WAIT, I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Maybe You Don’t Need 8 Hours of Sleep After All.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED FOR ENTERTAINING, at the Amazon Thanksgiving Store.

Plus, introducing Amazon Handmade.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Courts Toss Out Lawsuits By Jobless Law Grads Who Sued Law Schools Over Misleading Placement Data. A cynic might conclude that the legal system takes care of its own.

CHANGE: Hungary to Close Its Border With Croatia in Migrant Crackdown.

UPDATE: Related: Angela Merkel’s support slips as immigrants flood Germany.

SO WE’VE REACHED THE “ACCEPTANCE” STAGE, NOW? Hey, President Trump Might Not Destroy America.

WELL, THAT’S SAD: The Dodge Viper Is The Last Great American Car. To be fair, I think Tom McCahill said that about the Chrysler Imperial.

UPDATE: People in the comments are surprised that I remember Tom McCahill, but the truth is I barely do. I read his stuff in Mechanix Illustrated in the school library in elementary school and junior high, and it made an impression. “Clearly, he was a gentleman of a different era.”

CO-OP FLOP: Here’s 12 things that help explain the biggest Obamacare disaster you’ve probably never heard about. So why can’t journalists at places like the New York Times and the Washington Post be as thorough and committed to getting the whole story as Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation?

PROSTHETICS: The Artificial Skin That Could Deliver the Sense of Touch Directly to the Brain.

IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, YOU SHOULD BE VERY HAPPY ABOUT THIS: China Details Next-Gen Nuclear Reactor Program: China, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, says it will deploy advanced nuclear reactors commercially by 2030.

FRONTIERS IN AUTOMATION: One operator controls 50 drones at one time.

YES: Democrats’ 2016 strategy assumes America is lurching left. Are they wrong?

A self-proclaimed socialist like Bernie Sanders will always be an oddity in American politics; one who polls so well in Iowa and New Hampshire doubly so.

But what was so odd about the Democratic debate on Tuesday was not the socialist; it was how little his opponents disagreed with him. Particularly Hillary Clinton, whose career has always been built on, well, Clintonian triangulation. Hillary’s lurch to the left is by now well-documented. There’s her support for immigration amnesty and tougher gun control measures. When those scandalous Planned Parenthood videos emerged, she initially expressed concern — old habits die hard — before veering toward a full-throated embrace of the pro-choice gospel. And, of course, there’s her flip-flop on the TPP free trade deal, which she herself negotiated and now opposes, as well as her newfound opposition to the Keystone pipeline.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether this progressive scramble is merely a primary gambit, to be discarded for studious centrism once Clinton can decorate her desk with Bernie’s bleached skull, or whether it is her true political strategy. But remember, her lurch to the left began before Sanders’ meteoric rise in the polls. . . .

The competing narrative says that America really is becoming a much more progressive nation. The increasing secularization, or at least unchurching, of the U.S. makes America’s middle much more friendly to progressive social issues — witness the stunning success of the same-sex marriage movement. The uncertainties associated with globalization and technological change, and the increasing atomization of American society, increase the demand for a safety net. The 2012 election, after all, was basically about ObamaCare, and Obama won. In this view, America’s changing demographic mix is creating an emerging majority “rainbow coalition” even as Republicans are locked in a deadly vicious cycle of relying evermore on supermajorities of the shrinking white vote to remain competitive nationally, turning off everyone else in the process. Obama really was a “New Reagan,” a figure who not only won political successes for himself, but also changed the political balance of power for the country.

The Democrats are banking on this competing narrative. One need look no further than Clinton’s response to Anderson Cooper’s query, “Just for the record, are you a progressive, or are you a moderate?” Clinton disavowed the moderate label and replied, “I’m a progressive. But I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.”

Yet just a few weeks ago, Clinton told a smaller Ohio audience, “You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center,” Clinton told the audience at a Women for Hillary event in Ohio. “I plead guilty.”  Even CNN talking heads have laughed at Clinton’s obvious flip-flopping.

By using the first national debate to proudly wave her progressive flag, Clinton is revealing that she thinks the “new narrative” of a left-of-center America is accurate.

IS HUMAN LABOR GOING TO LOSE ITS VALUE? I dunno, it’s still hard to find a robot that can fix a toilet.

