About freakin' time, dudes.

CPC FINALLY keeps their promise and kills the gun registry.

The Harper government's controversial bill to end the long-gun registry has passed the House of Commons, marking the end of a long political battle over one of the most controversial law enforcement measures in recent memory.

The bill passed easily, by a margin of 159 to 130, as the Conservatives used their majority in the House secure passage of the bill, which now goes to the Senate where the Conservatives also have a majority. The Senate hearings are expected to take several weeks before the bill is passed into law.

I've been waiting for this since Kim Campbell ramrodded C-17 through, the original "assault weapons" ban of 1991 and the beginning of Alan Rock's gun registry ambitions.

Twenty years is a LONG F-ING TIME TO WAIT, O great CPC overlords. I'd appreciate it if y'all would get the lead out so I can go shooting this spring.

The Phantom

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Today is Starbucks Appreciation Day.

As relayed by The Captain at Kate McMillan's Small Dead Animals, today is not just Valentine's Day. It is also Starbucks Appreciation Day.

Apparently some hoplphobe gun grabber outfit approached Starbucks about not serving gun owners, and Starbucks told 'em to push off. Very out of character for a Seattle based outfit, and a welcome change from the usual behaviour we have come to expect from Corporate America. I would guess that an accountant deep in the bowels of headquarters compared the number of  true-believer gun control fanatics to the annual gun sales in the USA, and went with the bigger figure.

So, for returning to profitability and common sense over pie-in-the-sky utopian whackoism, The Phantom applauds Starbucks and says to all you faithful out there: "Go buy a coffee."  Make mine a double cappuccino with extra caffeine please, still haven't got my motor running this morning.

The Decaffeinated Phantom

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Is Liberalism a disease, and if so is it contagious?

New evidence says... maybe!

Hat tip to Small Dead Animals.

The Phantom

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From today's "No, you are not paranoid enough" file...

Three items which taken separately are alarming, when taken together they're... how shall I say this without tipping off the watchers... they are double-plus ungood.

1:" The LAPD is fighting crime from a high-tech war room that gives it eyes all over the city. The surveillance hub is now a model for police forces around the world..."

You know where else they have surveillance hubs? Prisons. Check out how they caught the LA arsonist:

Most recently, RACR was invaluable in putting an end to the Hollywood arsons.

Malinowski says RACR plotted each arson fire incident as it happened, creating a three-square-mile geographic hot spot that resulted in the quick arrest of accused fire starter Harry Burkhart.

"At the time he was taken into custody, this area was flooded with sheriffs and with LAPD officers," says Malinowski. "Based on the fact that we kind of could see his movements in real time."

They can catch that guy, they can catch YOU. For doing NOTHING. Or maybe for voting Republican.

2: Homeland Security is monitoring the web for anti-government sentiment and signs of social unrest.

A privacy advocacy group has swayed Congress to hold a hearing next week into the Department of Homeland Security's practice of monitoring social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as media reports and organizations, including The Drudge Report.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) recently obtained close to 300 pages of documents, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, detailing the federal agency's "intelligence gathering" practices on the web.

Among the documents were guidelines from DHS instructing outside contractors to monitor the web for media reports and comments that "reflect adversely" on the agency or the federal government.

11 million bucks worth, from the article.  Here's two Brits they pulled this Twitter surveillance on. Here's a Canadian.

3: Occupy CPAC protesters were paid $60 each.

Protesters at Friday's "Occupy CPAC" event, organized by AFL-CIO and the Occupy DC movement, told The Daily Caller that they were paid "sixty bucks a head" to protest outside the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

One protester told TheDC that all the "Occupy" activists were being paid to protest, and that his union, Sheet Metal Workers Local 100, approached him about the money-making opportunity.

"I have nothing nice to say about Local 100. … They just told me 'you wanna make sixty bucks? So c'mon,'" the protester said.

Other "Occupy CPAC" protesters were unwilling to speak on camera because they were unaware what they were protesting and what the CPAC event was about.

So at the VERY SAME TIME that the cops are gearing up war rooms and the federal spooks are haunting your internet connection, friends of the regime are gettin' paid to frig up the opposition's political events.

That's what I call double-plus ungood, baby.

But the cherry on top of this sh*t sandwich has to be Barry's announcement about churches and reproductive medicine.

The White House announced today that, instead of forcing religious employers to pay for birth control, it will force insurance companies to offer the drugs free of charge to all women, no matter where they work.

What's alarming about this, even if you're not Catholic or whatever, is that the President of the United States doesn't have the power to tell private insurance companies to pay for this stuff. He can't do that. And here he is, doing it anyway. While paying punks to beat up people he doesn't like and spying on everybody.  Oh, and if he does win in November he's not only got 4 more years to do whatever the hell he wants, as in more of the same, he's got the power to appoint new Supreme Court Justices. So as the NRA says, you can kiss your guns goodbye.

Got that private island in the Pacific ready to run to?

The Phantom

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Paranoia update: Canada joins in the fun!

Big Brother Inc. (Canadian division) has begun reading your texts and will arrest you for unlawful figures of speech.

A Muslim businessman in Canada became a terror suspect for telling his sales staff in a text message to "blow away" the competition at a New York City trade show, a religious association said Friday.

Moroccan-born Saad Allami, who works as a telecommunications company sales manager, was arrested three days after he sent the message in January 2011 and detained while police searched his home, said the Muslim Council of Montreal.

"The whole time, the officers kept repeating to the plaintiff's wife that her husband was a terrorist," said court filings in a lawsuit filed by Allami, cited by local media. Allami was released after four hours of questioning.

Some of his colleagues reportedly claimed they were also held for hours at the Canada-US border on account of the accusations made against their boss.

I predict this kind of thing is going to become extremely common over the next few years as these keyword-trawlers start getting used by every podunk cop-shop in N. America and Europe. You're going to write "I was blown away by that movie" in an email and have a cop on your doorstep twenty minutes later.

I recommend increased use of euphemism and creative spelling. Or maybe just send lists of keywords to your whole address book a couple times a day, that works too.

Or we could assert our rights as free people and put a stop to this crap.  Radical idea I know but hey, nobody has tried it recently.

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fun and useful hack, tiny display.

From Hack-A-Day, this excellent hack of a cheapie little 1.5" display.

Little, no name, 1.5 inch LCD photo key-chains are all over the place for practically nothing. Not too surprisingly these things do not vary much in the parts that they use, some flash ram, a little lipo battery and a 16 bit color LCD. Wanting to find a way to reuse that LCD [Simon] Has an excellent tutorial on how to reuse a FTM144D01N LCD with a ILITEK ILI9163 LCD driver for your electronic projects.

What I like about this article is it shows you how to figure out the display's logic from scratch. Using this guy's method most any small display of unknown provenience can be used to do something fun.  I've been thinking those cheapie picture frame displays would be nice to use for something, but there are never any drivers for them.

Now we can write our own. Yay!

The Phantom

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Self guiding bullet no longer just for Flash Gordon.

This is extremely cool.

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