YOU’RE GONNA NEED A RICHER INVESTOR: Many vegans want to destroy the modern food system. Investor Chris Kerr wants to use it to take plant-based products mainstream.

HMM: Veterinarians Face Disproportionately High Suicide Rates, Study Says.

John Ellis noted here a couple days ago that suicide rates are shockingly high for members of the media, too.

IT’S A MADHOUSE, A MADHOUSE! Perez nixes ‘undercard’ debates for 2020 primary.

With the prospect of upward of 20 Democrats running for president in 2020, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez announced on Thursday that the party would split up candidates by random selection and host debates on consecutive nights if there were too many candidates.

The decision will allow the DNC to avoid attempting to fit the expected bumper crop of candidates on one stage or sorting debate appearance by polling numbers.

Perez said he didn’t want any voters to feel that the party was toying with the debate or debate schedule to help out certain candidates. “The critical imperative is making sure everyone feels their candidate got a fair shot,” Perez said. He said the logistics of dealing with so many candidates is a “first-class challenge to have.” The committee did not say how many candidates constituted too many for one stage.

Putting the fringe candidates in with the more mainstream contenders (I’m being generous with the word “mainstream”) might exacerbate something I wrote about here yesterday: “Primary election pandering to small groups of niche — and I do mean niche — voters could end up being a real turn-off for the Obama-to-Trump voters who decided the last election.”

NO OTHER REASON IS NECESSARY: U.S. Cites Sovereignty as One of 5 Countries to Vote Against UN Migration Compact.

21ST CENTURY WORKPLACE ISSUES: Surprise DNA Results Are Turning Customer-Service Reps Into Therapists. “How do you tell someone that her brother is not her brother?”

TONI AIRAKSINEN: Big Tech Censorship of Hate Speech May Cause Violence, Warns Terrorism Expert.

SOMEBODY’S GOING TO GET SUED: Syracuse Cops Force Doctors to Probe a Man’s Rectum for Drugs, Then Bill the Man For It.

According to the story, Jackson was arrested after a pretextual traffic stop where officers found a baggie of marijuana and detected cocaine residue on his car seat.

Jackson has a long rap sheet and was combative with police in jail, but the encounter crossed into dubious ethical and legal territory when police compelled doctors to perform a medical procedure they saw as unnecessary.

Previous cases like this have resulted in police and hospitals paying out huge amounts of money to settle lawsuits.

Jackson was clearly trouble, resisting and taunting the police, but: “At least two doctors resisted the police request. An X-ray already had indicated no drugs. They saw no medical need to perform an invasive procedure on someone against his will.”

I wonder why the doctors gave in, and just how much the city will have to pay out to settle.

CHANGE: MSNBC Winning December in Primetime With Most Viewers Overall and Demo.

It’s far too early to say “Get woke, go broke” about Fox News, but it’s past the time when people noticed that Fox has been working hard on occasion to alienate its core viewers.

BORING: Elon Musk and Gayle King test drive the tunnel he hopes will solve L.A. traffic.

“Unless we can make tunnel digging at least 10 times cheaper, then digging tunnels will not be an effective means of alleviating traffic. It’ll just cost too much,” Musk said.

Musk’s vision depends on him being able to do it all faster and cheaper than current industry standards. While modern subway tunnels in Los Angeles cost around $900 million per mile, he says he built his for about $10 million. One way he saved money: he literally made it dirt-cheap.

“When digging tunnels…it’s quite expensive to have all this dirt trucked off somewhere. And we’re like, well, why don’t we try to use that dirt for something useful? So we are creating bricks on-site…and you can pick ’em up for, they’re very cheap; 10 cents a brick,” he said.

That’s quite clever, but this is brilliant:

At only 12 feet in diameter, it’s much more claustrophobic than most transportation tunnels. According to Musk, cars will be able to travel up to 150 mph in the tunnel but must be on autopilot.

“Because the autopilot has radar and cameras that will automatically slow you down before you impact another car…you would only be allowed to go through the tunnel on autopilot,” Musk said.

