Third Edge of the Sword Tenth Anniversary

Yes, you read that right. Third Edge of the Sword just turned ten years old today.

So to celebrate, I thought this would be a good day to look back over the past decade of posts. For every year I'm going to pick my personal favourites (Gold, Silver, and Bronze). So without further adieu, let's take a look starting all the way back in 2005.

2005: 2005 was a pretty short year (only the last three weeks of December) so you may notice there isn't as much to choose from. Yet there still is some quality stuff in here.
Bronze: Alberta Separatist Hockey: My little rundown of my hockey fandom, basically a reminder that I'm Albertan, not Canadian. A little hint too at some of the hockey coverage that will come up over the next decade.
Silver: Boxing Day: With the "Syrian" "Refugees" big in the news, it's a good time to look back at the last time American leftists forced their military to retreat and cause a refugee crisis. Just like with the middle eastern gutter trash coming on this trip, it's worth noticing the criminal impact on poor Canadian citizens from the sort of people that we bring in as "refugees".

the rise of Vietnamese gangs in Western Canada stems from the Vietnamese boat people crisis

Gold: Thoughts on Sean Avery and Ed Schreyer: My first ever assault on the evil forces of sodomy. (This is so old that I originally used the G-word in it, and had to go back a few years later and remove the references).

If Ed lives to 90 years old, will he be standing tall with Jack Layton and Svend Robinson proud to say that their old "dinosaur" views about polygamy are now purged from their systems? Or will pedophilia be the first old-school morality they enthusiastically ditch? If this is a possibility 20 years down the road in the same way that their support for faggot civil unions didn't seem possible 20 years ago, do they not owe it to the electorate to be honest and frank on this matter?

It seems I was awfully prescient, wasn't I? It turns out that the sick thing Handjob Jack's party signed on for in the years after this has been "gender identity", which is the PC term for "you aren't supposed to judge a wacko who cuts his own dick off because he's delusional and thinks he's a girl". It's worth noting that even supposed "conservatives" have signed onto this madness in this time period as well.

2006: By contrast to 2005, 2006 was Third Edge of the Sword's busiest year with 573 posts to chose from. Now true, this was before Twitter existed so some posts were nothing but a snide comment and a link. Still, it was more than a little bit of a challenge
Bronze: The LRT is a kickass getaway vehicle: This was back when the Edmonton murder rate (caused mostly by Klein's infamous eastern creeps and bums) was out of control. It was also before the disastrous LRT expansions that Edmontonians will be suffering over a generation. It was one of two legendary "crime + transit" discoveries I made that year (it's a reader exercise to find the second)
Silver: Hey Ed, make me the minister responisble for: alcohol: One of a two-part series where I campaigned for the role of Solicitor General in Ed Stelmach's cabinet. Remember Ed Stelmach? Yeah, him. Anyways this touched on several of the key points I brought up during the last two provincial elections: that the "Progressive" "Conservative" Party was out of touch with basic ideas of liberty. Imagine an Alberta where ridiculously extreme "drunk driving" legislation (which Stelmach's successor has made even worse than when I made this post!) is a thing of the past. Where 24 hour bars serve drunks whatever hour they wish to be serving, and fights over precious food and cabs (less so if Uber takes off) and sluts are kept to a minimum. Where you feel free at every stage of your alcohol consuming process. It would be a proud and glorious land. First off is bringing back an Alberta Premier at least half as smart as Ed Stelmach. 2006 me has a hard time envisioning that statement.
Gold: George S. Patton would have made a lousy soccer coach: Before social media, this post went mini-viral, and was particularly popular in Europe. For semi-obvious reasons. At the height of the 2006 World Cup fury, I dropped a bombshell on the world...namely, that if you wanted to do well in the World Cup that year your country ideally would be really incompetent at actually dropping bombshells.

I call it Feynman and Coulter's Love Child's FIFA World Cup Prediction System. It goes something like this:

The less the success a country acheived in World War II, the greater the success at the world cup.

While it ultimately fell apart as a predictor in the final [or did it? read the comments! -ed] it ended up being a fun and popular and silly way to look at the tournament that Europe obsesses over. It's no crazier than all those Presidential predictors (Redskins win, shortest name, etc.) that fell flat in 2004.

2007: 2007 was another busy year, but 355 posts is still a lot easier to choose from than 573. And if you wish you could see a longer listing of quality tunes that perhaps is also rather catchy musically, 2007 was the year I did a musical year-in-review number.
Bronze: "This is cool. Is this how liberals feel all the time? Well, except now": Hey, remember Liberal Leader Stephane Dion? Yes, he was a humiliating embarrassment for the Liberal Party back when they still worried that their leaders could be considered huge national embarrassments. I had also ripped on him for wanting to hold an election on the GST cut (though I can see Shiny Pony doing this again) but the best was the Christmas interview on Global TV where for once the conservative candidate didn't get the hardest questions.

Harpers first questions were about Christmas traditions and fond winter memories. Dion's first question was:

Are you ever going to become fluent in English?

Even I, an on-record Dion-hater, thought that was a little harsh to start off with.

Silver: Gretzky/Messier starting a grand Edmonton tradition: What will we ever decide to name after Connor McDavid? We still haven't even named anything after Ryan Smyth? Can I make a comedy list about famed former Oilers players and not make a Chris Pronger sex joke? None of these questions are answered in this post where I start examining things in Edmonton to name after former players for our team. Instead, Edmonton City Council wants to name things after men who fuck underage boys and cops who harass citizens who insult men who fuck underage boys.
Gold: Helping the good Reverend Stephen Boissoin in his fight: Technically speaking, this wasn't even my post. But it's even more relevant today than it was in 2007. And so, as I did then, I again today reprint in its entirety the letter Rev. Boissoin wrote to the Red Deer Advocate with the caveat that I agree with absolutely every word he said.

The following is not intended for those who are suffering from an unwanted sexual identity crisis. For you, I have understanding, care, compassion and tolerance. I sympathize with you and offer you my love and fellowship. I prayerfully beseech you to seek help, and I assure you that your present enslavement to homosexuality can be remedied. Many outspoken, former homosexuals are free today.

Instead, this is aimed precisely at every individual that in any way supports the homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s. I cannot pity you any longer and remain inactive. You have caused far too much damage.

