:
 Nominated for best SF movie , Ghostbusters.

'Nuff said.

The Phantom

Another kitchen robot.

Pretty soon, the entire kitchen will be automated. Sally the salad robot, coming soon to a burger joint near you.

Sally occupies about the same amount of space as a dorm room refrigerator, and uses 21 different ingredients—including romaine, kale, seared chicken breast, Parmesan, California walnuts, cherry tomatoes, and Kalamata olives—to craft more than a thousand types of salad in about 60 seconds, while the customer watches the process. The machine weighs in at 350 pounds, making it more appropriate for industrial settings than for home kitchens at the moment. "Sally will be going on a diet," said its creator, Deepak Sekar, 35, founder of Chowbotics Inc., looking into his and Sally's future.
The benefits of Sally are manifold, according to Sekar. "Sally is the next generation of salad restaurant," he claims, comparing it to chains such as Chopt and Fresh & Co. For one thing, a robot can make salad faster than a human can. Also, you will know precisely how many calories your salad is delivering; there won't be the problem of consuming one piled high with garnishes that turn out to be more fattening than a burger. And it's more hygienic to have a machine prepare your salad than to have multiple people working on a line—or worse still, a serve-yourself salad bar.

Sally does require a human set of hands to prep the ingredients that go into its canisters, which are then installed in the robot. (Sekar called the process of chopping ingredients in the machine "too complicated right now," although it's something he promises for the future; he offered an analogy: "It's like paper getting stuck in a printer; it shuts down the process.")

A McDonalds will have one kid in the back keeping all the machines fed, and a cop in the front making sure people don't wreck the place.

Except there won't be a sit-down place, just an armored slot in a concrete wall. The slot spits out eco-friendly hemp based dishes full of robot prepared McGruel(TM). Because no one has a fucking job, so no one can afford a salad.

The Phantom

No wonder comic books suck.

With management like this, no wonder Marvel Comics suck.

Marvel's vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio's efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers "were turning their noses up" at diversity and "didn't want female characters out there".

Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.

But speaking at the Marvel retailer summit about the studio's falling comic sales since October, David Gabriel told ICv2 that retailers had told him that fans were sticking to old favourites. "What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity," he said. "They didn't want female characters out there. That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not."

He added: "I don't know that that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales … Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up."

This is a guy who makes decisions on what gets the green light at Marvel Comics. Sales are down because our customers are racist/bigot/homophobe nerds who should all be ashamed of themselves!

I hate to tell you buddy, you lost me back in 1993 before Northstar was gay.

Let's consider where Marvel has been lately:

Thor is a chick.

Peter Parker is dead, Spiderman is some other kid now.

Captain America was dead, then he was some black dude fighting -against- America, and now he's alive again, but he's a Nazi.

Wolverine is a broken old man dying of something, Professor X is an incontinent demented geezer who killed all the X-Men by accident, America is Hell and Canada is The Promised Land. (Seriously, have any of you hipsters ever even BEEN to Canada? Or out of Manhattan?)

Johnny Storm is a black kid with a white sister, and Mr. Fantastic is a cowardly dickhead. Sadly, the Johnny Storm thing was not dumbest thing about that movie.

Tony Stark is either dead or in detox, Iron Man is a black chick with big hair.

Various minor superheros who were straight are now gay as their single most defining characteristic.

That's not "diversity." That is imaginational bankruptcy. (Imaginational is totally a word.)

I do not want to pay three or four dollars for a ten-page comic that is mostly full page panels of blood spatter and advertising. I want to read Peter Parker, the Amazing Spiderman vs Villain Guy. I do NOT want to read "Peter Parker transitioning to female," or "Peter Parker dies horribly and some random scrub takes over for him. Then dies horribly."

I am not going to collect twenty different universes, most of which only exist so that big name characters can be gay, or chicks, or gay chicks, or some other fucked-up combination.

Stan Lee and those old geezers in wheelchairs started with a simple concept. What if Spiderman was a real kid, who really lived in NYC? What would happen? Then they ran with it. That's what made Marvel awesome, and I suggest if you want your sales to climb back up out of the toilet, you get back to it ASAP.

So, if you want to have a gay black girl with big hair in a wheelchair be an armored crime fighter, I might be up for that.  As long as the thing isn't one long boring sermon about how much America sucks.

Making her Iron Man? Nope. Not going to read it. Tony Stark is Iron Man, Peter Parker is Spider Man, Thor is the SON of Odin, Johnny Storm is a smart alec blond kid, and Colossus is a straight Russian dude with a Boris Badenov accent you can spread on toast. How fucked is it that the best X-Man movie so far is fricking Deadpool?

The Phantom

Hollywood writers threaten strike!

There's a new reality coming to slap Hollywood upside its head.

