Author: Blazingcatfur
China’s Toxic Dog Food Threatens Our Four-Legged Friends
The ongoing food-safety problem has never been more important, nor more human-centered.
A nexus can be formed among seemingly unrelated things during unusual times. Such is the case with dogs, COVID-19, mental health, politicians, and China’s history of peddling toxic products.
Americans of all ages have experienced a harmful lack of social interaction in the last year, with no definitive end in sight. For millions, the best therapy is a dog.
Why The Left Is Helping Make America Racist Again
One problem with telling people to “be themselves” is that they often don’t know who they are. Indeed, many people proclaiming this mantra seem intent on dismantling stable sources of identity, such as family, patriotism, and religion.
Instead of defining ourselves by relationships, place, and faith, we are encouraged to define ourselves by what we want — from sex to consumer goods to entertainment. This reduction of people to bundles of impulses makes them easy to market to, but it does not provide a stable source of identity.
Anti-Sex-Work Racism Was Not On My Bingo Card
‘A specific kind of racism’: Atlanta shootings fuel fears over anti-sex-work ideology
“Following an interview with authorities, the Cherokee county sheriff, Frank Reynolds, maintained that Long “gave no indicators” that his crimes were racially motivated. “We asked him that specifically and the answer was no,” Reynolds said on Wednesday.
This idea is ludicrous to many who have observed the surge in racist violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic: in the past year, there have been 3,800 reported incidents of anti-Asian violence, roughly 503 of which took place during 2021 alone, according to the group Stop AAPI Hate. Women make up the vast majority of those attacked. And some argue that it is equally absurd to exclude discussion of anti-sex-work sentiment from the conversation about these most recent attacks on the Asian community.”
Only at the Guardian.
H.R.1 – Is It Really “For the People”?
A lot has been written about H.R.1 — the so-called “For the People Act of 2021.” Former Vice President Mike Pence has opined on the bill. The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal sounded the alarm back in January. The editors of National Review come right out and call it a “partisan assault on American democracy.”
H.R.1 purports to, “expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.” The Bill is 791 pages long.
Indonesian schoolgirls ‘bullied’ into religious clothing: Report
Jakarta, Indonesia – Indonesia’s national motto is unity in diversity, but Wiwin’s experiences in school have made her question how that maxim plays out in real life.
The 21-year-old lives in West Java. Her family is part of a religious minority called Sunda Wiwitan, who venerate nature and ancestral worship.
She said she faced relentless pressure in high school to wear a “jilbab”, a loose garment worn by some Muslim women, which covers the head, neck and chest.
She told Al Jazeera she often cried after school.
“They [a group of seven teachers] questioned me in the headmaster’s office, asking, what is your religion … who is your God … where is your holy book?” Wiwin recounted.
But but but… Indonesia bans forced religious attire in schools
How China targets Uighur expats in the US
Some prominent activists say they’ve been tracked down several times
It has been more than two years since Ziba Murat has heard the voice of her ailing mother, Gulshan Abbas, a retired physician who was abruptly ‘disappeared’ in September 2018 in Xinjiang province, China.
While exact facts and figures are hard to come by, it is widely reported that at least three million Uighurs in China have been forced into concentration camps, which Beijing calls ‘reeducation’ facilities for stamping out ‘Islamic extremism’. The scale of the ongoing atrocities is bone-chilling: from forced sterilizations and sexual violence to beatings and indoctrination.
Report: Ford to Offshore $900M Investment from Ohio to Mexico
The Ford Motor Company, a multinational automaker, is reportedly planning to move a $900 million investment originally intended for an Avon Lake, Ohio plant to a site in Mexico, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union alleges.
Subversive Education: North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against “whiteness in educational spaces.”
Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”
Opponents of gun control bill are denouncing Trudeau and no longer want him at Polytechnique commemorations
MONTREAL — Survivors, family members of the victims of the 1989 massacre at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and current students are warning Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that they will never again allow him to stand with them at the annual commemorations of the shooting if he allows his government’s proposed gun control bill C-21 to pass.
