Liberals never, ever learn anything.

Canada's Liberal Party, stuck on stupid forever.

There's no reason assault rifles like the one used to slaughter 20 young schoolchildren in Connecticut should be available in Canada, says Liberal leadership hopeful Marc Garneau.

The Montreal MP said Tuesday he'd look at banning semi-automatic weapons, like the military-style, .223-calibre Bushmaster used in last week's massacre.

"There is absolutely no reason that anybody can vote to say that that kind of weapon, that can fire off great numbers of rounds like that, is necessary," Garneau told The Canadian Press.

"That kind of weapon, to me, definitely — well, it is (already) a restricted weapon but one should look at not allowing those things."

Mr. Garneau may not have noticed, but his party already did everything he's suggesting. And now they are but a shadow of their former selves.

They posture, they prance, they pout, but they don't learn.

The Phantom

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Joe Manchin, Trayvon Martin, and Barney Fife: Implications for Gun Safety By James Fallows of The Atlantic.

Dear Sir:

I read your piece in The Atlantic today. I would like to address your points in order as you wrote them.

1. Maybe this time is different.

I agree. This time is different.  After every mass shooting or notable gun incident such as George Zimmerman defending himself, gentlemen and ladies of the media like yourself trot out the same arguments. The Josh Sugarmann argument that "assault weapons" are different. The "impulsivity" theory so popular in the medical literature that guns cause crime merely by being present. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

But this time, everybody knows all those arguments have been disproved. This time, your readership knows that you know it too. For example, you know very well that the M-16 is a rifle specifically chosen by the US military because it was -less- lethal than the M-1 Garand, and that the AR-15 is not a machine gun. You know that .223 caliber ammo is too weak for deer hunting. You know that the Second Amendment is not about deer hunting. You've been told so often over the years by so many people, your ears probably ring every time you hear it again.

All you media guys know this stuff. And after 2000 when Al Gore lost the election to Chimpy McBushitler you didn't bring up any of it for twelve years. Until today. Post election 2012, Obama safely ensconced for four more years.

This time is different, because this time there is no chance at all you are mistaken or just don't know the facts.

2) Are more guns the answer?

Yes. Obviously so. Furthermore as I said above, you know it to be true. Already demonstrated across the USA.  I don't have to bore you with the Concealed Carry success story or all the famous cases where armed civilians stopped mass shootings. You know them all.

3) What about the "knowledge gap?"

There is no knowledge gap. There is no question about "whether gun-safety advocates "know enough" about firearms to make sensible proposals". They aren't gun safety proposals. They are gun confiscation proposals. Civil disarmament proposals. Propaganda disguised as concern for the children. "As the father of a young daughter, I for one do not want her growing up in a world where she is told she has to carry a gun to be safe."  Please. Can we really be that stupid, Mr. Fallows? Really?

This is not a debate, sir. Its not a discussion of the relative merits of a public policy. Gun control has no merits. It is a stupid idea which doesn't work, and has been proven not to work every single time it is tried. You know it, and we all know that you do.

This is a partisan smear campaign waged by the Democrat Party for political advantage, and you are a volunteer. Your boss got his daily update from the Democrat Party. He told you to dust off that anti-gun piece you've had cluttering up your hard drive since the 1990's, and you did. How does the saying go, "never let a crisis go to waste"?

I should tell you though, I think you and the rest of your main stream media colleagues are making a grave mistake. The only concrete result of your propaganda push has been record breaking gun sales in an already record breaking year. It seems to me that about half the people in the USA have decided they really need lots of guns and ammunition, as in lots more than they already had stored up from four straight years of record gun sales.  Call me a crazy gun freak if you like, but I don't think that's a healthy sign in a democracy.

The Phantom

Update: Well the guy wrote me back! It was an awesome conversation:

James Fallows  

Brave people write under pseudonyms.

The Phantom

Smart people write under pseudonyms, you mean.

Do you know the term SWATing? It happens to people like me sometimes when we disagree with sacred cows like gun control in public. Ask Patrick Frey and Erick Erickson how they liked it Mr. Fallows, that would be my answer to you. Safety first.  Or perhaps take the example of Stephen Crowder who got punched out on camera last week by one of your Democrat coreligionists in Michigan.

At any rate, you want to back up your article or you going to concede my point?

James Fallows

Sorry, no written exchanges with people who won't use their real names.

Like any name I give this idiot is going to be the real one. I'm tempted to make some shit up, but its really not worth the trouble, he'll just lie. Again.

Point conceded!

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Soledad O'Brien: Fool or Liar?

