AT AMAZON, Top Holiday Deals in Camera, Photo & Video.

WHY JAPAN IS Obsessed With Kentucky Fried Chicken On Christmas.

GIRL TALK: I’m Paid Less Because I’m A Woman, But It’s Mostly My Fault:

A man is going to come home with the real bacon. Anything I did was just like extra credit.

I didn’t realize I unconsciously thought these things until I was a 28-year-old woman.

“You haven’t played your career out to its full potential because you didn’t have the stress of making as much money as possible,” my friend told me.

I rolled my eyes, but I realized he was right. First of all, it’s true that being a man who feels wholly responsible for providing for a family is as stressful as it is liberating. My father was fortunate, yet not. I’m sure he fought for raises twice as hard as I have because he really fucking had to. But I don’t have a wife and daughter, so all these years, when I have gone into work it has been with the understanding that I am so grateful to have a job at all, so excited to be in a workplace. I am less concerned with where my career is going or what my paycheck is.

The need to support a family focuses the mind wonderfully.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Optimal Bond Loads In Designing Molecular Machines.

AT AMAZON, top-rated Science Fiction.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: The U.S. Already Had a Conversation About Guns—and the Pro Side Won. “Current policy isn’t an NRA conspiracy. Americans have become increasingly opposed to controls even as debate on the subject rages.”

But the lefties are hoping they can use a combination of tragedy and bullying to change the game. Meanwhile, does Media Matters’ David Brock have a new assistant who carries an illegal Glock, or is that over with?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: My Boyfriend Still Lives With His Parents! Forward!

SO WITH TIM SCOTT’S APPOINTMENT, the GOP has the nation’s only black senator and both of its two latino governors. Kinda busts the racial narrative, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: The narrative isn’t giving up: “The linked WaPo article identifies Thurmond — ‘the former segregationist’ — as a Republican, but when he was a big-time segregationist, he was a Democrat.”

Yep. Just like DNC-member Bull Connor. Plus, from the comments:

A female, Indian GOP Governor appoints a black man to the Senate.

Do you really need any more evidence to believe that the GOP is engaged in a racist, sexist war on minorities and women?

Not if you’re at the WaPo, apparently.

CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATION MENACED BY OVERWHELMINGLY WHITE ANTI-CHOICE MOB.

Meanwhile, if you favor gun rights you might want to call your Senators and Congressmember — at their in-district local office — and tell them that you don’t want more gun control.

TIM CARNEY: Media myths on ‘assault weapons’ and ‘semiautomatic firearms.’ “If gun-control advocates and our media want to have a conversation about government restrictions on gun ownership, I think that’s fine. Debating more issues, rather than fewer, is probably good for our politics. But the conversation about guns needs to be a bit more factually precise.”

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VIRGINIA POSTREL: No Flying Cars, but the Future Is Bright.

Such warnings serve a useful purpose. Political barriers have in fact made it harder to innovate with atoms than with bits. New technologies as diverse as hydraulic fracturing and direct-to-consumer genetic testing (neither mentioned by Thiel) attract instant and predictable opposition. As Thiel writes, “Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare.”

But the current funk says less about economic or technological reality than it does about the power of a certain 20th-century technological glamour: all those images of space flight, elevated highways and flying cars, with their promise of escape from mundane existence into a better, more exciting place called The Future. These visions imprinted themselves so vividly on the public’s consciousness that they left some of the smartest, most technologically savvy denizens of the 21st century blind to much of the progress we actually enjoy.

Read the whole thing.

NIKKI HALEY TO PICK TIM SCOTT TO FILL DE MINT’S SEAT. So a black man will fill the same Senate seat once occupied by segregationists like Strom Thurmond.

SHOCKER: Green Grift: Solar Firms Under Investigation for Inflating Costs. “This fiasco only brings one question to our minds: Is there anybody in the world of tax-funded green energy who isn’t a sleazy thief or an incompetent idealist? The green agenda is hardly helped by these kinds of stories, though the greens are constantly telling us that everything will be fine if we just let them run the world.”

GOOGLE HAS HIRED RAY KURZWEIL. He’ll be helping them with “machine learning and language processing.”

Here’s my Wall Street Journal review of Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Will Transcend Biology.

IF YOU HAVEN’T READ IT YET, you should read Matt Lewis’s column in The Week about how the media should be ashamed of their Sandy Hook shooting coverage.

But aside from the “Death Porn,” as some have called it, there’s also the instinct toward moral bullying and control coupled with appalling ignorance that was demonstrated by Rupert Murdoch and Mark Shields, both of whom seem to think that any American can just waltz up and buy a machine gun at the drop of a hat. Perhaps Murdoch’s ignorance is excusable because he’s a foreigner — though if he wants to use that as an excuse, he might also want to butt out until he learns something about the country he’s criticizing — but Shields’ excuse is . . . what, exactly? Senility?

SHOCKER: States That Spend Less And Tax Less — And Grow More. To the political class, however, spending and taxing more means more power and more opportunity for graft. They value that more highly than growth, usually.

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Also, today only: Roku LT Streaming Player, $39.99. At this price, how can you not give it a try?

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Gun-free zones provide false sense of security.

And, of course, this piece is evergreen: People Don’t Stop Killers: People With Guns Do.

FROM ROSIE THE RIVETER BUILDING BOMBERS, to Molly The Welder, building spaceships.

FRUITS OF BRITAIN’S GUN POLICY: Culture of violence: Gun crime goes up by 89% in a decade. But gun-controllers don’t really mind criminals having guns. It’s ordinary people they want disarmed.

Related: BBC: Handgun crime ‘up’ despite ban. “A new study suggests the use of handguns in crime rose by 40% in the two years after the weapons were banned.” But again, it’s not really about crime. It’s about control.

THE HILL: Even After Rice’s Withdrawal, Republicans Are “Not Giving Up” On Benghazi.

MICKEY KAUS: Unions: Dems Duck The Big Question.

Is Wagner Act unionism a good thing or a bad thing. That seems like the key question raised by Michigan’s enactment of a “right to work” law. The main effect of such laws–which allow workers in a unionized workplace to avoid both joining the union and paying union dues–appears to be to simply weaken unions. Employers know if they locate in a “right to work” state there’s less chance their workforce will be unionized.

My answer to the key question: Wagner Act unionism might have been a good thing in the 1950s, when we didn’t face much in the way of foreign trade and the pace of change required to remain competitive was relatively slow. It’s usually a bad thing now. It may result in (perhaps temporary) wage gains for the lucky few who are in the union, but the cost– impeding change with work rules and obsessive negotiations, plus excess protections for individual workers, plus a tendency to overshoot the mark when negotiating future costs–outweighs the social benefits. . . .

Is there a Democrat who argues with a straight face that unionization makes firms more competititve? Who points to highly efficient unionized firms that are beating non-union rivals? Union defenders used to make those arguments. You don’t see them much anymore.

Today’s left-centered Web pundits increasingly don’t even try. Instead they deploy a variety of evasions, which have been on vivid display in the debate following Michigan’s adoption–by a fair vote of a fairly elected legislature–of “right to work.”

Read the whole thing, where Kaus names and shames. Best bit: “Simple question: Would Kinsley want a magazine he edited to be unionized? I think I know the answer.”

Idea for Republican operatives: Create a union — say, the Organization Of Campaign Workers And Volunteers — and send it to “organize” Democratic campaigns. Unlikely to succeed, sure. But fun to watch!

CREEPING LIBERTARIANISM? Growing number of people support gay marriage, but oppose racial preferences.