My banner has now been raised and war has been declared so as to defend the precious sanctity of our innocent children and youth, that you so eagerly toil, day and night, to consume. With me stand the greatest weapons that you have encountered to date - God and the "Moral Majority." Know this, we will defeat you, then heal the damage that you have caused. Modern society has become dispassionate to the cause of righteousness. Many people are so apathetic and desensitized today that they cannot even accurately define the term "morality."

The masses have dug in and continue to excuse their failure to stand against horrendous atrocities such as the aggressive propagation of homo- and bisexuality. Inexcusable justifications such as, "I'm just not sure where the truth lies," or "If they don't affect me then I don't care what they do," abound from the lips of the quantifiable majority.

Face the facts, it is affecting you. Like it or not, every professing heterosexual is have their future aggressively chopped at the roots.

Edmund Burke's observation that, "All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," has been confirmed time and time again. From kindergarten class on, our children, your grandchildren are being strategically targeted, psychologically abused and brainwashed by homosexual and pro-homosexual educators.

Our children are being victimized by repugnant and premeditated strategies, aimed at desensitizing and eventually recruiting our young into their camps. Think about it, children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.

Your children are being warped into believing that same-sex families are acceptable; that men kissing men is appropriate.

Your teenagers are being instructed on how to perform so-called safe same gender oral and anal sex and at the same time being told that it is normal, natural and even productive. Will your child be the next victim that tests homosexuality positive?

Come on people, wake up! It's time to stand together and take whatever steps are necessary to reverse the wickedness that our lethargy has authorized to spawn. Where homosexuality flourishes, all manner of wickedness abounds.

Regardless of what you hear, the militant homosexual agenda isn't rooted in protecting homosexuals from "gay bashing." The agenda is clearly about homosexual activists that include, teachers, politicians, lawyers, Supreme Court judges, and God forbid, even so-called ministers, who are all determined to gain complete equality in our nation and even worse, our world.

Don't allow yourself to be deceived any longer. These activists are not morally upright citizens, concerned about the best interests of our society. They are perverse, self-centered and morally deprived individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives. Homosexual rights activists and those that defend them, are just as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities.

The homosexual agenda is not gaining ground because it is morally backed. It is gaining ground simply because you, Mr. and Mrs. Heterosexual, do nothing to stop it. It is only a matter of time before some of these morally bankrupt individuals such as those involved with NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Lovers Association, will achieve their goal to have sexual relations with children and assert that it is a matter of free choice and claim that we are intolerant bigots not to accept it.

If you are reading this and think that this is alarmist, then I simply ask you this: how bad do things have to become before you will get involved? It's time to start taking back what the enemy has taken from you. The safety and future of our children is at stake.

2008: 2008 was one of the hardest years to do. There really was a dearth of great stuff I had to leave out of the medal count. This is the year that Third Edge of the Sword first made the news (it wouldn't be the last), with the first of (many) random revelations I would discover about Shernell Pierre, an immigrant who was killed in west Edmonton this year. It was also the year of the three elections: an Alberta election, a Canadian federal election, and then the 2008 Presidential election where President Monkey obtained the post he would use to destroy America in the following three-quarters of a decade. SUN-TV viewers may also remember when Ezra Levant adapted my anti-Suzuki commercial idea (minus the liberal uses of the word "nip").
Bronze: As God as my witness, I didn't think they were that stupid: As mentioned, in October of 2008 Canada held a federal election. Stephen Harper won but only with another minority. Everybody remembers this. But the biggest thing that people (not leftists!) remember about the 2008 election was that as soon as it was over the other three parties decided that, contrary to all the talk about no coalitions they promised during the election, they went ahead and planned a formal coalition to remove Harper for his serious crimes. What were those crimes? Easy: he was going to take away the free money that political parties receive after every election. Yep, that was it. Officially, the reason was that Harper wasn't undertaking Keynesian economic policies in the wake of the 2008 global recession (which is also important to remember every time a liberal complains about how Harper didn't run surpluses. He budgeted one in November 2008, and Layton created a constitutional crisis to force him to do otherwise. As the anger over the plan started causing conservatives to actually rally, I had already posted this analyzing the tactical missteps for the opposition parties that the coalition represented.

The end question has to be, as mentioned above, how many new votes for the coalition do Dion and Layton expect to get? For the electoral calculus on this move to make sense, they have to get a number greater than x+y to decide to switch to either of their parties. The problem is that this just isn't going to happen! Conservative supporters (even tenuous ones) aren't going to support one of the two parties they just finished voting against! They might siphon a few Green voters (more on this later), but I thought the whole deal with the Greens is that their voters weren't voting for political expediency and therefore won't be strategically switching votes. Did the LibDips expect that they were going to get a lot of undecided voters?

The coup is opposed by huge numbers of Canadians, including NDP and Liberal voters. The coup is supported only by NDP and Liberal voters.

Silver: Why there's no reason to cheer for the Toronto Blue Jays: With the Blue Jays making the playoffs for the first time since 1993 this year, Canada "came together" to support a team that for large spans of Canada is from a city we actively hate and wouldn't object to destroying. Geographically, I take a look at the rest of Major League teams and remind Edmontonians which ones are closer to us (though culturally is a different story).
Gold: Pro-sodomite who studies societal change now claims there's no societal change: Tom Lukiwski was in the news again recently, which makes this post about his previous video on poofters rather timely. It's also a pretty good pop culture mix, where I link Lukiwski with...Eddie Murphy?

Delirious in 1983 was eight years before Tom Lukiwski's videotaped comments in 1991. Eight years after 1991 it was 1999 (my left-leaning readers have math issues, so I'm just making this all clear). What happened in 1999? Well, on June 8th of 1999 Parliament voted 216-55 in favour of preserving marriage as exclusively the purview of one man and one woman. Edmontonian and Liberal Justice Minister Ann McLellan stated that the Liberals had "no intention of changing the definition of marriage or legislating same-sex marriage."

