IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO MAKE END-OF-YEAR DONATIONS, F.I.R.E. IS THE WAY TO GO: ‘Consumer Reports’: FIRE Among Nation’s ‘Best Charities.’

The donation link is here.

BAD NEWS FOR CARLOS SLIM’S VANITY PAPER: New York Times Will Vacate 8 Floors In Its HQ To Generate “Significant Rental Revenue.”

MATT DRUDGE is enjoying the transition:

UPDATE: Obama Press Conference Deflates Progressive Fantasies. “The fever swamps of the left were eager for Obama’s final press conference of the year. Would the CIA’s leaks about Russian hacking force the President to disrupt the transition? The Electoral College meets Monday — could Obama give them all the intelligence? Would Obama refuse to relinquish power to that borscht-slurping Putin stooge tweeting at 4 a.m. from Trump Tower? They were sorely disappointed. Obama instead gave another tedious, blame-shifting performance. Packing five minutes of content into an hour and 26 minutes of podium time, Obama began by outlining what a wonderful President he has been.”

Plus: “And then there was a pre-Festivus Airing of Grievances. Any discord in America or the world was due to Republicans, Assad, fake news, the DNC, guns, Putin, the press, Wikileaks, Hillary, or Iran (wait, I thought he fixed Iran). But to the chagrin of progressives, Obama deflated their case to somehow invalidate the election. . . . Rather than calling for more agitation, Obama recommended that Hillary voters accept their loss.”

Related: Liberal Media Turns On Obama.

I DON’T SEE WHY THIS ISN’T JUST PROTECTED SEXUAL PRIVACY: Cops: Couple Made Illicit Animal Videos. I mean, what about the “sacred precincts of the marital bedroom?” Sure, some prudes may be offended, but this is 2016!

YOU WENT FULL TRUTHER, PAUL. NEVER GO FULL TRUTHER: Krugman: Trump has incentive to allow a terrorist attack.

Still though, think of the infrastructure rebuilding possibilities, Paul! They’d be almost out of this world!

HOW THE LEFT OVERREACHED IN COURT:

In short, many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. When I first posted about this on Facebook, I wrote that I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court. I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.

Read the whole thing.

LET ME JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO RE-PRAISE Bulb & Socket Lube by Aura. I’ve been changing a lot of light bulbs lately, and smearing a bit of this on the base makes them go in much more easily — and, even more important, makes them come out easily. It’s cheap, and it works, and one tin lasts forever.

GOOD: Americans’ Hearing Loss Decreases Even With Ubiquitous Headphones.

NATALIE SOLENT: Two articles about sexual violence in left wing papers that surprised me.

SHE HAS LEARNED NOTHING AND FORGOTTEN NOTHING: “‘We are feeling what not having hope feels like,’ [Michelle] Obama told [Oprah] Winfrey in response to a question about whether President Obama had achieved the ‘hope and change’ he promised while campaigning in 2008.”

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Michelle’s statement and its Soviet-style implications. And thus, she bids adieu to the position of First Lady as she entered it, as proud of America before Obama took office as she is today. Why, oh why have the American people failed her husband so badly?

Seriously though, punitive liberalism, and substituting politics for religion makes smart people say very stupid things.

IF WE HAD A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS, YOU KNOW THEY’D HAVE DONE THIS TO TRUMP, OBAMA WOULD HAVE SIGNED IT, AND THE MEDIA WOULD BE CHEERING: North Carolina Governor Signs Law Limiting Power Of His Successor.

TEST DRIVE: 2018 Volkswagen Tiguan: We Finally Sample the U.S. Version.

STUPID SHOULD HURT, AND I BET THIS HURT A LOT: A Florida man tried to rob a former WWE wrestler — and got body-slammed.

Florida Man was 2016 before it was cool.

WHAT, DO NOTHING UNTIL YOU LOST AN ELECTION, THEN PISS AND MOAN? Obama: We Handled Russian Hacking The Way It Should Have Been Handled.

PRESIDENT WHO?

Hey, President Donald Trump: Do you know where your bombs are falling? https://t.co/cqPjGBSuDY pic.twitter.com/ef88Yui1WK

— Salon (@Salon) December 15, 2016

It isn’t like anyone believed Salon was ruthlessly employing layers of editors and fact-checkers, but this headline is an egregious mistake still.

BILL WHITTLE: Fake News.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s Exactly Why Snow Tires Are So Much Better Than All-Seasons. I’m sure this is right, though I have all-seasons and they do pretty well in what little snow we generally get in Knoxville. It’s rare we get more than 3 inches at a time, though we have gotten a couple of feet at a time in my memory.

