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And we could have had this guy as President. There’s a bullet dodged.

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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.

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Sky Is Falling, We’re All Going to Die — Film at 11.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

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Americans believe the federal government wastes 51 cents on the dollar, and while the federal government has no concrete estimate on total waste, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported some eye-popping examples of it throughout 2016. From spending $400,000 studying gender approaches to glaciers to paying for IRS employees to live at high-end hotels, here are the most outrageous expenses of 2016.

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This year’s University of California Students of Color Conference unproductively devolved into something of an “oppression Olympics” between different minority groups, prompting arguments between participants and ultimately leading to some canceled sessions at the annual event.

‘I’m more oppressed!’ ‘No, no, I’M more oppressed!’

” There are constructive things that we can do to prevent this happening in the future.”

Yeah, quit looking under every rock for a Victim Card to play. But I suppose that’s not an option for Students of Color.

The crux of the debate centered around the conference theme: “Fighting Anti-Blackness.” Apparently it was not communicated to students that the conference would have a particular theme this year. At the event, held at UC Irvine, students of different minority groups began arguing when it became known that the conference would focus almost exclusively on discrimination against the African American community.

‘I’m more oppressed! ‘No, no, I’M more oppressed!’

In one of the larger workshops, one of the students raised a question about why the only issues being discussed were those involving anti-blackness, prompting an African-American student to respond that black students are the most oppressed, to which a Muslim student made a comment about her people being bombed in the Middle East, according to Alvarez.

Hey, black people get bombed every day, usually on Controlled Substances. What is YOUR oppression compared to theirs? (African-American students might point out to Muslim students that they are also the people doing the bombing, but that might be in poor taste.)

“I am very unhappy about how this conference was ran.”

I am very unhappy that a student at UCLA apparently can’t write grammatical English. Students of Color might want to investigate how their being aggressively ignorant contributes to ‘anti-Blackness’.

Students of Color Conferences in years past have not chosen a particular theme, but have instead brought together many types of minority groups including Chicano/Latino, South Asian, African American, and Muslim students for the purpose of establishing dialogue and solidarity, Alvarez told The Fix.

Rather, the theme was ‘How can Students of Color leverage our Victimness into power and privilege?’ Everybody knew it, nobody had to say it.

The conference typically ends with a demonstration and protest in the community surrounding the school where it takes place, however Alvarez said that this year students felt conflicted about participating.

Most conferences have ‘break-out sessions’, this one apparently has ‘break-up sessions’.

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Of course not — it was designed to shame and embarrass.

If somebody gets offended, it’s a sign that they’re an unreconstructed racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe and need the course more than anybody.

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The 2016 presidential election has taken an emotional and personal toll on many Americans, affecting their relationships and alienating them from relatives and close associates, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found.

The country is apparently full of Special Snowflakes.

God help us if we ever get attacked by, say, Russia or China.

Clinton voters were more likely to get crosswise with family and friends over the election: 42% said they avoided talking politics with family, compared with 24% of Trump supporters, and 40% of Clinton backers said they had gotten into a heated argument about the campaign, compared with 26% of Trump backers.

Backing an incompetent deranged crook will do that.

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2016 is drawing to a close, and the Era of Obama is almost over. Emmet Scott takes a look back at the eight years of the Obama presidency and the cultural sewer it brought to the forefront of American political life.

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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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials refuse to explain why they let pollution fester at up to 302 highly-contaminated sites under their authority for years or even decades. They also won’t explain what they’re doing to protect people’s health.

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The worst legacy of the Obama administration may be disdain for the Constitution’s separation of powers. President Obama’s actions have created dangerous stress fractures in our constitutional architecture, making it imperative that the Trump administration and Republican Congress commence immediate repairs.

…

The media and academy enabled the administration’s unconstitutional behavior because they support its policy agenda. But the Framers expected members of Congress to jealously defend congressional power against executive encroachment—even from a president of the same political party. As Madison observed, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

This principle disappeared during the past eight years. In his 2014 State of the Union address, the president vowed to implement his agenda “wherever and whenever I can” without congressional involvement—to thunderous applause by Democrats. In November 2014, Democratic Senators urged the president to vastly expand his unilateral amnesty for illegal immigrants.

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A lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Robert Behn, writes abut this as “the law of diminishing control: the larger any organization becomes, the weaker is the control over its actions exercised by those at the top.” He says bureaucrats speak of “residents” and “tourists”— the residents are the bureaucrats; the tourists are political appointees, just passing through. Or, Behn writes, a member of the permanent government refers to himself or herself as a “We Be” — as in, “We be here before you’re here. We be here after you’re here.”

Jerry Pournelle likes to say that the purpose of a civil service is to hire and pay government workers. Let’s see whether the Trumpster can make any progress in the face of The Great Sponge.

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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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Voices of the Crust know on which side their bread is buttered.

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All contributions toward making ‘progressives’ of the Crust look like clueless idiots will be gratefully appreciated.

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The first duty of a government is to keep its people safe.

Allowing Muslim refugees into the country would appear to be incompatible with that.

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Two Texas electors voted for different Republican politicians: Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and former Texas congressman Ron Paul.

