2023-02-25

RIP Norm Macdonald

I know, I know, he died ages ago now. But with the exception of one joke (wait, why can't you have it on to avoid a copyright strike?) here's the longest version of Norm's roast available.

According to Bob Saget, there's almost 20 minutes of original footage highly unlikely ever to see the light of day.

2023-02-24

@JoshuaDoerksen - For the taxes I pay any government employee who can't produce a passport in 45 seconds deserves the chair

Much like Shiny Pony, Josh believes in the wonder that big government can do.

Yet for all they talk about how much they love big government, they can't seem to reconcile that with the fact that they really really suck at it.

Surprisingly absolutely nobody, last summer as the world began to remove Wuhan Flu restrictions based 100% on the incontrovertible science (which hadn't changed) and absolutely 0% nothing to do with the noble Freedom Convoy who stormed Ottawa and inspired the world to demand action, people around the globe decided two full years was enough practicing for 15-minute cities and they would like to go out and see this great big exciting planet again.

The problem was, of course, most people only renew their passports for 5 year intervals and nobody was interested in paying to renew it while it was useless as a result of the sort of Viro Fascism that these same incompetents engaged in. As a result, there was a surge of passport applications and renewals that began last spring (again, totally randomly, immediately in the wake of the Freedom Convoy). Everybody in the world knew this was going to happen and everybody took action to deal with the looming cris...haha, just kidding.

Public Service Canada still was letting everybody work from home, with all the hard nosed dedication to completing their day to day tasks such a lifestyle encourages. No additional resources were devoted to dealing with passport demand spikes.

Every country saw a spike last year, and some like the UK still had longer waits despite taking efforts to relieve the pressure. Of course seeing how Rat Bastard 2.0 was still denying the unvaccinated their human right to travel at that time, Canada should have seen less demand than other countries. Israel devoted extra resources but then shunted them away to Ukrainians fleeing the police action ongoing in that country. Canada ended up looking more like Bhutan, who ran out of passports last summer, than Germany, who saw their passport wait rise from 10 days to...18 days...

Germany seems to be the only country to learn from what happened to the Americans in 2021, when their passport offices saw strain and then again resources applied to fix the problem.

Now while Josh is correct that we never had 48 hour passport service, this is disingenuous (a phrase that we use about 83 times a month to describe a leftists' argument): the whole reason for the 48 hour emergency service was to expedite requests that were so backlogged that people applied for a passport months in advance (long before the official 6 1/2 weeks) and then 48 hours ahead of their flight still hadn't received it.

The "garbage service" whose honour Josh was leaping to defend after it was so brutally impinged in the earlier thread was of course the situation that led to a situation where 48 hour emergency passport processings were being held.

I noted earlier that Canada was looking a lot like a third world country than a first world one with the passport troubles. While you may try to defend the situation by pointing to America or Israel or Germany or Israel, we go back to where we started this all off:

Canadians are raped by confiscatory taxation that's supposed to prevent all of this!

The tax burden of Canadians is justified by scumbags on the left because of all that the benevolent government does for us. While Canada isn't the highest taxed realm in the OECD, adjusted for rising government debt and the size of the public sector would make us pretty close.

Curiously, despite being a known issue, there isn't really any literature or studies that compare the taxpayer burden in this fashion. Let's say 50% of your population are government workers. Therefore even though your income tax may claim to only collect 46% of your revenue, 23% of that isn't really income revenue, as it's already been collected from the actual economy and paid out to the government worker (and their negative value). Conversely, diverting tax revenue away from individuals in the form of taking on debt is a shell game that can artificially lower income tax revenue (while it does actually lower actual revenue in a given year, the economy as a whole is too smart to fall for it and shrinks as a result of business awareness of the looming threat).

Norway (7 weeks wait due to backlog, half a week longer than the Canadian "normal") is similarly a highly taxed country but at least in return for that money being stolen from the hands of hardworking Norwegians they get a passport in return.

Also, I'm not sure that "other countries tax you through the nose and then screw this up" is exactly the best defense. It might make people realize there's a systemic and institutional issue at play here, and demand change accordingly. Indeed during the Harper government, Canada actually did a lot to speed and simplify the passport process: in a typical year you could renew within minutes and hold your new passport within days. In other words, we started from a better position than many other countries, and in 2022 we threw that advantage entirely away.

Part of the problem, indeed, was that passports continued to expire during the period the Canadian state made them worthless. In the same way the USA has extended green cards, why couldn't the Canadian government have done the same with passports? Send a mailout to every person whose passport expired between March 2020 and December 2022 and give them a special option to one-click receive a new (free) passport that didn't expire until December 2022: after which they would need to renew using the standard pay-up methodology. I didn't let my passport lapse, you Viro Fascists denied it to me: why am I on the hook for this?

As the post title noted, if the Canadian government insists on holding all the power, then they either execute their duties in a reasonable manner, or reasonable people are perfectly justified in performing their own executions.

2023-02-23

The most open and transparent government* ever

* If you doubt it, just ask them!

Back on February 10th, Shiny Pony's government ended the mask mandate for Service Canada (ie. passport offices). Seeing as how you need to take your mask off to verify your identity at the same office, it seemed absolutely ridiculous.

How was the policy decided on? It wasn't, they just claimed in the House of Commons that it was, and quietly moved behind the scenes to make the change before anybody noticed they were lying.

Falk grilled the Liberal MPs present at the committee meeting, asking “Why is a mask mandate appropriate for Service Canada but not necessary in other federal government settings?”

Social Development minister Karina Gould responded to Falk, telling her, “My understanding is masks now are encouraged but are not required.”

Falk shot back at Gould, telling her, “That’s a policy change?” to which Gould replied, “That’s been a very recent policy change.”

Gould confirmed with Falk that the COVID-related masking mandate for Service Canada offices was suspended as of February 10. She gave no reason as to why the mask mandate was only lifted now, and why those who did not wear a mask were denied service.

Not at all related: Rat Bastard 2.0 goes out of his way to violate legal FOIP requirements.

Oh wait, there's more: The Liberal Party of Canada invents the use of non-disclosure agreements to make government even less transparent than ever before!

QOTD

The CBC celebrates the mutilation of dead animals. I didn't have that in my 2023 scorecard.

The quote of the day, however, comes in the MSN comments (remember: the CBC refuses to allow comments about Red Indians on their platform as that nasty truth keeps coming out) from "Ramsey Orta", in response to the claim from "Clarence Tugeye" that:

Disconnection from traditional activities and practices are what led them to incarceration. There is a distinct correlation between decolonization and better outcomes.
No. there is no causal relationship at all. You made the false claim that there is a "distinct correlation". Please provide one methodologically sound study that supports your point.

