Gavin McInnes reads this stuff so you don’t have to.

MTV News just released a remarkably patronizing New Year’s guide entitled “2017 Resolutions for White Guys,” and boy, are us white guys angry. It’s a video with white beta cucks, ethnically ambiguous minorities, and a black guy in a kitten shirt telling us we need to “be better.” It’s a perfect example of how soft and retarded the alt-left has become, but the ten topics they list serve as a good springboard to tell white guys what they really should be doing.

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First, let’s agree that governments around the world regularly screw indigenous peoples. The most frequent governmental screwing occurs when authorities take their land on the grounds that it has not been not properly registered and titled. Additionally, except for the United States, nearly every other government claims to own all mineral rights within its territory. Consequently, royalties from mining concessions awarded by governments go to, yes, the governments. The upshot is that indigenous communities get screwed again when they have to endure the downsides of mining that takes place where they live while receiving none of the benefits that royalties would provide since those monies are diverted into government agencies headquartered far away.

Why am I going on about this? Because The Washington Post could have usefully made these observations in its story, “Tossed Aside in the ‘White Gold’ Rush: Indigenous people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet.” The article details how various mining companies are beginning to exploit lithium deposits in Argentina’s far northwestern province of Jujuy. The indigenous folks who dwell and herd llamas and goats in those remote Andean valleys happen to live next to giant salt flats that contain millions of tons of lithium. Lithium, of course, is the main element in the batteries that supply electricity to our mobile phones, computers, and electric cars.

The main complaint of the article is that besides new relatively high paying jobs and some minor financial assistance with community projects, the international mining companies that are making millions mining lithium are not sharing much of the proceeds with local communities. Basically, The Post casts the mining companies and the high tech companies that use Argentinian lithium in their products as the villains. Certainly, some of the local Atacama people are pissed off because they feel insufficiently consulted and rewarded. And that’s fine. But the real villains are the national and provincial governments that take the royalties and taxes and then do not use them to provide adequate services to their citizens who live in the region.

It’s all about the Hating Capitalism Narrative, Larry.

John Hinderaker sums it up.

The Democratic Party has been making a fool of itself ever since Election Day. (Before that too, probably, but that’s a different post.) An utter lack of self-awareness apparently disables Democrats from understanding that 1) they lost the presidential election because they nominated the worst candidate of modern times, 2) they have been losing ground across the large majority of America for a decade or longer, and now are at best a minority party everywhere except California, New York and a few other enclaves, and 3) their party’s leadership is uniformly both geriatric and corrupt.

Yeah, that about covers it.

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Snow last fell in the small Saharan desert town of Ain Sefra Feb. 18, 1979, when the snow storm lasted for less than an hour. Ain Sefra is 3,280 feet above sea level and is nestled between the Atlas Mountains in Africa.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Rising sea levels nipping at your toes yet?

Oh, wait, we’d better look at that list of islands that have disappeared because of rising sea levels — and … that would be … none. Hmm. Well, keep on believing in the face of facts; that’s what religion is all about.

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For those for whom current life isn’t difficult enough.

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A lot of people worry that robots — or more generally, software and automation — will take everyone’s job. One study found that almost half of US jobs are capable of being automated over the next two decades.

But automating routine jobs isn’t something that might happen in the future. To a large extent, it’s something that already happened. Today, just 8 percent of American workers work in the manufacturing sector — less than a third of the share 50 years ago. Another 6 percent work in industries like construction, mining, and agriculture that are involved in producing physical goods.

These are the sorts of jobs people refer to when they whine about ‘shipping our jobs overseas’.

What do the rest of US workers do? They’re in service industries like health care, education, retail, hospitality, and local government. It’s not necessarily that jobs in these industries can’t be automated. Some of them can, as technologies like self-checkout kiosks and exercise videos make clear.

But in most cases, customers don’t want them to be automated, because automated versions of the service aren’t as good. Most of these jobs are automation-proof because people like interacting with other people.