That disturbance in the Force you just felt was the result of an awesome and momentous event: The Phantom just disagreed with Kathy Shaidle.  Doesn't happen often, but when it does, its worth talking about.

From the official web site of the dangerous short person Kathy Shaidle, aka Five Feet of Fury:

Soledad O'Brien is the reason women shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Kathy links to this interview between Soledad O'Brien and John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime".

Now, as one might imagine John Lott has done many years of research on the topic of gun control laws, and has authored many a book and scientific paper on the subject in his time. His opinion is, to put it mildly, an informed one.
Watching the interview with Ms. O'Brien is somewhat frustrating, because Lott doesn't defend himself. She spends the whole segment calling him irrational, pretty much. He just keeps laying out more and more data, which doesn't forward his side of the argument at all. It just makes him look like a Poindexter.

This is the source of my disagreement with Kathy.  She posts this O'Brien quote from the end of the interview:

 "I appreciate you talking with me this morning, but I just have to say, your position completely boggles me, honestly. I just do not understand it."

Kathy's thesis is that O'Brien is clearly an idiot who can't understand a simple exposition of fact, because she won't shut up long enough to hear the answers to her questions.

Here's the problem. Soledad O'Brien is a news reader. She doesn't interview people on the spot with questions of her own devising, she reads a teleprompter. Somebody else wrote her side of that interview, she just read it. So its entirely possible she really is an idiot, but we don't know because she doesn't give anything of herself in these segments. She reads the screen.

I think what's important here is that distinction, and the implication behind it. Since Friday last and the Sandy Hook shooting, we have seen the liberal media having a paroxysm. News readers from all the stations and shows are making huge errors of fact, talking about machine guns that fire thirty rounds a second, talking about high powered weapons that are no good for hunting, all the horseshit they always used to say back in the pre-2000 time before Algore got beat by George W. Bush in the Presidential Sweepstakes.

A major part of that Bush victory was the anger of gun owners against Clinton for the Assault Weapons ban, and the certain knowledge that Gore would pass even more gun control. Despite 9/11, the Republicans did not change the gun laws because they knew they'd be slaughtered at the Primary elections if they did. The DemocRats likewise shut up about guns for twelve years. Even after the Aurora Colorado shooting in July this year, pre-election, there wasn't much in the news except grumbling from the usual suspects, like Nancy Pelosi. But now, post election? ALL the old chestnuts are coming out.

Previous to the 2000 election I thought there was genuine ignorance in the media, and that they really didn't know the facts of the matter. Since then there has been ten years of war and ten years of mass shootings in Europe, the repeal of the Assault Weapons ban, the passage of Right to Carry laws in many US states, Stand Your Ground laws, and most recently the obscene spectacle of gang banger Trayyyyyvon Martin being held up as a victim of "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman, complete with Black Panthers, death threats and NBC falsifying 911 tapes. After all that my friends, there is no media wanker left out there who doesn't know a Bushmaster AR-15 is not a machine gun, or that .223 caliber is not a High Powered Rifle.

This is a different game now. We are not dealing with a bunch of thick-headed liberals who won't listen.

What we have here is a focus grouped, Photoshopped, airbrushed and polished propaganda campaign put on by frustrated partisans who have been sharpening their knives for twelve years.

Now the stars are in alignment for the Big Push, they think. Obama the Saviour has won his second term, the Democrats have held their Senate majority, the red states are in retreat and the Blue Liberals are in the ascendant. House Republicans are caving on the Fiscal Cliff, their voters stayed home on election day, their moral is low, and so "Now is the time for all good DemocRats to come to the aid of the party!"

And you know, I'm sure in certain circles this propaganda putsch is being quite effective. No doubt all the hipsters in Greenwich Village are texting all manner of witty Tweets to each other about those stupid Republicans clinging to their guns and religion. Soledad O'Brien won that segment against John Lott. She came off looking good, he came off looking the way CNN's producers wanted him to look. Like Poindexter.

Kathy is therefore el wrongo. Little Soledad isn't a fluffy bunny eyecandy bonehead, she's a friggin' shark in a cheap rabbit suit. She's reading focus-grouped lies and distortions off a teleprompter on purpose to get what she wants.

However, the other side of the story is the gun sales. After the Sandy Hook shooting on Friday the USA experienced the record breaking gun sales weekend of all time. In a recod breaking year they broke the record again. Sales continue sharply up this week, I surmise. So the real result that CNN, the rest of the media and all the Lefty politicians are getting is the arming of America. Exactly the opposite of what they are trying to accomplish, which is the dis-arming of America. Half the country is voting NO! at the gun shop.

