Why does St. Albert hate patios?

Two weeks ago I did what I hadn't done yet this summer: visit the outdoor St. Albert Farmer's Market. Since the closure of the amazing 104th street outdoor market in Edmonton, St. Albert is the only major farmer's market to take place on a weekend outdoors.

 

It was okay from a window shopping perspective (helpful hint, never ever buy at a farmer's market what you can also buy in a regular grocery store), but the one highlight from last year appears to have vanished: the outdoor patio at the Royal Canadian Legion located at the far western tip of the market. This was a little disappointing, especially as I had finished talking it up, but there's other places to go in that little burg so we decided to try again.

And again.

And again.

Until we went back to Edmonton.

The first place we hit was Central Social Hall on the northside of the city, which had a nice expansive patio and...nope, it was deserted.

Nevermind, down Mark Messier Trail you can find the only Irish pub left in town, the Dicey Reillys. Literally zero people. Okay, further down there's the previous Irish pub, the Thirsty Rooster (formerly Paddy's, formerly formerly Celtic Knot, formerly formerly a buffer restaurant), which also had an...empty patio. In fairness, the Earl's next door had a few people on the patio but none of us wanted Earl's or for that matter the Original Joe's near Central Social apparently had a few patio-dwellers according to the people who drove past it.

Okay, fine, you know who has an impressive patio even though every staff member is a worthless cunt? Canadian Brewhouse near the Henday. I mean just look at this thing:

Okay that's the outside, what's it look like inside? Couldn't tell you: unlike the other deserted patios this one you have to get in to discover that the patio is closed.

For those of you keeping score, this was early September and the weather was almost +24°C which may not sound impressive but felt considerably warmer.

Last Saturday was similar temperature on Whyte Avenue, and despite the 10+ air quality index caused by the summer of smoke, there were full patios galore. No, this is apparently a St. Albert thing.

Candy Cane Diembodied Skeleton Lane

 

You are no doubt familiar with Candy Cane Lane if you live in or around Edmonton. It's the section of 148th Street just south of 98th Avenue (where 147 Street merges with it creating what turns out to be an officially named (Isabelle Connelly) park and continues  south for about 1148 metres until 148th street ends and turns eastward to become 92nd Avenue for a half block before becoming the new 147th street (then becoming 92A Ave) where the Christmas decorations kind of fizzle out.

It's nothing more than a lot of houses putting out elaborate Christmas decorations, really, though they do supplement with food bank donations and sleigh rides and all sorts of bells and whistles. Except, of course, during the Wuhan Flu debacle when the Viro Fascists at City Hall banned walking on sidewalks.

However, there's a good chance you aren't familiar with Candy Cane Lane's unofficial Halloween competitor.... Pumpkin Lane? Ghosts and Goblins Lane? Okay, they need to work on coming up with a term for it. Where it is, it's along Summerside Grande Boulevard, the road that leaves the (private, but the bragging by residents is very very very public) Summerside Beach at 88th Street and runs approximately 1017 metres to the traffic circle roundabout at 70th Street. In other words, 89% as long as Candy Cane Lane. They could barely have planned it better.

The best part about it is that its apparently relatively new (the couple people I've heard about it from don't think it happened pre-COVID), so what ends up happening is late September/early October people start putting out their decorations. Then by mid-October (weather permitting) pretty much everybody who is going to decorate (about 4-5 houses didn't, which isn't that much different than Candy Cane lane) has finished decorating. However, what happens then is that some neighbours have brought in even more elaborate decorations than the previous year, which causes a mini Halloween-decorating arms race where the decorations get added to and replaced and become more and more elaborate in the days leading up to All Saint's Day. Indeed reports are it started this year before 9/11, so it could be insanely elaborate even before this gets posted.

In general, the north side of the street gets more of the decorations than the southside, possibly due to amount of sun they get in their front versus their back. The northside also gets in the spirit earlier, leaving the southern neighbours playing the most catchup.

Also, you'll have to get there later in the day, especially on weekdays, as most of the houses with inflatable decorations don't leave them plugged in all day:

Don't bother walking around the rest of the neighbourhood either, a block off in either direction the number of decorated houses falls to approximately zero:

In a preview for this year, I thought I'd share some of the highlights from last year's edition (click on any of the images to see them "full" sized). Also if you live on this street and you don't see your house, my apologies but there is so much to see it's hard to capture it all. I'm currently working on a YouTube video that will show the full scope of these decorations:

 

These guys really got a theme going.

Scary skeletons on the second floor! This was everybody's favourite of the photos.

I wonder if they will play less like zombies than the actual Oilers...

Somehow even uglier than the real Bette Middler.

And finally, the scariest home decoration of all:

A faggot lives here! Run away kids, he's evil and wants to molest you!

More violent niggers murdering their superiors

Two black teenagers steal a car and go joyriding. They film themselves as they rear-end another vehicle, then spot a man bicycling along the side of the road. They deliberately run him over, killing him, as they film the murder, laughing.

Powerline is slightly cowardly in their writeup. 

These savages are niggers. N-I-G-G-E-R-S. They loudly and proudly call themselves that in the video, so I find no reason we should ever dance around calling them anything but.

Instead of "reparations", niggers like these need to be found, their throats slit in the public square, whites dance around their bodies and cheer, and then their mothers forced to sit in a chair Clockwork Orange style as they have to watch the video of it happening over and over and over again.

Every single nigger who misbehaves like this, we repeat the exact same ceremony over and over and over again. You will be slaughtered -- it's important to avoid any imprimatur and therefore the term "executed" is to be avoided -- and those you care about will be tortured with the knowledge that we have not only done so, we have gleefully done so.

