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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?

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The liberals are truly going nuts, and it’s beautiful. They recently resurrected Nancy Pelosi for another glorious term winnowing away the House Democrat caucus. Pretty soon it’s just going to be her and some guy representing Berkeley who they recruited while he was shouting “Workers of the world unite!” at bored coeds on Telegraph Avenue. You know, if you want to reach out to the kind of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, normal Americans who voted for the black guy then allegedly refused to vote for the woman because they are racist, you totally want an ancient, rich, snooty, San Francisco leftist and Botox after-picture like the Nanster.

I forget who said that the Democrat party is a conspiracy of the Upper Class and the Lower Class against the Middle Class, but he ought to get a medal.

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Trump’s victory was largely minted in the suburbs and smaller cities of the new American Heartland, from Pittsburgh to Omaha to Dallas-Ft. Worth. The heartland regions depend on agriculture, home construction, manufacturing and energy, all of which could benefit from the policies of the new presidential administration and Republican Congress. In contrast, Hillary Clinton favored extending the Obama administration’s policies on fossil fuels and housing that may win support in the dense progressive bastions of the East and West coasts, but were viewed with alarm by many tied to heartland industries, some of which have been under pressure from a global decline in commodity prices.

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Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t. The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.

Politicians, aided by economists, have long ignored the negative impacts of trade-induced structural change. Indeed, they have even cheered it on. After all, the process “releases resources” for use in other, more productive parts of the economy. Those workers are just “low-skilled” workers. The US needs more “high-skilled” workers anyway.

Fact: Workers hate being referred to as “low-skilled.”

How we respond to Trump is important. If we simply fall back on our standard numbers, we lose. If we confidently predict that TPP is a big win because it will add 0.5% to GDP by 2030, we lose. If we just use this as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of a college degree, we lose. We have been doing this for decades, and it helped deliver Trump to office.

…

We don’t have answers for these communities. Rural and semi-rural economic development is hard. Those regions have received only negative shocks for decades; the positive shocks have accrued to the urban regions. Of course, Trump doesn’t have any answers either. But he at least pretends to care.

Just pretending to care is important. At a minimum, the electoral map makes it important.

A Reddit that asked people who had met Trump before he ran for President what he was ‘really’ like.

A typical comment:

A post from Tyler Cowen’s econ blog Marginal Revolution, explaining why celebrities and CEOs make better politicians than politicians typically do.

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“Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods,” Tobe told EE Times in advance of his exclusive report on agricultural robots, “Subdividing their acreage into many unique subplots—and in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree or animal—thereby enabling increased productivity, traceability and lower overall costs. Unmanned aerial vehicles are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray.”

Pretty soon there won’t be any rednecks for Obama to kick around any more.

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When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.

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A robochef, like Rosie from the Jetsons, could be just the machine to salvage desire from disappointment. The robochef, Lusk informs us, isn’t just a dream of futures past, but a present-day reality. Designed by Moley Robotics, a prototype robochef — a pedestal topped by a seven-foot cylinder with programmable robotic arms — debuted at a 2015 industrial fair, where it prepared a crab bisque by duplicating the movements of a celebrity chef.

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How about that Global Warming, eh? Do you feel the rising seas nipping at your toes yet?

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I’m wondering why everybody is having the vapors about offending the Russians. Looks to me as if they’re still a Third World power. Do any of their nukes still even work?

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Much can be said about the Left’s lavishly-financed effort to portray global warming as an existential threat, so that a small minority can profit while the rest of us are impoverished. But this is perhaps the most fundamental point: a scientific argument can be made that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase global temperatures by about one degree C. Most people agree that this would be a good thing; it would undoubtedly contribute to the greening of the Earth, since CO2 is the plant food required for photosynthesis.

So what’s the problem? The climate alarmists assert that various positive feedbacks, principally an increase in the main greenhouse gas, water vapor, will amplify that scientifically-defensible one degree increase into something like six degrees. EVERY SINGLE THING you have ever read about the supposedly baleful effects of CO2 is based on that unproven assumption. Actually, the net feedbacks–clouds are the great unknown–may be negative rather than positive.