2009: Another busy year, with 407 posts. Fortunately, I finished up the year with a best of the year poll. However, I figured with the fullness of time that I should still look at some of the other posts and see what the past half-decade has done to age them. This was the year of the liveblog (everything from the mlb playoffs to the Grey Cup) and of the countdown where I did a Top 10 countdown for both George W. Bush (pbuh) and Corner Gas.
Bronze: WhyCantYouMoveOn.org?: I was a proud attendee when George W. Bush (pbuh) came to Edmonton. I also did a review of the event itself, but this post holds up better years later because liberals are still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, but Canadian liberals got such a case of Harper Derangement Syndrome that it became an issue in the recent federal election.

That was the day that left-wing media outlets decided they had one mission in their lives (and with the current financial state of the industry we can see they put everything they had into it): bring down George W. Bush. This wasn't just restricted to the news: all of the mentally inferior media folk took part. Family Guy, The Daily Show, and Kanye West all started out during the Bush Presidency. Biased reviewers such as Alan Cross made sure that anti-Bush musicians got all of their second rate anti-Bush albums positive reviews. It would be the Obama administration before anybody learned that Whoopi Goldberg considered rape to be acceptable.

You can see the same forces in play about Stephen Harper. In fact, replace "Bush" with "Harper" in much of this post and look how accurately it described the nutters who blamed Harper for the federal deficit (which was Handjob Jack Layton's fault), among other things. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the next few years under Shiny Pony.

Obama hasn't done anything (positive, at least) of consequence. When you place your entire life to getting a "transformative" politician elected and then the few changes he makes are negatively received, its a tough pill to swallow. From the dumbest black man on Chicago's southside to the most pretentious Norwegian Nobel Committee member to the first member of Edmonton Coalition Against War and Racism to get their teeth bashed in by Edmonton Police Services, those who pushed for Barack Obama as the "anti George W. Bush" are discovering that the "anti George W. Bush" is -- surprise surprise -- more imcompetant than their friendly media outlets labelled the actual George W. Bush. It's hard to swallow, and the natural reaction (not meaning to defend such psychologically pathetic reactions) is to continue to blame everything on the man who quietly retired into private life until convinced to travel to Calgary one evening in March to deliver a speaking engagement.

Silver: Liberal Doctors Tell Medical Lies: Besides the fact that far-left extremist Ken Chapmen went psycho because an Alberta Liberal was caught lying and therefore exposes his lies alongside, this post remains one of my favourites ever on the site. Back when H1N1 was a thing, the Alberta Government did the same thing they always do during flu season: order some vaccine, beg people to ignore the anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, and then wait months while people slowly take them up on their offer. Here in 2015, in the middle of flu season they can't even get hospital employees to get the flu shot. In 2009, things were different: the hype over H1N1 was massive even though it barely killed more people in 2009 than the rest of the flu strains did. It turns out scare stories in the media over H1N1 was more important to people than scare stories in the media about kids getting autism. In the midst of this, former Liberal leader David Swann did what Liberals always do. Lied. Because liberals always lie, and everything a liberal says is always a lie.

I’ve heard from seniors...the very people most at risk and most likely to benefit from the vaccine!

- "Doctor" David Swann, former Public Health Officer
(of the government bureaucracy he reminds us is routinely incompetent)

Elderly, you may note, are not being targeted for immunization in the newly revamped plans the Alberta Government announced today. Why is this?

Why, its simple. Seniors are not in high-risk groups for the Swine Flu. Oh, also it appears that the elderly receive little benefit from the flu shot.

But Swann wasn't done. By the time he finished he lied about the number of flu clinics in Edmonton, his own immunization status, and even how long the problem had been a problem. David Swann is a liar and a coward. He tells tall tales to scare little old ladies, and uses his possibly fraudulent medical degree as his false authority. While having Rachel Arab crowned Premier was hardly an ideal situation this year, it was nice to see Doctor Fraudpants humiliated in ways that Kim Campbell would cringe at.
Gold: "Democratic Renewal" comes with a free pair of jackboots: What can I say, the Alberta NDP have proven to be so evil in governance, so deserving of a violent overthrow after only 7 months in office, that this post about union thugs and the WCB seems far more apt today than it was in 2009.

we have found the one person on this earth who thinks the current WCB environment is anything on this side of reason. I've written about WCB issues before, and what always strikes me is that its not privatized NOR is it government run. What happens instead is that any complaint you take to WCB is redirected to your MLA because its provincial legislation that gives carte blanche to WCB... but once you talk to your MLA you're assured that WCB is a totally independent agency outside the purview of government. Employees dislike WCB, employers dislike WCB... it seems the only people who enjoy the Workers Compensation Board are those who happen to cash a paycheque from them.

Those who cash said paycheques are, of course, AUPE employees. Remember kids, I call her Rachel Arab to remind you she's literally in bed with the unions. I also cover such issues as provincial overspending (which is, of course, far more problematic in 2015 than it was even in 2009 or 2012), the free association that is denied in existing provincial union legislation, and the myth of tax rate increases leading to tax revenue increases. All pretty good work just to demolish a blogpost that features a guest comment by United Nurses coward David Harrigan!

2010: With only 160 posts it's a little less work to go through, though again for every one I put on this list there are four that I wish I could extend the rules to include.
Bronze: Out with the old, in with the new: As Tacitus famously quipped, the more corrupt a society the larger its number of laws. While in practice it isn't going to be easy to figure out, the basis behind this is still something that any right-thinking citizen in a western country should be pushing upon his upon his leaders.

In all of these stories and countless others, you see the same words over and over again: new regulations about x; tougher rules about y; more restrictions about z. Do you know what you never hear? That's right, the exact opposite: ending of regulations, looser rules, fewer restrictions. Legislatures across the democratic world, in an intense desire to show their "legacy" and/or prove how much they "care" pass mammoth behemoth after mammoth behemoth into law, burdening all of our lives with incremental and seemingly irreversible intrusion.

Silver: City of Edmonton Taxypayers paying to dig a hole, and then to fill another one: With the recent nightmares caused by the Metro LRT line caused by Mayor Coward's inept leadership it's good to look back at the ridiculousness being planned long-term as this same line is intended to go up to St. Albert and cause further traffic delays.

The cost argument is truly laughable. Remember that eventually they will end up having to redesign the area roadways to compensate for the stupid decision they made in 2008. I remind future citizens of Edmonton that Iveson will not pay out of pocket for these stupid decisions: unless you force him to with some sort of retroactively personally culpable legislation. I strongly encourage this to all surviving Edmontonians in 2045 who aren't recovering from their stab wounds: especially when you realize that idiot Iveson's defense of the next LRT phase is that they will get rid of left turns entirely. Wait, isn't this the guy all up in arms about our carbon footprints? And now we're going to wind up with big stretches of traffic-jammed roads

Gold: An easy deconstucting of the strawman "white privilege" that still does not exist. Unlike, say, female privilege.: Now that "check your privilege" has entered the lexicon, this post deconstructing "white privilege" and how Red Indians and women have actual legislated privileges remains one of my favourites (even though I didn't get to title it with a Blazing Saddles joke).

Apparently, no white people have ever not gotten a job where they "had a feeling" they were the best candidate. It's a good thing too, otherwise we would...hey, wait, nevermind, that does happen. Maybe a black person got "our" job! I think I just found a solid undeniable case of black privilege

Lina, in her comments to my earlier post, accused me of being "not prepared for a reasonable and mature discussion". Readers may remember that both on Twitter and in that post, I continually asked for an answer to the obvious question: where is my legal privileges granted to me for being white? If, I argued, no solid grounds of white privilege could be found, then the concept deserved to die. Not just be "swept under the rug": killed off. Thrown about like so much garbage.

The "Aboriginal community" already has treaty rights not granted to other blood relations of long-established white families who deserve just as much special credit for being the first in North America as they did. We see that from a 'justice' perspective in Caledonia how little privilege the peaceful white townspeople were afforded.

Unfortunately, partly because of the social justice warrior movement which is given a pass in the far-left media (like Paula Simons and the Edmonton Journal) this pathology is even more widespread than it was before. As always, the facts don't matter to these retarded extremists. You can lead socialist nutters like Lina Hoffbauer to the truth, but you can't make their brain drink -- it's already full of Kool Aid.

2011: This was by far the easiest year to pick from, with only a dozen posts having to go unmentioned in this.
Bronze: Did Edmonton Oilers rookie Ryan Nugent-Hopkins score a hat trick on October 15th 2011?: Ryan Nugent-Hopkins (RNH) is possibly on the trade block this season for the Edmonton Oilers as the team's defensive woes combined with "Nuge"'s disappointing on-ice performance has the Oilers at the bottom of the league looking up (again). The night of October 15, 2011 I was watching the Oilers play the Canucks and watched the "third" RNH goal. Immediately I started questioning the official scorer's account, enough that I went to YouTube and the CBC website and carefully watched all the video showing that Taylor Hall was the actual goal scorer.
Silver: #yegslutwalk participants, as sluts, agree to any and all sexual activity. They don't say no: if they do, they don't mean it, they're just teasing: The slutwalk is one of the big aspects of the silly social-justice-warrior mindset polluting our cultural spectrum these days. You probably have seen several conservative takedowns of the phenomenon, but I still think my analogies break some new ground on the topic.

What next harsh reality are these girls planning to protest? If you walk into the Hell's Angels club on the Yellowhead wearing a rival club jacket, you're gonna get murdered. Do we 'blame the victim' for this crime? Uh, yeah. If you do something stupid, bad things happen to you.

I don't back down, of course: not on this, not on anything.

Every woman marching in the Edmonton Slut Walk is publicly declaring herself a slut. This means every woman there desires sex with any and all partners. Any sexual activity you initiate with them comes with implied consent.

It's also worth noting that, as I've noted, police "blame the victims" all the time when they need to take further actions to prevent them from being victims of crime.
Gold: So we get to have an election...: The 2011 election, the one that gave Stephen Harper his majority (that Rat Bastard 2.0 recently took from us), wasn't even officially underway when this post was made up, but I did come up with a few of the issues and concerns going into that election.

the NDP is basically at the highest number of seats they could reasonably be expected to achieve. An election risks those seats, and by extension Layton's leadership. Dozens of competing theories have abounded why Layton would do this, most involving the word "cancer".

But then yesterday a bombshell dropped: Ipsos polling shows the Conservatives are pushing in on majority territory and the new question arises: is the party pushing for an election with bad internal polling numbers the NDP? Or should we instead be looking towards the Liberals?

After all, if the Ipsos numbers are to be believed the Liberals have had their support plummet to an almost inconceivable 24%. Is this poll an aberration, or does it jive with what the NDP number crunchers have themselves discovered: the Liberal Party of Canada is as vulnerable as it could ever be?

To be fair, I vastly underestimated the NDP wave that would give them a whopping 103 seats (I had guessed 40). On the other hand, the Liberals did have a historically bad election in 2011, partly because Ignatieff is, in so many many many ways, not Justin "Shiny Pony" Trudeau.

2012: 2012 was another multiple-election year, and while I didn't post much about the US election that saw President Monkey defeat Mitt Romney, I did cover the Alberta one. Lots. Like, I mean, lots. How much lots? Well, just scroll down to the gold medal winner if you're curious. But first...
Bronze: "He's not a taxman, he's the taxman": You may have watched the (apparently disappointing) Corner Gas movie from a couple years ago. Well back in 2012, the left-wing writers of the show were complaining that Premier Brad Wall had cancelled their precious tax credit.

The real hypocrisy, of course, is when you remember who wrote Corner Gas: Mark Farrell, Paul Mather, Kevin White, Andrew Carr, and Brent Butt. With the exception of that last name, every one of those writers was previously best known for working for This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a far left CBC show which year after year showed its contempt for conservative politics, policies, and politicians. This was the show that NDP faggot Rick Mercer became famous for too, remember. A bunch of extreme leftists who'd never met a tax hike they didn't like, thought that its only "fair" that people's hard earned dollars go to support Big Government, and that raising these taxes had absolutely no impact whatsoever on how people behaved and denied until the cows came home that raising taxes came with any loss of economic benefit.

Until their tax exemption was at risk, and they were in danger of paying the same taxes that you or I pay. Now suddenly look who's concerned about people leaving the province and losing their jobs if they suddenly see a tax increase.

The post also features a decent bit of quick "photoshopping".

Alberta is a pretty expensive place to film a movie. Why? Our economy is booming. Why? Well, we're still reaping the benefits of almost two decades ago when we elected our own Brad Wall.

My how things change for the worse, though...
Silver: Devon Hugh Saunders "speaks out" about Shernell Pierre: If you remember, in 2008 I mentioned that Third Edge of the Sword was a bit of a media sensation over the fact that I had learned some personal details about a recent murder victim. This year I even posted a little retrospective of the case and more explanation of my involvement. But even though the story was big in 2008, the real surprise came 4 years later where I was again in a random situation to learn more about the events surrounding her death. To wit, after police named a suspect I managed to hear from a close friend how he has admitted to coming clean about the case.

The reason for the confrontation and the eventual murder? Money. Apparently, when they were together Saunders loaned Pierre very significant sums of money: tens of thousands of dollars worth. When the two of them broke up, she didn't return the money. Quite to the contrary, she kept it. But she did more than that: she taunted him. She constantly told him that he was never getting it back, she was keeping it, that she was going to spend it for fun and on her new man, and that there was nothing he could do.

It turns out there was something he could do.

Gold: Why I'm Voting For Wildrose / Why I'm Voting Against the Redford PCs: At first glance, this post isn't all that long. It's deceptive though (much like an Alberta NDP MLA campaigning at your door). I link to 33 of my own posts about the 2012 Alberta Election. The kicker, of course, is that every one of these links is indeed gold. Some more gold than others, obviously, but everything from Bill 44 to body armour bans is covered. Let's peek at a couple highlights.

This is the perverse world in which the far-left lunatics like Red Redford live in: Alberta's education budget is extraordinarily high thanks to the ridiculous salaries paid out -- thanks in part to the highly militant teachers union. The teachers, who mismanaged their own money for decades (these are the people teaching math to your children, by the way) get a sweet taxpayer bailout for their incompetence (though, to be fair, that paycheque they receive every 2 weeks is a pretty good bi-monthly bailout for incompetence too) and then when their education system ends up needing to take a hit thanks to the bailout, they whine and have a 'progressive' come along and restore it as well.

At no point has there been anybody in the provincial government who's got the brains to say "now wait just a cotton-picking minute here." Teachers (who work only 10 months of the year and receive a full-time salary) get pretty sizable sums of money for work which is so easy and with so few failure standards that there are lineups of would-be mooches just waiting for their seat on the gravy train. Their union manages to protect them from even the smallest of criticisms while simultaneously being in charge of their certification (sweet deal!). The education budget is given to local school boards, but then the province sets wages so high that even with their unnecessary yearly increases the board are feeling the pinch.

Under Red Redford's badly written law, you don't have any legal recourse if this "administrative" penalty is enacted against you unfairly or improperly. You have no defense if the cop on the roadside violated your Charter Rights (funny, I thought Red Redford was so excited about Charter Rights this week for some reason), you have no restitution available to you, and the offending officer risks no punishment. All of this, mind you, for people who aren't the problem in the first place!

One of last things the Red Redford government tried to do before the election was to bring in new rules and changes to homeschooling in this province. As part of their “reorganization”, they tried to exert even more control over the children of this province. In Red Redford’s world, children do not belong to their parents, they belong to the state. When those children are in danger of becoming fully educated and aware citizens, the Redford government and her corrupt Alberta Teachers Association union combine forces to make sure that all that are created are little lumps of progressive clay: uneducated peons fed lies and nonsense, who then grow up convinced that the state (with the power of unions) is the provider of all that is well and good, keeping the world at bay from the greedy capitalists who would seek to destroy us all. If you think this is unrealistic, ask yourself how many high school graduates are ever educated about when the Constitution of Canada was created, or whether we had free speech rights circa 1910. The answer may surprise you.

And what will happen to you, dear 2012 reader, by then? You became a doctor in 1975 and thirty years later you're forced to perform abortions. You became a marriage commissioner in 1999 and ten years later you're forced to pretend sodomites can really be married. These weren't part of your practice when you took this oath, but they are now. You're in school to be a nurse and graduate in 2014? Enjoy that world of tomorrow. In KikkiPlanet and Red Redford's Alberta, you're a gnat, an automaton. The directive from comes in from the office of the Premier of Alberta. This is the way it is going to be as a cousin of mine was particularly fond of saying during his Elementary School years. You are merely a tool, a hand with a scalpel in it. What to do, how to do it, and whom to do it to? That's all set out of your control. Here's some money and just shut up about all that morality.

2013: This was by far Third Edge of the Sword's quietest year. Only 30 posts in total, you'd think this would make picking the Top 3 easier. Somehow, it was harder.
Bronze: William Aberhart + Love of Sodomy = Don Iveson: When Mayor Coward was elected in 2013, I warned you about the amount of money he's spending that isn't his. After two years, an arena, a malfunctioning LRT, an airport closure that already is coming closer to my predictions than his, and not one but two over-budget and way-behind-schedule bridges sure puts me on the right side of history, doesn't it?

Thirdly, whining about how much public infrastructure the City of Edmonton is responsible for would carry a lot more weight if it wasn't for the fact that the City of Edmonton, with socialist idiots like Mandel and Cowardly Don Iveson leading the charge, are wasting metric shit-tons of taxpayer money building infrastructure that the private sector should be forking over the tab for. From overpriced rec centres to ugly redesigns of art galleries to free hockey arenas for billionaires, the Mandel tenure has featured the money-grubbing little slumlord signing on council sycophants like Iveson to blow through hundreds of millions of dollars -- which would sure cover a lot of infrastructure upkeep -- building things either Edmontonians don't want or things that they do want but have been convinced it's the job of city council to pay for.

Silver: "He tasks me, and I shall have him. I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!": I've reviewed and recapped Fringe plays and even Toronto Film Festival events, but of all my reviews I think I'm most proud of this one. Not only do I make about 34,000 Zach Quinto faggot jokes, but I throwback to the Star Trek running gag of...running.

This movie begins with Spock literally flaming.

Pace the Mitchell and Webb skit about Princess Diana, the Klingons are notoriously slapdash about their own borders. I mean they only send 47 ships to blow up Nero just one movie ago. A dozen movies and a lifetime ago they sent 3 cruisers to blow up a nebula that had wandered into their space without permission. They attacked a Voyager space probe with such ferocity that a piece of worn out old metal literally cried out in pain. They send two battleships to take out Captain Beverly Picard's medical ship, and three battleships to punish old Admiral Janeway for screwing them over on a business deal. These are tough hombres!

FaggotSpock and Kirk get to chat a bit while looking on as the other dies. The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few, etc. etc. There's a decent bit of arc here: FaggotSpock couldn't understand or appreciate what Kirk did for him earlier in the movie and now he does, getting emotional and understanding the deep camaraderie involved. In fact, FaggotSpock gets so emotional he cries out loudly to the sky.... "KKKKHHHHHHAAAAAANNNNNNNNN!!!!!"

And as the audience realizes they've been had (and Nick Meyer walks out of the theatre to go call a lawyer, we hope), the dreadnought goes sailing past the Enterprise: Khan's still alive, his ship still has power, and when he swings around he means to deprive you of your life.

Gold: Did the Conservative government really lose 3.1 billion dollars?: This one was pretty popular, as it seems nobody in the media could be bothered to read the Auditor General's report that didn't claim that the Harper Government lost $3.1 billion dollars. Instead, they all read the Toronto Star's article on the subject which reported that such a claim was reported in the report. It wasn't, but I not only bothered to actually demonstrate what the report said but also explain how governments will always claim a spending spree.

Again note the massive differences between this audit and, say, the response from Chief Dances-With-Burrito on the (far more devastating) audit of her band's funds last year. The online Harper-haters freaked out when an audit of the incompetent Indians running the show at Attawapiskat had actually spent money (unlike in this audit), that they had no justification that any of the money actually spent had been spent properly (unlike this audit), and that money had been spent without paperwork to account for it (unlike in this audit). They demanded an "audit" of the Harper government, and with this latest auditors report had been hoping they'd found it.

They haven't, of course. This audit is about the federal government (across two different parties and three Prime Ministers) allocating funding initiatives for a hot-button issue which then received a significant amount of federal money (all of which was spent properly) but due to politics and cross-department integration it was unclear if this money wasn't going to be spent otherwise and highlighting a minor problem with how the government records spending.

2014: 2014 was a big year as Third Edge of the Sword made the local, provincial, and even national news when the Faggot Familiars in the media did a story about my Fringe reviews (after a local poofter who's Twitter name this Christmas season is literally HoHoHomo didn't like me pointing out his sick lifestyle). Third Edge of the Sword also stood out this year as one of the few blogs to actually cover the disgusting Faggot-Familiar Alliances (which actually lost three separate times in the legislature) as the Fagosphere rose up and pushed the faggot members of the media (notice a 2014 trend?) to one-sidedly cover their agenda until it went through. For a hotly contested bill, notice that the media never told the other side of the issue. Anyways, aside from such obvious choices what are the three best posts of 2014?
Bronze: Danielle Smith has decided that elections are a waste of [your] time: Almost a year ago today, Danielle Smith and a group of Wildrose MLAs decided to cross the floor to join the Prentice PC party that was only months away from an implosion, convinced that it was such an unstoppable force that there was no sense going against it. While none of us could see Rachel Arab's disgusting NDP government on the horizon, there was much concern about how she and a big chunk of the party could decide that a hint of power was better than the principled stand the party was based on. The thing was, Danielle came in as the win government versus "be the NDP of the right" (and again, think about how that turned around on it's head) so when she "failed" at that mission then her instinct wasn't to advance/protect conservatism in Alberta but rather to make the play for winning government. In the post, I warn about the implications for Wildrose's electoral prospects that really hammered home in the 2015 election where the voters were (irrationally) mad at Jim Prentice but didn't think Wildrose was ready for government (and we know how much they regret it today).

The sheer size of the floor crossings, and that they include the leader of the party, make this quite different than the average MLA swapping parties. Oddly enough, since the actual reins of power aren't changing, the dynamic of this switch is even more monumental. This is, at least for the next election cycle and probably the next two cycles, going to completely eliminate the Wildrose Party from contention. Don't be surprised next week to find that Wildrose has ironically dropped in popularity. Why? Voters are mad at Danielle Smith and eight other people...who are now actually PC MLAs. Voters can be dumb, that's how come Wildrose didn't form the government in 2012

It feels sort of eerie reading this now, doesn't it? Not a lot written by a lot of people in the aftermath of Danielle Smith holds water (*cough* *cough* Colby Cosh *cough* *cough*) and my post does a pretty good job. It also features one of my first uses at some neat formatting: the "Simpsons Did It Sidebar" that compares the Wildrose defections to the South Park episode "Douche Vs. Turd". Finally, I link to a now-private "progressive" blog that hilariously failed to both predict the 2015 election and make a key distinction between Danielle Smith and Ezra Levant's different "unite the right" initiatives. Great stuff.
Silver: Lessons from 1995: Scotland's oil doesn't make it more like Alberta: Last year Scotland held an independence referendum. Much like a couple referendums Canadians remembered, the "Yes" side was guaranteed to win...and then they didn't. And they'll try again in a few years. There was a lot of articles comparing Queerbec and Scotland last year, but not only did not nearly enough of them address it from the right side of the spectrum, and noticing that the SNP claims mirrored the BQ claims wasn't unique to me, but still:

Queerbec Referendum: "Yes, you'll be able to keep your Canadian passports" (even though that would have to be negotiated with a host country that would be bitter, angry, and no longer incentivized to make concessions)
Scottish Referendum: Yep

Queerbec Referendum: "We'll keep the Canadian dollar" (technically Canada can't stop another country from using our money, but the Bank of Canada can play around on its monetary policy levers as much as it likes, even if it means starving every Frog in the province to death).
Scottish Referendum: Well what do we have here?

Queerbec Referendum: No no, the English lie, we pay into them!. (Hint: the Frogs are the ones who are lying)
Scottish Referendum: Totally different. These are Scottish people making this ludicrous claims

Queerbec Referendum: After a "Yes" vote we'll still be part of all the international agreements we were in before, from NAFTA to NATO to the United Nations. (sidebar: if you opposed such organizations, you were told that Quebec would proudly get to renegotiate them to have better terms, which compared with the first statement makes no sense whatsoever).
Scottish Referendum: Well, even Queerbec wouldn't have contemplated joining the European Union

I also looked at how England would be impacted by a Scottish Yes vote, which unless you're reading David Mitchell's always hilarious and always hilariously misguided articles in the Guardian, you wouldn't have seen very much have.