My wife loves using the automated check-out area in stores. I hate it, and will gladly stand in line to work with a Real Person. One of the two Costco stores nearby has a couple of automated check-out lines, and recently I was in line at one with a Real Person when a helpful Costco employee approached me and pointed out that the automated lines were free. ‘I hate those things and will not use them’, I responded, and was started to receive a round of applause from the people standing in line with me.

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Apparently one of the possible reasons for prevalence of obesity where we would least expect to find it, among poor people, is the result of the fact that poor people pig out when food is available, which makes a certain degree of sense, since a key indicator of poverty is never knowing where your next meal is coming from.

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She may have a very good case for this being a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech. If it’s permissible free speech to burn the U.S. flag, I don’t see how it’s not permissible free speech to fly the Confederate flag.

On the other hand, there is also a very good case for charging her with treason. Treason is defined in the Constitution as ‘levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.’ The Confederacy was certainly an enemy of the United States, and it’s difficult to see how flying its flag is anything other than ‘adhering to’ that enemy. U.S. government officials have traditionally been very accommodating to Confederate irredentism, and this might be an appropriate time to remind people that supporting the Confederacy was, and is, treason.

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I predict that this will end badly for the assassin and his family and quite possibly anybody with which he shared a friendly word in the last twelve months. The Russians don’t dick around — unlike Barack Obama’s America — and have a very direct way of responding when their people are messed with.

Much like Donald Trump, come to think of it. Hmm.

The gunman is reportedly a member of Turkey’s special operations police force, and shouted islamic terrorist affiliated slogans in his shouts.

I think the Turkish Prime Minister is probably changing his underwear even as we speak.

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In a paper published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers Norman Li and Satoshi Kanazawa report that highly intelligent people experience lower life satisfaction when they socialize with friends more frequently. These are the Sherlocks and the Newt Scamanders of the world — the very intelligent few who would be happier if they were left alone.

Other people are the problem, not the solution. Whenever something bad happens to you in life, other people are involved. Think about it.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

At least they didn’t spend all their time being offended.

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Scientists at Virginia Tech report that, in blind tastings, the flavor of milk stored in a standard supermarket-style dairy cooler is significantly degraded by fluorescent light passing through translucent plastic containers. When LED bulbs were used instead, tasters rated the milk about the same as when it was packaged in a lightproof container—which is to say, a lot better.

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Alex Egoshin ran the presidential election returns through GIS software to create new relief maps comparing the United States of Doanld to the United Urban Centers of Hillary. Above, you have the Clinton Archipelago, and below, TrumpLand. Open each in a new tab for the full-size versions.

I suspect that, were the places where ‘income inequality’ is most extreme mapped as well, the map would match pretty closely to the Clinton Archipelago. Democrat preponderance tends to align with dense urban areas, and those are also the places where extremes of wealth and poverty are found.

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Film student Anthony van der Meer had his iPhone stolen and the thought that a stranger had access to all of his personal data really concerned him. What kind of person would steal a phone? Where do these phones end up? These were his biggest questions. To get answers, Anthony had another phone stolen from him on purpose, but this time he followed the thief using a hidden app and made a captivating documentary film about the whole process.

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At the heart of liberal utopianism is the concept that through political exertion you can have a perfect society without tragic outcomes of any kind. This is one reason why liberalism rebels against human nature. (In fact, I think we should routinely refer to liberals as “human nature deniers.” Sauce for the goose and all that.)

It is this ineluctable characteristic that explains why liberals are having trouble making it through the five stages of grief over Hillary’s election face plant. Acceptance? No way.

Hence the bevy of Hollywood heroes who are now imploring members of the electoral college to vote for someone other that Trump is terrific ironic comedy gold. Give them props for saying to Republican electors—we’re not even asking that you vote for Hillary! Just some other qualified Republican. So here’s a fun idea: knowing that the House of Representatives would choose Trump in the case of an electoral college deadlock, how about a bunch of Republican electors say, “Fine: How about Ted Cruz?” And then sit back and watch the Hollywoods liberals choke.

I would find that amusing. Or Dick Cheney. That would be even more amusing.

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That conundrum goes like this: Can you think of three foods where any two of those foods taste good together, but all three combined taste disgusting?