Hey niggers, your niggery pursuit of niggerish activities will be permanently unniggered at our delight in the harshest of methods.

I'm reminded of something I didn't get to blog about earlier in the month: the wedding massacre in Ottawa. I was away all weekend, however I instantly knew what the media was cravenly scared to admit: this was just more niggers killing other niggers. The signs were all there, of course; CTV News channel had a lot of coverage about the event, however at no point did the crack team of journalists have that mainstay of tragedy porn: the bystander interview. They didn't seem able to find anybody who was actually there who could speak to them about what was happening, which seemed odd for a wedding that took place at a convention centre. There was nothing but bland official reports, which of course told you nothing, and there was only one possible explanation for why CTV wasn't airing something better was that they didn't have anything better. The Occam version is of course that they didn't want to air anything better: it would be a bunch of niggers stumbling through basic English making you immediately realize that if we hadn't let them into Canada from the Niggerland (Somalia, likely) then there wouldn't have been a shooting. Similarly, early Sunday morning Ottawa Police put out a cryptic note that this "didn't appear to be a hate crime" which immediately told you that you were looking at a nigger wedding.

Despite the size of the event, it appears CTV News isn't the only one who seems uninterested in a followup: Ottawa Police are appealing to the general public -- who were not attending the wedding -- to speak up if they think they noticed anything hinky over the weekend after presumably failing to get anything out of the attendees but a bunch of clicking noises and the sort of trashy nonsense the niggers in the vehicular homicide video were blathering. That same weekend, of course, was yet more citywide nigger violence in Alberta, this time in Calgary. Oh, and...uh... checks notes...Tel Aviv.

For Christ's sake, what are niggers from Eritrea doing in Tel Aviv? Don't they have enough trouble with sand niggers causing violence in Israel? Did they think to themselves that they were bored of this and why not import some O.G. negroes to perform the one task they seem uniquely capable of performing?

At least Israel seems interested in doing something about it. On this side of the Atlantic, as Mark Steyn notes in discussing the Nevada niggers murdering an innocent white, the media seems very interested doing exactly what I noted CTV did on September Long Weekend by doing everything they can to minimize the obvious problem with letting in more and more niggers who misbehave worse and worse

Having remained silent through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the Review-Journal finally returned to the "bike crash" today to defend its feeble, anaesthetizing coverage:

As the online firestorm evolved on Saturday, editors at the Review-Journal changed the headline of the article, removing the phrase "bike crash" and replacing it with "hit-and-run," hoping the change would calm the online vitriol.

But that isn't true either: it's an act of murder - a vehicular homicide for which that guy in Charlottesville, Virginia is presently serving half-a-millennium.

Even more disturbingly, the paper revealed that its original "reporter" (a "hero", according to the paper) had known about the cellphone footage for over a fortnight:

In fact, a source had contacted the Review-Journal about the existence of the video more than two weeks ago, and a reporter had instructed the caller on how to forward the video to Metropolitan Police Department detectives investigating the case.

Why, they even did another bland, insipid minimal item on the charge getting upgraded to murder.

Er, okay. But in that case - if you knew about the video "more than two weeks ago" - why didn't you do a piece on that? Because, in any real journalistic culture, that's the story - not sentimentalist sob-sister crapola about, aw, he was a nice guy with a "love of coffee" who unfortunately came a cropper on his bicycle.

The video is the story, but the local paper wouldn't cover it. As its comrades elsewhere in the US media still haven't covered it. Why is that? Oh, well: as usual with an American news event, it took Viscount Rothermere's Daily Mail to write it up in any detail.

 Steyn of course is quick to point out that maybe niggers would be better behaved if we didn't keep telling them that behaving in a civilized manner in a civilized society is so white and therefore bad even though the superior white culture and standards of conduct are objectively better than what the niggers are replacing it with:

Given American education's decline into an unending relitigation of an ever more remote past, are you really stunned that some people are willing to take it to the next level? It's just the slightly more hardcore end of the same continuum as Ibram X Kendi's lucrative racket, "Critical Race Theory", "white fragility" in America, the awful "Voice" referendum Down Under, the toppling of Sir John A Macdonald in Dominion Square in Montreal, and all the other bollocks of the continual 24/7 assault on, for better or worse, our shared inheritance. And, once it's no longer shared, what's left to hold society together in the bright new dawn of Year Zero?

So why be surprised that it seems to be advancing from Civil War statues to flesh-and-blood human beings?

Of course, in the past week the infamous Gregoire Lake has been the site of another murder where no whites were involved: a Red Injun teenager found dead on the side of the road. No mealy mouthed "oh he died in a bike crash" headlines, of course.

If you want a LotR Wifi SSID, use "You Shall Not Password"

A few weeks ago the 21st Century Clown World's Newspaper of Record, the Babylon Bee, had this clever gag posted:

Boomer Forgets Password

KHAZAD-DÛM — A local man suffered from an embarrassing "boomer" moment today, as Gandalf the Gray experienced great difficulty remembering the password to unlock the Doors of Durin at the West-gate Moria.

"Oh dear me," Gandalf was heard grumbling to himself as the party he was traveling with arrived at the hidden entrance. "What is my password again? I know it was something easy that I knew I could remember. Great elephants, this is embarrassing!"

The group accompanying Gandalf on the trek — consisting of two men, an elf, a dwarf, and four hobbits — collectively rolled their eyes as they realized the old man had forgotten his password. "May his beard wither," Gimli the dwarf reportedly muttered out of frustration as he and the others sat down near the locked door.

