Author: Blazingcatfur

How Woke Put Paid to Publishing

Until the industry reclaims its allegiance to free speech over ideological orthodoxies, both readers and writers will suffer.

News that Salman Rushdie had been stabbed on stage at a New York literary festival shocked the world. It prompted an outpouring of sympathy for the author, who has spent more than 30 years with a fatwa placed on his life. Amid concern for Rushdie’s health, some have begun to ask whether The Satanic Verses, his 1988 novel accused of blasphemy against Islam, could even be published today.

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

Coffee with Hitler review: how naïve 1930s Brits tried to ‘civilise the Nazis’

Historians writing about the years immediately before Adolf Hitler’s war have to contend with two problems: hindsight and the common and dangerous conflation of Germans and Nazis. It was the German state, not the Nazi party, that went to war in 1939 (though of course the state was under Nazi control) and the vast majority who were not Nazis kept their heads down to avoid ending up in a concentration camp or worse. Almost all of those who ended up at the end of a rope at Nuremberg, took the suicide pill or escaped to South America, were committed party members – with all that entailed.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inBooks, WW II History

America’s Voluntary Military Suicide

Though largely unreported by mainstream media, the slow-motion collapse of America’s all-volunteer military is a reality of grave importance to national identity and international security. All branches of service are significantly below their essential recruitment goals and have been for several years. The Army is in the most critical shape. This year, it has recruited only 40 percent of the soldiers needed for minimal force replacement, despite ever-lowering standards and ever-increasing enticements for enlistment.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inMilitaria, USA

It’s Open Season on Jews in New York City

Of the hundreds of hate crimes committed against Jews in the city since 2018, many of them documented on camera, only a single perpetrator has served even one day in prison

The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inAnti-Semitism, Anti-Semitism and the Left

The rising surveillance state in American cities

Is lowering the crime rate worth giving up your privacy?

Three American cities now require or likely will soon require businesses to give police access to their private surveillance footage. Leaders of all three cities see it necessary and cite rising crime. But privacy advocates decry the proposals as another example of the USA becoming the United Surveillance States of America.

Houston became the first city to enact such rules. It’s part of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s federally funded One Safe Houston initiative. Turner announced it in February following a series of officer-involved shootings coupled with several dozen murders.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

Western’s vaccine mandate will harm students and fail to protect the most vulnerable

University students, many of whom sacrificed two of the most formative years of their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, are now making up for lost time. The return to school plan adopted by Western University in London, Ont., which includes mandated booster shots and mandatory masking, came from a good place, but does not fit the reality we live in. These measures are concerning because there is the potential for harms with only marginal benefits.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease"

How a London, Ont., cricket plant found itself at the heart of an international conspiracy theory

A London, Ont., cricket factory that produces insects used as pet food has found itself at the heart of a sweeping international conspiracy theory whose purveyors claim a cabal of shadowy elites are trying to force the population to eat insects as part of a sinister totalitarian plot.

The conspiracy theory has been circulating for months, amplified and published by hawkers of online misinformation in Canada and elsewhere in English and Chinese, often with the falsehood growing more sweeping or outrageous with each iteration.

Those spreading the myth aren’t just online bloggers and anonymous social media accounts. The falsehoods are also spread and tweaked by a number of political operators to suit their agenda, including the Alberta separatist movement and politicians like a sitting MP and a Conservative Party of Canada leadership hopeful.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Eat Government Bugs"

Somali pirates lose their grip on global shipping

Piracy in the Horn of Africa is no longer a threat to global shipping, an industry group has said, ending the era of swaggering Somali pirates taking hostages and seizing cargo.

From next year the Indian Ocean will no longer be considered high risk because no attacks on merchant vessels off Somalia have been reported since 2018. “This announcement is a testament to nearly fifteen years of dedicated collaboration to reduce the threat of piracy in the Indian Ocean,” the International Maritime Organisation said in a statement.

I’m sure Justin will offer them citizenship.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Islam, Islam and violence, Somalia, WTF?

Women journalists targeted in co-ordinated campaign of hate: Canadian Association of Journalists

In her six years in journalism, Fatima Syed estimates she has received about 150 messages of hate. The vile messages arrive in her email inbox, or come in replies to her social media posts.

In emails she has shown to CTV News, Syed is called a variant of the N-word and is referred to as a “Nazi c**t.” She has been threatened with rape and told that she should be put on her knees and “shotgunned, Afghan style.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Journalists", WTF?

Rex Murphy: Environmentalists biggest triumph was to aid Vladimir Putin

When Donald Trump was president, he warned Germany that leaving its economy vulnerable to Russia, by depending on Russia for natural, gas was dangerous.

Now I’m not entirely foolish. Please note the qualifier. I am aware that any sentence with Donald Trump as subject, and suggesting that on any issue, any issue at all, he knew what he was talking about and should have been listened to, will for many sensitive readers, bring on convulsions.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia", Green-Scam

Chinese Canadian ‘Leaders’ Spread Disinformation about Taiwan on TV

Two prominent Chinese Canadians, including one on a B.C. government Advisory Council, have appeared on a partially China-owned television station telling Chinese viewers that Canada recognizes Taiwan is part of China, a false statement.

The statements also suggest that Canadian government’s actions might lead to war with China if Canada doesn’t tow the Beijing line on the Taiwan issue, an extrapolation of threats of “forceful measures’ by Beijing against Canada if a group of lawmakers visit Taiwan.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Canada's China Class", "China - Communist Slave State"

Little by little the truth of lockdown is being admitted: it was a disaster

Public fear was deliberately stoked to justify decisions made on the hoof and based on questionable advice

Lockdown was an extreme and unprecedented response to an ancient problem, the challenge of epidemic disease. It was also something else. It marked one of the gravest governmental failures of modern times. In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has blown the gaff on the sheer superficiality of the decision-making process of which he was himself part. The fundamental rule of good government is not to make radical decisions without understanding the likely consequences. It seems obvious. Yet it is at that most basic level that the Johnson government failed. The tragedy is that this is only now being acknowledged.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease"

Islamist Terrorism Is Winning In The West

The new Islamist attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie reminded me that years ago, the Egyptian-German scholar Hamed Abdel-Samad told Rushdie, at a 30th-anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa ordering Rushdie’s assassination, “30 years ago, there was a Salman Rushdie in the world, today there is at least one Salman Rushdie in every Islamic country, not to mention those in Western countries.”

In 2012, Al-Qaeda published a list of critics of Islam as “most wanted” targets for assassination. Networks of Islamist websites today call for the assassination of extensive lists of infidels and “apostates” around the world. Some have already been killed, others silenced, and almost all live under police protection.

That’s a very long list.

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

California has weaponized transportation against its own population

In 2008, California voters approved what was supposed to be a $33 billion high-speed rail project to connect Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco. What they are actually getting is a project that may still never connect those cities but will cost at least $113 billion and won’t be completed until at least 2030.

In the meantime, California’s legislature is as determined as ever to make affordable transportation illegal, going so far as to ban gasoline-powered automobiles.

The high-speed rail project is a predictable rat’s nest of rent-seeking by politically connected contractors. Assuming it is actually ever finished, it will require constant operating subsidies and maintenance costs. This California crazy train was back in the news last week because it received one of many environmental green lights required for its completion, which will come no sooner than 2033. However, be prepared for disappointment — this project has consistently blown through every cost estimate and time projection that has been applied to it so far.

As goes California goes Justin

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCalifornia, Green-Scam