And no, the research on criminal recidivism does not in any support your claim. In fact, over 70 years of research says the opposite. We have studied programs that have pursued cultural goals at the expense of known risk factors and have found them to be criminogenic; they make the problem worse.

Culture can certainly be a responsivity factor, but it is not a risk factor. The risk factors remain:
(a) criminal/antisocial history,
(b) criminal/antisocial values/impulse control;
(c) antisocial/criminal personality disorder(s);
(d) antisocial peers/associates;
(e) family;
(f) substance abuse;
(g) education/employment; and
(h) leisure and recreation.

One final point worth making to the cheerleaders for this type of programing, there are nearly 500 different tribes in Canada, each with their own cultures. Which of these diverse cultures takes precedence in this "sensitive" programing?

Zing!

2023-02-22

@mochamomma is guilty of murdering an innocent girl

Kelly Hurst has blood on her hands. Back in 2021, she tweeted about the "social/political determinants of health" and when my cousin read this tweet she became so distraught that she slit her own wrists.

I lost a family member due to this disgusting wench and I demand that she see the inside of a prison cell for her crime. The best bit is, Hurst totally agrees with that which is why I look forward to her immediately saying that she will turn herself in and plead guilty as charged.

After all, while her intent was to complain about her physical pain caused by schools telling a lying race hustler to take a hike that doesn't matter nearly as much as the impact: a girl barely out of university killing herself as a result.

Again, some of you may disagree with that, but Hurst cannot. She is, by her own admission, guilty of murder.

Evander Kane, warchief

Last week I made a joke about Evander Kane during a hilarious Oilers loss.

Not to be outdone, the Alexander First Nation (not first, not a nation, but there was an Alexander at least) decided to join in by giving him an Indian Name: Hits Like a Buffalo.

I would have gone with Dances With Wolves (Without Their Consent) myself...

2023-02-21

@risahoshinomd - Were you this much of a whiny bitch in 2018 too?

No, seriously, how did you possibly endure living before a well-publicized pandemic pushed governments into masking others and demanding worthless vaccine passports? You wonder why we call you and your ilk Viro Fascists and refused to follow your rules

Nobody cares what you say when you're wearing...well...anything.


 

George "Gorilla" Floyd destroyed more lives than Communism

Ann Coulter:

During the first few months of the pandemic, violent crime plummeted everywhere. You couldn’t have missed it. The Washington Post, Politico, Voice of America, Cambridge University, and on and on and on—even the Times itself!—reported that violent crime had virtually disappeared in cities around the world due to the COVID shutdowns.

And then on May 25, a fentanyl addict with a bad ticker died in police custody in Minneapolis, whereupon the depolicing demands of Black Lives Matter swept the nation with the active encouragement of all organs of elite liberal opinion, especially the Times.

Cops, the only people who seem to really believe “black lives matter,” risking their lives to bring safety to dangerous neighborhoods, were viciously slandered and kneecapped at every turn. Again, especially by the Times.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

After going into free fall during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic, homicides and aggravated assaults in the U.S. rose by about 35% from Floyd’s death to the end of June. Burglaries, mostly commercial, shot up by an eye-popping 190% the last week of May—the height of looting during the “mostly peaceful protests.”

Other countries, also affected by the pandemic, saw no such rise in violent crime.

During the Summer of Floyd, murders increased by 42% in the 21 largest U.S. cities. By the end of 2020, the national murder rate had increased by 30%. That’s double the next largest hike on record, in 1968, the heyday of the country’s last experiment with liberal crime policies, when the murder rate rose by a comparatively paltry 12.7%.

2023-02-20

Book/movie review: The Hound of the Baskervilles

This afternoon I watched the 1959 Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing classic The Hound of the Baskervilles based on the legendary Sherlock Holmes book.

Having read the book a couple of times (most recently about 6 years ago I think) I remembered many if not all of the details of the plot. There were some minor changes between the book and the film (Stapleton's wife posed as his daughter, not his sister, there's a drunk bishop for some reason, Sir Henry being in South Africa instead of Ontario, completely removing the Lady Lyons subplot, replacing the London hotel shenanigans with a spider attack), but in general the story remains the same.

Here's the basic plot synopsis:

  • A visitor arrives at Baker Street needing Holmes' help to save the new master of Baskerville Hall
  • Holmes sends Watson to go to Devonshire with Sir Henry as he's "clearly too busy"
  • Watson takes an agonizingly long time dealing with red herrings and extraneous filler
  • Holmes miraculously turns out to have been secretly been around the whole time and knew who the killer was since the beginning but was simply dicking around and wasting time
  • They fail, but it turns out they didn't because the victim of the first murder was a case of mistaken identity
  • They succeed in saving Sir Henry from the crazed dog that really did exist

The actor who played Watson did an okay job, and seeing as how this particular story is basically Watson's, I think they made a mistake in not casting somebody more charismatic, but perhaps they thought Peter Cushing's Holmes needed to be contrasted against him. Cushing did a great job with Holmes, but what you're left with watching this film is how insanely boring Christopher Lee is when he's not evil. You keep waiting for him to be evil and he isn't.

I just really can't get over how much unnecessary filler is in this story. I'm not going to blame the film, since it's a sin from the actual book. I understand its considered a classic but it's maddeningly long. As Douglas Adams once wrote in one of his Hitchhikers books, you can stretch descriptions out and lengthen your novel but your readers will never forgive you. 

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere You don't, in short, want to know. 
As you're going through that second and third act of the movie, much like in the book, I'm half screaming at Holmes what on earth are you waiting for? The movie, unlike the book, doesn't at least end with another scene of Holmes explaining the details that we already should have known. After the hound was dead and Sir Henry wasn't, the movie has one minute of Holmes and Watson in their smoking room having a thematic discussion and then boom! credits!

@immrincognito - You totally can. Try it sometime!

It's probably a good idea to always assume leftists are lying. They really almost always are. 99.9% of the words out of the mouth of every leftist is a complete fabrication of reality. A man who tells you that Putin disproves religion is somebody who you can never trust. So if he yells the theatre is on fire, just believe it as much as anything else he says.

That being said, next time you are bored and in a "crowded theatre" (whenever that happens), you can totally yell out "fire!" I've done it, and I'll give you a little hint: absolutely nothing happens.