The federal government can pass all the gun bans and bullshit regulations that they want, but that genie ain't going back in that bottle boys and girls. There's millions of brand new guns, hundreds of millions of old ones and billions of rounds of ammo out there. No power on Earth is going to winkle them all out of hiding. Its impossible.  All Little Soledad the Shark Babe is really doing is driving a wedge deeper between the big urban centers and Flyover Land. That would be the place where the big urban centers get all their food.

Kathy is therefore also right, Soledad "the Shark" O'Brien is a damn fool. But then sharks are known for their bite, not their wit.

The Phantom

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Christians beating plowshares into swords, legal style.

Yoga. Not what one thinks of when the word "controversy". But in California some Christians seem to have awoken to the fact that yoga is a Hindu religious practice, not plain old calisthenics.

Encinitas is believed to be the only public school system that will have yoga instructors teach full-time at its nine schools as part of an overall wellness curriculum that includes nutrition and a school garden program, among other things.

The program is expected to teach a 30-minute yoga lesson to roughly 5,000 students twice a week at the district's schools, which run kindergarten through sixth grade. It is funded with a $533,000 grant from the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit whose board of directors includes the son of the late Indian instructor Krishna Pattabhi Jois, whose teachings are said to have popularized Ashtanga yoga in the Western world and were followed by Madonna and Sting.

A parent is going to sue the Encinitas school board  on the basis of that old chestnut so beloved by liberals everywhere, the separation of Church and State.

Mary Eady pulled her first-grade son out of the classes.

Eady said she observed a kindergarten class in which the children did the motions referred to in yoga practices as a sun salutation. The folded over children, stood upright, sweeping up their arms toward the sky.

She said while the teacher called it an "opening sequence" the connotation was the same in her mind: Students were learning to worship the sun, which went against her Christian beliefs that only God should be worshipped.

"It will change the way you think," she said. "What they are teaching is inherently spiritual, it's just inappropriate therefore in our public schools."

Their attorney, Dean Broyles, says they are considering suing to halt the program.

The article goes to some considerable length to ridicule this woman, but give all the lawsuits over Christmas trees and nativity scenes from the Left over the years, I think she's got a major point. Yoga IS a Hindu religious practice. It is designed to lead the practitioner in the ways of Hindu spirituality. Its properly considered as prayer, and is practiced as such.  It has no Christian  basis at all, and indeed runs counter to many basic Christian tenets. One need not read too far in the Yoga Sutras to discover that.

So way to go Mary Eady for making the Lefty sword cut the other way for a change. Stand up for yourself or be ground under.

The Phantom

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Some things which should be obvious, stated bluntly.

Time for some blunt force trauma with the Cluebat Of Truth, my friends.

The Truth hurts.

 I got me some liberal sacred cows to slaughter today.  Conservatives and Friends of The Phantom will find it obvious that this screed is not meant for them. No, I'm talking to YOU, dumbass liberal reader. Let me lay it out for you in small words even you can understand, you illiterate nekulturny morons.

1. Government does not have the power to control guns.

They really don't. What they have is the power to pass laws. Laws and police are insufficient to keep guns away from criminals. IT.CANNOT. BE. DONE. The Chicoms couldn't do it, the Soviets couldn't do it, the Mexicans, Canadians, Jamaicans, British, French, Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Danish... Ugandans... Rwandans... there is no government on this Earth, no matter how dictatorial, brutal or pervasive, which has successfully prevented bad guys from getting a gun if they want one.

Why? Well, after 112 years of drug control laws, are there fewer junkies in the world? No. Can you buy weed and speed at the local high school? Yes. Will the vast panoply of government power fare better against something that you can make in your basement than against plants that have to be grown and refined on a different continent and shipped here across multiple foreign borders? Unlikely.

 And yes, you CAN make an AK47 in your basement. That link is to a guy who made one. By hand. In his basement. Out of a shovel.

Some guy made this out of a common garden spade.

So grow a clue, liberals. Your beloved government does not have the power to do what you want it to.
What the government does have is the power to do is kill you and/or fuck up your life.

Which brings us to the second point.

2. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution is not about hunting.

My favorite quote from the crocodile-tear shouting section over Sandy Hook today:

The grieving state's [Connecticut] Governor Dan Malloy backed a proposal to bring in a ban on assault weapons. He said: "You don't hunt deer with these things."

She didn't die from being shot.

Hunting has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. If you are an American, it is about your last chance to prevent falling into the trap that crushed the Ukranians in the 1930's. They call it the Holodomor.  Under-educated fans of Marx should look this up.
The Founders of the USA knew that all the cleverness in the world was not going to keep scumbags from seizing control of government forever. Current conditions and past history prove them right. Their actions in creating the Second Amendment were to create a last-ditch for the general citizenry to fight tyranny from. You can tell you are in that last ditch right now because of the amount of effort the DemocRats are expending to take it away from you.

