Edmonton SUN has to delete comments that expose progressives for who they are

As usual, when liberals lose an argument their first instinct is censorship. They try to hide from the mean words that proved them wrong.

So, with that, here are the comments I made to this Edmonton Sun column on Rachel Arab's sick dream of increasing taxes which the useless tits who I exposed complained about like women.

See? Property rights, tax cuts, removing regulatory hurdles...all proof of what I said.
Meanwhile, as Gunther noted, the NDP love tax hikes. They will want to increase yours, and your employer's, and with any luck when it comes time to let somebody go the boss looks right in your direction. Leftists like you are often insulated from the impact of your destructive policies, it would be nice to see a charming fellow like you be the exception to the rule.

At the rate the NDP is losing their retarded MLAs, they'll be in minority terroritory by Christmas, so you have some hope!

No, it's because we've rationally decided that the dollar Rachel Arab would take (and use to fund a lazy unionized teacher to function as a babysitter for a kid who has trouble adding two numbers togther) is better off in our own hands.
How much money is in your bank account right now? How much is your home and auto worth? Would you liquidate your assets and send it all to the provincial government to use to supposedly "better future Albertans"? Or are you just greedy?

Much like with the election of PMOTUS in the States, I'm curious to see what Rachel Arab's election does to gun sales in Alberta. I know I've already bought another one.

Not a surprise. She's a leftist. Leftists always lie.

Very soon. Rachel Arab will turn Alberta into a have-not province by early 2016

Well, we've only had a week and already we have the NDP's $103M hike to incompetent school boards. Looks like when Rachel Arab gets turfed you'll be able to put out an even longer list after a fraction of the time!

But we aren't "bettering future generations of Albertans". We're throwing them in a public school system rapidly deteriorating thanks to the "progressives" who have been running them for decades following edu-trendy BS like FFAs and "no-zeros" at the expense of learning. Then we constantly increase these lazy louts pay scales even as the school outcomes themselves fall below even the piddly level that public schools have deemed acceptable.
We're talking about THROWING MONEY AWAY ON LAZY UNIONIZED TEACHERS. If you're willing to spend MY money on such useless trite in order to make yourself feel good about your "investing in our future" fantasies, then YOU are the problem.

I liked all the non-Gunter press corps yesterday so anxious to believe Rachel Arab's spin. Just like every corrupt Latin-American socialist government she dreams of becoming, step one is denounce the outgoing guys, ideally prosecuting them for something along the way. Her theory is that when Prentice took office and saw the finances were bad, he told us that they were bad....but didn't tell us that they were even worse than he claimed. In other words, when given the chance he told a lie in order to potentially paint himself in a less favourable light. Is there literally any chance at all this would happen? If we have to decide which of these leftists is lying, it's always a good idea to pick the one further left. Are the NDP claiming finances are worse now than they really were? Would this be a scheme to make their inevitable failures look less likely and now not their fault?

Why the fuck don't you know who Alice is?

I was listening over the long weekend to the Smokie hit "Living Next Door to Alice" yesterday, and was struck (as I think I had been a few times before) at how ridiculous the 1995 Gompie cover...that's the one you know now, and the one that people sing whenever the song is played at a bar (though, now that the infamous King's Knight Pub on 34th Avenue is closed, I'm not entireley sure where in Edmonton you can hear this song anymore).

If you aren't familiar and don't feel like clicking YouTube links, the Gompie version is just the Smokie song played straight through, except after the chorus line "living next door to Alice" a crowd of people yell "Alice, Alice, who the fuck is Alice" over the music.

It's a big hit, gets the crowd almost as pumped as that "hey motherfucker get laid get fucked" bit chanted during Billy Idol's version of "Mony Mony"^†, and is popular in spite of or perhaps because of from a literal perspective it literally doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

^† Actually come to think of it, that gag doesn't really make any sense either does it? If the person is literally a "mother-fucker" than they are already having sex, quite possibly with the Mom of the person chanting the song. If the person is a "motherfucker" in the vernacular, then they are a horrible person that presumably another person is going to be having sex with...in other words, you've just wished a horrible sex partner on a random stranger.