This being the 21st century of course you don't have to even yell. Just pull the fire alarm (which is essentially yelling 'fire' over and over again in a crowded theatre) and watch in shock and horror as...people barely do anything. Last month I was in West Edmonton Mall when the fire alarm went off, and people went about their day continuing to shop for almost 20 minutes before the alarm was turned off. Nobody died at the exits, or even piled up and survived.

Typically when somebody "shouts fire" in a modern building, the only danger of anybody dying is that everybody ignores what you and/or the alarm is saying, and might die in the event there's an actual fire.

Of course, most of the time you read about "fire in a crowded theatre" you'll learn that in the United States that jurisprudence was already overturned a half century ago, that the ruling's original purpose was to imprison progressives who opposed government policy, etc etc etc.

As Cosh notes, this is now extremely well-known as a lazy and inaccurate trope, which is why Incognito calling somebody "simplistic" before using the 'fire' analogy is particularly hilarious.

It's like "government is just a name to describe us all working together" (which, as that same Hitchens noted a quarter century ago, implies that in 1930s Germany a bunch of Jews committed suicide).

2023-02-19

@brownsugar7878 - I was "disgusted" they didn't go far enough

Jazz Meat Sing is a fag lover and a terrorist. He is absolutely evil and can and must be stopped by any means necessary and at any cost.

None of this is up for debate. Last year in Peterborough Ontario, the worthless piece of shit whose death would be a cause for celebration didn't get anywhere near that glorious standard.

Instead, he was...wait for it...openly criticized in public.

So scary. Poor little snowflake (except snowflakes are pure and white). And yet even that mild level of pushing back against him and his unspeakably evil agenda caused Maxine a bad case of the vapors.

Bad news for you, sweetheart: Jazz Meat deserved 10,000,000 times worse than he got last year, and I'll hold a massive street party on the day it happens.

Play your cards right and you might even get an invitation.

2023-02-18

South Park nailed Meghan Markle (in the second funnest way to do so)

@cinefeminism - We already know Jews murder prophets and wallets, but babies too?

 

Fake Rabbi Dan Bogard pretends to be religious in order to push his far-left agenda (and keep him and his wife in the nws)

Nicole Morse is a mentally ill chick who thinks that "Thou Shalt Not Murder" is a New Testament creation.

Together, they (falsely) make Judaism a religion deserving of being permanently wiped off the map.

2023-02-17

@Leenintome2 - Nobody associated tiny negresses with wholesome outdoor activities

Last year, another organization tried very hard to have the stupidest overreaction ever to a random ugly nigger dying of COVID while a cop kneeled on his back: this time it was the Girl Guides of Canada, who removed the word "Brownie" because apparently one human being on earth heard that name and didn't only think of a bad sexual pun regarding baked goods. If you only read media coverage, Canadians were clamouring for the change and danced with joy in the streets after it happened.

In the real world, angry parents who sacrificed and volunteered for the organization (the few at least who hadn't already left in disgust after little boys in dresses were allowed to join) stormed out and refused to darken their door again. I've heard that thousands of parents and volunteers have already left, and that most troops are dangerously understaffed and in danger of closing down.

Surprise surprise, the nonwhites aren't particularly interested in being part of the organization. Like in politics or in sports, groups might not want to chase away their loyal supporters to bring in new people who won't come anyways.

So far the number of blacks and actual brownies who want to send their daughters in pursuit of Lares and Kelpie badges is completely unaffected by the name change. So until they start offering merit badges for violent assault or faking hate crimes, the number of niggers in the Girl Guides probably isn't going to be benefiting the change.

Hey, wait....

#NigGirlGuides has quite the ring to it!

They should have gone with that.

2023-02-16

@EliasCrimLaw - Put your money (and the lives of these addicts) where your mouth is

Let's find out how much Zack here is convinced that safe injection sites cause less property crime, and that these poor addicts won't be causing disruption in the neighbourhoods they are forced upon.

There's an easy way to do it: enact Stand Your Ground laws in 100.00% of every political jurisdiction that also introduces safe injection sites.

If his theory is correct (the theory that it saves worthless lives has already been disproven, though he wisely avoids it here), he shouldn't have anything to worry about: these pathetic wastes of humanity will be helpfully in government facilities getting "safe treatment" and not rummaging through my backyard. And therefore, they aren't in danger of me shooting them if they refuse to leave upon my command.

Somehow I don't think he's going to go for that. Hmmmm, I wonder why...

2023-02-15

Oilers celebrate Black History Month by stealing a point from the Detroit Red Wings

In the 4th round of the shootout, after Evander Kane is stopped like he's passing counterfeit $20 bills, Detroit wins a game they seemingly had locked, but let the Oilers come back to tie it up in the third period.

Besides, Canada's flag is the Red Ensign

Tristan Hopper every once and a while has a good take, generally has okay takes, often has a pretty lousy take, and then occasionally a brutally horrendous take. His article last year proclaiming the Canadian flag as "the best" isn't brutally horrendous but definitely falls into the left side of his bell curve.

It’s timeless!
One big pain-in-the-butt with the U.S. flag is that they have to manufacture new ones whenever they add a new state.

The argument about "timeliness" is just that so long as there's a country named "Canada" it can have a Maple Leaf. It's worth noting for all his talk about the American flag it hasn't changed since 1959 while the Union Jack has been around since 1801. Meanwhile Canada's flag underwent a change far more radical than either in 1965, and how much do you want to bet some Indians aren't already demanding we change it and oh look there it is. So much for timeless.

It’s easy to reproduce!
Quick! Try to draw the Mexican flag. Now do the Welsh flag. On the semi-frequent occasion that a Brazilian wears their national flag as body paint for a soccer match, they almost always screw up this complicated middle part.

The "Canada's flag is easy to reproduce" claim is laughable. It's an eleven-pointed maple leaf. Nobody west of Sault Ste Marie has even seen one in person. The spines go out in all sorts of random-ish directions for varying lengths. While the Welsh dragon might be hard to draw, it's much harder to draw the flag of Canada then the flag of China, or Chile, or Cuba, or...for fuck's sake we haven't even gotten out of the C-names yet and we're already out of top place. For those wondering by the way, Chile's flag dates back to 1817. China's is shockingly new (1949. but still older than Canada) but sure is easy to reproduce. In fact the rejected old Chinese flags all beat the maple leaf in this fashion.

It’s modular
Here’s a fun detail about the Canadian flag: You can take out the middle symbol and that in itself becomes an instantly recognizable symbol of Canada. Basically no other flag does this. If you flash around Japan’s red dot without context, it would just confuse people.

Somebody needs to get out more. I suggest Switzerland.

