AT AMAZON, Save on High-Speed HDMI Cables.

TYLER O’NEIL: Hey Hollywood, how about some exciting history that isn’t Robin Hood or King Arthur?

The Battle of Kursk would make for an epic war movie, except… who you gonna root for?

FASTER, PLEASE: New HIV vaccine candidate shows promise in animal tests.

SHOCKER: Apolitical Stars Are Biggest Draws.

Nobody wants a lecture with their popcorn.

BRAD TEMPLETON: Flying cars, robocars and more will rewrite the rural landscape, for good and ill.

REMEMBER “DON’T BE EVIL?” WASN’T THAT AWESOME? Google employees sign letter against censored search engine for China.

Google’s plan for returning to China, which is known as Project Dragonfly and would reportedly allow the Chinese government to blacklist certain search terms and control air quality data, has garnered significant backlash internally since it was first reported on in August. More than 1,400 Google employees signed an internal petition criticizing the lack of transparency around the project, and at least one employee resigned in protest.

But Tuesday’s letter, which was initially signed by nine current Google employees, is a bold step for employees of a company that prizes internal transparency but considers leaking information to be not “Googley”. Organizers of the letter said they would continuously update the letter as more employees signed on; by midday there were more than 50 signers.

Good for them. It will be interesting to see if they end up losing their jobs for what is essentially a political expression.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: You Can Sleep With the Latest Sex Robots at This Brothel—But Only if They Say ‘Yes.’

2019 is next year, after all.

OF COURSE THEY DO: NYT Editorial Board Compares Right-Wingers to Jihadists, Demands Censorship Of Social Media.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: What’s the matter with Portland?

Despite it all, their tourism ads are awesome, however:

THAT’S WHAT XHE SAID: Google pulls gender pronouns from Gmail Smart Compose to reduce bias.

Gmail’s Smart Compose can save you valuable time when you’re firing off a quick message, but don’t expect it to refer to people as “him” or “her” — Google is playing it safe on that front. Product leaders have revealed to Reuters that Google removed gender pronouns from Smart Compose’s phrase suggestions after realizing that the AI-guided feature could be biased. When a scientist talked about meeting an investor in January, for example, Gmail offered the follow-up “do you want to meet him” — not considering the possibility that the investor could be a woman.

These are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

SHOCKING OUTCOME: Supreme Court Holds That “Endangered Species Habitat” Must Contain Actual, You Know, Endangered Species. 8-0.

REASON TV: Socialism Leads To Violence.

I THINK IT’S GOOD TO UNDERCUT THE CULTURE OF IMPUNITY AROUND LEFTIST “PROTESTS.” More protests would not surprise Sheriff Thomas Hodgson.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson says it “wouldn’t surprise” him if the protesters who showed up at his home with bullhorns on Thanksgiving come back again — and added they’ll face swift arrest if any legal lines are crossed.

“The minute you violate the law, we’re going to lock you up,” Hodgson said yesterday, a few days after about 20 protesters from the leftist Rhode Island group FANG Collaborative demonstrated against Hodgson’s pro-ICE stance outside his Dartmouth home as he and his family ate their turkey.

Hodgson, an outspoken supporter of President Trump and his immigration policies, said people “have every right” to protest legally. But added that the FANG people are acting “ridiculously,” and should see the full might of the law if they overstep their bounds.

There’s no First Amendment right to trespass, to intimidate, or to commit violence against persons or property.

INDOCTRINATED, NOT EDUCATED: Half of Younger Millennials Think Barack Obama Had a Bigger Impact Than George Washington.

He really was the perfect fit for the Preen Generation.

ROGER KIMBALL: If you don’t believe in borders, should you be deciding US immigration policy?

THE ONLY WAY TO WIN IS NOT TO PLAY: A Conservative’s Survival Guide to the Twitter War.

PAUL RAHE: The Abbottabad Archive And The Silence Of The Chattering Classes.

Earlier this week, Mary Habeck — a military historian whom I first met some twenty-three years ago when she was an assistant professor and I, a visiting professor at Yale — came to Hillsdale to give a talk for our local Alexander Hamilton Society. Over lunch, she told me something that I did not know — which set my mind a-wandering. Just over a year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency posted online nearly all of the materials collected from Osama Bin Laden’s lair by the Navy Seals who effected his demise.

This is no small trove. There are tens of thousands of pages of material, and items in the collection spell out in detail Al Q’aeda’s dealings with the governments of Pakistan and Iran — among others.

That I knew nothing of this is passing strange. I am not a War on Terror obsessive, but I follow the affairs of the Middle East closely, and I read widely. For an historian — indeed, for a journalist or policy wonk — such an archive is invaluable. It allows one to ascertain where previously one could only guess.

And yet . . . when I go to the internet in search of reports concerning what this archive includes and what its contents can tell us about the developments of the last twenty years I find next to nothing. I went to Pravda-on-the-Hudson, I searched, and I found no mention of this material. I did the same on the website of Pravda-on-the-Potomac; and I tried The Wall Street Journal as well; and I found nothing in either paper. It is no wonder that I knew nothing. The only informative article I found in the public prints was a piece by Steve Hayes in The Weekly Standard on the reasons why the release took place.

There was, to be sure, a snippet in USA Today early in November 2017, and CNN mentioned the release at that time, as did ABC, CBS, and US News. Moreover, the Long War Journal did a descriptive piece of some value. But our leading newspapers, such as they are, did nothing. One would have thought that they would have found reporters, versed in Arabic, to go over at least some of the 470,000 documents released. But this they did not do. It is as if no one these days has the resources to do any serious reporting. It is as if no one involved at the editorial level in our leading journals cares a whit.

These days, they have only one mission, and the archive is unlikely to advance it.

WINNING: Trade tensions with the United States blow hole in budget for China’s newest aircraft carrier.

DUE PROCESS: Judge: Professor Had Right to Question Her Accusers. “A professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor disciplined for harassment should have been able to cross-examine her student accusers, a federal judge ruled last week, according to Mlive.com. In a lawsuit, Pamela Smock, the professor, argued that she was unfairly punished with a three-year pay freeze and denial of sabbatical, among other sanctions, after students — whose identities were not disclosed to her — said that she’d behaved inappropriately.”

PENNSYLVANIA: Disgraced Former Attorney General Kathleen Kane Exhausts Appeals, Heads to Jail for Perjury. She’s a Democrat.

[CRICKETS]: Obama Administration’s Border Patrol Shot Pepper Balls At Migrants In 2013.

SUNSHINE: A healthier energy drink? A lot less sugar and caffeine than the ones I’m familiar with.

PRIVACY: DNA-testing company 23andMe has signed a $300 million deal with a drug giant. Here’s how to delete your data if that freaks you out.

If you thought a confidential, $99 DNA test was too good to be true, well, it was.