Notice I said "England", not "Britain" [and certainly not "Great Britain"! Ed.]? That's because the AI heroine is Waifu Amelia, an independent, subversive, England-loving, purple-haired Goth girl taking online, disgruntled Brits by storm.
Amelia's fictional backstory is that she's a schoolgirl who deeply loves British flags and culture. Wild child that she looks, Amelia is immensely proud of her country and has a real problem with the state of the so-called United Kingdom today.
She sees the hordes of immigrants being allowed to pour into the Septic Isle not as an asset but as an invasion. And she's pissed that any public manifestation of British pride is immediately quashed by a nascent, tyrannical government now preying on its citizens, while indulging and encouraging the worst in the newcomers flooding into the tiny island.
The problem with Amelia, according to British authorities, is that her outspoken and unfiltered views are all wrong... politically incorrect in the extreme! The discomfiture of the ruling Labour (read: leftist) party is exemplified by the booby bobby wearing a rainbow vest, arresting the old man who is stuttering, "What did I do?", to which the answer is "You tweeted rudely, and you're under arrest!"
The cheeky, freedom- and England-loving Amelia has become an icon, and that's hilarious considering where she originated. Waifu Amelia is the British government's own creation and has been around for a couple of years.
She was a bit player in Pathways, a nanny-state online game created by the government for yoofs in an effort to warn them off "right-wing extremism". She was meant to be "the far-right, anti-immigration bad girl" who tries to sway a tender and impressionable kid to join her on the wrong (read: right) side of the tracks.
The campaign turned out to be a spectacular own goal. Here's what Waifu Amelia stands for now!
Thanks to BCF for pointing us in the right direction! Ed.
Here's one for the True Facts Department, as reported this weekend by AP via NPR. NPR is to the Paranoid States of America as the CBC is to Canada, except that they don't get funded directly by a leftist government. But their political stance is just the same as if they'd been paid. They sure do love Emperor Trudeau and all his works, including this latest bit of statist nonsense.
Canada is poised to become the first country in the world to require that a warning be printed on every cigarette.
The move builds on Canada's mandate to include graphic photo warnings on tobacco products' packaging, a policy that started an international trend when it was introduced two decades ago.
"We need to address the concern that these messages may have lost their novelty, and to an extent we worry that they may have lost their impact as well," Minister of Mental Health and Addictions [Seriously. That's her title. Ed.] Carolyn Bennett said at a news conference Friday.
"Adding health warnings on individual tobacco products will help ensure that these essential messages reach people, including the youth who often access cigarettes one at a time in social situations, sidestepping the information printed on a package."
A consultation period for the proposed change is set to begin Saturday, and the government anticipates the changes coming into force in the latter half of 2023.
While the exact messaging printed on cigarettes could change, Bennett said the current proposal is: "Poison in every puff."
Bennett also revealed expanded warnings for cigarette packages that include a longer list of smoking's health effects, including stomach cancer, colorectal cancer, diabetes, and peripheral vascular disease.
Canada has required the photo warnings since the turn of the millennium, but the images haven't been updated in a decade.
Rob Cunningham, senior policy analyst with the Canadian Cancer Society, said he hopes the warnings printed directly on cigarettes become popular internationally, just like the package warnings did.
"This is going to set a world precedent," Cunningham said, adding no other country has implemented such regulations. He's hopeful that the warning will make a real difference.
"It's a warning that you simply cannot ignore," Cunningham said. "It's going to reach every smoker, with every puff."
Smoking rates have been steadily falling over the years. The latest data from Statistics Canada, released last month, shows 10% of Canadians reported smoking regularly. The government is seeking to cut that rate in half by 2035.
StatCan noted that roughly 11% Canadians 20 and older reported being current smokers, compared to just 4% of people aged 15 to 19.
This is a true story, not something made up by the Babylon Bee. Carolyn Bennett is a medical doctor by training, but apparently doesn't practice her profession very much, having given it up for politics in 1995. Such is her charisma and confidence that she has been shuffled through three (and counting) cabinet posts in Liberal governments, including Minister of State for Public Health, Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, and now Minister of Mental Health and Addictions.
Walt notes that Ms Bennett's annoouncement was made while Mr Socks was in California, engaging in acts of mutual admiration with Gov. Gavin Newsom. They agreed, inter alia, to work together to stop wildfires, although exactly how they would do so wasn't made clear. If Canucks were wondering where Mr Socks gets his nutbar ideas, now they know.
A few days ago the government of Canuckistan (J. Trudeau, Prop.) opened its side of the World's Longest Undefended Border (TM) to American visitors, as long as they've had the kung flu jabs. (Frostbacks are still barred from non-essential travel to the US side.) Border crossings [including the one at Roxham Rd, Québec? Ed.] have been festooned with welcome signs -- "Keep Canada green! Bring American money!"
