Author: Blazingcatfur

Life in Ukraine’s Trenches: Gearing Up for a Spring Offensive

In a thicket of trees between two vast farm fields, a plywood trapdoor built into the forest floor opened to reveal stairs leading underground.

Inside was a subterranean bunker, cut into the black earth, where Ukrainian troops from a mortar unit awaited coordinates for their next target. The men squeezed past one another down a shoulder-width dirt corridor lit with LED strips, staring at tablet computers showing a live drone feed of the terrain outside. Blast waves from artillery shells and rockets shook the bunker, and a radio crackled with a warning of incoming Russian helicopters.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"

Intelligence watchdog questions cyber agency’s approach to international law, CSE insists it was above board

One of Canada’s intelligence watchdogs has scolded the country’s cyber security agency over its approach to international law.

The National Security and Intelligence Review Agency reviewed the Communications Security Establishment’s activities in 2019, the first year after it received new powers. While the review was completed in 2020, its report was made public only this week.

The CSE insists it never violated international law and is calling the matter a “philosophical” disagreement with its oversight body.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCSE

A plague of super rats is taking over our homes

For Graham Sharpe, his rat problem started with a persistent gnawing he heard one evening in his kitchen. Sharpe, a 52-year-old academic at Nottingham Trent University, ransacked the cabinets and replaced an external drainpipe which he thought might be an access point; but the furtive scratching and chomping continued. Then one night as he and his wife were lying in bed, they suddenly heard a deafening scuttling across the bedroom ceiling directly above their heads.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Mother Nature Hates You"

Does a country have ‘no choice’ but to subsidize its auto industry? Ask Australia

Bad economic arguments often come with a “tell” – a hand-waving catchphrase, inserted in place of reason or evidence as a means of coaxing agreement. Appeals for industrial subsidies are notorious for this.

For a long time the vogue phrase was “value-added.” Asked why a company’s fate should not be decided in the usual way – by its ability to sell a product to willing consumers or to raise capital from willing investors, rather than by its ability to lobby governments – the industrial strategy advocate had only to mumble something about the critical need to “move up the value-added ladder” to sweep away all objections.

SNC, McKinsey and now VW. Justin’s LPC seems to like doing business with corporate criminals.

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

Why I can’t have nice things …

My cat Xavier is insane.

The receiver for my ceiling fan remote died so I opted to go Old School and purchased a couple of decorative pull chains, one for the fan and one for the light.

For some reason they freaked Xavier out, as in scared him crapless.

I have had to hide them in the fixture and I suspect he knows they are still attached … waiting to pounce.

At this point I have stopped the fan, next I will turn off the light to see if sanity can be restored.

If that fails I will uninstall the pull chains.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCats. What Else?

‘Toronto is in a very bad mood’: Why the city’s race for a new mayor will likely get meaner

It felt this week like candidates in Toronto’s race to pick a new mayor started to use their elbows a little bit more.

Multiple candidates issued statements and tweets taking shots at their rivals.

Ana Bailao called former council colleague Josh Matlow, a “plagiarist,” accusing him of cribbing his platform from former candidate Gil Penalosa. Mark Saunders also took a swipe at Matlow, saying during an announcement “I usually chuckle when I hear candidates like Josh Matlow chastise people for using cars.”

Will we look back and say that this election marked the end of Toronto? I suspect so if a left leaning mayor is elected.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Toronto - Canada's version of a Democrat run city"

House Oversight Chairman: Witnesses Against Hunter Biden ‘Fear for Their Lives’ Amid Threats, Intimidation

A leading congressional Republican is now warning that federal prosecutors are not looking at the broader picture of potential misconduct by Hunter Biden and his family, and that witnesses in the GOP investigation, as well as investigators themselves, are being threatened and terrorized by powerful Democrats.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Biden Family Sleaze"

Can Joe Biden even last four years? If not, it’s awful Kamala Harris

ROLL up, roll up for the worst election race in history.

No, I don’t mean our next general election, I’m referring to the US Presidential election, which also takes place in 2024.

Because this week Joe Biden announced he is going to run for another term.