The problem is that the entire song "Living Next Door to Alice" is telling you who Alice is. In fact, the very first time the chance arises to yell "Alice, Alice, who the fuck is Alice?" (okay, so the chant starts off the Gompie song, which I always thought should inspire a followup hit where somebody chants "who the fuck are you asking about?") occurs at the end of the first chorus...the second half of which is entirely about who Alice is:

'Cos for twenty-four years
I've been living next door to Alice.
Twenty-four years just waiting for a chance,
To tell her how I feel, and maybe get a second glance

I'm not sure at this point even that you can use "who the fuck is Alice?" as a chant? Alice is the girl the narrator has been living next door to for almost a quarter century. But we hear that she's leaving in a limousine which you think would lend to a couple clues.

But just in case you're really dense, almost in response to your crude yelled out question the song narrator goes into further detail about Alice.

We grew up together,
Two kids in the park,
We carved our initials,
Deep in the bark,
Me and Alice.

Now we get back into him lamenting that for twenty-four years she's been next to him and now she's going away.

Alice, Alice, who the fuck is Alice?

Christ, are you retarded or just deaf? We now know that Alice is the girl who lived next door to him for 24 years including his childhood (or at least part of it), and they were if not lovers at least very close friends who seem to have had a puppy love stage.

In the final verse of the song, by the way, Sally says she's been waiting years for the narrator to be over his love/fixation of Alice and finally notice her. We know that Sally was the one who told him the news about Alice, presumably she's also been in the neighbourhood for 24 years. We know far less about Sally than we know about Alice, why are you all confused about who Alice is? This is the entire subject of the song?

The "who the fuck is Alice" people remind me of those brain-dead liberals on Twitter who always reply to things with cutsey memes like "Cool Story, Bro" when they hear some news that they've never heard before (because they stick with their biased media coverage). It certainly doesn't help that, like a group of drunk soccer moms, liberals are groupthink-obsessed and easily swayed into mob behaviour. This level of lazy sloganeering is what happens when actual critical and independent thought is thrown by the wayside. You can just chant a crude slogan along with everybody else! Don't think about it in any way shape or form, don't listen to what you're reacting to, just react.

Alice grew up, apparently achieved success, and then went onto bigger and better things. After twenty-four years waiting for a chance, the narrator seems to have to settle for Sally as the big limousine disappears. Alice is gone, get over her, and if you don't know who she is then why not let the man tell you?

Special guest column: Stephen Notley on how to endure the NDP

Earlier this month, Alberta fell into darkness as Edmonton's second most offensive politician, Rachel Arab (née Notley), took over to become Alberta's Premier with her ridiculous NDP party at her side. It's going to be a long and painful five years. Fortunately, as today's guest column from Rachel's brother Stephen tells us, things aren't necessarily as bad as they seem..

Some Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists

It's been a pretty depressing couple of weeks, Wednesday May 6th particularly, a fog of defeat and despair that made it seem there could never be anything good again. But Thursday was better, we had a chilly but fresh-smelling afternoon, and the mind settles a bit. Here's a few thoughts that calmed me, at least.

It's all on Notley now

One of the galling things about another Prentice term is that it would have allowed socialists who repeat their pattern of moving into an area, screwing everything up and then walking away blaming their predecessor as somebody else cleans up the mess (ie. Wall, Bradley). Now it's all gonna come down to them: the Redford/Notley combination of far-left lunacy in Alberta and they're going to be holding the ball when the shit *really* goes down. I gotta admit, I'm looking forward to seeing that.

It's still a pig

They say you can dress up a pig but it's still a pig. This government is a big fat ugly pig, and though this election will slap a ton of makeup and fresh shiny lipstick on it, at the end of the night when the makeup's worn off just like a Hallowe'en costume, it's still gonna be a pig. I'm sure the media will capitulate completely and assume that every issue of the Stelmach-Redford era is now dead, but socialists are so retardedly incompetent they're gonna start generating new disasters almost immediately and things are gonna start looking bad again with no election campaign to distract everyone.

