Links - 28th January 2019 (2)

Drivers using freaky reflective face decals to discourage high-beam users - "Some drivers in parts of China are so fed up with tailgating high-beam users that they’ve resorted to using these freaky as shit rear window decals that are only visible when the high-beam is flicked on. The ghoulish decals feature images of ghosts, spirits and monsters from Eastern and Hollywood films"

'A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving' Is Now Racist - "Another holiday classic has been slapped with the label "racist" by SJWs for supposedly marginalizing the token black character: "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving." People on social media have expressed outrage over the fact that the lone black character Franklin in "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" appears seated differently juxtaposed to the white characters... Fortunately, black journalist Jeremy Helligar cleared up some of the controversy on Friday when he noted that the character Franklin had prime seating in other episodes of the "Peanuts."... The historical significance of the character Franklin cannot be understated; his creation was reportedly demanded by Charles Schulz following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. when a teacher named Harriet Glickman sent him a letter... The Schulz Museum also celebrated Franklin's 50th anniversary in July. He has never been treated like a token black character added for cheap lip-service to diversity and has always been a valued member of the "Peanuts" gang... "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" is not the only holiday classic the Left has skewered as racist in recent years. In 2016, Salon.com denounced "A Christmas Story" as a racist vehicle of "white nostalgia""

WATCH: John Kerry Warns Immigration Has 'Crushed' Europe - "A week after Kerry made his remarks, two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made similar remarks in an interview with The Guardian. "Clinton told The Guardian (UK) that Europe has badly mishandled the migration crisis from the Middle East," Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote. "In verbiage reminiscent of one Donald J. Trump, Clinton acknowledged that Europe’s influx of unvetted immigration from Muslim countries has led to social fracturing on the continent.""
The comments on the NYT Facebook slamming Hillary were very funny

Man in burqa, woman in motorcycle helmet walk into Melbourne ANZ bank to test political correctness - "She asked why she had to remove her helmet while her party colleague, running as an upper house candidate for Southern Metro, could keep his burqa on. 'Well, how come that lady can wear a burqa?,' she said. The bank employee struggled to answer her question... Still wearing her motorcycle helmet, Mrs Robinson protested about being discriminated against."

A University Dean Defended Brett Kavanaugh. You Can Guess What Happened Next. - "A university dean who defended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh from uncorroborated allegations of sexual assault has resigned from his leadership post. Will Rainford, Catholic University’s dean of social service, had held his position for five years, but was suspended after tweeting logical questions of the women who came forward to accused Kavanaugh just before he was set to be confirmed. “Swetnick is 55 y/o,” Rainford said on in a since-deleted tweet, according to The Washington Post. “Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!”... “We should expect any opinion he expresses about sexual assault to be thoughtful, constructive, and reflective of the values of Catholic University, particularly in communications from the account handle @NCSSSDean,” Garvey said at the time. “While it was appropriate for him to apologize and to delete his Twitter and Facebook accounts, this does not excuse the serious lack of judgment and insensitivity of his comments.” By “thoughtful, constructive, and reflective of the values,” he means Rainford should have accepted the accusations at face value and considered the women victims without any evidence, as colleges and universities across the country demand. Side note: Catholic University was sued in 2017 by a male student accused of sexual assault after the school’s Title IX coordinator helped the accusing female “create a coherent narrative” to explain why her text messages didn’t match her allegation"

Julie Swetnick: 3rd Brett Kavanaugh accuser has history of legal disputes - "Julie Swetnick, one of the women who has publicly accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, has an extensive history of involvement in legal disputes, including a lawsuit in which an ex-employer accused her of falsifying her college and work history on her job application... the company said Swetnick, a software engineer, was an employee for a few weeks before its human resources department received a report that she had engaged in "unwelcome sexual innuendo and inappropriate conduct" toward two male co-workers at a business lunch... To support her claim for lost wages, Swetnick named "Konam Studios" as one of the companies promising to employ her. A court filing identified Nam Ko, a representative of "Kunam Studios," as a possible plaintiff's witness for her case.Ko, however, told AP on Friday that he was just a friend of Swetnick's and that he had never owned a company with a name spelled either way and had never agreed to pay her money for any work before she injured her nose. He said he first met Swetnick at a bar more than a year after her alleged accident."I didn't have any money back then. I (was) broke as can be," Ko said."

WATCH: Female Antifa Punches, Spits On Conservative Demonstrators. It Doesn't End Well For Her. - "The #HimToo rally was organized by conservative activist Haley Adams to draw awareness to the sexual victimization of men and the falsely accused. Left-wing counter-protesters showed up to disrupt the event. Demonstrators and at least one reporter on site were harassed and assaulted by the agitators. The rally ended with a total of six arrests... At least one reporter was victimized by Antifa at the rally. "I was assaulted by a mob of masked individuals in black. They also targeted my equipment. They called me a fascist & Islamophobe. They said my parents & grandparents would be ashamed of me," said Ngo. "It feels surreal to be treated this way by people who don’t even know me.""