3. The police are not going to protect you.

Living next to Caledonia Ontario as I do, I'd have to be a blind and deaf idiot to still think the police are there to protect me and my property. But just for the sake of the bleating liberals who might chance to read this, I will pretend they are. The police love me and want me to be safe.
Ok, given that, and accepting that police in North America really will show up armed, dangerous and thirsting for criminal blood at the site of a school shooting, the Sandy Hook school shooter had more than enough time to break in to the locked school (yes, it was locked) kill all those kids and teachers, and finally off himself just as the cops finally showed up to frag his murdering ass. I'm sure we can assume the cops went as fast as they possibly could, given little kids were involved.

This is what cops -actually- do: clean up.

It was too slow. Because the total length of the engagement was under ten minutes. It had to take at least five minutes for the cops to even show up and get their rifles out. Five minutes in, those kids were already shot. Cops can't be there, even when they want to.

Conversely...

Little known fact from the Clackamas Mall shooting in Oregon last week, which happened the day after Sandy Hook, that Oregon shooter was stopped by an ARMED CIVILIAN. But you didn't hear about that. At all. Because the national media isn't telling you. The Gabrielle Giffords shooting was stopped by armed civilians and unarmed ones as well, who tackled Jared Loughner and stuck a .45 in his face. Giffords' husband seems happy to forget that little detail even though it likely saved her life.

Call 911 and die. Pull out a roscoe and live. Its that simple.

4. If you think you're in grave danger of being randomly shot to death, you are an IDIOT.

Go crunch some numbers. You're a lot more likely to get eaten by wild animals than shot in a mass killing spree. How many people do YOU know that got eaten by a bear?

More likely to kill you than an AK-47.

In fact, according to statistics of the World Health Organization you are more likely to die of the measles than any form of violence.

Much more likely to kill you than a crazy shooter.

Historically speaking you are tremendously more likely to be killed by your own government than by any criminal activity, much less a mass killer. See number 2 above.

Hence the Second Amendment. Them Founder dudes wuz smart.

Bottom line, if you think this type of random murder is at all likely to happen to you, you're also the type of idiot that buys ten lottery tickets to "improve your odds". Lotteries are a tax on people like you, who can't do basic arithmetic. You idiot.

This concludes my rantings for today. Send this to the next stupid son of a bitch that tells you only gun control can save us. It won't convince them, because they are probably an unreasoning fool who wouldn't be convinced if the very stones by the side of the road leaped up and screamed it at them. But it -will- enrage them, and that might make you feel a little better. (Hitting them upside the head with a 2x4 might make you feel better too, but don't do that. Hitting is illegal. Verbal abuse is still legal. So far, anyway.)

So go buy a gun today and piss off a liberal. Best defense is a strong offense.

The Phantom

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In Soviet Amerika, TV watches you.

Just be careful what you get for Christmas in Oceanea.

Viewers, beware: while you're watching TV, your TV might be watching you back. A security firm discovered that Samsung's Smart TV can give hackers access to the device's built-in camera and microphones, allowing them to watch everything you do.

The Malta-based firm ReVuln posted a video showing its team of researchers hacking into one of the Samsung TVs and accessing its settings, channel lists, widgets, USB drives, and remote control configurations. The security flaw allows hackers to access any and all personal data stored on the TV.

With this access, hackers can use the Smart TVs built-in camera and microphones to see and hear everything in front of it. Instead of just watching TV, viewers could themselves be watched without knowing it.

But this flaw isn't present in just one specific model. The vulnerability affects all 11 Samsung televisions of the latest generation. The Smart TVs have many of the same features as a computer, but lack the same kind of protection. The devices do not have security features such as firewalls and antivirus software.

One more reason not to have TV.

The Phantom
 

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It's Friday, but...

... due to the atrocity in Newtown CT today and the INEVITABLE Liberal posturing and demagoguery, I find myself not much in the mood for girls and bacon.
Mayor Bloomberg of NYC
Mayor Menino of Boston Mass.
Rupert Bloody Murdoch, owner of FOX.

Also Obama of course, and so forth and so on. These assholes just got handed the golden opportunity that they were trying to create with Fast&Furious when it blew up in their faces.

All told, if I were an American I'd go buy a gun tomorrow morning and look in to home-schooling any kids I might have. If every Conservative parent in America pulled their kids out of school on Monday morning, that might send somebody a message.

The Phantom

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