Author: Blazingcatfur

I’ll have two babies with the same dad but I don’t know what he looks like

“Growing up, this isn’t the life I expected at all,” says 41-year-old Lucy who had always imagined motherhood arriving in a more traditional order – a partner, a wedding, then children.

Instead, her journey to becoming a mother began with IVF and donor sperm, a choice she made during the pandemic after she realised how much she missed seeing her sister’s and friend’s children.

She jokingly told her parents that she could have a child on her own and recalls: “I expected them to laugh it off but they said I should and got excited about it.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inWTF?

What the Iranian uprising means for the Middle East

The Middle East has long been organised around two competing logics: pragmatic alignment and ideological alignment. Before the 7 October war, these logics produced two regional blocs that structured most political, diplomatic and security behaviour. The Palestinian attack and invasion that triggered the war ruptured both systems. Incentives shifted, alliances frayed, and assumptions collapsed. What followed has not been the emergence of a calmer order, but a reconfiguration in which ideology has returned in new forms and pragmatism has narrowed, and hardened, requiring deliberate encouragement and support to survive.

For more than a decade, regional politics moved along these two tracks. Pragmatic alliances rested on interests that could be negotiated, measured and enforced. Security cooperation, intelligence sharing, economic integration, technological exchange and opposition to common threats mattered more than symbolic solidarity. Stability carried value. Growth carried legitimacy. Ideological discomfort could be managed or deferred.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran

WARMINGTON: Nine arrests at counter-protest against Canada First rally

Used toilet paper inside plastic bags with eggs and urine, as well as smoke bombs were allegedly being thrown.

The targets of this “disgusting” approach were Toronto Police officers and members of the Canada First “Stop Mass Immigration Rally” gathering. Cops were trying to keep Canada First demonstrators separated from a counter-protest made up of participants identifying as Antifa, local unions and some who have been regular participants of the pro-Palestinian movement in the past two years.

Half on both sides are likely RCMP .

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada

US protests condemn ICE killing of Renee Good and ‘a regime that is willing to kill its own citizens’

On a rainy Saturday in Philadelphia, two separate protests, both with a few hundred people, marched from city hall to the federal detention center. They differed slightly in solutions as well as crowd makeup – white older adults dominated the morning’s march organized by the groups behind the No Kings protests, while a more racially diverse crowd swathed in keffiyehs and N95 face masks led the afternoon’s, planned by the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter. However, both groups shared a goal: for ICE to get out of American communities and to put an end to Donald Trump’s warmongering in Venezuela.

“From Venezuela to Minneapolis, all we’re seeing is a regime that is scrambling, willing to kill its own citizens, willing to kill foreign citizens, to maintain its power,” said Deborah Rose Hinchey, co-chair of the city’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.

Compare and contrast with the Guardian piece.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Deep State"

Trump ‘policy’ has turned the U.S. into America the Random. Here’s why that’s more dangerous than ever

In my book “The Next Civil War,” I wrote about how the American political system, in collapse, eventually reaches a post-policy phase. Domestically, the U.S. reached that phase long ago. Abortion is a case in point. The conservatives who orchestrated the fall of Roe v. Wade over the course of a generation have discovered that they have changed nothing: The overturning of the law they so hated has resulted in a rise, rather than a decline, in the number of abortions in the United States. Maybe they never cared about such outcomes in the first place. Maybe they just wanted to scream “life” at people. When politics can no longer affect change in people’s lives, when it leaves behind policy, it takes on an aesthetic function. It’s just for kicks.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inUSA

Underground church says leaders detained as China steps up crackdown

Carney loves China. Carney wants to ‘recalibrate’ Canada-China relations with visit

Leaders of a prominent underground church have been detained in south-west China, according to a church statement, the latest blow in what appears to be a sweeping crackdown on unregistered Christian groups in the country.

On Tuesday, Li Yingqiang, the leader of the Early Rain Covenant Church, was taken by police from his home in Deyang, a small city in Sichuan province, according to the statement. Li’s wife, Zhang Xinyue, has also been detained, along with two other church members: Dai Zhichao, a pastor; and Ye Fenghua, a lay member. At least a further four members were taken and later released, while some others remain out of contact.

