J. D. Vance TED Talk: America's Forgotten Working Class (VIDEO)

I finished the book over the weekend.

See, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

I can see why it's gotten such a buzz. I especially loved the last 60 or 70 pages, where Vance discusses his education, from Ohio State to Yale, as well as meeting his future wife. He drops a lot of sociological theory and such. I liked it.

Here's his TED talk from October. He's an interesting guy:

Splits in the 'Alt Right'

These people can just go away. Their 15 minutes are up.

Interesting take, though.

From Matt Pearce, at LAT, "The 'alt-right' splinters as supporters and critics agree it was white supremacy all along":

"When people start throwing Nazi salutes in public, it has a way of clarifying where everybody stands." https://t.co/34tOe68o69

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) November 30, 2016

When people start throwing Nazi salutes in public, it has a way of clarifying where everybody stands.

The loosely defined “alt-right” movement — made up of social-media-savvy white supremacists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, misogynists and other fringe figures who supported Donald Trump’s election — has splintered in recent weeks as less hard-core supporters distance themselves from the term.

At the same time, critics and media outlets have moved to avoid using the phrase “alt-right,” saying it’s a deceptive new term for old far-right ideologies that have traditionally been shunned in American public life.

And among die-hard fascists, the writing is on the wall.

“The alt-right is and has always been the same thing as it is right now – a white identity movement,” Andrew Anglin wrote at the Daily Stormer, a popular neo-Nazi site. “Looks like we finally have this term for ourselves. Finally.”

The shift came after a meeting of white nationalists inside the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington on Nov. 19, where members threw Nazi salutes and shouted, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

The man they were saluting was the white nationalist who coined the term “alternative right,” Richard Spencer, who had just given an anti-Semitic speech in which he quoted Nazi propaganda and called the United States a “white country.”

One white nationalist called it “the Heil Heard Around the World.” Coverage of the Nazi salutes went viral, and public reaction was severe.

Readers denounced news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, for not portraying Spencer and his supporters in a harsher light. The left-wing investigative magazine Mother Jones, which ran a deep profile of Spencer in October, was criticized for titling its piece, “Meet the Dapper White Nationalist Who Wins Even if Trump Loses.” The word “dapper” was soon removed from the headline.

Frustration also boiled over inside the mainstream media.

One Politico editor, Michael Hirsh, resigned last week after posting Spencer’s addresses on Facebook and telling followers to "Stop whining about Richard B. Spencer, Nazi, and exercise your rights as decent Americans,” according to comments first reported by the Daily Caller.

“He lives part of the time next door to me in Arlington. Our grandfathers brought baseball bats to Bund meetings,” Hirsh wrote, alluding to Jewish Americans who attacked Nazi sympathizers before World War II. “Want to join me?” (Politico’s top editors denounced Hirsh’s remarks.)

Trump himself disavowed the alt-right in a meeting with New York Times journalists, telling them, “It’s not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”

Among the alt-right’s less hard-core associates, the coverage of the Nazi salutes has been like a light suddenly turned on in a dark room. They scattered, issuing clarifications and recriminations along the way.

Paul Joseph Watson, an editor for the conspiracy-minded site InfoWars, said in July that he was “in the alt-right,” but then denied it last week, going on to argue that two different factions of the group had emerged.

“One is more accurately described as the New Right. These people like to wear MAGA [Make America Great Again] hats, create memes & have fun,” Watson wrote on Facebook, criticizing mainstream media for focusing on Trump’s racist supporters. “They include whites, blacks, Asians, Latinos, gays and everyone else. These are the people who helped Trump win the election.

“The other faction likes to fester in dark corners of sub-reddits” — a reference to branches of the social-media site Reddit — “and obsess about Jews, racial superiority and Adolf Hitler. This is a tiny fringe minority. They had no impact on the election.”

Some white nationalists themselves have a term for the split: the alt-right versus the “alt-lite.”

White nationalists are alt-right and right-wing sites like Breitbart News and its chairman, the new White House advisor Stephen K. Bannon, are alt-lite, according to Brad Griffin, a white nationalist who blogs under the pen name Hunter Wallace at the site Occidental Dissent.