Be careful what you wish for….

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Tell the truth: You didn’t even know that there were Turkish Roots in Jewish history.

New research suggests that the majority of the world’s modern Jewish population is descended mainly from people from ancient Turkey, rather than predominantly from elsewhere in the Middle East.

That’s going to come as a shock.

The new research suggests that most of the Jewish population of northern and eastern Europe – normally known as Ashkenazic Jews – are the descendants of Greeks, Iranians and others who colonized what is now northern Turkey more than 2000 years ago and were then converted to Judaism, probably in the first few centuries AD by Jews from Persia. At that stage, the Persian Empire was home to the world’s largest Jewish communities.

Diversity? Check.

Dr Elhaik, an Israeli-born geneticist who gained his doctorate in molecular evolution from the University of Houston, believes that three still-surviving Turkish villages – Iskenaz, Eskenaz and Ashanaz – on the western part of an ancient Silk Road route were part of the original Ashkenazic homeland. He believes that the word Ashkenaz originally comes from Ashguza – the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian name for the Iron Age Eurasian steppeland people, the Scythians.

I’m sure Conan fits in there somewhere. Perhaps his name was originally Cohen.

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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.

Check it out.

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The resemblance between Leftist celebrities and kindergarten children is more than just skin deep.

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Guess the Russians hacked the weather, too.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

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Gone, but not forgotten.

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The U.S. Navy has spent more than $58 million on alternative fuels for its “Great Green Fleet,” according to a Senate report on Pentagon waste.

The report, by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s office, found the Navy’s goal of weaning itself off petroleum products has cost taxpayers millions of dollars and did not bring U.S. fleets much closer to getting 40 percent of its energy from alternative sources.

“Unfortunately, not only has the Navy failed to meet its goal, but the alternatives it explored have been without exception far more costly to taxpayers than traditional petroleum products,” reads McCain’s report on $13 billion wasted by the Department of Defense.

Spending your money on a bogus political agenda — it’s what Democrats do best.

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The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor’s (ITER) Tore Supra tokamak in France will start its first set of experiments this coming spring. It will heat gas to several million degrees Celsius and contain the plasma from the resulting reaction. Construction of the tokamak began in the 1980s.

Let’s hope it works.

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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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Two parents at a Pennsylvania elementary school reportedly objected to a famous line in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, leading the principal to cancel its Christmas play.

However, Abby Huntsman reported that  officials at Centerville Elementary School in East Hempfield Township said they dropped the play from their schedule because it takes too much time out of teaching academics.

But, Huntsman said the unnamed parents objected to Tiny Tim’s famous “God Bless us, everyone” phrase in the 19th Century classic.

A reminder not to send your kids to a government school if you actually want them educated.

Check it out.

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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A Democratic elector in Maine who is required by law to cast his Electoral College vote for Hillary Clinton on Monday says he will choose Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders instead.

David Bright announced on his Facebook page that he is picking Sanders in order to instill hope in young voters, especially those who supported the democratic socialist in the Democratic primaries.

Now there is a principled stand.

Of course, it also demonstrates the congenital Democrat propensity to obey only the laws they like. You can imagine the meltdown if Republicans acted that way.

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Assuming, of course, that it’s not just another hoax.

(… as opposed to a Love Crime Attack?)

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Tell the truth, you’ve always wanted to do that.

I suspect that Angelina Jolie is involved somehow.

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All of them are, of course, people on the fringe of normal society — which tells you everything you need to know about the profession, if I may so mis-use the language, of psychiatry.

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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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The taxpayer-funded University of Kentucky has punished a journalism professor for sexual misconduct because, the professors says, he publicly sang “California Girls” by The Beach Boys.

Everybody’s a critic.

“I sent an email asking to know what exactly were the complaints against me. My message was turned into an open records request by UK’s legal office. A few days later I received a two-page letter denying my request.”

“When I inquired about my due process rights, I was told by the provost that I didn’t have any,” Ryan explains.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America. (And yet Trump is the New Hitler.)

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it. Refresh to get a new one.

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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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No fact is too petty to escape being used by the DemLegHump Media to try to smear Trump.

If Trump’s shoe size were the smallest of any President elected since FDR, it would be front-page ‘news’.

Jim Goad looks at the Unbearable Whiteness of the liberal media.

Referring to “whiteness” as “unbearable” is not a bold move if you want a media career these days. In fact, it appears to be a prerequisite.

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What’s the over/under on when the Associated Press runs out of ways to smear Donald Trump? At the current rate of approximately two anti-Trump stories per day, it is hard to see how the AP can make it to the midterms without running out of new angles.

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During Mass this past Sunday, an Islamic State suicide bomber made his way inside St. Peter and St. Paul’s Coptic Church in Cairo and detonated his bomb, leaving 25 people, mostly women, dead. The bombing, the deadliest since the 2010 New Year’s Eve bombing of the Two Saints Church in Alexandria, drew swift condemnations from governments around the world. But as much as such attacks remind the world of the plight of Copts, it is their daily encounter with discrimination and persecution that poses the greatest threat to their future.

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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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All the news that fits the Narrative we print.