In perhaps the least inspiring video message of all time, the 80-year-old President announced his candidacy.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Joe Sleazebag Biden"

Why they hate Tucker Carlson: The liberal elite’s fear of Fox News is really a fear of the white working class.

Woe betide the left-leaning hack who deviates from the narrative about Tucker Carlson. Tucker’s a fascist and any liberal who says otherwise should expect swift cancellation. Witness the troubles at the American Prospect. On Wednesday, the day after Carlson’s abrupt departure from Fox News, that young organ of pained liberalism made the grave error of publishing a piece suggesting Carlson might in fact be a complicated figure. Perhaps – whisper it – a rebellious one. Might this boisterous puncturer of the new elite’s ‘lazy pieties’, this primetime critic of war, free-market capitalism and Big Tech, hold some lessons for the left? Oh dear. Summon the mob. A liberal has made unapproved comments about Mr Carlson.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Elites vs. Populists"

Inside Women’s Studies

The charges of oppression that privileged white feminists once leveled indiscriminately at men ended up being turned back on them by women of color.

The setting: Town Hall in New York City on the evening of April 30, 1971. The event: a debate about “Women’s Liberation,” occasioned by Norman Mailer’s new book, The Prisoner of Sex, and featuring Mailer himself as moderator. His gruff, snarky opening remarks are followed by four talks in widely differing styles: an earnest, deadly dry presentation of the feminist ideology of the day by Jacqueline Ceballos, a commissarlike representative of the National Organization for Women; a barbed, witty attack on Mailer, the nuclear family, and much else (not to mention praise for Mao Zedong’s “analysis of society”) by the glamorous Australian author Germaine Greer, who’s riding high with her bestselling The Female Eunuch, and whose irreverence and unabashed sexiness set her apart from other superstars of Women’s Lib, a movement already notorious for its humorlessness; a sober, dispassionate analysis of ’70s feminism by New York intellectual doyenne Diana Trilling, a voice for reason and pre-New Left liberalism; and Village Voice scribe Jill Johnston.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inBatshit Crazy Feminists

Meloni knows that immigration and fertility are linked

Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, met Rishi Sunak this week at the start of her two-day visit to Britain, as part of her mission to convince Europe that she’s a conservative not a fascist.

Top of her agenda was the importance of continued military aid to Ukraine, but after that the two issues about which she hopes to be most persuasive are the ones that threaten Europe most: migrants arriving on boats, and Europe’s plummeting fertility rate.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inDemography

White progressives on course to dominate the Democratic Party

A new ‘diploma divide’ has given this group an outsize influence

As President Biden announced his reelection campaign, no fact — not his on-stage energy, his age, his potential challengers, nor his policy priorities — merits as much attention as his audience of choice. Mostly comprised of trade union members and overwhelmingly white and male, the crowd represents not the campaign’s base, but rather its disappearing faithful.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inDemocratic Party

Germany: Ibrahim A. Charged With Murder Following Brokstedt’s Knife Rampage

The accused was deemed harmless by a prison psychiatrist before being released from custody where he was being held because of an earlier knife attack.

Three months after the deadly knife rampage in Brokstedt that saw two young people murdered and five others injured, public prosecutors in Germany have brought forth charges against the perpetrator, Ibrahim. A., a 34-year-old Palestinian.

Ibrahim. A., who previously compared himself to Anis Amri—an Islamist terrorist who in 2016 killed 13 people and injured 67 after plowing through a Christmas market on Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz with his vehicle—on Thursday, April 27th, was formally charged by the Itzehoe public prosecutor’s office with two counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder, Der Spiegel reports.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Germany, Islam, Islam and violence, Islamization of the West

The antisemitism that drives identity politics

For many in the West, Jew-hatred is invisible and grossly misunderstood.

A furor over a British Labour Party politician tells us a great deal about the tsunami of Jew-hatred rolling across Britain, America and the West.

Diane Abbott, who in 1987 became Britain’s first black female member of parliament, caused widespread outrage last weekend when she wrote in TheObserver that Jews, Irish people and travelers don’t face racism but merely suffer the same level of prejudice as people with red hair. The only possible victims of racial prejudice, she suggested, are black people.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Identity Politics", "Intersectionality", Anti-Semitism and the Left