“Steve Bannon is the most important figure in the alt-lite,” Griffin wrote. “We all see Breitbart as the premier alt-lite website which has popularized a diluted version of our beliefs.”

Breitbart News, which channels a more nationalistic form of mainstream conservatism, gained notoriety over the last year both for implicitly supporting Trump’s candidacy and for Bannon’s proud announcement to Mother Jones in August, “We're the platform for the alt-right.”

Left-wing critics have called the site a front for white nationalism and anti-Semitism, which its staffers have vigorously denied...

The leftist media went batshit crazy over the "alt right" a couple of weeks ago, and leftists have glommed onto the "racist" meme like it was going out of style. And it's so stupid. It's like Paul Joseph Watson says, the genuine racists are at the fever swamps , a tiny fringe, with no influence whatsoever. But to progs you'd think we were back in the 1930s.

Perpetual Leftist Victims

Aww, isn't that precious?

Leftists are sad because their votes in the big urban strongholds and coastal enclaves "don't count."

Joan Walsh is such a loser. Eight years of attacking conservatives as flyover rubes and now the shoe's on the other foot.

I'm just all torn up about this.

Kneejerk animosity toward/dismissal of NY & CA, as if 60 million Americans are an asterisk inside an "elite" "bubble," is deep, dumb, ugly.

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) November 26, 2016

We have to change this. Our votes don't count. https://t.co/zMdpQZwx8K

— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) November 27, 2016

Please Say 'Merry Christmas'

It's December everybody!

It's a wonderful time of year!

Merry Christmas!

From Dennis Prager, one of the better Prager University videos I've seen:

Lauren Southern: Millennials Should Embrace Tradition (VIDEO)

She's a good lady.

She name checks Charles Murray's book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

I Voted for Hillary. And Now I'm Going to Write for Breitbart

This is interesting.

It's Greg Ferenstein, who I've never heard of.

But trying to get a handle on what makes the other side tick sounds like a plan.

At Politico, "We can’t ignore the voices that put Trump in the White House. But maybe we can persuade them."

And here's the dude's first piece at Breitbart, "Ferenstein: My Search for Data on Trump Supporters and Racism."

Donald Trump and the Emoluments Clause

This has been something of a topic, but it hit home with I was having a discussion with my department chairwoman this week.

Here's Louise Mensch, at Heat Street:

President-Elect @realDonaldTrump Addresses #Emoluments Clause, Promises to 'Leave' His Business https://t.co/gtZI6ZQ3b8

— Heat Street (@heatstreet) November 30, 2016

Also, via the Heritage Foundation, "Emoluments Clause."

Nice Lady

Heh.

Found on Twitter:

🎣 pic.twitter.com/humaz7jZvX

— Country Girls (@DownHomeGirls) November 28, 2016

Laura Ingraham Discusses Trump's Cabinet Picks and the Ohio State Jihad Attack (VIDEO)

She's so hot.

Via Fox Business News:

Amber Lee's Chilly Morning Forecast

It's been nippy this last few mornings.

I mean, I like it, but you better have a jacket with you, heh.

Via CBS News 2 Los Angeles, the lovely Ms. Amber:

Standing Rock is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time

Heh.

Following-up from earlier, "Dakota Access Pipeline Protests Just Another Chance for Idiot Leftist Hijacking and Exploitation (VIDEO)."

Leftists have to constantly turn every protest into the "civil rights issue of our time," whether it's black lives matter, the latest hurricane (OMG Katrina George Bush racism!), or push-back against the war on terror's "backlash" against Muslims. You name it.

Here's one of radical left's biggest enviro-shills, Bill McKibben, at the Guardian U.K., "Standing Rock is the civil rights issue of our time – let's act accordingly":

Representatives of more 200 Indian nations have gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in an effort to prevent construction of an oil pipeline that threatens the tribe’s water supply, not to mention the planet’s climate. It’s a remarkable encampment, perhaps the greatest show of indigenous unity in the continent’s history. If Trump Tower represents all that’s dark and greedy in America right now, Standing Rock is by contrast the moral center of the nation...

Amazing, but you'd think leftists actually won the election in November. This kind of demonizing rhetoric is a major reason why the Democrats lost.

The idiots aren't learning the lessons of defeat, apparently.