Unshackled of the burdens of supplying social services, two official languages, and full control over her own immigration policies, the federal government could have heralded over a new era of prosperity, while Queerbec floated ever further into backwater territory.

In England the situation isn't as clear: the Brits don't have the economic storm to weather as much, but they will lose a large chunk of the North Sea oil reserves. The bigger risk to the United Kingdom is loss of prestige: this is the sad last little wisps of the great BRITISH EMPIRE, a worldwide force so dominant clever bloggers treat it like names in Star Wars title crawls. American politicians still agonize over who "lost Vietnam" or "lost China", it remains to be seen if the stigma of "losing Scotland" similarly impacts David Cameron's Tories and/or Gordon Brown's Labour. Brown has recently dominated headlines as the fevered voice of "No": the voice that fellow Labour politician Alistair Darling was supposed to be, but spectacularly fell short on. Labour certainly seized the chance to be the defender of Britain that a weakling like Cameron couldn't have -- and seeing how the Scots are mired in far-left politics, it makes sense. Jean Charest, not Preston Manning, was the voice for "No" in 1995. Of course, Manning (or Harper?) could have had the more forceful addresses in the Brown style. What's French for Alistair Darling? Jean Charest.

Just to piss off any of my leftwing readers, I go into how the UKIP could benefit from a Scottish Yes vote, and even bring up #IdleNoMore.
Gold: @lansy61: You may not get a feel for what it is from the post title, but I had been participating in an online argument about speed limits with the titular character in this post who just doesn't understand that drivers don't, nor should they, obey random signs on the side of the road. I was tired of being restrained to 140 characters and decided to just go all out. What resulted was a great and flowing post that uses a very colloquial style to point by point explain why this crazy old woman's argument is completely nonsensical, and why I used allusions to Greek mythology when trying to figure out why she would always drive the speed limit even if it was dropped to 5 km/hr on all roadways.

You never did answer, because I don't think you're capable of it. All you're able to do is look at what the government tells you is the speed for you to drive, and drive it. If they did change the limits around your house (and I do mean your house, specifically, I want it so wherever you move the limits around you are always 5km/hr) you'd drive that new slow speed, you'd take 3 hours to get from Rexall Place to Polland Meadows Park and you'd never question or complain about this travesty except to freak out if somebody drove 6km/hr and "risk killing you with "excessive" speed.

Forget that as I continued to give you examples (such memorable and heartwarming examples like example 1,example 2,example 3,and of course who can forget example 4) of roads with speed limits set ridiculously low which nobody generally follows (that's where my 85th percentile talk came from, if you remember), you were so mind-numbingly retarded that you thought I was somehow playing a game where I was guessing which roads you drive on the most. You never did say which roads you drove, what speed you would drive on them if I covered up all the speed limit signs, nor why you thought that just magically the number a pencil-pushing rights-imposing city bureaucrat was always the exact right speed for that particular section of road. That you apparently never ever ever drive less than the limit also indicates you're completely mental on the subject of driving. The speed limit on Whyte Avenue is 50 km/hr. Yes yes, I know this is another of those roads you "never drive" but please please please just this once try to grasp the actual topic of discussion. The speed limit on Whyte Avenue is 50 km/hr. If you drive this speed on Whyte Avenue you will kill somebody.

As always, the "don't speed" retards are completely stymied by this basic question: how ridiculously low do speed limits need to be before you decide that it's "okay" to exceed that speed limit? In many cases, including Lansy, it seems the answer is "no speed limit is ridiculously low", which is crazy when you remember that we have a retarded cowardly mayor who has literally said that he wants speed limits so low that nobody will ever die.

nce you do that, you'll start realizing that you can do this all the time. The Henday limit says 100 but it's a warm day, the road is dry, and there isn't much traffic (and the traffic that is there is cruising around the 130 mark)? Yes, you can let the needle climb. Climb! Past 101. Past 102. Past 103. Let it climb even higher and higher. Let it sail up to 115, and feel the liberation within you as you come to realize that the number on the roadside is, as I said many many times, mostly random and all bullshit.

As you come to realize this, you'll start to notice some things. You'll start to notice how many other people, despite a legislative imperative to do otherwise, keep driving faster than the stupid sign on the side of the road. You'll start to wonder how much faster people would drive, using their rational judgement as surely as you did when you saw "115" on your speedometer for the first time, if there was no asshole useless cops like your cowardly buddy Brandan Power trying to round up tax dollars to support his desire to rule over the populace.

2015: Here we are: this very year (that isn't quite over, but ah well), the year of the twin far-left Canadian elections, the year of strife, the year of fire, the year of...oh, wait, that's 2261. Still, if you're reading this in 2015, this is our year. If you're reading this in a scary future time, this is how the world was in 2015 (and if there's a post that you think is better than the three posts listed below, please indicate so in the comment section below). Speaking of which, 2015 was a year that I took efforts to migrate comments off the native blogger commenting system and instead move to IntenseDebate, including disabling commenting on the mobile browser (since a lively IntenseDebate comment thread can be wiped out when a single guy posts a comment on native comments available on the mobile browser). It's a little bit of a backend effort, but it's there.
Bronze: You can't spell "funicular" without "waste of stolen tax dollars":I'm not sure if the Edmonton Journal's Paula Simons has ever been to Istanbul, but I have. As a result, I'm well aware of the value of funiculars in cities with lots of steep hills and large amounts of tourist and local traffic. This is not Edmonton, you may note. Meanwhile, the Edmonton funicular isn't even an Istanbul-sized one: it's instead a pint sized one: only 9% the size of their Kabatas-Taksim Funicular. So in the post I have some fun tearing apart the various defenses for this waste of tax money including the claim that it's "found money" (it's not), and that it would give us the feel of the Grand Budapest Hotel (which was a fake funicular in a fantasy movie). I especially like the picture that shows Paula Simons logic: Edmonton should build a giant Death Star! It would make our city futuristic and classic like a long time ago in a galaxy far far away! Also, I include pictures of children and ask parents if they mind me slitting their throats. Can't go wrong!
Silver: Toddlers didn't burn to death because of Whitey: In February two young boys burned to death on the Makwa Sahgaiehcan Indian Reservation. It was a tragic event, made even more tragic when the #IdleNoMore losers started complaining that a small(er) town down the road didn't come to help -- even when they had repeatedly helped only to have the Red Indians spit in their face. I did a series of posts on this topic, one of which received a quarter million hits in less than a month and discussed the budgetary disasters on this hugely mismanaged reserve. But as I stay at the top of this post, the first one was a little more dry and was about the finances themselves. This is a separate post that I think is better, and more important to the greater discussion: the backwards Red Indian culture and how it links everything from the financial trouble to the dead kids to the missing and murdered women and the substance abuse problems.

