Author: Blazingcatfur

A little distracted …

157 KB to 14 KB. Sweet.

It’s been a day.

Last night as you are aware we were unexpectedly taken off-line.

BCF’s most excellent blog host has plans to move us to a quicker, better server and in prep for that something went wrong.

That was fixed in due course. Of course.

Meanwhile I have been keeping watch on the image optimization program I purchased.

BCF has accumulated over 100,000 images in over 200,000 blog posts during our long and less than illustrious career.

That’s a lot of pics and now they take up so much space the blog has become like an overstuffed pinata as I never much cared to follow best practices for image size.

I have been running the image optimizer for the past 48 hours.

It works as advertised, and so far 15 GB of images have been reduced to 4 GB in size.

But that’s like 15% of the total so it’ll be awhile.

See the cat pic above – 157 KB to 14 KB. Sweet.

The good news is that once running it just hums in the background unattended.

Sorry for the day’s inconvenience and thank you all for your help and patience!

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted intechnology

Michael Higgins: Shame on Trudeau for wanting to give in to Hamas after executions

Even as he pleaded for a deal to be done, Jonathan Dekel-Chen was under no illusions. To get his son released from the clutches of Hamas meant negotiating with the devil.

“We’re dealing with Satan,” Dekel-Chen told CBS news on Sunday as he talked about his son Sagui, a father of three girls, who is being held in Gaza.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Ford rules out Ontario election in 2024, but could call an early election in 2025

Ontario Premier Doug Ford ruled out calling an early election this year, but left the door open on Tuesday to calling one in 2025.

The province’s next fixed election date isn’t until June 2026, but Ford continued to dance around the issue of whether or not he’ll call an early election.

“We aren’t having an election this year,” the premier said at an unrelated news conference, without providing further clarity on whether he would call an early vote.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inOntario

Justin Trudeau tops list of Canada’s worst prime ministers, says new poll

Timing is everything in politics.

If New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jack Layton had not emerged as the clear winner of the 2011 federal leaders’ English language debate in Canada, the Liberal Party may have had a chance to regroup and stop the Conservative Party from forming a majority government.

If a televised debate had not aired so early on CNN in the presidential electoral season this year, Democratic Party supporters in the United States would not have realized that Joe Biden had to be replaced as their nominee.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Adam Pankratz: AfD’s rise in Germany offers stark lessons for Canada

Any sentence that ends with “for the first time since 1945” is likely to garner attention. When the first part of the sentence is “Germany votes for far-right government,” drinks are spat out and the volume on the telly is turned up.

And so it is. Over the weekend, German voters in Thuringia easily lifted the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the top spot in regional elections. In Saxony, the party placed a close second, right behind the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which, together with the centre-left Social Democratic party, has had a lock on power nearly everywhere in Germany since the modern Germany state was founded in 1949.

There is nothing “extremist” about defending your best interests from vile politicians and a rapacious corporate class as we are faced with in Canada.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Mass Immigration - Follow the money", "Mass Immigration is Class War", "Societally Destructive Immigration Policy", Canada's Corporate Welfare Class, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Criminalizing Dissent Is Coming

Ah, I arrived at the gate for my Berlin flight, and found that it’s delayed for 90 minutes. So I have time to dash off something. I think this is important, actually.

Yesterday Politico dropped a story about how “former GOP officials are sounding the alarm over Trump’s Orban embrace.” Gosh, where would we be without Former GOP Officials, eh? The story attempts to demonize anyone who has anything to do with the Hungarian prime minister.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent"

NDP to have ‘tough conversations’ about its deal with Liberals at coming retreat: MP

OTTAWA, W.Va. – New Democrat labour critic Matthew Green says his party will be having “tough conversations” about the future of its agreement with the Liberals at a coming caucus retreat.

Two years ago the NDP and Liberals forged a confidence-and-supply agreement, with the New Democrats agreeing to keep the minority government in power until June of next year in exchange for movement on key priorities.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, NDP

Israel: Ceasefire Deal Will Prevent Hostages from Coming Home, Anti-Government Protests Only Embolden Hamas

The aim of the execution of six Israeli hostages by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas was to shock the Israeli public and incite it to rebel against the Israeli government. The goal of the executions, which reportedly took place in a tunnel in the Gaza Strip last week, was also to convey to the Biden administration the need to increase pressure on Israel to accede to most of Hamas’s demands in exchange for the release of the captives the terrorist group is holding in the Gaza Strip.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023"

Leigh Revers: A woke takeover is coming for Canadian physician training

“Victor Laszlo published the foulest lies in the Prague newspapers until the very day we marched in. And even after that, he continued to print scandal sheets in a cellar.” So ran the accusation by Colonel Strasser in Michael Curtiz’s impeccable 1942 film noir, Casablanca.

Strasser was vilifying the upstanding resistance leader who challenged the prevailing regime in Morocco that attended France’s surrender to Germany in the summer of 1940. Today, in Canada, more than three-quarters of a century later, this enduring scene begs comparisons to a new, looming rebellion, this time between doctors and their regulatory agencies, and one that bears all the same hallmarks of defiance.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Peak Woke"

PBS: Conservative ‘Backlash’ Is Ruining DEI for ‘Trans Workers at Tractor Supply’

Taxpayer-supported PBS mourned success by conservatives on Wednesday’s News Hour in pushing back with consumer activism against the flagrantly dishonest “diversity-equity-inclusion” drives in corporate America. PBS used the term “conservative” six times, but never found an ideological label for the Left. They were “pro-DEI folks” pushing “diversity initiatives” for people like “trans workers at Tractor Supply.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"DEI - Diversity Equity Inclusion", WTF?

Workers can’t find affordable housing. Their pension funds are part of the problem

Across Canada, a nurse earns between $28 and $50 an hour, which works out to a moderate to median annual household income of $58,240 to $104,000. At the Canadian standard definition of housing affordability – that housing takes up no more than 30 per cent of pre-tax household income – a single-parent nurse would be looking for a two- or three-bedroom home costing between $1,456 and $2,600 per month. But the average asking rent for a two-bedroom apartment rental in Vancouver is $3,666.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis"