Mammoths may yet roam the plains.

But not if the liberals, animal rights whackos and general issue pussies of the Ivory Tower Left have anything to say about it.

The pioneering scientist who created Dolly the sheep has outlined how cells plucked from frozen woolly mammoth carcasses might one day help resurrect the ancient beasts.

The notional procedure – bringing with it echoes of the Jurassic Park films – was spelled out by Sir Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh-based stem-cell scientist, whose team unveiled Dolly as the world's first cloned mammal in 1996.

Though it is unlikely that a mammoth could be cloned in the same way as Dolly, more modern techniques that convert tissue cells into stem cells could potentially achieve the feat, Wilmut says in an article today for the academic journalism website, The Conversation.

"I've always been very sceptical about the whole idea, but it dawned on me that if you could clear the first hurdle of getting viable cells from mammoths, you might be able to do something useful and interesting," Wilmut told the Guardian.

"I think it should be done as long as we can provide great care for the animal. If there are reasonable prospects of them being healthy, we should do it. We can learn a lot about them," he added.

Because what would be the point of having a sick mammoth around, right? Who could object to that? Well its the Guardian, so they do:

Earlier this month, the most complete woolly mammoth carcass ever recovered from Russia was unveiled at an exhibition in Yokohama, Japan. The baby female, nicknamed Yuka, lived about 39,000 years ago, and is remarkable for the preservation of her fur and soft tissues, such as muscle.

Samples from Yuka have been sent to the laboratory of Hwang Woo-suk, the disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist, who, with Russian researchers, hopes to clone the mammoth.

Disgraced, you say? For what? Well, we don't know because the article doesn't say. I suppose I could go look it up, but the Guardian is counting on me to not bother. Long story short, he's an embezzling dick.  BUT, that doesn't mean he can't -do- it.

I say, full steam ahead baby! I want my woolly mammoth farm!

The (watch those road apples!) Phantom

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Militarized cops are cowards.

Gutless wonders.

Something interesting happens when you put cops in body armor and helmets, give them assault rifles, shotguns, tasers and pepper spray. It turns them into pussies. Which makes them extremely dangerous. Case in point:

According to an e-mailed press release from Park Forest police, officers were sent to 101 Main Street in Park Forest about 8:42 p.m. Friday to help a private ambulance company with a "combative" resident of the home there -- Warna. The Victory Centre of Park Forest, a supportive living community for adults 65 and older according to its website, is at that address.
Warna was being "involuntarily" committed for medical treatment by staff at the Victory Centre, the release said.
When police arrived, Warna was threatening staff and paramedics with a metal cane and a 2-foot metal shoehorn, the release said.

Here we have a tactical situation with multiple cops on scene, facing down an old, OLD man who's got a cane and a friggin' shoehorn. Do you:

A) Remove all personel from the immediate area, shut the door and wait for the old geezer to get tired?
B) Take the cane and the shoehorn off him and slap him on the back of the head to wise him up?
C) Punch him in the face before taking away the cane and the shoehorn?
D) Smack him with your night stick until he falls down?
E) Taser him to the ground and then tackle, stomp and hogtie him?
F) Screw around shouting instructions at him until he drops the shoehorn and picks up a knife (how is there a knife handy?), then taser him, then shoot him in the guts with beanbags until he falls down, THEN tackle, stomp and hogtie him?

In Chicago, the policepussies chose F.

Police demanded that he drop the cane and shoehorn, but he did not comply and then picked up a "12-inch butcher type kitchen knife."
Police continued to demand that Warna surrender and follow their orders and eventually used a Taser on him. That failed to subdue him and he continued to threaten others, the release said. Police then fired bean bag rounds at the man to get him to drop the knife and surrender. He did so and was taken into custody.
The man was conscious and talking to officers and staff before being transported to St. James Hospital and Health Centers in Chicago, according to authorities.

"Taken into custody" is a euphemism for being tackled to the floor, stomped on and hog-tied with handcuffs.