But to obsess over how better to spend the money is almost to miss the point. We just need to stop giving these Indians the money in the first place: this isn't a Makwa Sahgaiehcan problem, that's only the most recent flare-up. Enoch Reserve did this exact same "don't pay for fire services" gag once to the City of Edmonton. Atawapiskat is mismanaged so the buildings are falling apart while the Chief's fuck-buddy gets to cash a paycheque and pretend he's the CFO for a Fortune 500 company. Davis Inlet had so many kids sniffing gas they moved them to a new town so they could sniff gas in cool new surroundings. Hobemma changed its name to remove the "stigma" that was causing gang violence that left little kids in its wake and the stigma-free town saw a youth murder within hours. Enoch in Edmonton is so incompetent they couldn't run a casino that receives 566% more revenue than the white casino down the road (while they get a smoking bylaw exemption). A Saskatchewan Indian gets so drunk he lets his kids freeze to death. There will be another heartbreaking story tomorrow and the day after and the day after.

Bad things happen, they make white voters feel guilty so they give more money, but money begets even more bad things and the cycle -- no, the death spiral -- continues ad infinitum. We don't have to do this anymore. So long as failures are our failures and successes (well, there aren't any but fingers crossed!) aren't our successes, we need to pick up our football and not play anymore. Maybe if we do that, the bill for fire services will actually get paid. Maybe if we do that, the 900-plus residents of Makwa Sahgaiehcan might get enough civic pride together to form their own volunteer fire department, at which point they may ask why Loon Lake down the road pays so much less in property taxes and their mayor earns 1/42nd the per capita amount. Maybe when their houses need "fire suppression" they'll just pull up their sleeves and install some fire suppression.

Gold: Why all 94 Truth and Reconciliation Recommendations are horrible and shouldn't be enacted: Justin Trudeau was literally elected on a pledge to enact "all 94" TRC recommendations. What does that even mean? What do the recommendations really say? How many of them are even in his jurisdiction? Do any of them help the Red Indian? More importantly, do any of them help Canadians, do any of them benefit the Canadian people in general and the Canadian taxpayer in particular? With that last question in mind, I went into the entire TRC report (both the Principles and the Recommendations sections) and dissected every suggesting, every assumption, and every consequence.

This is another ridiulously expensive one, all based on lies. It is true, strictly speaking, that "the current state of Aboriginal health in Canada is a direct result of previous Canadian government policies". Specifically, if it wasn't for the policies of Canadians governments, the Red Indian population would have been completely erradicted by disease. In Edmonton, that monument to the monies spent keeping the Red Indian alive is known as the Charles Camsell Hospital: built and funded and staffed by whites to cure the Red Indian of Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, by the way, remains a large health issue around the world, and even in 2015 we can see that in third world countries (which, had whites never come in 1492, would accurately describe a Canada only being run by the Red Indian) TB is crippling. That's the world that Canadian government policies avoided. Likewise, every Red Indian who is alive thanks to surgery or the Germ Theory of Disease is alive as a direct result of Canadian government policies: namely, providing the Red Indian with modern healthcare that their primitive culture could not have come up with.

With the TRC due to release another report, and Shiny Pony due to enact all of the expensive and destructive recommendations, it's worth seeing exactly what horrors this recommendation will place on the Canadian people.

We the Canadian people call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to ignore the call for racially segregated "justice" systems that do not provide justice in accordance with civilized and enlightened views. Unless, again, German people get trial by duelling. Maybe Africans can settle legal disputes 8 Mile style as well? Then we'd really be culturally sensitive. Again, though, let's be serious and look at what treaties have to say about "implementing Aboriginal justice systems". Nothing. Nothing at all. Wait, that can't be right, can it? Oh yes it can. There are no treaties that discussed allowing the Red Indian to set up independent or even parallel criminal and/or civil court systems. This isn't a mere oversight: parallel civil court was established in Queerbec as part of the British Conquest in 1759-1763. It's not like the idea was so alien they didn't think of it. France was able to get a strong settlement out of Britain because the English wanted to avoid a war: Canada was straight up traded for Guadeloupe with the British allowing Roman Catholic Frenchmen to maintian thieir civil (but not criminal!) law. In other words, what this recommendation calls for is a completely new treaty right. In other words, an admission that the treaties should change. What a novel idea! I have a few ideas for changes too! (Change Number One: abolish all treaties. Change Number Two: go have a sandwich, Change Number One pretty much solved everything).

This entire post should basically be required reading. Those who advocate for the TRC proposals are either extremist Red Indian activists or clueless liberals who don't know what the recommendations actually say. The first group is unspeakably evil, and the second needs education. Nobody else is going to provide it, you'll have to come here.

So that segue's a fair bit into the basic rundown of the last decade: commentary, comedy, analysis, and reviews that you can't find anywhere else. Hence, of course, the blog's title. I had thought about blogging for a year or so before I created this site, and I couldn't think of the name I wanted. Finally, Ambassador Kosh gave it to me: "Understanding is a three-edged sword: Your side, their side, and the truth. The truth is something I've said and will never stop saying. "You go fuck yourself, I say what I want" as Fallaci infamously said.

The haters will hate (they really want to pretend this viewpoint doesn't even exist, let alone expose their lies), but after a decade and 2572 (and counting!) posts, I'm not going anywhere. I believe every word I've written on this site. I believe it more than the left believes what they say, and I'm willing to do more and go further to push my agenda then they are to push theirs. Only I have the balls, as I once said. I still got them, and they're bigger than ever.

Now onto the next decade.