Redford won her election in a landslide

She was in charge of an unpopular "past-its-prime" government, people hated her and protested her, and she won anyway. She praised the "modern progressive Alberta". Not long after that she overreached, acted like the spoiled princess women in power not named Thatcher tend to get, and got booted out on her ear in humiliating fashion. Could happen again. Tougher, true, with the pro-NDP bias in the mainstream media and devoted legions of easily-swayed unionists to protest any opposition, but anything can happen.

An NDP fairytale (that isn't about Ricardo Miranda's NAMBLA membership)

With the disgusting new NDP government in Alberta under the command of unabashed left-wing extremist Rachel Arab, it's a good time to review Ronald Reagan radio broadcasts.

Okay, so the segue isn't the cleanest one ever, but when you're dealing with the sort of unrepairable mess which is the provincial NDP caucus, it's probably for the best we all just get used to it.

Anyways, if you haven't heard the Ronald Reagan retelling of the Little Red Hen fairytale, you probably should click the link. It's extremely prescient in the wake of Notley's promise to perform a royalty review to determine what "fair share" of resource revenue her government will be stealing from companies developing the tarsands^†.

At last the time came to bake the bread. "Who will help me bake bread?" asked the little red hen.

"That would be overtime for me," said the cow.
"I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck.
"I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig.
"If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the goose.
"Then I will," said the little red hen.

She baked five loaves and held them up for the neighbors to see. They all wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, "No, I can eat the five loaves myself."

"Excess profits," cried the cow.
"Capitalist leech," screamed the duck.
"I demand equal rights," yelled the goose.
And the pig just grunted.

And they painted "unfair" picket signs and marched round and around the little red hen shouting obscenities. When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, "You must not be greedy."

"But I earned the bread," said the little red hen.

Today in Alberta, it's easy to find the little red hen. There are tens of thousands of them, the majority working in the various direct oilsands^†-related industries, mostly around Fort McMurray. They aren't the only ones, of course: many others are working in the secondary industries: those giant extraction facilities need equipment manufactured and maintained, and the companies themselves all need accountancy firms and lawyers and managers. Those are the little red hens in Alberta.

Rachel Arab wants to deprive them of their loaves of bread with her royalty review.

A lot of big talk from the left is nonsense about "fair share". The thinking goes that since the Albertan government owns the oil (and, quite often, the land above the oil), then the potential revenue belongs to the people who live in the province (this is not the same as "belongs to Albertans" by the way). The thinking continues that the only way for the people of the province to get this revenue is by raising the royalties on the companies which extract the oil from the ground (and, it goes without saying, ridiculously high increases to their taxes).

This thinking is wrong, of course, for the reasons Reagan made so clear in his modern-day Little Red Hen fairy tale. The Laffer-able truth is that the potential revenue of the oilsands^† extraction isn't a constant. The people who actually do the work -- the little red hens at Syncrude, Suncor, Trinidad Drilling, etc. -- only do so because of the loaves of bread they get awarded. Take that away, as Rachel Arab is proposing, and you're implicitly punishing those who actually do the work and are compensated for the value of what they produce, and helping out the pigs and geese and ducks: the lazy unionized public sector workers, the useless twits wasting government funding in their post-secondary education, and the slacker-class who nominally work but don't provide enough value for their employers to justify giving them more money at the end of the biweekly pay period.

Seeing how actual Albertans are in general swamped by an invading class of foreigners who have no loyalty to the province yet despite their own employment at highly competitive wages in fields unrelated to the tarsands^† are still lazy and entitled enough to think that they "deserve their fair share", it's completely inappropriate to confuse provincial government spending on social programs with an efficient effective or fair method of compensating the owners of this oil wealth with the benefits it provides. I covered a lot of this in my post on Norwailing, but it bears some repeating that the long-term benefits to Alberta are not met by providing government largesse in general, particularly when so many of these eastern creeps and bums are here consuming them at the expense of real Albertans.