The dozens of signatories, including several family members of the 14 young women murdered on Dec. 6, 1989, write in a letter (posted below) to the prime minister that his dismal bill gives the appearance of fulfilling his election commitments, but does nothing to address them.
Interesting headline. Looks good on him.
Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter
Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.
The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Why are Conservatives privately slagging Erin O’Toole? Look no further than the polls
OTTAWA–Erin O’Toole is preaching unity as his detractors within the Conservative Party of Canada whisper division.
Sources close to O’Toole say they are unconcerned with the spate of negative headlines and rabble rousing within the ranks as he heads into his first policy convention as leader this weekend.
Nevertheless, there is an acknowledgment among O’Toole’s inner circle that the call is coming from inside the house — that elements within their own party are seeking to undermine the new leader, even as the possibility of an election looms.
“If we were five or 10 points ahead in the polls, you wouldn’t be hearing any of it,” a senior Conservative source told the Star in an interview Wednesday.
The party has chosen to leave a great many former supporters behind. I’d vote for them even if I knew they’d lose assuming they at least tried to be conservative.
Europe’s Experience on Islamism Is a Cautionary Tale for the United States
Is anyone paying attention to what’s happening in Europe? If you care about freedom in the West, take a look now. Fault lines between Islamists and the secular West, etched over generations and deepened and fortified by failed post-9/11 policies, have tectonically shifted. Nearly written off by some, European nations are suddenly taking serious and significant action to push back in earnest against encroaching Islamist separatism and radicalization. And the United States, as an observer, stands to learn a lot.
In 2020, as the world remained deeply embroiled in the pandemic, France, Austria, and much of the rest of the European Union (EU) began to confront the Islamist ideological monster within their borders. Led by French President Emmanuel Macron and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, European leaders seem to have woken up from their slumber and realized it wasn’t just the militant Islamist acts of terrorism that they needed to defeat—rather, it was the ideas that incubated them, political Islam or Islamism.
Has any nation been successful “integrating” Islam?
Apathy might be what’s keeping Canadians from ditching the monarchy
If asked, most Canadians would vote to cut ties with the monarchy.
But this country’s constitutional relationship with the Windsors isn’t likely to change any time soon, for one simple reason: too few Canadians care enough about the monarchy to make putting the question to them worth all the trouble.
From time to time, something erupts in the news that reminds Canadians of the existence of the British Royal Family — an institution that polls suggest most people in this country see as irrelevant to their lives. When that happens — because a governor general resigns, for example, or because of bombshell new allegations in a TV interview — it inevitably leads to questions about why Canada is still a constitutional monarchy.
The Queen is the royal jelly holding the cookie together her passing will likely accelerate it’s crumbling.
Your Face Is Not Your Own
When a secretive start-up scraped the internet to build a facial-recognition tool, it tested a legal and ethical limit — and blew the future of privacy in America wide open.
In May 2019, an agent at the Department of Homeland Security received a trove of unsettling images. Found by Yahoo in a Syrian user’s account, the photos seemed to document the sexual abuse of a young girl. One showed a man with his head reclined on a pillow, gazing directly at the camera. The man appeared to be white, with brown hair and a goatee, but it was hard to really make him out; the photo was grainy, the angle a bit oblique. The agent sent the man’s face to child-crime investigators around the country in the hope that someone might recognize him.
When an investigator in New York saw the request, she ran the face through an unusual new facial-recognition app she had just started using, called Clearview AI. The team behind it had scraped the public web — social media, employment sites, YouTube, Venmo — to create a database with three billion images of people, along with links to the webpages from which the photos had come. This dwarfed the databases of other such products for law enforcement, which drew only on official photography like mug shots, driver’s licenses and passport pictures; with Clearview, it was effortless to go from a face to a Facebook account.