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How about that Global Warming, eh? Feel the Rising Sea Levels(tm) nipping at your toes yet?

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It’s hard to single out the most delicious example of the post-Trump liberal freak out, but the din about California secession has to rank high on the list. Among other obvious things, California provided Hillary Clinton with her entire margin of victory in the popular vote—without California, Trump wins the popular vote in the other 49 states handily. (Without California and the five boroughs of New York City, Trump’s popular vote victory starts to approach a landslide.)

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Gotta retrain those rednecks who voted for Trump somehow.

Harvesting takes me an hour. That’s an hour in which I drive at little more than walking pace from one end of a field to the other and back again 20 or 30 times. It’s not the most fun I’ve had in a video game, but then I do need the money.

Farming Simulator 17, released on 25 October, is the latest game in a series made by Giants Software in Schlieren, Switzerland. Players start out with little land and few machines and must plant, tend and harvest crops – or raise livestock – to earn money to buy more land and more machines.

Prediction: No Democrat will ever play this game.

The Other McCain explores Leftist sociopathy.

Inside their liberal echo chamber, hermetically sealed by epistemic closure, Democrats never have to consider the possibility that they’re wrong. Their friends at the New York Times and CNN all agree with them, as does every professor at Columbia, Yale and other major universities, and every celebrity in Hollywood. Democrats never talk to anyone who disagrees with them, because people who disagree with Democrats are not merely wrong, but also ignorant and evil.

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

The Alt-Right Dog-Whistle Theory, as we may call it, serves a valuable psychological function for Democrats. If the people who voted for Trump were racist — “RAAAAACIST!” — then (a) Trump’s election can be dismissed as morally illegitimate, and (b) the Democrats can avoid the question of whether their policies are wrong. Inside their echo chamber, Democrats cling desperately to this kind of rationalization, because the only alternative would be an embarrassing admission of failure.

Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, you’re the dog.

Democrats hate babies. Democrats hate Catholics. Democrats hate Jesus.

Democrats used to love Catholics, when Catholics helped elect Democrats like John F. Kennedy who, among other things, supported Vietnamese Catholics fighting against Communism. By 1972, however, Democrats hated Catholics and supported Communists in Vietnam. Of course, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were the party of the working class, whereas now Democrats are the party of Hollywood, George Soros and every whiny liberal arts major at Oberlin College.

So it would seem.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Feeling the rising sea levels nipping at your toes yet?

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I think I saw a movie based on this premise once … The Last Starfighter, I think it was called. I doubt that these are for that sort of job.

Stockfuse, developed by SHFuse Inc., a New York-based startup, is just one of a new breed of apps that invite people to play games that also serve as real-world recruiting tools.

Such apps aim to shed light on how a candidate might perform in a job based on how he or she performs in a game. With Stockfuse, for example, what stocks a player invests in and the returns achieved typically provide plenty of data for consideration. Games from other developers range from solving mazes to managing a simulated sushi restaurant.

The question immediately arises, are they testing the correct qualities in their prospective employees? I have long been doubtful of whether companies, even successful companies, really know what skills are responsible for their success. On the other hand, the military is increasingly using ‘wargames’ to train — and evaluate — their officers, so the attraction seems to be widespread.

I wonder who will be first to use games as an admission factor for schools? One could quite plausibly say that admission tests are actually such ‘games’ — after all, what is a game? You face a situation, you make choices, and on that basis succeed or fail. Sounds like a test to me. Myst was notorious for being an animated IQ test; I’m perfectly comfortable with the notion that anybody who could work through Myst could handle college.

Joe Bob Briggs does diet.

Listen to me, people. Gluten has nothing to do with being fat. Unless you have celiac disease, shut up!

And how many people have celiac disease?

0.7518797 of the Western population. Less than 1 percent.