It’s unique!
Here’s the problem with most world flags: They all look the same. Mali is just a backwards Guinean flag. Slap a star on it, and it’s the Senegalese flag. If you leave an Italian flag in the sun too long, it becomes an Irish flag.

It's modish! Celebrating a lengthy and common heritage that should be the envy the world over for its benefit to humanity? That's so dorky Australia and New Zealand! Haha, il Tricolore of natural rights/social equality/freedom turn into an trídhathach of Catholics/Protestants/peace between them once you expose them to ultraviolet radiation! Mali and Senegal both wanting to pay tribute to the French who colonized them is so old school. Ewwwwwww.

It’s instantly recognizable!
The whole point of a flag is for it to be instantly recognizable from long distances and in not-ideal conditions.

Uh, you're confusing a national flag with a standard. While both are similar in their point, a flag just had to be seen underneath you. Typically a flag featured a coat of arms, and those certainly aren't recognizable from long distances. Also you can't poo-poo the historically inspired flags in one breath and then hearken back to a fantasy "good old days" where Aussies and Kiwis could torpedo each other's ships at a distance without enduring friendly fire.

But you hoist the Canadian flag in basically any country around the world and people know what it is. And that, my friends, is how you design an effective flag.

Uh, whoops.

2023-02-14

She's so drryyyyyyyyy (sorry Tal)

Randy Bachman's son takes a break from exposing the evil faggot who turned his pedophilia into fraudulent "gender dysphoria studies" and inexplicably praising Bono, and instead tells the story of how washing machines no longer do the job you pay them for.

The machine allowed no independent control over water volume, cycle time, or water temperatures. It only allowed selection of a preset computerized cycle—none of which got your clothes clean.

The more I used the thing, the more I hated it. As did Koko. Everything about it was wrong. It didn't even have an agitator. How does a machine wash clothes without an agitator? You need friction. You need something to really move the water. But all this thing had was a few ridges on the bottom surface of the drum. They didn't remotely cut it.

The newfangled LG, it turned out, also skimped on water and power usage (the cycles all included down time, during which the machine just stopped spinning to let the clothes soak). So, no agitator, not enough water, and not enough activity.

Yet more irritating was the reason it skimped on water and power: it was trying to stop global warming. Oops—I mean "climate change". It was "environmentally friendly". Except it wasn't, because you usually had to run at least two cycles to get your clothes clean. That's right: you had to use the same amount of water in the end anyway, and double the electricity.

And so—not for the first time—I had stumbled upon yet another example of technological "progress" which exacerbated the very (pseudo) problem it purported to solve. The new useless LG "Save the World!" piece of garbage was the home equivalent of Hollywood stars taking private jets to a carbon reduction conference in Switzerland.

It's worth an aside to note that most people use far more laundry detergent than they actually need to and indeed agitated water is enough to clean everyday soiled clothes without any detergent whatsoever. On a totally unrelated note, why do you think companies are trying to push you to use pods and tablets (where you only get to use the discrete doses they prescribe) rather than liquid (where you have almost 100% control over how many atoms are poured into the machine)

@FrancesMFDanger - Why don't you want us to tell the true story about what faggots do?

It was (briefly) hilarious when the "representation matters" crowd who insist on having their evil lifestyle choice endlessly promoted had to deal with the smallest dose of reality.

You can't de-fag Jeffrey Dahmer in the same way that the Catholic Church can't de-fag the priests who took advantage of them. This is exactly who they are. This is the sort of people all of them are (it's only a matter of degree) and "pretty gross" is the most charitable possible way to describe them.

Indeed 100.00% of all faggot stories already are true crimes, Farmer Frances. You just are too stupid to notice.

2023-02-13

@mysterybarmb - No, I'm assured that I'm going to "kill and erase" them

Can't win? Nonsense.

According to the false claims of tranny activists, all I have to do is walk past a washroom with a megaphone and say "everybody is the sex they are born as and you have a mental illness if you think are special" and they'll all just drop dead.

Problem solved.

USA unveils their new official motto: If it flies, it spies!

In response to public pressure about failing to stop the Chinese spy balloon when it was easy and obvious to do so, the United States military apparently re-read their Tom Clancy, took the SAPS filters off their radar sets, and started blowing up the ridiculously large number of UFOs which apparently have been always floating around up there.

The Newspaper of Record weighs in: Goose Getting Suspicious This F-18 Is Following Him

There are various degrees of bad luck. There's "stubbed your toe" bad luck. There's "I just came home from an expensive European vacation to find my roof is leaking". Then there's "I traveled 14000 light years to Earth and because of a Chinese spy balloon the week before my spacecraft got shot down".

Bonus WTF: next time you take that stupid Injun themed boat from Manitoulin Island to Bruce Peninsula, watch the unfriendly skies.

2023-02-12

Big football game at the end of the season

Why, what are you watching?

2023-02-11

@WomenScienceDay - Go engineer me a sandwich

I'm kidding, of course, I love doing scientific experiments on women.

Extra reading: If women get really good at science they'll get to the point where they can follow along with the research that shows men are simply better at it.

Related: Give women all the extra time they need to try and catch up with the men, and instead they just fall even further behind.

2023-02-10

@BossLady4T7 - Why are Red Indians too lazy to dig a well?

Why is it the Canadian government's job to help so-called "First Nations" build working water treatment facilities on what they keep (falsely) insisting is their "sovereign land"?

Why are Red Indians in 2021 (or 2023 for that matter) less talented and capable than the junior-high-at-best educated whites who settled the empty prairie in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?

On top of that, stop lying about the Right Honourable Stephen Harper (PBUH). It was fifteen years ago that I admonished him for not doing exactly what you accuse him of doing: ignoring the retarded TRC.

2023-02-09

Jackson wins

Jackson, Mississippi tops the USA in murder again in 2022. The Guardian wants you to note a salient fact about them but not the other one.

Totally unrelated: Steven Tucker wants you instead to play board games.

@DennisKendel - Is Shahab an expert in human rights or economics?

"Advisors advise, Ministers decide" was a famous declaration by Margaret Thatcher.

During the Wuhan Flu overreaction, this basic premise was completely ignored by people who claim to be smarter than you but in reality are barely competent enough to find out what a bullet tastes like.

In fact one of the primary issues with government responses in the 2020-2022 period was that they let medical advisors run rampant. Deena Hinshaw (the useless cunt who's now BC's problem) had far more authority in 2021 than the Chief Firearms Officer (which is a position which does exist) or Chief Digital Innovation Officer (which also exists) or Chief Economist (which doesn't exist). However that's not supposed to be how governments work.

