LinkSwarm for March 23, 2018

After making noises about vetoing the liberal-provision-packed omnibus spending bill, President Donald Trump signed the bill anyway. This is certainly a bad and base-depressing move, but shouts that this has “doomed” Republicans in this year’s midterms are premature.

Some links:

  • But the omnibus spending bill does provide $500 million to build a border wall. In Jordan.
  • “Saudi Arabia is seeking to purge its school curriculum of any influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and dismiss employees who sympathise with the banned group, the education minister said.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is starting to look like an actual, real-life Muslim reformer.
  • Seems like a good idea:

  • Former Senator and Governor Zell Miller has died. Miller was a conservative Democrat who insisted his party had left him and endorsed George W. Bush in 2004.
  • Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reigns in unions at Department of Education, including making them opt-in rather than semi-automatic. As far as I’m concerned, her tenure is already a success… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Ohio high school student suspended for not walking out of school. One most never challenge the latest and most sacred dogma of the overclass… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “How Facebook Went From ‘Ideal Way’ to Reach Voters to Being ‘Weaponized’ (Hint: a Republican won).”

  • Orlando Weekly attacks woman as a “white supremacist” for posting anti-Jihad messages to Twitter. Tiny problem: she’s black.
  • Margaret Atwood, “bad feminist.” “Canadian literature (‘CanLit,’ as it’s known within the treehouse) has become ‘a raging dumpster fire” of embittered identity politics and ideological tribalism.'” (Hat tip: Gregory Benford’s Facebook feed.)
  • The enduring appeal of Casablanca.
  • EU decide to make things difficult for antiquarian booksellers:

    Starting next year they may become subject to new import regulations that will significantly complicate the process of buying old books, prints and manuscripts from sources outside the EU. The purpose of the changes is to combat the looting and smuggling of antiquities and prevent the financing of terrorism through the illicit trade in cultural goods. While the need for the new regulations is presented almost entirely in relation to the war on terror, the sweeping new rules themselves will be applied comprehensively and include no provisions for exempting goods from areas which are free from armed conflict or terrorist activities.

    The new regulations apply to a broad range of cultural goods, but none will be impacted more adversely than books. The new procedures are as follows:

    If a book, engraving, print, document or publication of “special interest” that is more than 250 years old is presented for import in any EU member state the owner or “holder of the goods” will be required to submit a signed importer statement to customs authorities in the country of entry. The statement must include a declaration that the books have been originally exported legally from their source country. However, in cases where the export country (distinct from the source country) is a “Contracting Party to the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property” then the holder of the books must provide a declaration that they have been exported from that export country in accordance with its laws and regulations. Needless to say, while the proposal specifies books and documents of “special interest” it does not give any more explicit criteria for defining what this means and the notion of “special interest,” on its own, is sufficiently vague and subjective to include, in practice, virtually any book that someone might want to import.

  • “The Bike-Share Oversupply in China: Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles.” With pictures. And when they say huge, they really mean huge.

  • Since the Social Justice Warriors at Google are purging firearms instruction videos, Full30.com.
  • The Onion: “American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm.”

    • To end on an up note: Happy National Puppy Day!

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    This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2018 at 3:44 PM and is filed under Budget, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    2 Responses to “LinkSwarm for March 23, 2018”

    1. BigGator5 says:
      March 24, 2018 at 9:01 AM

      That is China’s problem in a nut-shell and long term, they are screwed. Time is on our side.

    2. Chinese Corporate Scam + Green Subsidy Scam = Mountains of Abandoned New Cars « Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog says:
      June 12, 2022 at 1:01 PM

      […] entry for the “China’s economy is smoke and mirrors all the way down” file. Remember the previous story on the mountains of unused bikes for failed Chinese bike-sharing startups? Well, evidently the […]

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