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What exactly does a person with a degree in Russian History do for a living? If the degree is from Harvard, the answer is anything that person wants, even investment banking. But if the degree is from even a slightly lesser school than Harvard (or Princeton/Yale/Stanford), there really aren’t that many employers demanding Russian History majors.

So the workforce of CIA analysts is going to be liberal-leaning SWPL types. I am sure they really liked President Obama, and they nearly all voted for HRC for the same reasons that SWPLs outside of the CIA nearly all voted for HRC. You know, because Trump is racist. And if you work in the government, maybe you are used to the last eight years and you think that President HRC means more of the same that you are used to and that’s exactly what you want.

Joe Bob Briggs points out some inconvenient truth.

As any deer hunter can tell you, the person most likely to preserve the wildlife population is the person who regularly harvests it. All hunters are conservationists. And likewise, all energy extractors are stewards of the environment. Do they screw up from time to time? Two words: Exxon Valdez. Of course they do. Do they wanna suck all the pressure out of the oil fields like Spindletop wildcatters and send dirty fuel to the Northeast so that people die of lung cancer? Of course not.

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Silicon Valley and its leading mini-me, the Seattle area, did very well under Barack Obama, and expected the good times to continue under Hillary Clinton. Tech leaders were able to emerge as progressive icons even as they built vast fortunes, largely by adopting predictably politically correct issues such as gay rights and climate change, which doubled as a perfect opportunity to cash in on Obama’s renewable-energy subsidies. Increasingly tied to the ephemeral economy of software and media, they felt little impact from policies that might boost energy costs or force long environmental reviews for new projects.

No wonder Silicon Valley gave heavily to Obama and then Clinton. In 2016, Google was the No. 1 private-sector source of donations to Clinton, while Stanford was fifth. Overall the electronics and communications sector gave Democrats more than $100 million in 2016, twice what they offered the GOP. In terms of the presidential race, they handed $23 million to Hillary, compared to barely $1 million to Trump.

Yet, there is one issue on which the Valley has not been “left,” and that is, predictably, wealth. It may have liked Obama’s creased pants and intellectually poised manner, but it did not want to see the Democrats become, God forbid, a real populist party. That is one reason why virtually all the oligarchs favored Clinton over Sanders, who had little use for their precious “gig economy,” the H-1B high-tech indentured-servants program, or their vast and little-taxed wealth.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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But … but … but … there’s a consensus! Don’t you know what ‘consensus’ means? It means we all get together and decide what’s true, like when we decided that the earth was flat! (Oh, wait….)

Steven Hayward does the autopsy.

Of all the stale cliches of liberalism, “the side of history” has to be the laziest. It is a romper room version of Hegelianism, or a secularized version of Providence. (Notice that it involves the Divine Right of the State replacing the Divine Right of Kings as the agent of transcendent History.)

But it explains a lot, including the incredulity and rage liberals exhibit whenever they lose an election. If “History” is on your side, it is categorically impossible that liberalism can lose unless the voters are stupid, or Republican cheated. (You can pick more than one.)

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Of course. He was a rich white Democrat.

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Has anyone else noticed that the insane popularity of getting your DNA tested coincides with the rise of the “race is just a social construct” myth—a kind of populist, Trumpian “screw you” to the elites?

Not that the elites themselves are untouched by such curiosity: Led by Professor Henry Louis Gates, numerous otherwise “progressive” celebrities have submitted to swabbing, dutifully expressing ecstasy when even an iota of black or Indian blood is detected—and famously squirming when they turn out not to be as Hispanic as they’d led producers and fans to believe.

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“[Trump] said he will not be politically correct,” said Sanders. “I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric. I think some people believe he was speaking from his heart and willing to take on everybody.”

Hayes then asked what political correctness means to Sanders. He responded:

“What it means is you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested and that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very powerful people. For years and years we have been told by Republicans and many Democrats that our trade policy was a great idea, that it was working for America. The American people don’t believe it. The American people I think want candidates and politicians to have the guts to stand up to the billionaire class and start representing the middle class and working families of America. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.”

Proof positive that even a blind pig can find an acorn every now and then.

Jerry Pournelle, who actually has some expertise in this area, shares some thoughts.