I'm not even bringing in any democratic requirements, mind you: this applies just as much to a parliamentary system as it would to a dictatorship. Being in government means enacting public policy. Public policies always have positive impacts in some areas and negative impacts in other areas. It's the job of a government minister (even a Prime Minister) to make a decision based on the information they are provided. If your government policy is "increase provincial coffers in 2023" that's pretty easy to do: if I was advised by say Scott Moe on how to increase his government's 2023 revenue there are several rather easy policy levers to pull. You could execute every Saskatchewan resident whose net worth is greater than $1M and confiscate their money. You could mandate tomorrow that government nurses and teachers have to work for free and any who refuse can be executed and their net worth confiscated. You could sell off every inch of Crown Land to the highest bidder, impose 100% income tax on registered NDP donors and voters, the whole lot of it. Really easy to do.

Of course, revenue in 2024 may be a little lacklustre as a result. Of course there are less drastic ways to increase provincial revenue in 2023 and 2024 and maybe even 2025, but the general principle holds: there is a downside somewhere to these policy goals. Now its possible you're in a happy situation that you politically want the downside to happen to exactly the people the downside would happen to: ask the Occupy Wall Street fleabaggers how they think the downside of their "tax the rich" policies will produce less business investment in medium sized businesses, for example. Yet that downside still exists.

Public healthcare cancelled surgeries and closed health clinics to both free up "much needed" medical space for the COVID death count as well as to "protect staff" and "maintain social distancing". The downside of this of course is that for everything other than the Cantonese Cough the population actually got sicker. The downside was presumably balanced by the upside as per the slew of Chief Medical Advisors (it wasn't, but that's incompetence on the part of the "expert class" of medical know-it-alls that worked to ban alternate views on social media rather than a failure to listen to other voices), but there were other side effects of public health policy besides just the medical ones.

Which is why it was entirely right of Premier Moe to listen to "Doctor" Shahab's list of suggestions and say yes to suggestions one and two, no to three through seven, yes to eight, no to nine, yes to ten through thirteen, no to fourteen through eighteen, yes to nineteen... and so on. It's probably not good policy to disclose what the list of original recommendations actually was, contrary to what Viro Fascist Dennis Kendel demanded. The upside is that Shahab would get to have an at-the-time politically popular boost in his social media impressions and get to show off his "stop COVID at all costs" bona fides in the press. The downside would be making it far more difficult to get public policy advisors in the future to be willing to be open and honest about their suggestions, and for the suggestions to be filtered through "what about when this gets out" lens which would overall diminish them. It would also mean advisors would be more motivated to only investigate and report on the upsides and not the downsides of their public policy suggestions.

It's a slightly extreme example, but policy makers can only openly evaluate suggestions when the best possible information is available to them. In the long term Shahab's suggestions being published, much like the suggestions were in the first place, cause more harm than good.

As for Viro Fascist Kendel's underlying argument: Let's say for example that Saskatchewan (who, like Alberta, doesn't currently) gets a Chief Economic Officer. If he had professional autonomy to issue Public Economy Orders, he would not issue an order to limit size of gatherings...except in the case of, say, union meetings in which case he would limit the size of those gatherings to ONE.

A Chief Economic Officer would, however, issue a Public Economy Order removing the provincial minimum wage, suspending a variety of environmental and national security regulations on the resource sectors, and ban all public and private sector unions.

Unless, of course, the government declined to follow his recommendations and instead look at all sides of the issue. They might look at "soft" or non-quantitative measurements: restricting union membership and activity, much like limiting the size of gatherings on private property, would impact on the fundamental human right to freedom of association. Other advisors would therefore weigh differently on the decision, leaving the government minister with the task assigned to him by Mrs. Thatcher of making the decision.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This common saying wasn't popular with Viro Fascists over the past three years and you can imagine why. They had a singular goal: stop the spread of COVID. Even if every one of their suggestions would have worked (spoiler alert, they didn't), that still didn't make them the right decisions. Stopping the spread of COVID might have, I dunno, caused governments to run up trillions in debt with severe long term implications (or even short/medium term implications such as rampant inflation or something similarly unbelievable), or created a perverse set of incentives which would result in severe disruptions to the global supply chain, or foster a culture of government dependence with severe sociological implications for future generations, create a society based more on distrust than trust, or ironically left the population less healthy due to a general two year closure of avenues for preventative care and treatment.

Sure you could argue that the goal (COVID ends in the fall of 2020 and we never have to hear about it again) is worth it, but maybe it is and maybe it isn't. That's why it's so important that the final decision rests with Scott Moe and not with Dr. Shahab. It never can be only Shahab's decision, because he doesn't know or likely care about the ramifications of his decision outside of the healthcare field (as the post title notes).

Plus can you imagine if we did all or even most of the things these Chief Medical Officers demanded and on top of all of these unlikely-but-possible side effects the actions they took didn't even stop the spread of the WuFlu like they insisted it would??

2023-02-08

Destroy Heather McCargo

In a "heartwarming" story, Down East Magazine talks about how Heather McCargo "wants to destroy your lawn":

“All hands on deck today,” said executive director Andrea Berry, who was hired when McCargo stepped down in 2021. WSP has since doubled its staff size as well as its membership. To date, the organization estimates some 1.8 million native plants have been grown from seeds it has distributed. Objectives before 2030 include reaching a quarter of all Mainers with WSP educational content, getting a quarter of Maine’s land-conservation organizations to prioritize native-plant diversity and abundance, and persuading the Maine Department of Transportation to rethink management of roadsides and medians, which are mowed into de facto lawn but could instead support wildflower meadows.

How about no? While the headline is a little sensational, don't think for a second government coercion to make you do something (stupid) that you (wisely) don't want to do isn't their end goal. 

The rapid growth of the Wild Seed Project coincided with a broader war on lawns gaining traction across the country. Lawns in the U.S. cover a land mass about the size of Iowa, accounting for as much as half of all residential water consumption and a quarter of the use of several popular herbicides. Gas-powered lawn and garden equipment puts an estimated 20 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, and the emissions footprint of nitrogen-heavy lawn fertilizers is as bad or worse. Across the country, particularly in the parched West, cities and towns have started mandating the removal of turf grass and incentivizing permaculture, and more-naturalistic lawn alternatives have even begun catching on in New England, as the region slogs through years of severe drought. 

When Heather and her cronies come for your lawn, you fertilize it with their corpses.

Bonus lol: Yup, like all (generally female) aged hippies, she's a total loon:

The Wild Seed Project started selling seedlings a few years back, but McCargo remains a devoted defender of seeds. “I grow everything from seed,” she says. “I’m for sexual reproduction. It’s critical to keep native plants sexually active.”