FASTER, PLEASE: Aging Is Reversible—at Least in Human Cells and Live Mice: Changes to gene activity that occur with age can be turned back, a new study shows.

THE INTERNET OF YOUR CHILDREN’S THINGS: Hackers Are Targeting Kids’ Toy Accounts and Sitting on Their Personal Data Until It’s Useful to Them.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Why the United Nations Must Move Forward With a Killer Robots Ban.

PRIVACY: Florida Court Rules Police Can Compel Suspect to Unlock Cell Phone.

A Florida Court has ruled that a man suspected of voyeurism using his iPhone must turn over his 4-digit passcode to police.

Even with a warrant, they couldn’t access the phone without the combination. A trial judge denied the state’s motion to force the man to give up the code, considering it equal to compelling him to testify against himself, which would violate the Fifth Amendment. But the Florida Court of Appeals’ Second District reversed that decision today, deciding that the passcode is not related to criminal photos or videos that may or may not exist on his iPhone.

That’s clever. Because the passcode is itself not “evidence” against he suspect, he isn’t really being compelled to incriminate himself. But the pass code is not a physical object rather it’s knowledge located in the suspect’s mind. The Florida court just ruled the police can have control over the things in your mind. A scary precedent.

Previously, courts have ruled that suspects must “give up” their fingerprints to unlock their phone, but not the combination or code. The difference between the two lies in a distinction between physical evidence, like a fingerprint and knowledge, like a phone code or password. “This interpretation sources back to the Supreme Court’s 1988 Doe v. U.S. decision, in which it ruled that a person may be compelled to give up a key to a strongbox, say, but not a combination to a wall safe,” explains Endgaget.

If a suspect smashed his phone before police could seize it, would that be “destruction of evidence,” even though there’s no way of knowing if any evidence was actually on the phone?

FASTER, PLEASE: Google’s Long, Strange Life Span Trip: Why does a mole rat live 30 years but a mouse only three? With $1.5 billion in the bank, Google’s anti-aging spinout Calico is rich enough to find out.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Colorado school district votes to allow employees to carry guns.

The Board of Education for Hanover School District #28 voted 3-2 to approve the resolution on Wednesday night, said Mark McPherson, board president.

McPherson, who voted against the plan, said it was inspired less by the fear of a shooting rampage on campus than by the district’s remote location, some 30 miles from the nearest sheriff’s station.

“We had a board member who introduced the idea back in June who indicated he felt the need for this because of the distance and response time (from law enforcement) as well as all the (potential) trouble from marijuana grows,” McPherson said.

The written resolution, however, says in part that it was drafted “in light of recent events nationally,” apparently in reference to a string of shootings on school campuses.

There’s still a lot of common sense to be found in Colorado, once you get far away from the Denver-Boulder axis.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, $39 EDUCATION EDITION: A Complete Computer Science Education—Minus the Student Loans. All in a $39 course. “This eight-course training touches upon all the fundamentals you need for a coding career. It isn’t haphazardly assembled by amateurs. Rather, it’s led by a team of former Google developers drawing upon their tech expertise to break down technical subjects into easy-to-digest terms.”

“HOMELAND SECURTY,” YOU KEEP USING THOSE WORDS: More states confirm suspected cyberattacks sourced to DHS.

The two states reporting the suspected cyberattacks were West Virginia and Kentucky.

“We need somebody to dig down into this story and figure out exactly what happened,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

In the past week, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office has confirmed 10 separate cyberattacks on its network over the past 10 months that were traced back to DHS addresses.

“We’re being told something that they think they have it figured out, yet nobody’s really showed us how this happened,” Kemp said. “We need to know.”

He says the new information from the two other states presents even more reason to be concerned.

“So now this just raises more questions that haven’t been answered about this and continues to raise the alarms and concern that I have,” Kemp said.

Through an open-records request, Diamant acquired the results of a survey Kemp asked the National Association of Secretaries of State to send to its members.

West Virginia wrote back, “This IP address did access our election night results on November 7, 2016.” Kentucky responded the same IP address “did touch the KY (online voter registration) system on one occasion, 11/1/16.”

In a letter this week, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told Kemp the department sourced the mid-November activity in Georgia to a federal contractor conducting what he called “normal” internet searches on the Secretary of State’s website. But Kemp says there’s a problem with that answer.

“We haven’t been able to recreate this the way they explained it to us,” Kemp said.

This is far more disturbing than reports of a DNC hack.