The vast majority of the wealth being generated by the economic activity in the Wood Buffalo region should be provided only to the Little Red Hens: the people doing the work. Fortunately, as Reagan's story tells us, this is exactly what a capitalist free-market system does: from the swamper working at the Kearl Oil Sands Project to Al Monaco to the everyday Joe who owns shares in Canadian Oil Sands Limited, in a purely capitalist system every single person who actually contributes to the tarsands^† wealth is already compensated for it, and...here's the real kicker...is compensated for it precisely as much as the value he provides for the wealth to be created. Isn't that wonderful?

Unfortunately, like Reagan's story and unlike the original Little Red Hen story, this one comes with an evil witch. Rachel Arab's plan will try to extract more money into the coffers of the provincial governemnt. While the province is indeed the owner of this resource, by unfairly and unnecessarily increasing the royalties (or, as leftists keep oddly calling it, "the rent") the overall level of wealth in the oilsands^† is going to decrease, not increase. This means that the labours undergone by those who are doing the work will be compensated less lucratively than is currently happening (which is already below the "matching the value provided to create the wealth" that a purely capitalist system would provide). This punishes the Little Red Hen in the name of "fairness" while the ducks, pigs, and geese get a free payday in return for their vote. It's sick and abhorrent, and matches with the sort of perverted lessons that the Dippers will be directing into education over the next four years.

Rachel Arab's plan needs to be stopped. Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor always sounds good until you remember that in this case the rich got rich by being successful, and the poor got poor by being lazy, entitled, and uneducated (and, unsurprisingly, ended up voting NDP). This is hurting Alberta, hurting Albertans, and hurting all of those (regardless of whether they're Albertans or not) who have been productively creating wealth that has been helping all Albertans whether they realize it or not.

^† Throughout this post, "tarsands" and "oilsands" are used interchangeably. Those who are curious about my willingness to use the politically charged term usually used by oilsands opponents can click here.

Unsheathed

One of the fun, and by fun here I mean basically the opposite of fun, but one of the fun things about the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is putting yourself in the world and trying to think about how realistically you could overthrow The Party and bring liberty back to Oceania. It's definitely not an easy task.

So that's why I so enjoyed this Stack Exchange question about how to write some subversive computer code in Orwell's nightmare-inspiring universe.

You are a programmer for the Party and are tasked with writing a program for the telescreens. It should output pro-party messages, and you have chosen the ones shown in task 1. below. However, you have recently begun to despise the Party, and you want the program to spark a revolution. So, you make the program say "Down with Big Brother!". You must give yourself time to escape, as you will be tortured once people realise what your program does, so you make it act as a "timebomb" that will explode after you have gone to safety.

Note: This will not spark a revolution, but you are in such a frenzy of hatred towards the party that you think it will actually make a difference.

Task
Write a program which:

1. before 14/09/2014, will always output the following lines on a rotation (i.e. prints one line, waits 10 seconds, prints next line, etc. ad infinitum):

   War is Peace
   Freedom is Slavery
   Ignorance is Strength

2. after 14/09/2014 will print Down with Big Brother! every 10 seconds.
3. at first glance looks like it does only 1. so that you will not be caught by the Party.

There are a fair number of good responses, but this is so far the best one since it doesn't include a boatload of background information that needs to exist in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four for the code to work, even though it doesn't necessarily exist within it.

"When he reached the new world, Cortez disabled his fleet discourging further mutinies on behalf of the Governor of Cuba" isn't as catchy

It's an awesome movie, and some of the "sins" aren't as bad as claimed, but this is still highly entertaining.

David Spade on Neil Patrick Harris

You know, I really liked this song from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog the first time I heard it...

...when it was called "Thrash Unreal" by Rise Against...



(what's with this riff and sexual perversions, by the way?)

“Ford... you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

Climate Change: The Facts is a new book by a variety of authors both academic and non-academic regarding the great climate swindle, the hypocrisy of its adherents, and the truth behind the science.