McCargo had the sex talk with me one afternoon last August, sitting in her backyard, a double plot ringed with pagoda dogwoods, with flowers spilling out from gardens and hundreds of baby perennials in pots throughout the yard. She had just noticed some activity near one of her pots: a hummingbird hovered at a shockingly red flower — Lobelia cardinalis, a cardinal flower — dipping its tongue inside the plant’s tubular, two-lipped blossoms to collect sweet nectar. The stamens essentially feather-dust the hummingbird’s head with pollen, so that, as the bird moves on, it pollinates the next flower.

@lahara - Neither Rebel nor CBC has retracted a Freedom Convoy story. Only one of them deliberately lied during their coverage of it

Loralee doesn't like Rebel Media. Ezra isn't everybody's shtick: I've known him personally for over two decades and never did really care for him, and I'm not afraid to make fun of him for being a Jew. Of course, he did also borrow one of my jokes (and forgot to credit me, as tends to happen), so it's a wash really.

However, Loralee then makes the mistake of claiming CBC and CTV retract and apologize for errors. This is, without a doubt, completely retarded.

Unlike cowardly liars at CBC and CTV which did ignorant hit pieces on last February's Freedom Convoy without setting foot on the ground, Rebel was to use an old war journalism phrase "embedded" since Surrey. As a result, they didn't have to apologize for or retract fake news stories, like claiming a pro-Nazi was one of the convoy protesters, that the convoy was a Russian psyop campaign, that the Freedom Convoy tried to burn down an apartment building, or that no guns were involved in rounding up the protesters.

The CBC did "clarify that they meant experts probably would agree that Russians would totally do this even if they didn't" but an actual retraction? Not so much. CTV pivoted to "hey the apartment fire had nothing to do with the convoy" sure enough, but only The Globe and Mail wiped their "the convoy did it" original story. CBC changed the text but never retracted their original insinuations.

So where do these mythical "retractions" come from? Last week we saw in the USA an example of why Loralee is disingenuous claiming she's seen retractions from mainstream media.

My final concern, and frustration, was the lack of transparency by media organizations in responding to my questions. I reached out to more than sixty journalists; only about half responded.

Even after every single media claim about God-Emperor Donald J. Trump and the Russian government has completely and utterly debunked, the press refuses to publicly retract or apologize for their false reporting.

Under that sort of landscape, what motivation does the far more centralized and subsidized Canadina media have to ever do the same?

2023-02-07

@BendingBirches2 - What's the difference?

Matt Walsh noted last month that since more Whites are killed by police in the United States than blacks (in a whole numbers sense), it stands to reason that all things being equal we should see far more rallies for Whites killed by cops. Yet we don't. All things are not equal.

What the differences are and why they matter, one can imagine, became a topic of much discussion. But what I found curious from this moronic leftist (who apparently has never heard that women voting was a horrible idea) was that immediately there was some pedantic difference between "rallies" and "protests".

Fortunately, I have it directly from a reliable source that there's a distinct and easy to identify difference between a #NiggerLivesMoreImportantThanSocietyMuthaFuckers "rally" and a "protest". There's even a handy infographic.


2023-02-06

@mayahiga - Men masturbating to what you look like predates Deepfakes

Right now there's a "big" controversy that you probably never cared about. In what seems like a flashback to Jeffrey Combs' worst Star Trek: Deep Space Nine character, a deepfake company has made a porn video featuring famous birdwatcher Maya Higa (sadly, the site was already taken down) and a famous Twitch streamer has been shamed (in front of his wife) over it.

Atrioc, who is married, appears to have paid for NSFW deepfake content (via Reddit) from a controversial deepfake site, although this has not yet been confirmed. The tab that was visible during the stream appeared to show a premium service hosted on an OnlyFans-like image-sharing site, where the deepfake creator asks for a $15 per month fee for unlocking their content.

You can certainly think deepfakes are weird and creepy, but to think that there's something particularly novel about them is absurd.

Here's a photo of Maya Higa which she posted in May of 2021. Does she literally not know what every guy did upon first seeing the photo?

All a DeepFake does is take this sort of logic and fill in the gaps. Based on her breasts in the shirt we estimate where her nipples are. If we're really clever like an algorithm would be, we cross reference with a variety of other pictures to get a decently educated guess of what she looks like naked. An AI program might generate an actual digital image of her, of course, but all its doing is what men have been doing already for a very long long long time.

It's the naked girl version of those people who generate AI battles between fleets of starships.

 

Anybody can just sit down and close their eyes and imagine these scenes, same as anybody can look at Maya Higa's photos and imagine her naked. Some pictures make it easier than others, obviously.

The DeepFake is of course simply a cleaner and better way of filling in the gaps. Some programs try to smooth her face onto a similar frame, which again isn't a new phenomenon but rather just new technology of existing phenomenon. I "removed her clothing" in that photo above, but I could just as easily put her face onto another body, say an existing pornstar.

Or, uh, exactly the opposite.
Pretty seamless, isn't it? Anybody who remembers the 90s will recall that this method was used to show us "naked" celebrities from Julia-Louis Dreyfus to Kate Mulgrew to Terri Hatcher to Alissa Milano.

Uh, wait, that last one was real.

So if Maya Higa was 15 years older she would been awkwardly photoshopped onto this month's Playboy centrefold. If she was 40 years older she would have been awkwardly cutout from a real magazine and taped to the body of this month's Playboy centrefold. If she was 140 years older we would have lewdly modified legitimate paintings of her.

I shouldn't have to be the one to break the news to you, kid. You've been "sexualized" as the common vernacular goes since at least puberty. The day your first YouTube or Twitch video posted, some guy got an erection thinking about you. Before that, the day you first put on summer clothes and walked around in public, you were noticed, and you were "sexualized". Men created whole movies in their brains starring you stripping down and sucking their dicks. Those "deepfake" videos were created without your knowledge (or apparently awareness).

It's not just you. It literally happens all the time. If you go to this video you can watch a walking tour of Taksim Square in Istanbul, taken last April. If you try to scan through the video timeline you'll see a huge jump in the number of repeat views during the time period just before 5:37 in the video. Any guesses why that might be? 

85% probability she's been masturbated to. And her friend in the white even more.

Funny enough, I was trying to find a different Taksim Square walking video featuring hot chicks just out on the street. Of course, you don't have to go online or even to Turkey to see hot girls on the street. Remember this classic from the 2009 Calgary Stampede?


