NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: I Went to the Opening of Elon Musk’s First Boring Company Tunnel and Here Is What I Found. “Turns out, the ride in Musk’s new tunnel is actually pretty damn cool. A group of us climb into a Tesla X, buckle up, and our driver rolls us into the surprisingly narrow tunnel. We won’t go more than 40 mph, but as the overhead line of lights changes from red to green, and we pick up speed…it becomes obvious that going 150 mph will be, um, awesome. Even at this clip, even with the bumps, the tight tunnel is mesmerizing, almost calming. It feels natural to be zipping in this discrete pod.”

Plus: “Here’s the thing about Musk: The flamethrowers, tweets, the suggestions that our reality might be a simulation—they all garner a ton of attention. But if you want to learn anything from the guy, learn to appreciate his eye for the absurd. Current tunneling technology runs about $2 billion a mile, and even at such cost, you can expect to dig that measly mile in a year. The state of this art is horrendous. So The Boring Company is doing the opposite of rocket science. Digging faster. Digging cheaper. Their newest modified machines tackle the costs of digging with almost ridiculously simple solutions. The engineers buffed the drill. The dirt the machines remove makes the concrete tunnel segments. And by boring and reinforcing the tunnel simultaneously, Musk thinks their custom machine can work 15 times faster than existing boring machines. And do it much cheaper—the 1.14-mile Hawthorne test tunnel cost $10 million.”

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: New snake species discovered in another snake’s belly.

LAW SCHOOLS: Bad for Democracy? This is a leftist critique, but it resonates rather a lot with my The Judiciary’s Class War.

OUT: STREISAND EFFECT. IN: DEAN MARTIN EFFECT. ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ cover by Dean Martin soars to No. 10 amid controversy.

HEH: ‘Oh, no’: The day Trump learned to tweet.

When Trump’s young social media manager saw the tweet, he was perplexed. He typically typed and sent Trump’s tweets for the boss, but in this case he hadn’t. He did recall that Trump had been spending a lot of time in his office lately playing around with a new Android smartphone.

The next morning, the handful of staffers with access to the boss’s account told the social media manager, Justin McConney, that they had not sent it either.

That’s when it dawned on him: Donald Trump had tweeted on his own for the first time.

“The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself was comparable to the moment in ‘Jurassic Park’ when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors,” recalled McConney, who was the Trump Organization’s director of social media from 2011 to 2017. “I was like, ‘Oh no.’ “

What happened next was history: Trump tweeted himself right into the Oval Office. That alone might be enough to explain why the platform has spent the last two years silencing right-leaning voices.

IT SURE LOOKS THAT WAY: Trump Blew His Chances of Building the Wall.

Wait, Now the President Thinks People Are Too Focused on ‘The Wall’?

This morning brings an extremely odd presidential statement that people seem too focused on the wall as a component of border security: “With so much talk about the Wall, people are losing sight of the great job being done on our Southern Border by Border Patrol, ICE and our great Military. Remember the Caravans? Well, they didn’t get through and none are forming or on their way. Border is tight. Fake News silent!”

Eight days ago, this president sat in the Oval Office arguing with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and explicitly and loudly drew a red line over the issue of the border wall. He was not vague, and he did not leave himself wiggle room.

The president was explicit and clear in that televised meeting: without the wall, the border is not really secure.

Now he’s insisting that the “border is tight”?

Everything he said in that meeting was a bluff. Pelosi and Schumer called his bluff. And now Trump has to slink away from the table with a loss and lamely insist that the border wall that was the centerpiece of his campaign wasn’t really needed all along.

I’m not ready to agree with Jim Geraghty’s conclusion in the last paragraph, or at least not yet. Glenn appeared on the money this morning, writing that Trump’s press conference last week made sense “if you figure Trump wants a victory — or even a defeat — on the wall to be a 2020 presidential campaign issue, not a midterm issue.” But today’s messaging is so confusing that it’s impossible to guess what’s really going on with the wall. If Trump is planning on running against the Democratic Congress in 2020, this is no way to get that going.

JOURNALISM:

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Five Terrific Alternative Christmas Movies.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: ‘They Shall Not Grow Old’: Peter Jackson’s Masterpiece War Memorial.