Walt spent the Labour Day weekend in the Niagara Region of southern Ontario, on the pretty and peaceful side of the river, to see firsthand how Mr Socks' campaign for re-election is unfolding.
As noted here a week ago, native Canadians -- meaning "old stock Canadians" (read: those of European descent), not the "First Nations" who used to be called Indians and Eskimos -- are angry about a costly and unnecessary election, called in the middle of the Covid "crisis" merely to satisfy the Trudeau ego. And -- surprise, surprise! -- they're actually taking to the streets in "mostly peaceful protests"!
Yesterday, as luck would have it, Walt was in the neighbourhood when Blackie McBlackface visited a steel plant in Welland ON, in the heart of Niagara, for what was supposed to be a photo op in which Hisself would appear doing fistbumps with happy smiling peasants [workers, shurely! Ed.]
As it turned out, he (and the short lady in black -- Canada's "Diplomat of the Year" for 2018 -- you can look it up) were surrounded by more cops and security guards than workers. The rent-a-cops were in turn surrounded by angry protesters. Here's the video, from CHCH-TV in nearby Hamilton ON.
How about that, EH?! As you heard in the video, Mr Socks claims the protesters were just a bunch of anti-vaxxers. But did you see the sign? Not the one that said "Trudeau is a little shit!", but the other one which read "Fear tyranny, not the virus!" That, dear friends, is what so many Canucks are upset about -- loss of freedom!
Forced vaccination, "vaccine passports", lockdowns, and the campaign by the nanny state to control every aspect of people's lives -- that's why people are up in arms, not just in Canada and the USA, but in the UK and Europe as well.
Still, it's surprising to see the normally polite and sheeplike Canadians getting so incensed (about something other than hockey) that they'd turn up on a holiday Monday when the weather was perfect for golf or sailing or whatever they usually do up there.
After the unpleasantness in Welland, Blackie McBlackface and the Lady in Black (it was actually the Hon. Chrystia Freeland, who usually wears a red dress, or sometimes a white one that shows off her nips) were bussed to London ON, where things actually got worse!
An even bigger crowd of protesters met the bus, heckling and jeering continually as M Trudeau made yet another little show of defiance, saying he would not stop "standing up for Canadians." He might better have said "standing up to Canadians", since the latest polls show the majority of voters are going ABT.
But wait (as Vince Offer used to say), there's more! While boarding the bus to get out of Dodge, the Little Emperor was hit by gravel or some such small objects [popcorn? sheep shit? Ed.] thrown in his direction. The Masked Male Feminist looked startled as he ducked inside the vehicle. He later confirmed to reporters on the campaign plane that he was hit by gravel, but said he was OK.
What will happen today? Will M Trudeau be able to make any public appearances, anywhere, without attracting angry protesters, just as flies are attracted to... well, you know.... Walt thinks the Diplomat of the Year [You've beaten that gag to death. Ed.] may have been wearing a black dress as a signal that she knows the Campaign to Re-elect Canada's Prettiest Prime Minister is doomed. Doomed, I tell you!
Polling day (the proper name, in Canada and the UK, for the day on which people vote) is September 20th. Stay tuned. Agent 3 will make the popcorn; Poor Len Canayen will make poutine.
Further reading: "FDR was right about one thing...", WWW 11/8/21. For Canadians, this election really is about freedom from slavery to the Almighty State.
If you're in any doubt, search for news from Australia, where there is a 2100 to 0500 curfew in effect, and folks who choose not to get vaccinated are being told (by their prime minister, no less!) that henceforth they will not be able to participate in the economy!
More reading: "How Trudeau is losing the support of voters", by Candice Malcolm, in the Toronto Sun, 7/9/21. "...a smug, entitled, self-righteous, and condescending politician who doesn’t practice what he preaches."
Ed. here. You may have noticed that Walt's posts this week have been more than a little short on content. Walt is speechless, or should I say wordless. He just sits in a corner of his cabin in the pines, seething and fuming. I expect a lavalike eruption of vitriol any time now, maybe this afternoon, but in the meantime am filling the space with appropriate visuals. This one comes from Agent 9, to whom we take off our masks.
To 9 and to all we say, don't expect things to get any better under a new administration. And don't get caught going out for a walk!
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. Last week AIER posted this calm, reasoned and fact-filled video by Ivor Cummins, an engineer-trained thinker who has worked to summarize the best science and data. His latest video brings enormous clarity to the topic, based on data and evidence from all over the world, presented without hype or ideology.