"It's getting more and more difficult to make a living as a writer," said John Bowman, a TV writer-producer, and former head of the WGA negotiating committee.

Naturally, being a pack of socialist idiots, the heavily Left leaning Writers Union proposes to strike. The last time they did that was 2007.

The article is blaming the Internet and Netflix, but similar things are happening in the newspaper, book and magazine publishing. Being a Left-leaning writer of Left-leaning propaganda in print form is a shrinking business model. Newspapers are going under all the time,

There's no reason to think that movies and TV shows are any different. If nobody is watching your crap, you are not going to get paid.

The Phantom

The Mike Pence Scandal: he doesn't harass women!

In honor of Kathy Shaidle, we should call this one Pence-a-quiddick.

Via Small Dead Animals, and Instapundit who said "How stupid are you?" we are alerted to this scandalous scandal:

The vice president—and other powerful men—regularly avoid one-on-one meetings with women in the name of protecting their families. In the end, what suffers is women's progress.

Wow! Really? How extraordinary! Tell me more!

In a recent, in-depth Washington Post profile of Karen Pence, Vice President Mike Pence's wife, a small detail is drawing most of the attention: "In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won't attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either." 

In context, this choice is not especially surprising. The Pences are evangelical Christians, and their faith animates both their policy views and how they express devotion to one another. Eight months into their courtship, the Post reporter Ashley Parker writes, "Karen engraved a small gold cross with the word 'Yes' and slipped it into her purse to give him when he popped the question."

Clearly these people are evil and must be purged. I mean, Christians? In the White House? Scandalous!

I was going to ignore the whole thing because it is the stupidest feminazi hackery yet, topping even the pussy hats. Particularly coming after the pearl-clutching uproar of Trump and his pussy-grabbing comment ten fricking years ago.

But then, I saw this. Ashley Csanady in The National Post, going full retard.

The Atlantic, bless its soul, actually dug up the context of the 2002 piece in The Hill. They add the details that Pence also sometimes eschews dinners and parties with male colleagues and it's "about building a zone around your marriage."

...snippage...

Pence is an evangelical Christian and his faith is being used to both defend and excoriate his no-ladies-for-lunch policy. The aforementioned Atlantic piece calls it the "Billy Graham rule, named for the famous evangelist who established similar guidelines for the pastors working in his ministry."
The religious origins of Pence's self-restriction don't make it any less sexist.

Really? Defending your marriage is sexist, now? Well no, actually it is so much worse than that.

At its core, Pence's self-imposed ban is rape culture.
Nor is that a label I assign lightly. "Rape culture" is a phrase so overused it's become almost meaningless, like calling someone a Nazi on the internet. But it has a very clear meaning: the notion, whether conscious or unconscious, that men can't control themselves around women because "boys will be boys."
The explicit reasons for Pence's restriction are religion and family, but the implicit reason is that he must avoid alone-time with women lest his stringent religious moral code fall apart in the presence of a little lipstick and décolletage. That is rape culture.

 And that, my friends, is why you never go full retard.

The Scandalous Phantom

When doctors lie.

When doctors lie, they do it really carefully. They use lots of charts, big words in Latin, and complicated statistics.

Compared with nonimmigrants, immigrant children and youth had a lower risk of unintentional firearm injury, although the risk of assault-related firearm injury was higher among refugees and immigrants from Central America and Africa. The results suggest that prevention strategies for firearm safety should target nonimmigrant youth as well as these newly identified high-risk immigrant populations.

The money quote:

 We counted almost 1800 firearm injuries among children and youth in Ontario over a 5-year period, which represents almost 1 injury per day.

What this study purports to show is that Canada needs more gun control, because kids are getting shot in this country. This leads to sensational headlines.

From the Blob and Snail:

New Canadian research shows one young person is shot almost every day in Ontario, with the vast majority of injuries being unintentional.

The Toronto (Red) Star:

 Every day a child or youth is shot in Ontario and three out of four of incidents are accidental, says a groundbreaking study on firearm injuries in Canada.

The problem is, "one young person is shot almost every day in Ontario" is a lie. One young person is not shot with a gun every day in Ontario. The point of the study is to make you think that, but it just ain't so.

The 1800 firearm related injuries turns out to not be 1800 gunshot wounds from actual bullets fired out of actual guns, hitting actual children/youths.

Lie One, 1800 "children" or "youths" did not get hurt. The age admitted to the study goes up to 25 years old. "Youth" implies an age under the voting, or at the most the drinking age. Voting is 18, owning a firearm is 18, drinking is 19. The study falsely labels those over the age of majority and legally adults as "youths." Why? To get the numbers up, because children never really get shot in this country.

Lie Two, "1800 firearm related injuries" turns out not to be actual gunshot wounds. The study considers air pistols and air rifles, BB guns and paintball guns to be "firearms." So if you twist your ankle playing paintball or pinch your hand in the hinge of a pump air rifle, those are "firearm related injuries." Of note is the omission of their interesting interpretation of the word "firearm" from the study. A reporter had to phone them up to get this rather important information.