Funny thing is, I actually have a story related to this. Last month (I believe it was during the Fringe) I saw a Lord of the Rings inspired Wifi network. Well as you can see from the screenshot, when you see the Wifi name "Speak Friend and Enter", the only proper nerdy password you can have is either:

1. mellon (best)
2. friend (distant second-best)
3. (there is no third best)

Yet you can clearly see here that the owner of this Wifi setup a password longer than six letters (otherwise "Connect" wouldn't be greyed out), and both "mellon" and "friend" are six letters long.

No. Just no. This isn't like the classic names of "Pretty Fly for a Wifi" or "FBI surveillance van #6557" or "pennygetyourownwifi" where you have carte blanche authority to pick your own password. The moment you make "speak friend and enter" the name of your Wifi, your choices are limited. I've since heard somebody suggest "friend and" likely was the password, with "enter" being a homonym for <Enter>.

No, this is too cute (and probably not even true) so you get no points for this.

This explains everything

 

China is up to some shit

Just for fun on Saturday I was channel surfing and stumbled across a 24/7 South Korean cable news channel. They showed boats on the screen, and since I liked boats, I watched.

The basic summary is right there in the post title. Red China is doing something shady.

Specifically this all revolves around several atolls that K'mpec had heard of but I'm sure 95% of the Canadian population hasn't: the Spratley Islands. Claimed by several countries (China, Red China, Vietnam, and the Philippines), the Sabina Shoal (one of the islands) are physically located about 135km from Philippine's Panay Island, definitely putting it within the 200-km Economic Exclusion Zone (the most northwest portion, the "North Danger Reef", is about 450km away). As my helpful South Korean TV channel pointed out, however, this same North Danger Reef is the part closest to China, and is a little over 900km from the island of Hainan.

In 1999, the Philippines intentionally grounded an old warship on a shoal closer to Sabina (James Bond style), and the Chinese Coast Guard has been using quasi-legal methods to keep naval resupply ships from reaching the craft. For those keeping score, it's slightly inside the Philippines' EEZ and is only contested between China and the Philippines. Again, the helpful chaps from South Korea who are under no anti-Chinese sentiment whatsoever point out that it's almost 1400km to get to mainland Red China (Macau) from the atoll.

However, mere facts and logic have no real bearing to the Chicoms. The Spratley Islands have oil and the People's Republic wants it. Unlike places like Canada and Africa, fellow asian countries know that every promise of free money from Xi comes with a price tag too horrible to fathom, which leaves the typical Chinese strategy of bribery off the table. Naked aggression is the next obvious ploy, and this sort of salami tactics using water cannons today and real cannons tomorrow seems designed to provoke FakePresident Asterisk into either overreacting and provoking a searing diplomatic response, or else not reacting enough and signalling that the next attempt will be even more successful.

The Newspaper of Record wins again

 

Breaking: They apparently found wreckage, however the link is from a low-trust satire site and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Mostly unrelated: "Why does the Navy's Army need an Air Force?" The same USMC who lost the F-35 are the ones whose requirements drove up the JSF's cost so much.

"the Civil Rights Act essentially replaced the American constitutional order..."

"...because it lets you pass whatever laws you like."

And as Greg Hood notes, that's really the laws "they" like that take away "your" actual rights.

Increasingly, democracy takes on a formal tone. It has become Our Democracy, capital O, capital D. We begin to sense that it is a closed system, in which rulers shape the population and condition it to support, or at least tolerate, the policies rulers want. The best way to do this is to turn the population into a collection of victim groups, or what our system calls “Communities.” If that doesn’t work, you can always import a new population, which is what the Great Replacement is all about. Public opinion is dictated — an effect and not a cause. If public opinion doesn’t match what the rulers want, they ignore it.

Why Wednesday's protest won't work

@commonsensecarl

Canada 🇨🇦, million to March, September 20th

♬ original sound - Common Sense Carl

On this coming Wednesday, September 20^th, an event called the "Million Person March" is being planned at every provincial legislature and at various schools across Canada^†, to help protest against the evil sodomites and their sick agenda.

I'm very very sorry that it's not going to be well attended.

I've written about this before:

Commandment The Second: Conservative Rallies Shall Be On Weekends
Ezra's second mistake was having the rally on a Friday afternoon. Another problem with conservatives rallying is that the target audience are all industrious and hardworking people who work full-time (and often beyond) at real life jobs in the real life private sector. Unlike the lazy unproductive losers who inhabit public sector unionized jobs (and even private sector unionized jobs), they can't just tell work that they'll be taking the rest of the day off to go protest a coffee company's policy of advertising on their in-house TV network. I'm not meaning to minimize #BoycottTims in any fashion here, but in all honesty there's no way that almost any political cause is as important as staying at work and getting paid money and not fired. Again, lazy public sector unionists can just leave at any time to go rally: they put it in their contracts for Christ's sake. This is because leftists aren't actually worth having at work, they can disappear for hours and life goes on. Conservatives have real jobs that they have to remain at during working hours or all hell breaks lose. The sheer uselessness of liberals ensures that a weekday rally will always favour them. Rallies that involve conservatives need to take place over the weekend.

And indeed, I will not be attending the Million Person March, because it's at 9am on a Wednesday. I'll be at work, the same place I'd be if the rally was moved to 9am on Tuesday or 2pm on Wednesday. With the way rush hour traffic in Edmonton has been the last few weeks, depending on the location 5:30 would be difficult to swing.

