SALENA ZITO: The cookie table and the bonds of traditions in America.

I THINK A BERNIE/HILLARY GRUDGE REMATCH IS JUST WHAT THE DEMOCRATS NEED: Sanders eyes ‘bigger’ 2020 bid despite some warning signs.

HMM: “Statins may be overprescribed for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to a modeling analysis of benefits and harm.”

HEADLINES FROM 1968-2018 INCLUSIVE: Pop Culture Clobbered Conservatives in 2018.

EVERYTHING IS RACIST: Calif. University ‘Whiteness’ Panel Claims ‘Veggie Tales’ Is Racist.

Actually, “whiteness panel” does sound kind of racist.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Winter-Testing Cars Is an Isolated Life That Quickly Gets Weird.

AT AMAZON, holiday deals on Bestselling Jewelry.

Plus, browse deals in Industrial and Scientific.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. ‘Die Hard’ Is a Christmas Movie, and Here’s Why.

“Lethal Weapon,” too.

AVENATTI PULLS OUT: Avenatti announces that he will not run for president in 2020. “After traveling to more than 15 states to speak in front of Democratic groups, forming a PAC and launching his first digital political ad, Avenatti was forced to scale back his public activities after the domestic violence arrest, leading some of his most loyal allies to express doubts about his viability.”

THANKS, BRETT KAVANAUGH, FOR GIVING US the new, feisty Orrin Hatch.

GOSNELL FILM IGNORED IN PHILADELPHIA, SCENE OF HIS CRIMES: “The film was released on October 12 but not one Philadelphia-based movie theater had yet booked the film weeks later. Where can Philadelphians go to see the film? To the far suburbs, of course, or into the hinterlands of New Jersey where there doesn’t seem to be film censorship… Because the film is pro-life, it is seen as Public Enemy Number One.”

I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT THIS MYSELF: Why Hospitals Should Let You Sleep.

Here’s what I wrote:

It’s other places where they fall down. Being in the hospital is an exhausting, draining experience even if you aren’t sick. I spent a lot of time, and a couple of nights, there, and I felt like I had been run over by a truck. Imagine how I’d have felt if I had been, you know, a patient with something actually wrong with me.

Sleep interruptions are one problem. The floor below my wife’s housed the sleep-disorder clinic, where they monitor people and try to help them overcome various problems, like sleep apnea, so that they can achieve an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Ironically, it’s probably the only place in the hospital where they let you sleep all night long if you want. My wife was interrupted, on average, about every 90 minutes or so all night long: To have blood drawn, to have vital signs checked, to have her temperature taken, to be given medications (“wake up, it’s time for your sleeping pill” isn’t just a hospital joke) and, most irritatingly, to be weighed.

Now, there are good reasons for a lot of this stuff. Medications have to be given at certain times, temperatures have to be monitored, and so on. Even the weight is important, especially for cardiac patients where fluid balance often matters a lot. (Though not in my wife’s case, as her problems were different.)

But the end result of all of this stuff, especially when it’s spread over the evening, is a huge amount of stress on somebody who’s already under stress from illness. I don’t think that anyone has done the experiment (as has in fact been done with regard to mental hospitals) of hospitalizing some healthy grad students for a couple of weeks and then measuring their condition on discharge, but I’m pretty sure I know what the result would be: Most of them would come out in far worse shape than they were when they entered, even if they managed to avoid other hospital hazards like nosocomial infections or malnutrition from lousy hospital food. And I rather doubt that anyone familiar with hospitals and hospitalization would disagree. That suggests to me that somebody ought to be thinking harder about ways of making the hospital environment more patient-friendly. It’s impossible to make a hospital as stress-free as, say, a spa or a hotel, but it seems to me that with a bit of planning and organization it would be possible to do a lot better than we’re doing now. (And several of the nurses with whom I discussed this problem agreed.) Like the traditional hospital gowns, an awful lot of things seem to be “flimsy, drab, and designed for the practitioner’s convenience rather than for the patient’s comfort.” It’s time for that to change.

More at the link.

CHANGE: Denmark Plans to Isolate Unwanted Migrants on a Small Island.

Denmark plans to house the country’s most unwelcome foreigners in a most unwelcoming place: a tiny, hard-to-reach island that now holds the laboratories, stables and crematory of a center for researching contagious animal diseases.

As if to make the message clearer, one of the two ferries that serve the island is called the Virus.

“They are unwanted in Denmark, and they will feel that,” the immigration minister, Inger Stojberg, wrote on Facebook.

On Friday, the center-right government and the right-wing Danish People’s Party announced an agreement to house as many as 100 people on Lindholm Island — foreigners who have been convicted of crimes but who cannot be returned to their home countries. Many would be rejected asylum seekers.

Expect more of this, as the “Merkel transition” in Europe continues.

FAKE HATE: This again? Another university, another racist note hoax.

WEIRD: Despite innovation, Europeans wait years for new cancer drugs.

BLUE ON BLUE: Meet the Google engineer getting its workers ready to strike. “Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones raised over $100,000 in three hours to support striking workers, then doubled it with her own contribution.”

Fong Jones is consulting with the worker advocacy organization Coworker.org on labor rights and laws, and how to administer the strike fund and a possible strike. But having given an ultimatum to soon leave the company if certain reforms from the first walkout aren’t enacted, she says shouldn’t be the one to plan a strike. Aside from refuting the latest story about Dragonfly, Google has not replied to my questions about a possible strike and how it might respond. Fong-Jones says she hasn’t heard anything, either.

Fong-Jones, a transgender woman, has mainly focused on promoting diversity, inclusion, and tolerance as an internal employee advocate–and eventually, one of 15 whistleblowers who took the story of staff bullying to the press.

When did Silicon Valley become such a hotbed of fear and loathing for the transgendered?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. John Stossel: Google and Facebook Cross ‘The Creepy Line’ (Video).

Related: WATCH: Apple’s CEO Suggests It’s ‘A Sin’ To Not Ban People From Platforms.

More: Another One? Conservatarian mom gets penalized by Twitter but she has no idea why.

To paraphrase the headline of Glenn’s recent USA Today column, is it time for Donald Trump to bust today’s Internet monopolies like Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts of his day?

OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: SecDef Mattis Says “40 years is enough” in Afghanistan.

HMM: Women reluctant to take preventive breast cancer drug, study says. “Further research discovered that almost 30 percent of women believed doctors prescribed excessive amounts of medicines. Nearly 25 percent of the women had bad reactions to prescription drugs. More than 13 percent of the women studied had some concern that prescription drugs were addictive, while about 6 percent thought all drugs are poison and over 3 percent said prescription drugs could do more harm than good. Also, almost 24 percent of the women thought that people who take medication should take a break at some point.”

Sure. Give that insulin a rest.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Note to My Catholic Friends about Hanukkah.

Related: So You Think You Know What Hanukkah Is All About. Think Again.

HERE WE GO AGAIN: Quora data breach exposes 100 million users’ personal info.

CLOSING THE MINESHAFT GAP: Abandoned Coal Mines Could Be Future of Farming.

DO-GOODERS, BUTTINSKIS AFFECTED MOST: 9-year-old boy gets town to overturn ban on snowball fights.