Cyber Monday Deals Week in Electronics

The Black Friday and Cyber Week shopping's going great!

Thanks everybody!

At Amazon, Shop Deals in TV, Video and Audio, Camera, Photo and Video, Computers and Accessories, Computer Software, Cell Phones and Accessories, Office Electronics, Musical Instruments, Electronics Accessories and More.

BONUS: AmazonBasics 6-Sheet Cross-Cut Paper and Credit Card Shredder.

Kendall Jenner Looks Spectacular at Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

Here, "Kendall Jenner looks ravishing in racy red lingerie with matching thigh-high boots and feathered wings as she takes to the runway at Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in Paris."

Also, "The greatest show on earth! Gigi, Bella and Kendall join Angel veterans Alessandra and Adriana as a spectacular parade of the world's top supermodels kicks off the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in Paris."

Don't Despair

This has been my message to students since the election. Don't despair. Move on with your life and enjoy the beauty. We've survived much greater challenges in the past. We'll survive four years (maybe eight) of Donald Trump.

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "Democracy’s Future? Don’t Despair!"

Democracy’s Future? Don’t Despair! - by @tobincommentary https://t.co/O05jiMBJqT pic.twitter.com/GOtyVTfMZb

— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) November 30, 2016

Deal of the Day: Sony H.ear on Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphone

At Amazon, Sony H.ear on Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphone, Charcoal Black.

Also, in blue.

And shop DSLR Cameras.

More, Nikon D3400 w/ AF-P DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR (Black).

Also, Canon EOS Rebel T6i Digital SLR with EF-S 18-55mm IS STM Lens - Wi-Fi Enabled.

Plus, Amazon Echo - White.

More, shop for Amazon accessories.

BONUS: Out January 30th, from Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture.

It's Probably Better to Stay Off Social Media Right Now

Well, I don't even check Facebook. And on Twitter I don't seem to be growing my follower count. Nobody does the "follow Friday" roundups anymore. It's pretty hateful.

@flexlibris Just send them a copy of this ;-) pic.twitter.com/hOMKe5GMw5

— Data Janitor (@abditum) November 29, 2016

Related, and this is funny, "Southern Poverty Law Center invents lucrative new hate crime: The Trump Effect."

The SPLC's a hate group, straight up.

Hailey Clauson Black Friday

She's got the right idea.

Happy #BlackFriday… now time to go back to sleep 💤💋 pic.twitter.com/ovYQwjtpVi

— Hailey Clauson (@Hailey_Clauson) November 25, 2016

And see Drunken Stepfather, "HAILEY CLAUSON’S IN HER UNDERWEAR OF THE DAY."

Adriana Lima Road to the Runway for Victoria's Secret (VIDEO)

The fashion show airs Monday, December 5th, at 10:00pm.

I'll have babe-blogging coverage through the weekend.

Dakota Access Pipeline Protests Just Another Chance for Idiot Leftist Hijacking and Exploitation (VIDEO)

I do sympathize with the Indians, but when radical leftists hijack the protests to promote their own revolutionary/anti-capitalist agenda, they lose my support.

See the idiots Neil Young and Daryl Hannah, at the Guardian U.K., "The Standing Rock protests are a symbolic moment":

Standing together in prayer to protect water displays a deeply rooted awareness of life’s interconnected nature, and of the intrinsic value and import of traditional ways. This growing movement stems from love, it is the most human instinct to protect that which we love. An eager and engaged youth are at the core of this pipeline route resistance, learning from a population of elders who pass down unforgotten knowledge.

It is an awakening. All here together, with their non-native relatives, standing strong in the face of outrageous, unnecessary and violent aggression, on the part of militarized local and state law enforcement agencies and national guard, who are seemingly acting to protect the interests of the Dakota Access pipeline profiteers, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, above all other expressed concerns. They stand against corporate security forces, the county sheriff and the national guard. Standing while being hit with water cannons, mace, teargas, rubber bullets. Standing without weapons and praying, the water protectors endure human rights abuses in freezing temperatures. Supplies arrive from all over as the social media universe shares the heartbreaking news to the world, that an American corporate media is not free to report. Thus, it is the ugliness of corporate America, seen around the world...

Right.