I understand that it's a school protest and meant to take place at schools during the time the kids being pushed pillow biting and chopping off tits as a positive lifestyle change, but by its very nature that provides the target protester a significant hurdle that we generally can't get out of. For those of us who have already used up our vacation days as a result, we simply can't go. That will certainly keep the number of attendees low.^‡

But, as I noted in that previous post, this won't affect public sector unionized workers. Indeed, the Ontario Federation of Labour is already privately whoops now publicly plotting (they literally call themselves "conspirators") to disrupt and deny the group who oppose faggots diddling children their ability to get the message out. They will be permitted to leave their workplace and specifically picket in defense of the union, while even conservative workplace owners who showed the Rebel Media documentaries in the break room (yes, this is a thing!) will not be permitting this. Of course, if you wanted to march in the Million Person March, that same public sector worker wouldn't permit it.

Nor is the other reason it's at 9am, the student walkout, going to be as successful as you might hope and for much the same reason. During Friday Climate Strike protests in 2019 for example, students who wished to protest the fact that fossil fuels are a great thing were given permission by their own school administration to skip class. The unit circle? Romeo and Juliet? Nonsense, none of those things are more important than the impending global warming disaster that 97% scientists agree will destroy the planet by 2015! While  school administrations were less forgiving of student protesters outraged over a rumour that a nigger was called a nigger, its still a better outcome than any student who walks out on Wednesday will receive. Just ask Josh Alexander, who staged a protest with far more validity than "the dominant religion in Africa is anti-black" and was suspended and later expelled for it, now having to fight in court to be allowed into the school he supposedly has a human right to attend. In other words, unlike the "climate justice" and "social justice" which school administration either actively encourages or neutrally ignores, this protest in favour of actual justice and protecting kids from the Kris Wells of this world so anxious to sodomize them before they get too old will likely be harshly treated by the same people who got together in that OFL video.

^† The Edmonton version is apparently at the ATA headquarters kitty-corner to Ross Sheppard School near Westmount, but your local locations may vary.

^‡ The First Commandment of Conservative Protests was "Conservatives Shall Not Rally". Conservatives are getting better this since that post in 2015 but still are a long way from exorcising the fact that as free thinking individuals we don't do well at mass protests. As you'll recall during the Freedom Convoy, there were far more supporters who never bothered going to downtown Edmonton or the Whistle Stop Cafe than those who went; when we did get a large-ish turnout one of the media talking points was the "various messages": unlike the left, when the right gets together to protest something there is far more of a spectrum of opinions and attitudes around the best alternative outcome. It's why our ideas are superior, this discussion wholly absent from the left, but it makes the messaging less firm.

The evil poofters in our schools need to be fought with every weapon we have and stopped by any means we deem necessary. This is an absolutely essential fight and we cannot stop until they are completely and utterly destroyed.

This event on September 20^th won't achieve any of that.

Red Deer Catholics need to exorcise ACSTA with fire

Another school trustee in hot water for saying the most anodyne of the inconvenient truth about faggots and their sick agenda:

Monique LaGrange, a first time school board trustee for Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools, uploaded to Instagram an archival photo of German children waving the Nazi flag juxtaposed with a contemporary picture of children waving the Pride Progress flag. The post had the caption “brainwashing is brainwashing.” In an exclusive interview with True North, Lagrange says that she uploaded the picture to social media because she thought the picture was a “great representation of what is happening within our culture and within our schools.”

Teachers are busy pushing the evils of sodomy in schools. They have been for almost two full decades, pausing only to attack the superior people who call them out on it. That it has been brazenly happening has been an incontrovertible fact, and the only thing up for opinion is whether the Nazis were even as half-assed in their brainwashing efforts.

“Our Catholic schools love all students as gifts from God made in His image, irrespective of their sexual orientation and gender expression,” wrote Salm in a statement.

“Removing a representative from our board is not a decision we take lightly, and Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools is invited to select a replacement Director to represent them. Given the manner in which the previous Director’s post has the potential to undermine the charitable learning environment offered by Alberta’s Catholic school system, we consider this to be the most appropriate response.”

Is Harry Salm (President of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association) high? God made man in His image, and yet He also created us in a world that permitted us to take actions and make choices in direct violation of His edicts. God made Mother Teresa and Pope Nicholas and Saddam Hussein and Ivan the Terrible and every single faggot ever in His image, it doesn't mean that we need to slavishly support the beliefs and actions of each one (and indeed you'd go mad doing so).

Sodomy is a sin. Every proponent of it needs to recognize this and be cured of it. That the ACSTA's own President is unaware of this is exactly why more people need to warn him of this fact, and louder and louder each and every time. (Seriously, you'd think that tolerating fudge packers would be something Catholicism by now in general has learned gets them into hot water).

Alberta Teachers Association president Jason Schilling condemned LaGrange’s post, calling it “repugnant” and a “form of repression.”

“Not only does it serve to undermine the atrocities of the Nazi regime, but it also acts as a form of oppression to entice further hatred toward members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community,” said Schilling.

They deserve every single ounce of this, Schilling. Your organization might love the fact that you let child molesters openly be "proud" of their child molesting orientation while they continue to work with children to defy the rights of their parents, but we don't and we will never stop making sure that you and your members and the children forced to suck on your members members are made keenly aware of this every day until they take up one of the two cures for sodomy.

Related: "Just as a parent calls a child in a dangerous situation back to safety, so God, a loving Father, continually calls us away from what is harmful in our lives and back to communion and new life with him."

Kate wins

My post (before the news): Residential Schools have always been awesome; more people are waking up to that fact

Her post (after the news proving me right): "Shovels 1 – Knowledge Keepers 0"

Bonus SDA winning: The Black Rod has the exciting story about how CBC Winnipeg was violently attacked by a Pizza Eater and then refused to mention it in their own news reports.

Wait, we've never seen Remy Munasifi and Pierre Poilievre in the same room at the same time, have we?

The Reason Magazine singer takes on the housing crisis:

"I'm not talking physical, 'how' it's happening. I'm talking the metaphysical 'why'"

The confused old man pretending to be the United States President has been stepping in it a lot lately.