The Cook County medical examiner's office said that the cause of death of John Warna was hemoperitoneum – bleeding in the stomach area from blunt force trauma of the abdomen after he was shot with a bean bag gun.

They did a Rodney King on a 95 year old demented man in an old folks home, is what they did. He bled out and died from ruptured internal organs before his heart could pack up from the taser.

Beanbag.

For the non-initiated, a beanbag gun is a large bore shotgun that fires a Kevlar bag full of lead shot. The blunt force involved is comparable to getting hit by a swing from Babe Ruth. They seem to have shot this guy more than once, making it kind of like smashing the guy in the gut with a baseball bat until he fell down.

Beanbag wound.

What a friggin' disgrace to the uniform. Every man in that squad should be suspended and put on hand-to-hand training and physical exercise for six months, at no pay. The officer in charge of the squad should be charged with manslaughter. But it'll never happen.

Random deputy Dawg with beanbag gun. Feel safer now?

Let this be a warning to anyone who has to deal with the elderly or with mentally disabled people. If you let one of them get out of hand and call the cops, there's an excellent chance the cops will just kill him like a mad dog. Because they are cowardly scum with guns.

The Phantom

Update: Welcome Blazing Cat Fur readers!

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The Phantom Returns!

Yes my friends, The Phantom has returned to Northern Command after a week's trip to Noo Yawk.  Its exactly as frigged up as I remember it from the Old Days. In fact I went down to the place I used to live and got a PTSD flashback just from driving by. wugh!

Many thanks to the Arms Chest Denizens for making it an awesome trip (trip down PTSD memory lane aside, it was awesome.)

Shout out to the Kry Havoc crew, I've got pictures of y'all with your mouths full. Bwaha!

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Obama unhappy with Traaaaayvon rioters.

As in there's not near enough guys out there rioting, so he's out there trying to kick things up a notch.

"You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son.  Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away," he said.

Yes, we know. Because thirty five years ago Barry was just one more useless stoner gliding through life on a combination of parental indulgence and affirmative action, just like Traaaaayvon.

So could little Traaaaaayvon have become President? Barry did, so I suppose with thirty more years or so of the Progressive March Forward its entirely possible that "youthful indiscretions" like assault, robbery and drug thuggery could become resume enhancements for a DemocRat candidate. "I be from the hood Yo, vote fo' me, yo get the free-bee. Word!"

I can hardly wait for three piece suits with droopy pants and matching Everlast drawers to start showing up in US board rooms.

In the mean time, its really something to watch the Commander in Chief of the biggest military machine in the entire world trying to gin up riots in his own cities. Go get the gas can Holder, Barry wants a full-on zombie apocalypse.  BAM baby!

The Phantom (channeling Emeril Lagasse)

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Cops are tracking your car too. Punks rioting anyway.

New revelation on Drudge today, police forces in the USA are tracking everybody's car.

Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.

As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge's approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver's location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a "single, high-resolution image of our lives."

ACLU publication here.

I guess the New York liberals who make up the ACLU finally clued that their beloved DemocRat party is set on crushing the ACLU under thumb along with the rest of us proles.

Now while the cops are busy recording every damn thing you do, they don't have time to arrest actual criminals.

At least 14 people were taken into custody Tuesday night and many more remained at large after marauding bands of young people conducted a string of robberies, assaults and acts of vandalism along Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles police said late Tuesday.

Incident commander Dennis Kato said police were inundated with phone calls beginning about 9 p.m., reporting that packs of young people were roaming along Hollywood and attacking people. Public information officer Rosario Herrera said at least one of the attacks was near Hollywood and Highland. 

The robbers knocked down tourists and grabbed their phones, Kato said. In at least one incident, they hauled off a cash register from a business. There were no reports of weapons involved in the attacks.

As many as 40 robbers were believed to be involved in the attacks. Kato said the robbers splintered into smaller groups of 10 to 15 people and spread through the area, regrouping at times. 

Police say the attackers appeared to be an organized group who knew one another. Officers swarmed the Hollywood area as helicopters for both police and news media circled.

