Archive for 2018

APPARENTLY, #METOO IS A CESSPIT OF CULTURAL INSENSITIVITY: Banishment of an acclaimed UC Irvine professor sparks debate over whether #MeToo can go too far.

For years, the professor told the assistant dean that she was beautiful and greeted her with hugs and a kiss on each cheek.

During their time together at UC Irvine, Francisco J. Ayala, 84, and Benedicte Shipley, 50, perceived their encounters in dramatically different ways.

He said he believed he was showing her admiration, respect and the courtly manners of his native Spain. She said she felt objectified and humiliated. Her version won out this year, when officials concluded that Ayala had sexually harassed Shipley and two other women.

The university swiftly moved to erase his presence. The world-renowned geneticist resigned, was banned from campus and stripped of prestigious University of California titles. And though he had given Irvine $11.5 million in donations, his name was taken off the university buildings he helped support.

The sanctions have bitterly divided the campus, drawn international attention and underscored the growing complexity of the nation’s pitched battles over sexual harassment.

Universities treat their donors so shabbily, it’s beginning to look as if the only winning move in the PC game is not to play.

BELIEVE ALL WOMEN: Woman jailed for falsely accusing teenager of raping her in public toilets.

A woman who falsely accused a teenager of raping her has been jailed for 18 months. Sophie Skinner, 25, went alone to a Wetherspoons pub in Abergavenny, Wales, in June 2016 where she was seen on CCTV ‘looking for attention’. She came across Damon Osborne, who was 18 at the time, and got chatting before she made her way to another bar.

The mother-of-three came across Mr Osborne again later that night while he waited for a lift home. She asked him if he wanted to have sex and the pair went into some nearby public toilets where CCTV caught her initiating sex. She then told him she could get him into ‘trouble’ after he refused to have a relationship with her because he had a girlfriend. Skinner went to another bar where she was again captured on CCTV ‘desperately looking for attention from others’, before returning to the Wetherspoons and telling bouncers Mr Osborne had raped her.

But women are morally stainless and never lie. All the best people assured me of that, when it suited their political needs.

Plus, the value of cameras. Quoth her victim: “If there was no CCTV in this case she may have been believed and I would be spending years in prison. It would have ruined my life.”

WHEN IDIOTS LARP AS CIVIL-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: Somali man whose deportation from the UK was stopped when plane passengers staged a mutiny is a GANG RAPIST who attacked teenage girl.

But the passengers who thought they were doing a good deed were unaware that the man they were defending had been sentenced to nine years in jail for his part in a vicious gang rape of a teenage girl – and that another member of his gang later fought for Islamic State in Syria.

Today The Mail on Sunday can reveal how Ahmed and three other youths preyed on a 16-year-old stranger after she became separated from her friends during a night out in London’s Leicester Square, in August 2007.

In a planned attack, they lured her back to a flat in Crouch End, North London, by pretending her friends were waiting for her there – then gang-raped her.

The gang, aged between 18 and 20, were caught when neighbours heard the girl’s cries for help and rang police.

All four men denied rape, despite DNA evidence. They were found guilty at Wood Green Crown Court and each jailed for nine years. Police detective Emma Bird said at the time: ‘The sentences given out by the judge reflect the seriousness of this offence.’

Ahmed, 18 at the time of the rape and living in Clerkenwell, North London, is thought to have been granted refugee status after arriving in Britain from war-torn Somalia as a boy.

Nice gratitude, Ahmed. The passengers should be named publicly, and prosecuted.

OPEN THREAD: It’s Saturday Night.

TIM BLAIR ON CHE GUEVARA: “So, for many, the question remains: how did such an incurable doofus, sadist and epic idiot attain such iconic status? Because lefties are suckers for a pretty picture.”

Read the whole thing.

I’M IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WRITING ABOUT TENNESSEE REGIONALISM AND THE BREDESEN/BLACKBURN RACE.. Excerpt:

The three regions are enshrined in the state constitution. East Tennessee extends from North Carolina to the Cumberland Mountains. Middle Tennessee covers the Nashville Basin from the Cumberlands to the western part of the Tennessee River. West Tennessee goes from there to the Mississippi. These divisions have real consequences: The constitution provides that no more than two of the five justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court can come from the same grand division, and signs at the state line once welcomed visitors to “the 3 states of Tennessee.” More important, they also reflect significant cultural and historical differences.

East Tennessee, which never had many slaves, was pro-Union during the Civil War and would have seceded from the Confederacy like West Virginia if it could have. Its population, mostly descended from small farmers and mountain dwellers, has a distinctive political history. Before the U.S. was founded, settlers in East Tennessee operated under their own constitution, the Watauga Compact. Later, East Tennessee was briefly the aspirational state of Franklin.

Middle and West Tennessee are much more traditionally Southern. Until recently East Tennessee, with about 40% of the state’s population, was heavily Republican while the other two divisions were Southern Democratic territory. Now the whole state has gone red, apart from its core urban enclaves. Still, differences remain. Historically, most of Tennessee’s Republican politicians came from East Tennessee. And they were typically down-home, folksy deal-makers—Sens. Howard Baker Jr., Lamar Alexander and Mr. Corker.

Mrs. Blackburn is in a different mold: Less folksy, more flashy. She’s running not as a deal maker but as a disrupter. She stands for building the wall and crushing Mr. Trump’s “deep state” opposition. On substance, Tennesseans agree with these things. But on style, her fit in East Tennessee is less than perfect. Mr. Bredesen’s down-home commercials and low-key speaking style are a better fit, even if the policies he’d support aren’t.

It doesn’t help that Mrs. Blackburn hasn’t spent as much time in East Tennessee over the past several years as she might have, partly due to the demands of her congressional seat. It’s not an accident that when Donald Trump and Mike Pence came to the Volunteer State in recent weeks, they both stopped in East Tennessee to gin up enthusiasm.

Mr. Bredesen has had his share of miscues. He touted a 16-year-old “A” rating from the National Rifle Association only to have the NRA indignantly point out that his current rating is a “D.” He indulged in an extended equivocation on the Kavanaugh nomination before ultimately announcing that, were he a senator, he would vote “yes.”

The Kavanaugh confirmation may end up saving Mrs. Blackburn’s candidacy. Tennesseans have a strong sense of fairness, and—as befits the region’s Scots-Irish character—a strong regard for matters of character and reputation. The Kavanaugh circus looked like Washington politics at its worst, and that seems to be helping Mrs. Blackburn, who’s running ads tying Mr. Bredesen to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In 2018 this may be enough to overcome her other weakness.

If Mrs. Blackburn wins, it will be a case of national issues outweighing local culture. And that will be fine with Mrs. Blackburn, and Mr. Trump.

The latest polls look good for her, and the swing since Kavanaugh is amazing.