Okay that's not true, he's just as pathetic and confused as he always was. It's just now even outlets like CNN have to admit it's happening.

Of course, that's nothing compared to what happened today on September 11th (you may remember it, it's the famous day that a bunch of adherents to a satanic cult crashed planes into buildings to protest their inherent inferiority).

That's right, the man representing the side of the political spectrum that always lies about everything lied. And it was a doozy.

Never forget...and then he immediately forgets where he was. https://t.co/l3sf2QIOFa

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) September 11, 2023

Now in fairness to the pathetic and corrupt piece of shit with the second rate belief system, it's easy to see what happened here. It's what in logic is known as a false premise. Unlike what occurs in a logical fallacy there is no error in reasoning done. It's not like "if A is true then B is true" and then reasoning that "since B is true than A is true". That's an error in the reasoning itself: we never said that when A isn't true that B also isn't true, the original premise could have been trivial. "If that nigger on the bus stabs the guy next to him, objects on Earth are subject to gravitational forces". B always happens, while A only almost always happens. Sometimes the nigger has a gun.

So with this information, we can see what broke down in what laughingly can be referred to as Biden's brain:

• The legitimate winner of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election was in New York City on 9/11
• I am the legitimate winner
• Therefore, I was in New York City on 9/11

So he starts off with Premise A (true), and then Premise B (false). However, if both A and B were true, then Premise C (the guy in the White House who wasn't subject to chicanery unknown elsewhere in the Western world was the same Donald J. Trump who was absolutely in NYC on September 11th and 12th and 13th and 14th of 2001) would indeed be true. His logic isn't that bad, it's just his grip on the facts (like all leftists, he thinks things that are patently not true are "facts") that's in question.

It's a common problem for him, really. Think about this one:

• Criminals are put in prison
• My son is not in prison
• Therefore, my son is not a criminal

Of course, the Newspaper of Record has weighed in.

Steve McQueen looks like Paul Walker's Dad

If the 1968 Steve McQueen classic Bullitt was given a Fast and Furious style trailer:

Now we just need somebody to edit in Vin Diesel to replace all of Norman Fell's scenes.

Bonus fun Bullitt fact: Despite looking just like him in every driving scene, the other driver Steve McQueen is racing against is not played by Graham Stark from A Shot in the Dark.

"Next week, on (insert name of show here): The Next Generation"

Would you believe that in 1985, a year before Paramount decided to make a new Star Trek series and two years before it aired, there was already a TV movie called Peyton Place: The Next Generation?

It was based on a previous TV show called, as you might guess, Peyton Place. It was a soap opera that debuted in 1964 (the same year as the first Star Trek pilot "The Cage") and lasted until 1969 (uh...the same year Star Trek went off the air).

Peyton Place: The Next Generation also starred Bruce Greenwood, and...okay, the simulation is just fucking with us now isn't it?

I mean, the explosive success of TNG could certainly be used to explain the use of "The Next Generation" in media after 1987: Bonanza, Degrassi, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, America's Test Kitchen, and many others. But before? This is like finding out "Make America Great Again" was coined in the 70s.

Bonus content: Dorothy Malone -- yes that Dorothy Malone -- played Constance in the 60s TV show but almost lost the job in the movie because the infamous Lana Turner (you might know her from the story where Sean Connery slapped around her mobster boyfriend at gunpoint) had played the character in a 1957 movie and producers thought they should bring her back.

Strike Strike Force Five in the face with heavy objects

Jenny Holland's recent bit on the lame podcast featuring the non-Gutfield comedians who are unable to perform without the little blue pills which metaphorically represent their writing staff is fairly good:

How quickly the once edgy comedians switched from objecting to the government forcing phone companies to hand over citizens’ private information to literally singing the praises of government coercion.

Not funny! Creepy! Condescending!

In this zero-laughs landscape, my expectations for a new podcast called Strike Force Five – featuring Colbert and fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and John Oliver – were low. And those low expectations were proven correct when the first episode came out this week.

Pathetic pieces of shit with horrible political views trying to lecture is isn't entertaining? I'm shocked. Well, no, I'm not: the reason they aren't performing while FOX News' late night host is of course...

As a way to help the men and women whose witty words make them look good (at least in theory), the five hosts have teamed up for a limited-edition podcast, with all proceeds going to their out-of-work writers.

That’s nice and all. But, as the hosts themselves point out, their writers are the folks who make them funny, so Strike Force Five is a real slog. And without the sets, the band, the audience and the guests, the comedy falls even flatter.

She ties in their vicious attacks on people who (accurately) determined that the COVID vaccines the late night talk shows kept insisting were "Safe and Effective" were in fact not, which is good. There's really only one area where it falls flat, when she compares it with the podcasting landscape:

The mainstream media, fundamentally, is an industry run by gatekeepers, where people who control access to the decision-makers hold huge sway. But the biggest and best podcasters of today – people like Joe Rogan – built their success without the appropriate prestige background. Someone like Rogan did not come through the system, yet can conduct agenda-changing, probing, hours-long interviews. For those behind the castle walls, this is just terrible. How dare people who have not kissed the requisite asses, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, be so successful?

Uh, what's this about Joe Rogan not having gone through the gatekeeping system? I have all of Newsradio on DVD, after all!

Edmonton Transit and Edmonton City Council are objectively dumber than every American combined

Reason Magazine just published Five actions transit agencies should take immediately to deal with the post-COVID looming crisis affecting public transit. They are:

1. Fully Fund Bus Service for Transit-Dependent Riders
2. Charge Choice Riders the Full Cost for Service
3. Replace Low Ridership Bus Routes with Paratransit
4. Contract Out Service.
5. Make Greater Use of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Curiously, they seem to be leaving some key recommendations off the table. I don't see anything in their policy briefs about...

