Author: Blazingcatfur

French elections: Macron targets Le Pen as run-off campaign begins

Emmanuel Macron is firing up his campaign for re-election, directly taking on far-right rival Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential run-off.

He made his first trip to a Le Pen stronghold at Denain, one of France’s poorest towns in the industrial north.

President Macron won the first round of the election, but opinion polls suggest the second round will be a close race on 24 April.

“Make no mistake: nothing is decided,” he told supporters after the vote.

Both candidates polled better than the first round in 2017, but Le Pen officials were in far more buoyant mood the morning after the result, even though she trailed the president by four points.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inFrance

The suspicious Twitter accounts claiming to be run by journalists in Ukraine

The FRANCE 24 Observers team has launched an investigation into three Twitter accounts that claim to be run by journalists on the frontlines in Ukraine. The suspicious accounts were originally spotted by Conspirador Norteño, an account that specialises in studying misinformation on social media. But before that, they were thought to be authentic – one even appeared in an article in a British newspaper. We found several clues that raise concerns about whether these three people exist.

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

SIMS: The carbon tax is a no rebate rip-off

There’s a moment in the TV show Community where the character Jeff Winger is exasperated with his study group’s attempt to interfere in their friend’s life.

Predictably, the interference doesn’t work and Jeff explode: “I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ so, I will SHOUT IT THROUGH CUPPED HANDS!”

Taxpayers are shouting through cupped hands: CARBON TAXES COST MORE THAN THE REBATES WE GET BACK!

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada's Corrupt Liberal Government, Green-Scam

Buffalo police cleared over pushing 75-year-old George Floyd protester

An arbitrator has ruled that two Buffalo police officers did not violate use-of-force guidelines when they pushed a 75-year-old protester to the ground in June 2020, during racial injustice protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The episode drew national attention when a news crew captured video of Martin Gugino being shoved by officers Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski in downtown Buffalo, as crowd control officers in riot gear cleared demonstrators for an 8pm curfew.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Depolicing"

Russia says it hits Ukraine air defenses before eastern push

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia claimed that it destroyed several air defense systems in Ukraine over the weekend, in what appeared to be a renewed push to gain air superiority and take out weapons Kyiv has described as crucial ahead of a broad new offensive in the east.

In one strike announced Monday, Moscow said that it hit four S-300 launchers provided by a European country it didn’t name. Slovakia gave Ukraine just such a system last week but denied it had been destroyed. Russia previously reported two strikes on similar systems in other places.

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

‘Infection doesn’t protect you’: Getting COVID twice more common as immunity wanes, experts say

Christine Enns said she was shocked when a rapid test showed she had tested positive for COVID-19.

Enns, who received two doses of COVID-19 vaccine and a booster shot, already had the virus in early February and thought reinfection was rare.

“I started feeling sick three to four days ago thinking, ‘This feels like COVID.’ I took five tests and … today it came back positive,” the bakery owner said Friday from her home in Warren, Mba., about 45 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

It took 5 tests to get the desired positive???

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

Canada targets Russia’s defence sector with new sanctions over Ukraine war

Canada is targeting Russia’s defence industry with its latest round of sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly says the new measures impose restrictions on 33 entities in the Russian defence sector.

Given it’s performance in Ukraine I don’t think the Russian armaments industry has a bright future.

Tens of thousands dead in Mariupol, Zelenskyy says amid plea to South Korea for arms

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday asked Seoul for any military aid it could provide as he said Russia could only be forced to make peace.

Speaking in a video address to South Korean lawmakers, Zelenskyy said his country needed more help, including weapons, if it is to survive the war.

“You have something that can be indispensable for us … armored vehicles, anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anti-ship weapons,” he said.

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

Elon Musk will not join Twitter board after all, company’s chief says

Elon Musk has performed a U-turn on joining Twitter’s board despite becoming the social media company’s largest shareholder with a 9.2% stake.

The world’s richest man was due to become a board member on Saturday but Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal, said on Monday morning that Musk had declined the offer. Musk, who is worth $260bn (£200bn), emerged as Twitter’s largest investor last week and was invited to join its board.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inTwitter, Twitter is Evil

Prominent Russian activist detained after Moscow anti-war protest

Oleg Orlov, a prominent Russian human rights activist, has been detained after staging a one-man protest in Moscow’s Red Square against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Members of Memorial, a now-banned human rights organisation of which Orlov had been a leader, shared a video of him on Sunday holding a banner before being taken away by police.

Just like Ottawa.

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

The key lesson from Ukraine for international order

Israel understands that the United Nations is a broken institution that helps sow chaos, terror and injustice. It knows that because it’s so often on the receiving end.

It’s taken the horrors in Ukraine for people to begin to register that a central pillar of world affairs since the Second World War has crumbled. Even now, though, the full implications aren’t acknowledged.

As evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine has mounted, the U.N. General Assembly has now voted to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

But the council has long been a vicious joke. Serial human-rights abusers, including such states as China, Cuba, Pakistan, Libya and Venezuela, are currently members.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inUnited Nations

The Coming Resource Wars

We are living in a material world, after all

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear that what Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s called “the cold peace” has given way to Cold War II. The first Cold War was a struggle not only of nations and alliances but also of systems—capitalism versus communism. The second Cold War is already a struggle among systems as well, pitting countries that focus on manufacturing (China) and resources (Russia) in the physical world against an alliance led by the United States, which for the last generation has sacrificed much of its own manufacturing and mining to specialize in global leadership in finance, services, and entertainment. To put it another way, the contest of models in Cold War II is not about ownership of the means of production; it is about material production versus immaterial service provision.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inOur World

We might want to be wary about purported new info from Hunter’s hard drive

On April 7, I wrote a post about the fact that Jack Maxey, a man who once worked with Steve Bannon at the latter’s War Room, was contending that he had successfully recovered 450 gigabytes of deleted documents and photos from Hunter Biden’s infamous hard drive. Maxey promised that he would soon be making this information available to the public. However, Yaacov Apelbaum, a writer whose work a highly reputable friend of mine recommends, suggests that Maxey’s assertions should be taken with a very large grain of salt.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inWTF?

Environmentalists Want Us to Freeze, Starve, and Die

 

They can’t bear people living guilt-free lives.

Every now and then someone pipes up to point out that if environmentalists really want to lower carbon, they’re going to have nuclear. And they’re promptly buried in a tsunami of outrage (“Nuclear? Do you want us all to die?”) and spin (look at this blog post sponsored by a solar panel company about how well solar panels work). The obvious answer is that environmentalists, like all lefties, don’t actually care about the things that they claim to care about.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inBatshit Crazy Eco-Luddites, Batshit Crazy Homicidal Progressives

How fear consumed American theatre

Broadway now exists to promote ideology, not art

We all know our consciousness is corrupt, and a long life, examined, brings the burden of regret, shame, and indeed a horror at our own actions that, at times, becomes scarcely bearable.

The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession and conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.

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