While the Twitch streamer in question did more than just peruse YouTube or Third Edge of the Sword (he paid money, remember), it's part of the ridiculous over-sensitization of society: a hot girl who used her status as a hot girl to become famous now is upset that she's hot and famous enough that people are seeking her out.

She can't be this dumb.

Bonus hot chick action: Pokimane is shocked to discover that her looks get both attention she wants and attention she doesn't.

What Azrenka should have said

During January's Australian Open, Victoria Azarenka (7.5/10, downgraded from 8) was required to remove her shirt over a possible sponsorship issue.

That isn't her big story anymore. After her loss, she pushed back on a reporter after being asked to comment on "big issue" political/social issues of the day.

“I don’t know what you guys want us to do about it,” Azarenka said. “I don’t know what’s the goal here, that it’s continuously brought up.”

Azarenka continued, “These incidents that, in my opinion, have nothing to do with players. But somehow you keep dragging players into it. So what’s the goal here? I think you should ask yourself that question. Not me.”

Rather than answering the tennis player, the reporter asked why she got frustrated with the question — showing just how out of touch with focusing on sports the journalist truly was.

“Whatever the answer, I’m going to give it to you right now, it’s going to be turned whichever way you want to turn it to,” Azarenka responded. “So does it bother me? What bothers me is there are real things that are going on in the world. And I don’t know. Are you a politician? Are you covering politics?”

“No, I’m a sports journalist,” the reporter answered.

“Yes. And I’m an athlete. And you’re asking me about things that maybe somebody says are in my control. But I don’t believe that. So I don’t know what you want me to answer. And if it’s a provocative question, then, you know, you can spin the story however you want.”

It was a pretty good response, but I would have flipped the script on them completely. I would have answered as follows:

Reporter: Just to clarify on that though, does it frustrate you that, um, particularly last night for example there was a clear sort of pro-Russian demonstration happening within the grounds of the tournament, that these people are coming and using the Australian Open as a platform for these kind of demonstrations, does that frustrate you?

FACLC channeled through Azarenka: (long pause, deep breath). I'm going to answer that question, but before I begin I'm going to make it clear that this is a two part answer, and that any news organization which references only the first part or only puts the first part in a headline is a Fake News organization, who is dedicated to spreading misinformation and any media organization who does so should be banned from all social media forever. Okay? If you do this you deserve to be punished for it. Now here is the first part of the answer: no I do not believe that the Australian Open should be used as a platform by pro-Russian demonstrators. Now here is the second part: I also do not believe that the Australian Open should be used as a platform for anti-Russian politics either: we have seen that fans are not allowed to bring in Russian flags, that Russian players are not allowed to have their nation's flag by their name, yet every other nation's player and fans are allowed to do so. Yet the Australian Open already did this, and decided to do it first: they fired the first shot. It's ironic that in response to Russia firing the first shot against Ukraine that so many people and organizations want to wipe Russia off the map, yet when they -- the Australian Open -- when they fire the first shot, they immediately cry foul when shots get fired back at them. Well guess what Australian Open? You fired at them first, and in response they are shooting bullets back at you and maybe they need to just keep on firing until you get the message that you fired that first shot, you are responsible for it, and until you surrender and apologize those shots against you are going to keep coming: they will keep shooting more and more bullets at you until you fall and they have every right to do so after you fired first. Officials and media organizations can't continue to pick a side over and over again: from Ukraine to sexual lifestyle choices to police shootings to Australia Day: can't continue to fire all these shots at people and then act surprised when the targets are firing back. You might find that not all players are 100% on board all of the time, and at that point you might just find yourself getting shot in the back.

2023-02-04

@jennimarshmarsh - Weren't you the least bit curious to find out why?

What was dangerous and never should have been allowed in the first place is mask mandates promoted by Viro Fascists like Jenni.

As a result of those ludicrous rules, school staff "intimidated and harassed" students and exactly one year ago today, we punched back twice as hard.

The problem is that Jenni isn't happy that concerned parents and citizens did the only sensible thing: bring pain upon the exact people (the staff) responsible. The teachers happily went along with this, therefore the first backs against the proverbial wall were (and should be) them.

Don't worry Jenni. You're next in line.

@serenitynow8822 - Why do you leftists always lie about health care "cuts"?

Ontario did not cut "almost a billion from health care". We've been through this before.

Doug Ford increased healthcare spending. I wish he had made cuts (90% annual is a good start, as I've said many times), but he hasn't.

One day, I swear, we'll get a conservative leader who actually does all the things the left keeps promising they'll do

2023-02-03

@UCalgary_FSW - "Knowledges"?

Just because a nigger learns a second thing it doesn't mean we have to pluralize "knowledge".

Also, when are you hiring for the White People Summer Youth Leadership Program?

2023-02-02

@LavalleyJer - Probably another coyote bone

Which scenario do you think is more likely?

  1. After possibly a hundred years, a perfectly preserved child's jawbone rooted its way up to the surface during the exact same timeframe that Red Indians haven't been getting much press about their supposed discovered graves?
  2. The jackpine savages are faking it again?

Blazing Cat Fur

Jeremy is very very upset that last month when yet another Indian Band tried to pull the "we found dead children" when they really only had an unreliable ground penetrating radar scan, Canadians started suspecting there really wasn't a wolf after all. Sure people like me were pointing out this was bullshit immediately, but it takes time for the self-evident truth of my blogposts to filter into the general consciousness.

As I've noted before, ground-penetrating radar does a bad job at detecting gravesites. If you can't use it to locate a grave you already know exists why would you think it could be used to identify graves that have no direct evidence of existing outside of the scan itself? Every time they dig they find nothing. It shouldn't be surprising that the "215 dead kids in Kamloops" plus "751 dead kids in Cowessess" plus now "2000 (!) dead kids in Star Blanket" lie is laid bare by the fact that, while the poorly named "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" claimed 2800 children died in Residential Schools some of the specific "children" "identified" actually had known fates that ended totally unrelated to their childhoods where they went to a school where hardworking whites tried to educate them.

Betty, as she was known, had earlier attended the Guy Hill Indian Residential School, but at the time of her death was attending Margaret Barbour Collegiate and living in The Pas with a non-Indigenous family.

Since Betty Osborne was not attending an Indian residential school when she died, the inclusion of her name contradicts the claim that the Memorial Register is a reliable record of “Children Who Never Returned Home” from residential schools.

These facts moved one concerned Canadian to ask the NCTR why Betty Osborne’s name is included in the Memorial Register.