6. When you get told about an amazingly cool new advanced signal timing system from a dubious startup that hasn't yet been tried anywhere in the world, take a second look at it.
7. When you're designing a transit system for one of the coldest cities in the Western world, make sure you use the same construction materials as every other structure.
8. Trains have weight, so your bridge structures should be built to handle the weight of the trains. Actually come to think of it, bridge structures themselves have weight so you should build them to handle their own weight and not fail after less than 2 years long before trains full of people have been even running on them.
9. When you're designing a transit system for one of the coldest cities in the Western world...actually no, wait, this isn't a localized problem. Do you know what every transit system on earth has to deal with? Oxygen. That's right, oxygen is a pretty common thing in the places where you might build a transit system, so you really should plan for there to be oxygen, and not be flummoxed when OXIDATION (which occurs every single time there's oxygen) occurs.

"I dare not speak much further: But cruel are the times when we are traitors and do not know ourselves, when we hold rumor from what we fear, yet know not what we fear"

We've mentioned many times about how the Wuhan Virus was Chairman Xi's incompetant bioweapon.

That would be a variant of the "lab leak" theory for those keeping track. That would be the lab leak theory that conservatives have been telling you since April of 2020 was a valid theory despite the supposed "experts" saying otherwise, and indeed getting social media to ban as "disinformation" when the correct term was "different hypothesis neither of which has been disproven". Many of course have been tracking the evolution of "this virus was engineered by Chairman Xi's highly skilled advanced scientific employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology" from a somehow 'racist' dogwhistle theory (no no, it's those disgusting dirty Chinese and their backwards primitive wet markets where they swim in disease, this theory is much less racist use it) to one that got you lifetime bans from social media for even suggesting, to begrudging remote possibility (promotion of which could still get you banned), to potentially valid theory (now you can say it), to its current state of "the current consensus hypothesis which, while neither can still yet to be proven, seems to be on balance of probability the correct one".

Oh, and during this process it turns out Chairman Xi's bioweapons team was also being funded by Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, and in fact possibly directed to perform the same "gain of function" research that would in theory have at least made an effective bioweapon.

Anyways, that's all old hat now.

Yes that's right, Mark Steyn tells the tale:

How long is it since you've heard anyone even on MSNBC or Facebook say the word "pangolin" with a straight face? But Messrs Tanaka and Miyazawa have taken it to the next level:

In this study, we aimed to clarify the evolutionary processes leading to the formation of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, focusing on Omicron variants with many amino acid mutations in the spike protein among SARS-CoV-2 isolates. To determine the order in which the mutations leading to the formation of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, we compared the sequences of 129 Omicron BA.1-related isolates, 141 BA.1.1-related isolates, and 122 BA.2-related isolates, and tried to dissolve the evolutionary processes of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants, including the order of mutations leading to the formation of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants and the occurrence of homologous recombination. As a result, we concluded that the formations of a part of Omicron isolates BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2 were not the products of genome evolution as is commonly observed in nature... [EMPHASIS ADDED]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up there. What exactly does that last sentence mean?

The analysis we have shown here is that the Omicron variants are formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology.

Er, okay. But again, what are you really trying to say?

In the genetic variation in the S protein in these variants, most of the mutations were non-synonymous (Fig. 1). There were no synonymous mutations in the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, or Mu variants, but only one each in the Lambda and Omicron variants. Among these variants, the Omicron variant (BA.1 lineage), which shows the greatest accumulation of mutations in the S protein, is primarily non-synonymous in the S protein and has only one synonymous mutation at c25000u. The synonymous/non-synonymous ratio is abnormal, given how human coronaviruses have mutated.

What "synonymous" means in this context is that normally, when something mutates naturally, it does so mostly in ways that don't change the nature of the original: hence, such mutations are merely synonymous. When you have a "synonymous/non-synonymous ratio" as "abnormal" as that of the Covid variants, that means they are not occurring naturally:

The fact that most of these mutations occurred without synonymous mutations (Fig. 2) suggests that none of these mutations arose as a result of trial-and-error random mutations in nature.

In other words, not only did the Covid come from a lab, but so did the variants:

Suppose the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant and its one amino acid reversion mutants were artificially and systematically generated. In that case, we should suspect that the other variants (Alpha to Delta) may also be artificially generated viruses.

Is it possible the conclusions drawn are (legitimately) flawed? Sure. Is it possible that the design of the study is inherently (and again, legitimately) flawed? Sure, it happens. Did they have the wrong data, or fudged the whole thing? Maybe.

However you'd think this would deserve some sort of press. Steyn agrees:

The analysis we have shown here concludes that the Omicron variants are formed by a completely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology.

That's pretty interesting, isn't it? Particularly if you're one of these politico-media zombies droning "Follow the science... Must follow the science" thirty times a day. Well, for eleven years I've been stuck in the dank toilet of the DC Superior Court for being a soi-disant "science denier". Yet I managed to "follow the science" all the way to Osaka and Kyoto and I was discombobulated by what I found there. Why is it only psmi and a couple of others and not the science and health correspondents of the BBC and The New York Times that are interested in the ostensibly startling revelation that all the major Covid "variants" are also lab creations?

Which is where we came in, with my modification of the "lab leak" theory. As you might think as you read this, the 'traditional' lab leak theory implies some sort of leak, similar to the 2007 foot-and-mouth-disease example from the Matt Ridley article linked earlier. Like you turn on your faucet, but the gasket gave out and now the water is leaking onto your floor. When multiple faucets in your house start all leaking consecutively, you might be inclined to think that a simple failure in equipment or process has stopped being the best explanation for what is happening.