Lonely Mob Fights Fantasy Nazis - "Feel blue? Lack purpose? Life a little dull? Get a lift by fighting some fantasy Nazis. Just before the election, an Andrew Gillum intern named Shelby Shoup was arrested and charged with battery after assaulting some college Republicans on the campus of Florida State University. It was rather less exciting than that sounds: She went on a rant about “Nazis” and “fascism” — Gillum’s Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis, finished up at Harvard Law and then joined the U.S. military and helped to fight actual Jew-hating totalitarian thugs in Iraq, in case anybody cares about the facts — before dousing the Republicans with chocolate milk... Imagine a line that measures the moral distance between Shelby Shoup’s battery in Florida to the Antifa assault on Tucker Carlson’s home, and then extend that line by the same distance in the same direction. Where are we then? Arson? Bombs? The kind of massacre James T. Hodgkinson was trying to pull off when he shot Steve Scalise and fired on other Republicans? How long until we arrive at Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden — both of whom earnestly believed that their acts of terrorism were morally imperative in the face of tyranny and evil? Shoup and Antifa flatter themselves that they are what stands between the United States and fascism or Nazism. This is, obviously, absurd. It’s pure tribalism: President Obama authorized the extrajudicial killing of American citizens as a national-security measure; President Trump is an angry tweeter. But it is the latter rather than the former that apparently presages the rise of a Falange Americana. That is how you know that this is a fundamentally unserious point of view... The politics of opposition, like the politics of government, should be based if not on things that are self-evidently true then at least on those that are not self-evidently false.Calling yourself an “antifascist” while defining “fascism” as “the enforcement of ordinary immigration laws” or “thinking that Bernie Sanders is a grumpy Muppet who should be kept far from the levers of power” is entirely childish and deeply stupid. (These absurd characterizations also, not that anybody really cares, drown out legitimate criticisms of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans.) These play-acting buffoons aren’t the moral equivalent of the French Resistance — they are mincing would-be thugs looking for something that will make them feel better about themselves. Apparently, terrorizing Tucker Carlson’s wife scratches an itch that weed and NetFlix don’t. Periods of intense social change often are accompanied by mass hysterias. The snoopery and vindictiveness of the Red Scare were only partly about Communism — much of the paranoia of that time had to do with events in Muncie, not Moscow. The mass hysteria about Satanic cults engaged in the widespread sexual abuse of American children — a complete fiction—was probably a moral overcorrection set against the divorce epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s and the excesses of the so-called Sexual Revolution. The age of easy and instantaneous connectivity, globalization, and related phenomena have created a new kind of “lonely crowd,” full of people who feel isolated, inadequate, insignificant — and resentful of being made to feel that way. There are many ways to assuage that loneliness, but many of them — family life, religion — have fallen out of fashion. Ordinary politics provides insufficient drama, as anybody who has observed the real business of government in action knows. Fantasy politics — I’m fighting the Nazis! — offers a lot more emotional oomph."

Lecturers banned from using capital letters to avoid upsetting students - "A memo sent out to staff at Leeds Trinity journalism department suggested using uppercase letters may ‘scare them into failure’. It also suggested ways they could address their students, such as writing in a friendly tone and avoiding overbearing and negative language... one employee said caps were needed to ensure students don’t miss an important part of the assignment.The lecturer told the paper that despite their students being intelligent, they felt the education system just wants to treat them like children... The memo follows two other universities banning fancy dress and clapping.Kent University last month introduced a ban on students wearing costumes deemed ‘inappropriate and offensive’, such as cowboy outfits and sombreros, because they may jeopardise other students’ ‘right to a safe space at our university’.While at the University of Manchester, the student union replaced clapping with jazz hands in a bid to prevent people suffering from anxietyor sensory issues."

China Is Paying for Most of Trump's Trade War, Research Says - "That’s the conclusion of a new paper from EconPol Europe, a network of researchers in the European Union. U.S. companies and consumers will only pay 4.5 percent more after the nation imposed 25 percent tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods, and the other 20.5 percent toll will fall on Chinese producers, according to authors Benedikt Zoller-Rydzek and Gabriel Felbermayr... The Trump administration selected products with the highest “price elasticity,” or high availability of substitutes... “Through its strategic choice of Chinese products, the U.S. government was not only able to minimize the negative effects on U.S. consumers and firms, but also to create substantial net welfare gains in the U.S.”... With the economic costs shifted to China, the U.S. levies will lead to a $18.4 billion net gain for the American government"

Matt Taibbi on Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning the 2020 Election - "In a media business geared toward reassuring demographics, audiences during the Trump presidency have been deluged with stories about his vulnerabilities, leaving the impression that his disastrous presidency has fatally wounded him as a politician. We’ve been treated to a succession of wish-fulfillment exercises disguised as news features — a stream of “last days of the Trump administration” pieces reappearing across two years of scandals. These have created the expectation that not only will Trump not be re-elected, he may be dragged out of the White House at any moment. But such cheery stories run counter to reality. By any rational standard, Trump in the past two years has made huge political gains. Trump began his 2016 run as a sideshow conspiracist, a human rimshot the papers turned to for comic relief. Today, he commands the electorate within his own party. He regularly pulls between 85 and 90 percent of Republican support — he was right at 90 percent just before the midterms — which is where George W. Bush was heading into the 2004 race. Retaining above 85 percent of your own party’s voters is a characteristic shared by the past four incumbents to win re-election: Obama, Bush, Clinton and Reagan"

'Feminists' Silent When a Rape Survivor Wins Nobel Peace Prize - "As feminists were busy peddling their “War on Women” narrative in the U.S., Yazidi sex slave survivor Nadia Murad was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting a real War on Women in the Middle East... While any comparison between Nadia’s story and the accusations leveled against newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would be completely unfair, it is fair to wonder how news of uncorroborated allegations of gang rape brought by porn lawyer Michael Avenatti can overshadow a gang rape survivor-turned-women’s advocate being honored with the most prestigious award in the world... It’s strange how women who self-identify as feminists get so worked up over unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault, yet so callously overlook human rights injustices staring them in the face. Imagine the difference these “feminists” could make if, in addition to banging on the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court, they also took a few minutes to bang at the doors of the United Nations."