BERM’S EYE VIEW: A Baseball Blog.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Obama’s Comments on Clinton Emails Collide With F.B.I. Inquiry. “The White House quickly backed off the president’s remarks and said Mr. Obama was not trying to influence the investigation. But his comments spread quickly, raising the ire of officials who saw an instance of the president trying to influence the outcome of a continuing investigation — and not for the first time.”

OPTICAL EFFECTS & MAGICAL MOMENTS: The latest screenshot-intensive post at the brilliant Matte Shot blog on how Hollywood accomplished its special effects prior to today’s current era of digital CGI:

I’ve always had a passion for old school optical effects mainly down to the fact that I just know how hard it was for these guys to make it all come together, where so many things could (and often did) go wrong during the delicate photo-chemical-mechanical procedure, thus requiring an entire retake, or often many retakes in fact, from scratch in order to gain a satisfying marry up of each strip of 35mm or 65mm film.  There were no ‘undo’ buttons nor ‘layers’ which could be quickly thumbed through in order that corrections be made to a particular element.  The optical process as it was prior to the move over to digital, was a slow, methodical and, possibly to some, unbelievably tiresome process.  I have great admiration for the folks celebrated here today and the wonders that they achieved.

And it definitely shows through; it’s a great blog to scroll through if you have any love of Hollywood’s golden era up to the 1980s.

“I DO NOT CONSENT TO BEING CALLED A RAPIST:” The rebellion against college “consent classes” spreads.

WELL, TO PROGRESSIVES, MALLEABILITY IS A GOOD THING: Paul Taylor on “The Near Infinite Malleability of Obergefell.”

After the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision in Obergefell v. Hodges was handed down, even commentators supportive of the result complained about the decision’s vague legal reasoning. So I did a little thought experiment: How much of the language from the Obergefell decision could be used verbatim to support the recognition of other fundamental rights to government benefits, such as unconditional welfare benefits? Remarkably few changes were necessary.

The NRO teaser then links to Paul’s longer piece, in which he essentially substitutes “marriage” for “welfare benefits” in the Obergefell opinion. The thought experiment shows how easy it would be for a future court, employing the open-ended (il)logic of Obergefell, to discover such new constitutional entitlements. As Paul confesses, it’s “not so tongue-in-cheek.”

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Here’s What Your Trick-or-Treat Candy Is Saying About You.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Draft Women? Why Not? In which I agree with President Obama on gender equality.

ROGER SIMON: You Didn’t Need to Apologize for Your Holocaust Talk, Ben.

Indeed. As Sean Davis of the Federalist wrote on Monday:

The progressive response to Carson is illustrative: deep down they know that Nazi gun confiscation during the Holocaust poses something of a problem for those who wish to institute gun confiscation regimes today. Defending forced gun confiscations in theory (“fewer guns means less violence!”) is a lot easier than defending forced gun confiscations in practice. So instead of being faced with either defending Hitler’s gun confiscation regime or acknowledging that Carson’s underlying point was correct, they chose to gaslight him.

Though perhaps deep down, some of Carson’s critics would have preferred sealed vans.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 890.

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: Insurrection Erupts at the Democratic National Committee. “Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s autocratic ways in limiting the number of primary debates, insiders say, alienated many of her colleagues. And the problem may get worse.”

Related: If Hillary wins, she has quite the reconstruction project ahead with her own party.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Russia’s Military Prowess Surprises Western Analysts.

Russian air and missile strikes in Syria over the past two weeks have surprised military analysts, who did not appreciate Russia’s sophisticated capabilities. . . .

The capabilities on display in Syria are surely sending shudders up Eastern European spines, but Washington should worry too. Although the United States remains a far more powerful military power than Russia, the speed with which Russia has managed to significantly upgrade its military equipment indicates the perils of resting on one’s laurels in an age full of rapidly-developing high technology. Armchair analysts who pooh-poohed the Pentagon budget cuts created by sequestration ought to revisit their arguments.

A greater worry: if Russia is startling us with its military might, how much might we be underestimating China?

Remember, the Administration wants to underestimate their strength, because a correct estimate would require them to do things, and make spending changes, that they find unpalatable.

IT’S AS IF THE WAPO WAS BOUGHT OUT BY SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE INTERNET OR SOMETHING: The Washington Post Pulls About Even With the New York Times in Online Readership.