It's just about possible to believe that the original strain escaped from the lab accidentally. But is it possible to believe that every artificially created variant from Alpha to Omicron also escaped from the lab accidentally whenever the Covid showed signs of flagging? (Including presumably the incoming referenced at the top.) You'll recall Boris Johnson as late as December 2021 insisting that the impending Omicron made it more urgent than ever that you get your booster, or he might have to cancel Christmas. Norman Fenton links to a Substack by a bloke called "psmi" that concludes:

Someone, somewhere, really is doing all this deliberately.

Shakespeare, with great apologies to the title of this post, got it wrong. We don't believe rumours because of what we fear, we fear rumours because it might break apart that which we believe. Like the furin cleavages of Chairman Xi's bioweapon.

"That’s where the 'lockdown' concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology"

As longtime readers are aware, I'm not a fan of Matt Taibbi.

Donald Rumsfeld never asked Chris Kyle to shoot children. I'm not sure how often Taibbi needs to be reminded of this. He seems dumb enough that you could brand that phrase into his forehead and put him in a room full of mirrors without figuring it out. As for the "high up the chain officials", I don't know how they do things at Rolling Stone magazine, but in both the army and the civilian real world, high up the chain officials are the ones who make strategic decisions. Do random copy editors over there get to decide to, say, fire Matt Taibbi? No? You mean that officials high up the chain just put them and their high-powered Photoshop into a tiny room and ask them to crop shots of women and children? That's barbaric.

This was from back in 2015, when Taibbi was still at Rolling Stone and...well, funny enough, he ultimately did get fired. The problem was, while he was indeed a leftie with all the usual intellectual and moral problems that entails, he was also a truth-seeking journalist who had made the mistake early in his career of living in Russia.

Now you might be thinking that for lefties of a certain age, "going to live in Russia" was a godsend. I remember an executive member of the University of Alberta campus NDP, in the 21st century mind you, who was actively learning Russian so she could "speak it when the revolution came". Until about 75 seconds ago, Russians were the good guys.

Three weeks ago, Joseph Biden, U.S. vice-president, made headlines by proclaiming the Obama administration’s intention to “press the reset button” in U.S.-Russian relations. Next week, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, will sit down in Geneva with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, to figure out what that metaphor means.

While there are plenty of specifics to talk about, the overarching concern in Washington and European capitals is that Russia is cracking down at home and throwing its weight around abroad. Not surprisingly, many are worried about a new cold war. However, that is not a useful way to think about what is happening.

No, the Taibbi problem was that as somebody who had lived in Russian and spoke Russian and worked with government officials and dissidents and ordinary people and corrupt mafia men pretending to be chief financial officers or normal companies, he knew what the Russians were all about. As a result, when the Trump-Russia affair started to heat up and become the dominant part of the left's narrative, Taibbi was left in the unfortunate position of realizing that what was being told made absolutely zero sense and almost certainly was 100% false. He knew enough about Donald J. Trump to know that (again as a leftie who hates anything sensible) he also hated Him, but also knew enough biographical stuff that when his Moscow Radar was already set off, started putting the pieces together that it was all a (relatively poorly) manufactured lie. Once he realized that the Russians didn't operate in the way that they were accused of working with Trump it wasn't hard to start seeing what was wrong with the whole affair (ie. Trump hates illegal immigration and strongly dislikes germs, which is why he wants to build a wall and also why he wouldn't let a bunch of hookers pee on him).

Of course once you start being led down such a path you start finding your ideological partners don't brook any such critical thinking. The Rolling Stone article I critiqued spent as much time decrying U.S. military action as it did the Clint Eastwood movie; Trump critiqued U.S. military action as well; from a different perspective than Taibbi absolutely, but it didn't escape his attention as 2015 moved into 2016 that a relatively antiwar candidate was starting to climb to the top of the GOP primary process. In several areas of domestic policy as well Trump's similarity to Taibbi's ideal U.S. Presidential candidate -- that would be Bernie Sanders -- also caught his attention.

Basically, Taibbi stopped being involved in Rolling Stone once he stopped being capable of promoting their agenda of critiquing the right at all times without stopping to think about it (which was the crime I accused him of). He could still hate Trump, and social conservatism, and economic conservatism, and jump up and down in favour of sick sodomites and poor downtrodden niggers and other standard leftist causes; what he couldn't do is lie or downplay real stories of facts centred around him.

That's what we call a rabbit hole, kids.

The problem was that soon he realized his ideological team wasn't interested in real stories of facts but narratives and enforcing narratives. Which is why when WikiLeaks pivoted from leaks designed to (or even with side effects which) weaken supporters of the Iraq and Afghanistan military operations, and instead started publishing leaks designed to (or even with side effects which) weaken the Hilary Clinton campaign against Bernie Sanders the left-wing establishment rallied around the DNC frontrunner designed to "destroy Trump/any possible other GOP frontrunner" and Taibbi did not. Part of that was that it was helping "his guy" sure, but it also came with a little ideological consistency. He'd spent half a decade supporting WikiLeaks when it was releasing true backchannel information obtained through extremely dubious methods with a specific political intention behind it -- and you'll note describing the Bradley Manning affair in this way also described the DNC hacks -- so it seemed only logical he continue to do so, even if the ultimate political victory was a bit of a pyrrhic one.