Gloriously, it currently sits atop the Amazon.com "Environmental Policy" bestseller list, ahead of numerous warmmonger texts, including another screaching missive by anti-liberty hack Naomi Klein. But there's another difference between the measured reality of Climate Change: The Facts and the sky-is-falling alarmism of This Changes Everything, and it's the combination of the two which makes me think of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words "DON'T PANIC" inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover

I'm Gonna Take that Mountain

Did the Nepalese earthquake move Mount Everest?

Unlikely, but currently inconclusive is the general sense.

The slip at the fault line was three metres, just north of Kathmandu, which means some houses in the area are now further south than they used to be. Not three metres further south, but further south nonetheless.

With the related devastation in the area, eyes turn to Mt. Everest. The world's tallest mountain is unlikely to have moved by more than a few millimetres, and almost certainly (but not conclusively) the mountain will be bigger today than it was a week or a month ago.

Everest wasn't unaffected by the quake, not even remotely. Seventeen people are dead after a massive avalanche related to the quake which destroyed the Everest base camp. As well, the path through the Khumbu icefield that takes you up the mountain is gone, and it's unclear when it will be available again. Everest may be unscalable for the foreseeable future.

And, as the Reddit thread on the subject jokes, if the mountain is taller again than everybody who scaled Everest pre-earthquake is about to have their achievement diminished. Even if it's only by a few millimetres.

The Dam at Otter Creek

I'm shocked I missed it when it first came out, but Jon Gabriel's piece on the left's Fox News obsession is really good.

For me, Twitter is less a social-media service than a six-year-long political argument with no sign of ending. In myriad (and meaningless) keyboard battles, I’ve tangled with progressives on economic policy, foreign affairs, elections, pop culture, social issues, education reform and countless other topics.

The fact is, I don’t watch Fox News. Okay, I DVR “Red Eye” (which isn’t really news) and watch the occasional yell-fest when a friend’s on the panel. But cable news in general doesn’t do much for me or most other people I know.

I recently visited two older relatives who watch Fox News non-stop and at high volume to cope with hearing issues. After 12 hours of dire headlines, testy commentators, and panicked “breaking news” alerts covering days-old developments, I wanted to lock myself in a soundproofed room with the Good Book and a fifth of Jack. It was exhausting.

Obviously Fox tops the rankings of TV news, but are most conservatives wedded to the channel? I appreciate it for providing an all-too-rare perspective on world events, but I’d rather be catching up on the game or watching sweaty chefs make a dessert out of cuttlefish, sidewalk chalk and Jolly Ranchers.

When I chat with liberals, I never assume they watch MSNBC because, well, who watches MSNBC? And every time I flip by CNN, they’re playing Anthony Bourdain reruns, most of which I’ve seen four times.

I don't get Fox News. As I wrote at the time of its collapse, I never got SUN News Network either. But Gabriel nails how it's all about "withering coup de grâce" they can throw on the end, as if that's the solution. Why, if people stopped watching that channel nobody would have the opinions expressed on it.

I think this has a lot to do with the left's lack of original ideas and prone-ness to groupthink to begin with. As the immortal Catherine McMillan reminds us, liberals leap at the chance to be part of a mob while conservatives don't. You have to really push some serious button a lot of times to get conservatives to do anything in a large group, and even then they start splintering apart almost immediately. Getting Wildrose and the Alberta Alliance to merge was a monumental feat, frankly.

So because liberals follow whatever codswallop they're fed and then pretend they loved every last drop of it, they assume conservatives must act the same way, in much the same way that conservatives are convinced that sensible appeals would get a liberal to agree with a good public policy idea. But it's not. Fox News publishes stories from a perspective that the liberal media abhors, then people who agree with the perspective or even aren't totally angered by it hear the story and then incorporate that new information into their own mental analysis and ideology and opinions. Because that's how conservatives work.

It's a tough one for liberals to get, mostly because they're unhinged.

Sluts-a-fightin

Suzanna The Wicked (isn't actually wicked) and Alva (is actually wicked) from Skyrim fight in their underwear:



(yes, that is the voice of Babylon 5's Claudia Christian you hear at the beginning)