How many ACTUAL children had an ACTUAL gunshot wound in Ontario from 2008–2012? We do not know from this study. I suspect the real number is under 100, but since the authors conflated paintball welts and BB gun bruises with gunshots, I can't really say.

They also use a bunch of other studies with equally dodgy evidence to lie about a bunch of other stuff. I'd go into it, but then this would be a book, not a blog post.

Bottom line, they lied. Like a pile of Persian carpets. Then the Canadian Medical Association Journal editors and the journal's reviewers allowed the lie to stand. Then the Canadian media en-mass transmitted and amplified the lie.

That is how things are, here in Canada in 2017. Nice, eh?

The Phantom

Smart TV hackable by TV signal.

This is making the "smart" TV market look very bad indeed.

A new attack on smart TVs allows a malicious actor to take over devices using rogue DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial) signals, get root access on the smart TV, and use the device for all sorts of nasty actions, ranging from DDoS attacks to spying on end users.

The attack, developed by Rafael Scheel, a security researcher working for Swiss cyber security consulting company Oneconsult, is unique and much more dangerous than previous smart TV hacks.

...

At the center of Scheel's attack is Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV), an industry standard supported by most cable providers and smart TV makers that "harmonizes" classic broadcast, IPTV, and broadband delivery systems. TV transmission signal technologies like DVB-T, DVB-C, or IPTV all support HbbTV.

Scheel says that anyone can set up a custom DVB-T transmitter with equipment priced between $50-$150, and start broadcasting a DVB-T signal.

We are nowhere near paranoid enough.

The Phantom

 

University of Regina to be renamed with a "Va"

In the ever-accelerating Race To Insanity, the newly renamed University of Vagina will have a "Masculinity Confession Booth" for boys to confess their sins.

A university will be hosting a "Masculinity Confession Booth" along with a number of other workshops and screenings to combat "hypermasculinity."
"We have all reinforced hypermasculinity one way or another regardless of our gender!!" explains the University of Regina event description. "Come and share your sins so we can begin to discuss how to identify and change our ways !!!"
The "Man Up Against Violence" initiative will be hosting these events at the University of Regina in Canada during the present week.

No word on whether they will have a "Femininity Confession Booth" for young women to confess their use of sparkle and pink ribbons.

The Phantom

Walmart as vending machine? It might happen.

Further to my ongoing ravings about minimum wage and how it is killing us, we have news. Walmart is doing an experiment.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is creating a technology-startup incubator in Silicon Valley to identify changes that will reshape the retail experience, including virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery and personalized shopping.

The incubator will be called Store No. 8, a reference to a Wal-Mart location where the company experimented with new store layouts. Marc Lore, chief executive officer of Wal-Mart's e-commerce operations, announced the incubator Monday at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas.

Amazon is kicking their ass lately, is what this boils down to. The "virtual reality, autonomous vehicle and drone delivery" part is to reduce employee headcount in the store. "Personalized shopping" is code for data mining. They track your every move in the store, and on-line, then serve you advertisements based on your behavior.

Pretty much they want a situation where you drive up, the store automatically knows exactly what you want, and spits out a box. You load the box in your car and drive away happy, while they bill your bank account remotely. What they really, really want is for you to chose items on their web site, then robots deliver them to your house. Because that can be end-to-end machinery.

Pretty soon, the only retail jobs that will be available will be robot mechanic.

Hacking your way to freedom, farmer style.

This is just unbelievable, on a bunch of levels.

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

You call that a nightmare? How about this: somebody else who isn't John Deere could shut down -every- tractor. Maybe the local government, maybe the state or federal government, or maybe plain old criminals. Hold the whole state of Nebraska to ransom at harvest time? They could do it!

On a plain old corporate level, every farmer who had to sign that contract is now looking at John Deere's competition for an alternative, because JD just pissed him off. This is what happens when sociopaths get into a company's management. They see the customer as a sheep to be sheared, and they trim as close as they can.

On a societal level, this is a thing we cannot allow. You are not leasing your house and everything in it, you -own- it. It belongs to you. Those two words, "own" and "belong" are the basis of Western civilization. Nobody is going to buy a tractor or a car, for tens of thousands of dollars, and then meekly accept that they have to keep paying the company so they won't turn the thing off. You buy it, you own it.

Except as we know, there's a huge push from Big Corporate and Silicon Valley to make this leasing model the new reality. They want Ford to retain ownership of your new Mustang, and prevent you from repairing or modifying it outside their dealer network.

Keep your eyes open for this, coming soon to consumer appliances in your house. Annual fee to keep your Smart Fridge going. You will be seeing this soon.

The Phantom Cassandra