You see, the "narrative" had been that since the Russians may have been connected to the DNC hack, therefore Trump had conspired with a foreign group against his (in their view, perfect and correct and totally a warm woman that every voter yearned to connect with) most formidable opponent. Taibbi's problem was that again he had enough knowledge and experience to already sense this was bullshit, so as the evidence it wasn't bullshit continued to be manufactured and yet be unimpressive he refused to sign on. Sure Russia seemed to be interested in manufacturing political unrest in the United States (but again as somebody who criticized U.S. foreign policy designed to manufacture unrest in other countries he had a cheeky sense that turnabout was fair play), but that manifested itself in Russia helping Sanders against Clinton, Trump against Clinton, but also Sanders against Trump and Clinton against Trump. Us-versus-them polarization seemed to be the gameplan rather than "help their puppet drumpf" which had become the...what's that word...right, narrative.

Needless to say, the complete collapse of the Russiagate story and its morphing into the Russiagate hoax vindicated the Taibbi approach, which is why the left totally understood and themselves pivoted to taking lessons learned into account and making sure that a future Taibbi would be listened to (even if he and the o.g. Taibbi disagreed).

Sorry, just making sure you were still paying attention.

Instead they vilified him, wrote endless "what happened to turn him from a great guy criticizing conservative artistic works into this scumbag who only opposes Trump 92% of the way instead of the full 100% of the way" thinkpieces, and then sent armed federal agents around to his house to intimidate him before testifying to congressional hearings (where they accused him of non-criminal fraud).

I guess the "what happened" isn't that crazy of an article to write (the fact that I'm in the middle of writing one belies that); the result was really that despite his protestations he has changed...a little. He's at the very least more sensitive to the fact that now when he sees mainstream media attack conservatives he's more acutely aware of the fact it's usually complete bullshit.

Specifically he's aware of the tactic of deplatforming to deny the target a voice, then mainstream articles attack with the knowledge readers won't get to the source material and wait this all sounds familiar. The pre-denouncing of "hatred" and therefore "don't listen to anything this person says even though the other side clearly drew up this Steele Dossier without any semblance to reality with cherry-picked claims that if you look for more than 18 seconds are actually just aimed to destabilize a local rival" has been catching in his craw for a while now.

Which brings me around to the reason I'm even talking about this: Third Edge of the Sword's first link to Racket.News, the Substack site Taibbi has been running for a year or two. One of his regular features is "Meet the Censored", and he's a couple times highlighted a case which hasn't gotten very much press: an American playwright being fined in Germany for criticizing a government official.

No amount of drugs exist that if consumed would allow a rational person to conclude that the writing of C.J. Hopkins furthers “the aims of a former National Socialist Organization.” Agree with him or not, and I increasingly do, he used his imagery to compare the sweeping declarations of emergency power that were common around the world during the pandemic (and were particularly authoritarian in Germany) to Nazi tactics. He compared, for instance, the 2020 “Infection Protection Act” to the “Enabling Act of 1933,” which announced that to “remedy the distress of the people,” the “laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution.”

C.J.’s real offense seems to be a response to a tweet by Die Welt, quoting German health minister Karl Lauterbach. Portrayed in full Sprockets-style smart-glasses glory, Lauterbach is shown saying, “The masks always send out a signal”:

C.J. retweeted the quote, adding the image from his book cover. That’s it, that’s the offense. No matter how you feel about that exchange, that is not “intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” That is using the negative connotations of Nazism to criticize a currently serving government official.

Taibbi notes something I noted when the Freedom Convoy was being slagged for having one guy with a swastika walking around nearby, regardless of your opinion of comparing things to the Holocaust, it's not promoting Nazi ideology when you attack your opponent by comparing him to a Nazi. German's famed laws prohibiting swastikas aren't actually as strong as most people believe them to be: indeed the swastika guy in Ottawa not only didn't break any Canadian laws but had he flown to Berlin he wasn't breaking German law either:

He was first accused of this “crime” in June, shortly after Roger Waters was placed under investigation for wearing his clearly satirical “Pink” costume in a stage performance in Berlin. As I wrote when C.J. was charged weeks later, authorities claim that through the use of the mask image, C.J. was “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

There's an interview with Hopkins at the bottom of the article that's worth a read, which briefly gets into this aspect as well: there's not any automatic link, even in Germany, between "display swastika = crime":

C.J. Hopkins: I’ve said it, I don’t know how many fucking times, it’s not illegal. Yes, if you’re a Nazi, it’s illegal to spread swastikas around in Germany. But if you’re doing art, if you’re commenting on history, if you’re selling a book, there are a whole slew of reasons for exceptions where people can and do use swastikas, which you put in your piece, you put examples of the book covers. My lawyer has made all these arguments to the prosecutor.

Matt Taibbi: And those arguments were rejected?

C.J. Hopkins: Not even addressed, really. It’s just we had a chance to respond first and then we asked them for the tweets. That’s when we got the tweets. Then my lawyer wrote an even longer and more detailed response citing the terms of law and explaining who I am and my whole history of published work that anybody could fucking look at and figure out who I am, and what my intentions are. And nothing. The next thing we got was called an Order of Punishment.

I started this off by talking about the Trump circumstances that forced Taibbi to start actually evaluating these and other "hate crimes" and "hateful things" and "criminal things" and "so bad you don't question them things", so I'll let the leftist prick (I may soften, but I don't bend) have the final say:

I defy any American reporter to justify incarceration for this type of criticism of a still-serving politician. We’d have to build a separate Supermax just for people who used Hitler analogies during the Trump years, or published gleeful headlines like, “Lawsuit Reveals Trump Can’t Stand Being Compared to Hitler.” 

And...

As C.J. points out, the real problem is not so much with his case (although he’s certainly worried), but the now-open way in which such laws are being applied, from the prosecution of Julian Assange to the suppression of Covid speech and even the extra counts addressing “false statements” in tweets by Donald Trump.