Think the super-spy surveillance crap is going to help catch these pukes? Unlikely, right? But then it isn't meant to keep track of them. Its meant to keep track of YOU.

The Phantom

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Revisiting Heidi Yewman: now with VIDEO!

Huffpoo has a video interview with Heidi Yewman about her Ms. Magazine blog article, My Month With A Gun.  I wrote about it here.  Ms. Magazine cancelled the rest of little Heidi's series after getting boiled alive by commenters, but then their "loyal fans" started in boiling them alive as well. So they released this statement here.

The Huff-and-Puff video is classic liberal. The gist of the conversation is that Heidi Yewman feels she is incapable of managing a firearm, but there is no legal entity (in her state) that will prevent her from owning and carrying a firearm. Plus it made her feel bad. :(

Also included, some pop-psychology misuse of science and some goof who used to be a cop.

Bottom line, she's complaining that some jackboot didn't march up and demand her papers.

Enjoy the barfalicious video.

The Phantom

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Microsoft researchers can predict your physical location in the future.

We know that our phones constantly broadcast their (our!) location to cell towers, 24/7. We know that both the phone company AND the phone manufacturers (Apple/Google) keep this information. For a long time. Like, forever most likely. So they know where you've been to a very high degree of accuracy. Well now there's a paper by two guys who took all that data and wrote a program to predict where you are GOING to be at any given time on any given day.

Using information from a pool of 300 volunteers in the Seattle metro area, Sadilek and Krumm gathered a mountain of location data. As the volunteers went about their daily lives--going to work, to the grocery store, out for a jog, even for transcontinental travel--each carried a GPS device much the same way they carried a cell phone. To further ensure accuracy, the researchers also installed GPS devices in commercial shuttles and transit vans that the volunteers used regularly, and the volunteers' own vehicles. After collecting over 150 million location points, the researchers then had Far Out, the first system of its kind to predict long-term human mobility in a unified way, parse the data. Far Out didn't even need to be told exactly what to look for--it automatically discovered regularities in the data.

"For example, it might notice that Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually about the same and fairly consistent from week to week," the researchers told us. "Then when we ask about a future Tuesday or Thursday, the algorithm automatically produces a typical Tuesday/Thursday as a prediction."

Salidek and Krumm were pleasantly surprised with the results. It turns out that no matter how spontaneous we think we are, humans are actually quite predictable in our movements, even over extended periods of time. Not only did Far Out predict with high accuracy the correct location of a wide variety of individuals, but it did so even years into the future.

This does not seem like much of a problem for a computer. Comparing data is what they're for. The real problem is collecting the location points, in the research solved by a GPS unit. In our non-research real lives, this data is available from Apple and Google for a small fee. Also available to the NSA because they archive ALL OF IT. In fact, I would be shocked if the NSA doesn't already do exactly this type of prediction on an on-demand basis. Its obvious.

Well, apart from spying, what could such a system be used for?

For now Far Out is strictly a research project not yet available in commercial products or services. And although its focus currently is on the future whereabouts of single individuals, eventually, the researchers' hope is that it can be applied to larger populations. This could be a boon to urban planners by leading to more accurate predictions about the spread of disease, traffic congestion, and the demand for electricity.

On the social side, there could even be something like a Foursquare of the Future.

Marketers and advertisers, too, would relish the opportunity to target our future selves with ads like, "Need a haircut? In four days, you'll be 100 yards from a salon that will have a $15 special." On the social side, there could even be something like a Foursquare of the Future--who wouldn't want to know where their friends (and enemies) will be for the rest of their lives…or at least for the next 285 days?

Because that's what we all need and want in our lives. More planning and regulation, more ads on our phones, and people either stalking or dodging us with ever increasing accuracy.

I'm increasingly thinking that a portable phone may be a hell of a lot more of a millstone than a help, given that the Stazi would have all happily sacrificed a limb to get this level of surveillance on East Germany. Its a tyrant's wet dream.

The Phantom

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