Signals from one server to another san often be recorded as they go by. With enough effort some of that can be read. Is that hacking? The Russian Intelligence Community is itself divided, between the successors of the State Security Committee (KGB) and the military intelligence organization (GRU). Both still exist but I think under different names; the KGB was successor to the ministry if the Interior, and went by MVD, NKVD, and a other names; there was also a party intelligence agency under the Soviets; I believe its assets were mostly absorbed by the KGB, which itself divided into an internal and an external agency, like the British MI 5 and MI5. Of course there are the remains of the old spy nets in the US and Canada; they are officially disbanded, and you can believe as much of that as you want to.

What they don’t have is infinite resources. They have enough to go after the low hanging fruit like a private server used by the Secretary of State, but hacking the Democratic National Committee with a goal of influencing an American election?

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If there’s anything American capitalism is really good at, after all—for better or worse—it’s figuring out ways for consumers to pay for things that they otherwise couldn’t afford, and may not even need. That new iPhone? Pay for it over two years in connection with your cellphone service contract. A new house? How about a 30-year mortgage, or even an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage? A new car? Lease it for three years. College tuition? Try a section 529 tax-deferred savings account, student loans, and financial aid.

Leave cancer or diabetes aside for the moment. With all due respect to Professor Gawande, Harvard, and the New Yorker, it’s just hard for me to believe that in the absence of Obamacare, the expense of pregnancy will suddenly become out of reach to ordinary Americans. Somehow, hundreds of millions of Americans managed to become pregnant in the more than two centuries that the republic existed before 2010, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed. If the law is repealed, we’ll find a way to reproduce again afterward.

Joel Kotkin debunks the myth.

Some aspects of Trumpism do exhibit some classic fascist modalities — emphasis on personal charisma, attacks on vulnerable minorities, rage against comfortable and self-satisfied elites. Yet, at the same time, some of the most histrionic attacks on Trump come from people who, rather than rejecting authoritarianism, really fear only his politically incorrect version of it.

During the election, Trump supporters did not generally disrupt Clinton rallies, but disturbances by progressives were somewhat common. After the election, the most hysterical forebodings about free speech came from the very college campuses — along with the left-leaning social media — that have not exactly been friendly to free speech.

The Left only worries about Fascism the way Coke worries about Pepsi.

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Out of idle curiosity, I’ve been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war — war stories they’ve heard from their families, facts they’ve learned in school, stray images that might have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn’t interested in fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target I asked about World War II.

…

So what did the people I asked know about the war? Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big totemic names — Pearl Harbor, D day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima — whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. Kasserine, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor, Falaise, the Ardennes didn’t provoke a glimmer of recognition; they might as well have been off-ramps on some exotic interstate. I started getting the creepy feeling that the war had actually happened a thousand years ago, and so it was forgivable if people were a little vague on the difference between the Normandy invasion and the Norman Conquest and couldn’t say offhand whether the boats sailed from France to England or the other way around.

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If you quit, even for just a month or so, the news-watching habit might start to look quite ugly and unnecessary to you, not unlike how a smoker only notices how bad tobacco makes things smell once he stops lighting up.

For one thing, you don’t have to listen to so many Democrats pretending to be impartial.

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Victor Davis Hanson: “Trump had all the right enemies. All the people you don’t like, don’t like Trump.”

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“What appeals to me about Trump is the same message that appeals to all Americans that voted for him,” Perez, 32, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Trump’s message is about putting America first and doing what’s best for the American people, even if it’s not the best for me.”

He’s a first generation immigrant from Mexico City now residing in Utah on a student visa.

“Some friends of mine make fun of me for supporting Trump and his ‘racist policies,’” he added. “But when we discuss it deeper and they think about it, they agree it’s natural to feel protective of your home.”

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Trump spent a grand total of $600 million in his bid for the White House, according to official FEC reports, much lower than the estimated $1.2 billion former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised and spent in her massive attempt to win.

Trump spent $94 million of that during the final month of the campaign, smaller than the nearly $132 million Clinton spent on just ad buys nationwide. Clinton’s last-minute spending push left her with only $800,000 in the campaign spending account — meaning she spent most of the money raised.