JAMES COMEY, MASTER DETECTIVE: Comey: ‘Who Cares?’ Who Funded Steele Dossier Used to Get FISA Warrants to Surveil Trump Team.

SUNSHINE IS THE BEST DISINFECTANT: Senator Tim Scott Tries to Mandate Reporting of Officer-Involved Shooting Details, Including Race. “The GOP senator named the amendment after Walter Scott, an unarmed black motorist killed fleeing police on April 4, 2015.”

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: We Could Use More Politicians Like Dan Crenshaw.

SPOILER: MUELLER HAS A BIG PROBLEM. Mueller Has a Big Problem If Carter Page Isn’t a Diabolical Spy.

As of now, Carter Page hasn’t been charged with so much as lying to the FBI or filing a faulty tax return, let alone Russian spying. He endured the most intrusive, intimidating methods the government has at its disposal. He was the subject of media leaks. His reputation was destroyed. If he’s never charged with being a Russian spy, he’s either that slippery … or it would suggest that the top intelligence officials who targeted him were either incompetent or corrupt. It would seem to border on criminal.

Lots more from Sharyl Attkisson at the link.

MURPHY’S LAW: China’s ruling Communists crackdown on radical Communist demands. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sees “…students of Communism agitating for the return of labor unions” as a threat to CCP control. The irony alone makes this post worth reading.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Feminist jihad’: Prof who taught ‘Men in Literature’ course still being harassed.

Seems like the Department of Education ought to be investigating this.

CONGO’S DECEMBER ELECTIONS AND YOUR LIFESTYLE: We live in interesting times.

RELATED: Cocktails from Hell, Chapter 6: Congo: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth

PROBABLY BECAUSE OF CAPITALISM: Saturn’s Rings Could Be Gone in Just 100 Million Years.

WHAT A TANGLED PATH THE LEFT WEAVES WHEN IT PRACTICES TO DECEIVE: It’s Thursday and the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Andrew Kerr has new details on how a lefty non-profit sought to cover its tracks regarding the Antifa activities and advocacy of its employee, Joseph Alcoff AKA “Chepe” and “Jose Martin.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: REPORT: Innocent until proven guilty not a sure thing at majority of top schools.

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HE WAS SCREAMING ‘ALlAHU AKBAR’ AS HE SWUNG THE SWORD: But Mohiussunnath Chowdhury claimed he was just kidding about being an ISIS supporter and what he really wanted was for the British police he was attacking to kill him. So the UK jury found him not guilty of attempted terrorism. Robert Spencer has the details.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Will Trump Veto and Much, Much More. “President Trump campaigned on building a big, beautiful wall and it sure looks like he has abandoned that plan. The President is going to have a real problem getting re-elected if he gives up on immigration reform and border safety. Late last night, the Freedom Caucus told the President they would have his back should he veto the border wall-less continuing resolution on offer and approved by the Democrats.”

NO. The Coming Commodification of Life at Home.

I’ve just asked Lowenthal what he, as an advertiser, would be able to do with data transmitted from an internet-connected appliance, and I happened to mention a toaster. He thought through the possibility of an appliance that can detect what it’s being asked to brown: “If I’m toasting rye bread, a bagel company might be interested in knowing that, because they can re-target that household with bagel advertising because they already know it’s a household that eats bread, toasts bread, is open to carbs. Maybe they would also be open to bagels. And then they can probably cross that with credit-card data and know that this is a household that hasn’t bought bagels in the last year. I mean, it’s going to be amazing, from a targeting perspective.”

The thought experiment I put to Lowenthal—the CEO of The Media Kitchen, an advertising consulting firm—wasn’t some far-off hypothetical. Over the past several years, the American home has seen a proliferation of “smart,” or internet-connected, devices and appliances. There are, of course, smart speakers (which roughly a quarter of American homes have) and smart thermostats, as well as smart thermometers, smart mattress covers, smart coffee makers, smart doorbells, and even, yes, smart toasters. After Amazon recently announced the release of a slew of products compatible with its Alexa voice assistant, including a smart microwave and a smart wall clock, an executive for the company said he could imagine “a future with thousands of devices like this.”

I enjoy my Hue light bulbs and Caseta dimmers and blinds — none of which has eyes or ears, and all of which are on a private subnet — but that’s as much automation as I’m willing to tolerate.