Mr Cummins presents lockdown and mandated mask analysis with detailed and documented evidence that these strategies were a massive mistake and had no impact on the virus. Without the imposed lockdowns, which caused more deaths than were ever saved, the virus numbers would have naturally decreased as shown in the stat charts in the video.
Agent 6, who sent this to us (Tanks, bye!) adds: Our nation's future has been and continues to be jeopardized with a lie supported by falsified, fake scientific information.
To which Walt says, indeed so! I just finished reading (and recommend highly) Barbara Demick's Eat the Buddha, an excellent and very recent book (Random House 2020) about the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The author mentions that as the kung flu spread, the Commies quickly devised a plan to have an app that would code everybody green, yellow or red, to determine if they had been infected and where they would be allowed to go. She predicts that the app will continue to be used long after the plandemic passes. Sound like anything you've heard of in your country?
Walt notes the uptick in demonstrations against government regulation and control, even by sheeplike Canucks. I don't totally disapprove of wearing a mask, social distancing and all that, but think our governments have gone waaaaay too far. In the end, isn't it the individual's responsibility to decide how much risk he wants to run? We shouldn't be letting the nanny state run our personal lives so much.
As Mr Cummins writes in his YouTube introduction: Get educated guys and gals -- or keep your head in the sand while your errant leaders destroy society around you.
De partis infidelibus, Agent 9 has sent us this interesting video. Seems that the rule of "no face mask, no service" applies even to taxis in west Africa.
What's interesting [to the prurient-minded! Ed.] is how the lady manages to divest herself of her undergarments without revealing any naughty bits. But the lesson is clear. You must do as you're told by the elites who govern us. It's for your own good!
I haven't written much this week [Did you write at all? Ed.] because I've been waiting for the furore about the "Corona Crisis", aka the Dempanic, to die down. [You couldn't think of another verb phrase? Ed.] Only today have I started to hear a few small voices cautiously whispering that the pandemic (as the WHO calls it) isn't that bad, after all, and maybe it's time that our authoritarian governments start to take their feet off our necks.
I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of the problem, but I don't think it's the huge crisis that the liberal political and media elites want us to believe it is. Their real agenda is to increase the almighty state's control over every single thing that we do, not excluding the things we say and the things we think.
We the sheeple have been led into a huge trap, giving up our natural and constitutional freedoms to the ever-expanding, overweening nanny state. If those who lead us knew what they were doing, rather than making it up as they go along, it wouldn't be so bad. But they don't!
Not that this is anything knew. Here are a few wise words from The Peter Principle, by Dr Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. For those who haven't read the book (published in 1969), the authors posit that things always go wrong, not because of Murphy's Law, but because, in a hierarchy, everyone tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
In the chapter headed Hierarchiology & Politics, Dr Peter quotes a student who said to him "I don't know whether the world is run by smart men who are...putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." The good doctor says, in response, that his studies have shown that "capitalistic, socialistic, and communistic systems are characterized by the same accumulation of redundant and incompetent personnel."
Those who (allegedly) lead us say that they're merely following the advice of experts. The problem, as Dr Peter sees it, is that "in any economic or political crisis...many learned experts will prescribe many different remedies!" Why? Because 1) Many of the experts have actually reached their level of incompetence: their advice is nonsensical or irrelevant. 2) Some of them have sound teories, but are unable to put them into effect. 3) In any event, neither sound nor unsound proposals can be carried out efficiently, because the machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies, riddled through and through with incompetence.
Agent 78 would agree. She is still waiting for some "emergency relief" promised weeks ago, to which she is clearly entitled. She has called two departments which might be tasked with doling out the elusive spondulix -- it's not clear which one actually has the responsibility -- but has been unable to get through on the phone. Indeed, she can't even get put on hold. Instead of saying "Hello", the computer at the other end just says "Try again tomorrow," or, believe it or not, "Try again next week."
The "cure" -- throwing money at the "crisis" -- is proving worse than the disease. No matter what they call their strategy, our governments are, in effect, printing money sufficient to ensure that everyone -- citizen or not, suffering or not -- will get some (eventually), and, at the next election, show their gratitude for being given their own money. The mind boggles.
Walt is a stamp collector. What else would an old man do on a cold winter night? Besides, it's a fascinating hobby. One never knows when a stamp, even a newly issued one, will become a rarity or at least something to provoke bemused discussion. Like these stamps, scheduled for release this month by the US Postal Service.
These are -- or were -- 10 (of 15) "active kids stamps", intended by the USPS to promote physical fitness. The message is that obese American kids should get up off the couch and go out and play! Alas, three of the ten stamps are "inappropriate" and "causing concern" to Forces for Good in the Community. So the whole series is being withdrawn, lest we get the Wrong Ideas.