The crackdown followed the arrest of 18 senior members of Zion Church, another prominent underground church, in a nationwide sweep in October. In December, there were also reports of approximately 100 members of another unofficial church in Zhejiang province being detained , according to Human Rights Watch.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China - Communist Slave State", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, Christian Persecution

A Bumpy Night: Bette Davis, Kathy Shaidle and All About Eve

In her autobiography A Lonely Life, Bette Davis remembers making All About Eve with none of the rancour or drama that should provide all the dirt an essayist would look for when writing about the film. Her part was supposed to go to someone else, but when Claudette Colbert injured her back while filming Three Came Home, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had producer Darryl F. Zanuck call Davis. “I can think of no project that from the outset was as rewarding from the first day to the last,” she writes.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inKathy Shaidle

Former MI6 chief says Trump should be given control of Greenland in the interests of ‘European security’

A former MI6 chief has expressed support for Donald Trump as he believes the US president obtaining control of Greenland is in the interests of ‘European security’.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-head of Britain’s intelligence agency, said there was a ‘strong argument’ for the US to have Greenland in a bid to deter Chinese threats.

The 80-year-old has urged Denmark to lease the territory to the Americans for a hundred years in a bid to strengthen security in Europe.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inGreenland, USA

Conrad Black: What Carney should have said about Venezuela

The enfeebling ambiguity of Canada as a government and a state among the nations of the world is underlined almost every week. The prime minister’s statement on the removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was commendably critical of the former president and skirted international law questions in a way that permits Carney to claim to recognize them without aggravating our relations with the Trump administration with whom delicate trade negotiations are underway. All the while, agitation continues in Parliament for the criminalization of those who would justify the native residential school system or minimize the negative consequences of it.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada's Corrupt Liberal Government, USA, Venezuela

The Secret Hamas-NGO Relationship

Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the Gaza Strip have been thoroughly infiltrated by Hamas, according to a new report by NGO Monitor: Puppet Regime: Hamas’ Coercive Grip on Aid and NGO Operations in Gaza. The report is based on Arabic-language documents, retrieved by Israel’s military, spanning the years 2018-2022, from Hamas’s Gaza Interior Security Mechanism (ISM), a unit within the Hamas Ministry of Interior and National Security.

“The evidence confirms that NGOs in Gaza do not operate independently or neutrally,” NGO Monitor found. “Rather, they are embedded in an institutionalized framework of coercion, intimidation, and surveillance that serves Hamas’ terror objectives.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Oct 7 2023"

New poll suggests one in five Albertans would vote to separate

Although Alberta separatists are organizing for an independence referendum and say they’re gaining momentum, a new poll released Friday suggested that only one-fifth of Alberta respondents would vote to separate.

The Pollara Strategic Insights survey found that 19 per cent of the 1,000 Albertans surveyed say they would vote for separation, and 75 per cent would vote against it.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Western Alienation Separation", "Western Independence", Alberta, Canada

Trump suggests Marco Rubio could soon get another job — president of Cuba … as Venezuela Oil shipments to Cuba are ended

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who just keeps racking up job titles, could have another one soon, President Trump hinted.

The commander-in-chief mused that Rubio, who once held four big administration jobs simultaneously and has been floated for more, could become president of Cuba, where his parents fled in the 1950s during the brutal Batista regime.

With Cuban ally Maduro ousted, Trump warns Havana to make a ‘deal’ before it’s too late

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump on Sunday fired off another warning to the government of Cuba as the close ally of Venezuela braces for potential widespread unrest after Nicolás Maduro was deposed as Venezuela’s leader.

Cuba, a major beneficiary of Venezuelan oil, has now been cut off from those shipments as U.S. forces continue to seize tankers in an effort to control the production, refining and global distribution of the country’s oil products.

h/t Mauser

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCuba, USA, Venezuela