Author: Blazingcatfur

People Are Fleeing California Cities, Despite Pols Push for ‘Urbanism’

San Francisco lost a whopping 6.7 percent of its population during the COVID-19 pandemic, the second-largest percentage drop after New York.

Since the 1970s, California policymakers have embarked on a land-use strategy designed to promote “urbanism”—the idea that we all ought to live in dense housing developments, that suburban sprawl should be limited by government planning restrictions, and rural land should be protected for farming and open space.

During his first stint as governor, Jerry Brown oversaw a report called, “An Urban Strategy for California.” In it, the state detailed a policy we’ve seen play out in the ensuing decades. The goal was to “create a more compact urban environment” and curb “wasteful urban sprawl” by focusing new construction in “existing cities and suburbs.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCalifornia

Why Elon Musk has rattled them

His attempted takeover of Twitter has revealed just how terrified the liberal elites are of freedom of speech.

We stand here on the edge of tyranny… Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. That, roughly speaking, has been the commentariat reaction in recent days as the world’s richest man has launched a takeover attempt of the social-media giant, citing his concerns about its censorious policies as his main motivation.

Musk revealed last week that he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder, with a 9.2 per cent stake. Now he’s offered to buy the whole company for a cool $43 billion, a nice premium on its current worth. As it stands, Twitter’s board is resisting and America’s great and good have gone berserk.

Look no further than Junior’s efforts to censor the web.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Elites vs. Populists", Twitter, Twitter is Evil

Texas is the future – California can’t compete with a new American Dream

In 1946, the American author John Gunther described Houston as “mostly ugly and barren, without a single good restaurant and hotels with cockroaches”. The only reasons to live in the city, he claimed, were financial; it was a place “where few people think about anything but money”.

This view was widespread at the time, and has lingered well into the 21st century. Forget Houston. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are the cities most frequently associated with the urban American dream.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inUSA

‘That’s it? It’s over? I was 30. What a brutal business’: pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on

In her classic memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine recounts not only the time she spent as a punk during the 1970s in her pioneering band the Slits, but also documents her life after the band had ended. This is unusual. Most music books don’t venture into this territory, tending to stop when the hits stop, thereby drawing a veil over what happens next. The unspoken suggestion seems to be that, were it to continue, the story would descend helplessly into misery memoir.

A fitting piece on rebirth during Easter.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oh Oh!"

Does the Western Lifestyle Put Societies on the Path to Extinction?

The rest of the world is noticing the West’s pronoun madness, trans madness, grooming madness, and other evils, and is drawing the obvious conclusions. The deputy commander-in-chief for coordination of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, said in a recent interview on Iranian TV that Europeans were losing the sense of their own national identity, and that the Western lifestyle had placed European societies on the path to extinction. He could have said exactly the same thing about the United States of America.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inOur World

The Russian Army can’t afford to lose more soldiers

The Battle of the Donbas, if that is what we are to witness, may be Russia’s last throw of the dice with this army

Sometimes history is closer than it seems. Russian soldiers who have been wounded, captured or lost friends and colleagues in Ukraine have learned that very painful lesson over the last six weeks.

The losses that the Russian Army has suffered have been extreme, not just by the standards of post-Cold War warfare, but by all 19th and 20th century standards. Indeed the Russian war experience so far is perhaps more reminiscent of the mud and gore of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 than any subsequent military engagement.

By my calculation, based on a variety of public information, the Russians have lost approximately 30% of the forces that they have sent into Ukraine. This is a truly colossal figure, higher, in fact, than almost any engagement in modern military history from the US Civil War through to the two world wars.

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

Headscarves enter French election fray as Muslim women confront Le Pen, Macron

Muslim headscarves took centre stage in France’s presidential campaign on Friday as both finalists in a tightly contested April 24 run-off were confronted by women in headscarves who asked why their clothing choices should be caught up in politics.

France is home to western Europe’s largest Muslim population and many Muslims feel the presidential campaign has unfairly stigmatized their faith.

Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who trails the incumbent in the polls, has said she will ban headscarves in public and fine women who flout the ban.

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

Apple’s Earth Day Initiative Demonizes Carbon-Free Nuclear Power

Apple launched its 2022 Earth Day initiative Thursday with $1 for every Apple Pay transaction until the environmental holiday on April 22 donated to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an explicitly anti-nuclear group.

“WWF has a vision for the future which phases out the use of fossil fuel and nuclear in the share of energy use across the globe,” reads a 2003 position paper from the non-profit outlining a stance maintained nearly 20 years later.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Corporate Social Justice Warriors", Green-Scam

The left is warping America’s view of itself

As progressive causes dominate the media, a poll found huge overestimates of the number of black, gay and trans people

American ignorance is always an easy target. But my compatriots’ misconceptions about the US illustrated by a recent YouGov poll aren’t merely comical. They’re telling.

On average, the respondents estimate that 41 per cent of their countrymen are black, when the real figure is 12 per cent. More astonishingly, black Americans believe that 52 per cent of the country is also black. Respondents think America’s population is 29 per cent Asian (true: 6 per cent), 39 per cent Hispanic (true: 17 per cent), and 27 per cent Native American (true: 1 per cent). Those guesstimates add up to an arithmetically impossible 136 per cent (but then, no one ever loses money betting on the lousiness of Americans’ mathematical skills) — and that includes zero white people. The headline on this survey might have read: “Americans believe whites in the US have been subject to total genocide and don’t seem especially bothered”.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Identity Politics", USA

10 wounded in shooting at South Carolina mall, police say

Ten people were struck by gunfire and two others were injured in a shooting at a South Carolina mall Saturday afternoon, police said.

Columbia police said at least one person opened fire at the Columbiana Centre after an apparent isolated conflict between a group of armed people.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Mass Shooting"

Conrad Black: How the West will be won in Ukraine

When Russia invaded Ukraine seven weeks ago, I wrote in this space that if Russia succeeded in crushing Ukraine as an independent state and strangling it as an aspiring democracy, in addition to a tragedy for Ukraine, it would be a terrible setback for the West. The egregious and vastly over-decorated chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, predicted that Russia would occupy Kiev within three days. If this had occurred, it would have been the first roll-back of western civilization since the early days of the Second World War. And when added to the terrible self-inflicted fiasco of the economic shutdown of the western world at the start of the pandemic, and the impending surrender of the West to the nuclear military ambitions of Iran, it would have announced a much clearer and stronger trajectory of western decline than global warming (which has contributed to Western decline also, as we inflict terrible economic hardship on ourselves to reduce carbon emissions on the basis of insufficient knowledge of what we are fighting).

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

Drawing New Lines – The White House enacts a new rule to crack down on “ghost guns.

This week, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) finalized a rule tweaking a number of firearm-related regulatory definitions. The rule targets legitimate problems, including that privately made “ghost guns” have played an increasing role in gun crime lately. It also draws attention to how vague the federal laws in this area are, giving presidential administrations great discretion to rewrite the rules as they see fit.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inGun Control, Gun Rights