After more than three months had gone by, the NCTR senior archivist sent this reply:

The Memorial Register is the result of over a decade of work by countless people and honours the children lost to the residential schools. Many names are added at the request of family members of children they lost who attended residential school. It may be the wish of these families to memorialize their lost children among the names of their schoolmates. This memorial registry is one meant to help Survivors (whose friends were lost) and families (whose children were lost) honour their loss and find peace to move forward. Again this register is meant to memorialize and honour the loss that families felt and continue to feel due to the residential school system.

As we are continuing our efforts on residential school research and helping Survivors and their families to heal, we will not be replying to further questions on the registry.

This official statement by the NCTR that the purpose of the Memorial Register is “to memorialize and honour the loss that families felt and continue to feel due to the residential school system” raises serious concerns. It indicates that the Memorial Register is not a verified list of 2800 missing children, or a verified list of children who “never came home.” It also suggests that the list will continue to grow far into the future as further unverified names are added by family members. If the principle continues to be applied that the Memorial Register is merely a way for family members, no matter how distantly related, to memorialize the name of a child who at some time went to a residential school, it is not inconceivable that the number of names on the Memorial Register could eventually reach the 15-25,000 estimated by TRC Commissioner Murray Sinclair

So who is the one with "garbage opinions"? Acer who Jeremy is so mad at? Or Jeremy himself for being fooled by the same fake trick over and over and over and over again. There's a reason the boy who cried wolf has endured as a story and will for hundreds more years...

The Injuns are lying. Jeremy probably knows they are too, he's just too invested in the lie. So many of them are, and that's why they will always announce absolutely everything except for any actual evidence. Remember when the Kamloops report was "a month" away? They now say whitey is never allowed to see it, which is part of the pattern:

In fact, a private researcher has found BC death records for 225 of the 416 children on the NCTR’s lists for “children who died at schools” in BC, which establish that most did not die at residential schools at all, and most are buried on their home reserves. In some cases the death certificates are signed by parents. The researcher has provided this information to the NCTR – which, as noted, was already aware of it since it has had the relevant BC death records in its possession since 2014. But requests that the NCTR remove from the Memorial Register the names of two hundred children whose deaths were not related to their attendance at residential schools have been met with silence.

The NCTR also declines to make accessible to non-Indigenous researchers the millions of documents it has received from governments and churches, which is particularly troubling since the NCTR is largely funded by the federal government with taxpayers’ money and is currently asking for a $60 million building to house its work. In that context, the senior archivist’s statement that the Centre refuses to reply to further questions is quite problematic. It suggests that the NCTR will continue to mislead the Canadian public by implying that the names in its Memorial Register are verified deaths which took place at residential schools, and that it will continue to place obstacles in the way of non-Indigenous researchers who are merely trying to establish the true number of residential school deaths.

They have to be careful, of course: if people start finding out they're lying about the huge number of dead kids, people might start to think critically about the other lies they tell about the excellent Residential School System.

That's a metaphorical punch to the jaw so hard it should make Jeremy's lower face the skull researchers examine a hundred years from now...

2023-02-01

@Annoyed_Science - Turns out "the science" is exactly as conservatives described, and exactly the opposite of what "expert scientists" warned us about

"Doctor" Bauer's take aged like a fine wine that you didn't realize until years later it had a real cork and couldn't be stored upright.

The known fact that viruses tend to evolve to be either extremely mild and therefore easy to spread, or extremely virulent and therefore easy to spread, has been known for a long time. As the linked article notes, the recent developments on this file have been learning how fast a virus can do this. It designs itself to get around immune responses, you see.

In 2019 everybody knew this. By mid-2020 only conservatives did. As a result, when the virus began to mutate around the vaccine (another thing only a conservative pundit could have told you during the global Wuhan Flu panic) the chattering expert class warned you over and over again that this mutation would be the worst ever.

Instead in 2021 we got two primary variants: Delta and Xi (huh, they skipped that name for some reason and went with Omicron). Each of these two mutations chose a much different method of improving their viruscraft (and apologies for anthropomorphising them). Delta was aggressive. It knew that once it took hold, it was a capital-d capital-v Deadly Virus and would damn well act on it. When it got a hold of a victim it grabbed hard and did everything it could to replicate at the cost of its host's health. I should know, I had Delta and it was quite something. I almost sniffled one night. Omicron took the other angle: it just kind of nibbled away at the edges of its host, trying very very very very hard not to get noticed. If you got Delta you stayed at home and in bed and didn't go out to The Keg because you felt like garbage. If you got Omicron you felt wonderful and had no symptoms and went out to the Keg and didn't find out anything was wrong until you started getting the contact tracing phone calls.

Politically this is one of the things that helped kill the Wuhan Flu fearmongering in western nations: huge numbers of people I knew who believed in the holy cult of masking and social distancing and vaccine passports did "everything" right and it didn't matter one bit: they got COVID anyways, sometimes twice over just a few months. However having got COVID they didn't feel great for a few days, got better, and collectively asked "wait, was that it? that's the big disease we've been miserable over for two years now?"

From a virus's perspective both of these two methods are superior to how it was spreading before: it either gets a wonderful life on the high hog, or else it does okay individually and spreads wonderfully collectively. These are the ideal end-states for a virus, so much like picking one of two chess strategies it was simply a matter of personal (er, viral) tastes.

Now obviously from the perspective of an individual human, the Omicron method is way better: you don't feel nearly as bad and it's almost impossible for you to die. Delta is a harder sell for any individual, however as a collective species the Delta is actually better: it's far better in an "area under the curve" sense for 2% of your total (sick and elderly) herd population to die alone and in pain than for 0.00002% to die with the tradeoff being that roughly 98% of the rest of your population will forever feel kind of crappy for a few weeks of the year every year forever and ever and ever amen.

Do you want 2% at 0% and 98% at 100%? Or do you want 100% to be at 99%? Run the numbers and you'll (collectively) take the first option over the second every time. Of course, we don't live (despite the false claims from the Marxists) in a society that values the overall health and efficiency of the population above and beyond the affairs of any individual member: if we did, and it turned out you could live longer by eating the heart of a nigger, we'd have heart-farms all over Africa. From each according to his ability yadda yadda yadda.

This is why its meaningless blather (and an example of "expert" overthinking) to treat viral "reproduction rates" as the big thing to be worried about. If you've decided politically that "death from COVID-19" is the only metric to be paying attention to, then you'll want the Omicron methodology. Yes yes technically its a "better" virus but it doesn't do the thing you've been endlessly worried about: it just goes around, everybody gets it, our immune systems improve, and oh shit didn't I suggest this three years ago?

Like I said, we haven't been wrong about this thing yet.