The "ugliness of corporate America" made both of these two big stars in their heyday. And look at them: blithering idiots. And hypocrites too. I don't see them out there schlepping it in the sub-zero temperatures with the reservation's natives. At CBS News This Morning:

Why All That Dancing in the Streets of Miami?

From Humberto Fontova, at FrontPage Magazine:

Fidel Castro jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six.

Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s Gulag.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for the media-shock value.

Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war.

In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with  the highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.

Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany. Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis Island years, in fact.

Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah.

Would anyone guess any of the above from reading or listening to the mainstream media recently?

In fact, from their reactions, all that dancing in the streets of Miami’s Little Havana this week-end seems to strike some talking heads as odd, if not downright unseemly.

But prior to the big news this week-end many of those same celebrants could be found with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst long rows of white crosses in Miami’s Cuban Memorial.  It’s a mini-Arlington cemetery of sorts, in honor of Fidel Castro’s murder victims.

The tombs are symbolic, however. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves dug by bulldozers on the orders of the man whose family President Obama just consoled with an official note of condolence.

Some of those future celebrants were often found kneeling at the Cuban Memorial, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You might remember a similar scene from the opening frames of “Saving Private Ryan.” Many clutched rosaries. Many of the ladies would be pressing their faces into the breast of a young relative who drove them there, a relative who wrapped his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders.

Try as he might not to cry himself, this relative usually found that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt were contagious. Yet he was often too young to remember the young face of his martyred father, grandfather, uncle, cousin -or even aunt, mother grandmother– the name they just recognized on the white cross.

“Fusilado” (firing squad execution) it says below the name– one word, but for most visitors to the Cuban Memorial a word loaded with traumatizing flashbacks.

On Christmas Eve 1961, Juana Diaz Figueroa spat in the face of the Castroite executioners who were binding and gagging her. They’d found her guilty of feeding and hiding “bandits.” (Castro and Che’s term for Cuban peasants who took up arms to fight their theft of their land to create Stalinist kolkhozes.) Farm collectivization was no more voluntary in Cuba than in the Ukraine. And Cuba’s kulaks had guns–at first anyway. Then the Kennedy-Khrushchev pact left them defenseless against Soviet tanks, helicopters and flame-throwers. When the blast from Castro’s firing squad demolished Juana Diaz’ face and torso, she was six months pregnant.

Rigoberto Hernandez was 17 when Castro’s prison guards dragged him from his jail cell, jerked his head back to gag him and started dragging him to the stake. Little “Rigo” pleaded his innocence to the very bloody end. But his pleas were garbled and difficult to understand. His struggles while being gagged and bound to the stake were also awkward. The boy had been a janitor in a Havana high school and was mentally retarded. His single mother had pleaded his case with hysterical sobs. She had begged, beseeched and finally proven to his “prosecutors” that it was a case of mistaken identity. Her only son, a boy in such a condition, couldn’t possibly have been “a CIA agent planting bombs.”

“Fuego!” and the firing squad volley riddled Rigo’s little bent body as he moaned and struggled awkwardly against his bounds, blindfold and gag. “We executive from Revolutionary conviction!” sneered the man whose peaceful death in bed President Obama seems to mourn.

Carlos Machado was 15 years old in 1963 when the bullets from the firing squad shattered his body. His twin brother and father collapsed beside Carlos from the same volley. All had resisted Castro’s theft of their humble family farm.

According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, the Castro regime’s total death toll–from torture, prison beatings, firing squads, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.–approaches 100,000. Cuba’s population in 1960 was 6.4 million. According to the human rights group Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans (young and old, male and female) have passed through Castro’s prison and forced-labor camps. This puts Fidel Castro political incarceration rate right up there with his hero Stalin’s.

It’s not enough that liberals refuse to acknowledge any justification for these Miami celebrations. No, on top of that here’s the type of thing the celebrants are accustomed to hearing from the media and famous Democrats:

“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984.)

"Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend." (Democratic presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democratic party,” George Mc Govern.)

“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.”  (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democratic party, Jimmy Carter.)

“Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell.)

“Fidel Castro could have been Cuba’s Elvis!” (Dan Rather)

"Castro's personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Cuba has very high literacy, and Castro has brought great health care to his country." (Barbara Walters.)

 “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (CNN founder Ted Turner.)