So all the hand-wringers pissing and moaning about The Effect Of Money On Politics can just STFU.

Sarah Hoyt is always worth reading.

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about the left is what I’d call “Sh*t sentimentality” and a crazy desire for the past.  Growing up, they made me read jobs about how bad some jobs were: cleaning lady, assembly line, miner, server.  BUT now they’re wailing that those jobs will vanish.

There are two keys to this: first, they are truly contemptuous of their fellow men.  The modern leftist is not a worker, nor a man of the people, he is an intellectual, someone who did very well in the indoctrination factories we call schools.  This encourages him to think anyone who doesn’t think like him is stupid, but more importantly, it encourages him to think anyone who doesn’t do well and mind-and-pen tasks is stupid.  I know.  I would have succumbed to that temptation if I hadn’t grown up in a village, where there weren’t enough people to insulate me from contact with people in manual professions who, sure, thought I was nuts reading as much as I did, but who could think faster and better than I in non-intellectual/abstract subjects.

And the second is that the left, thinking they’re smarter, think they have an obligation to “look after” the less intellectually fortunate.  Which is why they are all bent out of shape about these sh*t jobs disappearing.  I mean, yeah, they suck, but how can the left/bureaucrats come up with new jobs to replace the lost ones?  How will they look after the unemployed?  And how can we not care that technology is killing jobs????  How can we not want to beef up the welfare state to look after these poor people too stupid to do anything else?  We’re monsters, I tell you, monsters.

Ammo Grrrl shows how it’s done.

And, oh, the fun things you’ll find in that pantry! On this shelf, lurking behind the powdered sugar, a weaponized chunk of brown sugar! Yes, yes, I know there’s household hints on how to soften it again, but I’d rather just go ahead and spend that $1.29 to replace it and read a good book. I may keep the bag in my nightstand next to my .45 as something I can throw if I run through all the cartridges in my four magazines. (Plus one in the chamber.)

Also found in the pantry are several small cans of beets, expired for just two years, that were purchased because they were supposed to be good for some darn thing or other I read about somewhere. Nobody in my entire social circle will eat beets. Even my farm girl bestie, Angela, insists that “beets taste like dirt,” though I have never asked her how she knows that. The Paranoid Texan Next Door has MILK that is more than two years old, but, call me crazy, I threw the beets out.

Over here are several varieties of stale crackers in opened boxes that SOMEBODY – I’m not going to mention any names here, but his initials are Mr. AG – failed to seal up properly. It is hard to keep crackers fresh when the boxes look like they have been broken into by some very impatient, ravenous raccoon and the little tab will therefore no longer fit into the slot.

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If you’re like me — and let’s face it, you are, in more ways than you care to admit — you live your life by one simple precept. One thought, over and over, that helps you navigate through your day: What would Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. do?

I don’t have to tell you that you failed to ask yourself that question on Nov. 8, America. And Joe is very disappointed in you.

Compare the treatment of Joe Biden in the DemLegHump Media (fawning indulgence) with that received by Dan Quayle (savage scorn and ridicule). Note that Joe Biden said ten times the number of Stupid Things than Dan Quayle is reputed to have said.

Marvel at the current search for Fake News by the primary purveyors of it in the modern world.

Joe Bob Briggs explains it all.

You’ve never been a billionaire. You don’t know where to start.

I’m here to help.

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He has succeeded in getting NBC and the Democratic Party to leap to defend the honor of big corporations, job loss, and overcharging on government contracts.

Not a bad day’s work.

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More real science to confound the fantasies of Globalclimate Warmingchange.

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The net impact of solar panels has actually increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to how much energy is used in their construction, a new study by Utrecht University concluded.

Researchers looked at 40 years of CO2 emissions from solar panels, including those caused by their production, then subtracted that by the amount of CO2 they prevented from being emitted. They found many older solar panels would take decades to lead to a net emissions reduction, which is far longer than their expected lifespan. They also concluded that the current generations of panels will probably only just reduce net emissions over years.

How about that ‘green’ energy, eh?