"What 'wrong ideas'?", I hear you ask. Look carefully. One shows a young swimmer doing a cannonball into water. In another, a child is skateboarding wearing a helmet but no kneepads. In the third, a youngster is doing a headstand without a helmet.
The New York Times "Motherlode" blog says it has confirmed with the USPS that the stamp series is on hold, saying the three drawings showed children moving in ways that "could prove detrimental to their health."
In the old days, we used to tell kids not to touch the hot stovetop or they'd get burnt. When they disregarded the warning, they did get burnt, and they learned a lesson. Today's kids aren't allowed to even look at the stove! Isn't it wonderful to live in a country so solicitous for the welfare of its children?
I don't know if liberals are capable of learning in the accepted sense. So many of their policies have clearly failed, but they keep polishing the turd, pushing self-destructive polices, and seperating actions and consequences in a way that goes from the ridiculous to the sublime.
Here is my scholarly theory. Liberals live in a bubble. Most of them live in concrete urban jungles where friendly policemen guard them from harm the way a sheep dog guards his flock. They don't grow their own food, most of them don't make anything of value, most work and live in artificial markets and workplaces, and the sum effect of all these influences is 'devolution'. These people are reverting back to savage, tool-using super-apes.
Consider your affluent rich Tranna Libs. [Those are the ones I call "Volvo liberals". Walt] They would be dead meat in any rural or productive society. They are unpopular, socially incompetent, and divisive. They are not the kind of people you want to make friends with or help out because they will not do the same for you. In any society that does not nanny stupid people -- as ours does -- Darwin would take them out.
In the liberal slums, drugs and gang activity are going through the roof. The only people that do well in those environments are the fittest and strongest. As drugs and illegitimacy and illiteracy ravage their families and communities, they become ever more dehumanized by crime and violence and start to resemble our feral ape-like evolutionary predecessors.
It is pretty much apparent to anyone that doesn't live in a leftist stupidity chamber that the great Liberal Social Experiment has failed. And now -- it's time to clean up the mess.
At the end of the hippy-dippy 60s, the Liberal Party imposed on Canada, as its new prime minister, one Pierre Elliot Trudeau. The man Allan Fotheringham dubbed "Himself" promised Canadians that when he got through with Canada, they wouldn't recognize it. He was right.
One of the most pernicious laws passed by PET's government, to enact his liberal humanist vision of the future, was the Canadian Human Rights Act, an Orwellian name for a law that actually destroys real rights. Everyone has rights now -- infidels, atheists, pacifists, rioters, vizmins, sexual deviates. Or almost everyone. Certain rights are conspicuous by their absence -- the right to life, and the right to speak your mind freely, not to mention the right to be left alone by the nanny state.
As Ezra Levant wrote today in the Sun papers, the entire law is a corruption of justice. It creates a kangaroo court, run by non-judges, that doesn't follow the same rules and procedures of real courts, but has massive powers to punish and fine people who aren’t politically correct.
According to Levant, the worst part of the law is Section 13, the censorship provision. Section 13 creates a word crime: the crime of publishing or broadcasting anything that can cause hurt feelings. Levant has run afoul of it more than once. So has Mark Steyn, as mentioned here before.
Levant says, and Walt agrees, that Section 13 is an insane law. It is totally contrary to traditions of liberty that go back centuries, inherited from the United Kingdom and more recently the USA, where freedom speech is (supposedly) enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
Last week, Canadian Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson rose in the House of Commons to answer a question about Section 13. The question was about a private member’s bill, introduced by Brian Storseth, a Member of Parliament from northern Alberta. His bill, C-304, would repeal Section 13. The effect would be to let people write and speak the truth, without having to answer to the PC police.
Unfortunately, in the Canadian parliamentary system, private members' bills have little chance of passing without the endorsement of the government. But Mr. Nicholson did endorse it. And he called on all MPs to support it.
So, Bill C-304, is now effectively a government bill. And with a Tory majority in both the House of Commons and the Senate, this bill is as good as enacted.
Canadians can look forward to the end of witch hunts by the Canadian and provincial Human Rights Commissions. The Forces of Good and Progress will no longer be able to persecute their political and religious enemies.
Repealing Section 13 would be the best thing the Harper government has done in five years. But C-304 could yet be derailed, if the lamestream media can rally "progressive public opinion" against it.
Walt encourages Canadians who value being able to speak truth to power to show their support for C-304. You can e-mail Brian Storseth and/or Rob Nicholson to let them know you're on the side of freedom. And wish them "Merry Christmas!" while you're at it!