As tech blogger Dave Mark noted, “Only properly outfitted cars will be allowed in these tunnels. Someone who can build such cars efficiently can make a lot of money.”

Someone like Elon Musk.

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES: Women sending love letters to convicted killer Chris Watts.

CORN, POPPED: Prepare for a Long, Chaotic Presidential Primary Fight.

Josh Kraushaar has six big bullet points, but I found the second one the most interesting:

With a massive field, candidates will play to niche constituencies at the expense of a national message. Without a juggernaut in the field and a limited pool of financial resources, many candidates will focus on their strengths and limit their scope to a handful of favorable states. So Cory Booker could skip Iowa and New Hampshire to make a bet on the African-American vote in South Carolina, Kamala Harris could make a home-state play in California, and a blue-collar candidate (like Sherrod Brown) may decide it’s worth waiting until March 10 to make a Midwestern pitch for Michigan and Ohio. Candidates trying to win a narrow niche of the electorate usually are unsuccessful, but the dynamic will be different with such a large field.

Primary election pandering to small groups of niche — and I do mean niche — voters could end up being a real turn-off for the Obama-to-Trump voters who decided the last election.

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

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.

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

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.”

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.

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

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.

IF IT FEELS GOOD, TAX IT: Federal Judge Strikes Down New York Tax on Opioid Industry.

A federal judge struck down Wednesday a New York law that aimed to collect $600 million from the pharmaceutical industry to help combat the opioid crisis, a ruling that could shape opioid legislation being weighed in other states.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla in Manhattan called the novel law an unconstitutional regulatory penalty on the makers and distributors of opioid painkillers, even as she acknowledged the validity of trying to legislate a solution to the epidemic gripping the nation.

The ruling comes days before a deadline set by New York’s health department to pay the first installment of the levy. Under the Opioid Stewardship Act, $100 million was set to be collectively paid each year for six years by companies that sold or distributed opioids in the state. The first round of bills, retroactive to 2017, were sent to 75 companies and their subsidiaries in November.

This country has a real opioid problem, but this “tax” like nothing more than an attempting mugging by Albany.

PRIVACY: How Facebook sneakily uses IP data & more for targeted ads, even if users disable all location settings.

Aleksandra Korolova, a University of Southern California computer science professor, has shared a post on Medium diving deeper into Facebook’s targeted ad technology. Specifically, Korolova focuses on how Facebook is able to deliver location-based ads even if you disable location services.

Korolova says that she has the Location History functionality disabled through Facebook’s website, and has Location Services for Facebook on iOS set to “Never.” She adds that her Facebook profile does not contain her current city, nor has she uploaded photos to Facebook or posted content tagged with her location. Korolova says she also doesn’t share location with WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Manager.

Despite this, however, she says she continued to see ads targeted for “people who live near Santa Monica” and “People who live or were recently near Los Angeles.” Korolova lives in Santa Monica and works in Los Angeles. Further, some of the ads were accompanied by an explanation saying Korolova was “recently near their business.”

With all of this in mind, Korolova dug deeper into how Facebook gathers location data for its targeted advertising. In Facebook’s “How Facebook ads work” explainer, the company says it gathers data from sources including “Where you connect to the Internet” and “Where you use your phone.”

Plus: Facebook collects user data from apps like Tinder, OKCupid and others.

Yesterday: Amazon and Facebook Reportedly Had a Secret Data-Sharing Agreement, and It Explains So Much.

And a rhetorical question: Why Should Anyone Believe Facebook Anymore?

POLITICS: Republicans slam Trump over plan to withdraw troops from Syria.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close Trump ally, said it would be an “Obama-like mistake” to remove American troops. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., called it a “grave error” and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Trump’s declaration that ISIS has been defeated is “simply not true.”

“An American withdrawal at this time would be a big win for ISIS, Iran, Bashar al Assad of Syria, and Russia,” Graham said in a statement. “I fear it will lead to devastating consequences for our nation, the region, and throughout the world.”

Earlier in the day, two senior defense officials and a third person familiar with the plan told NBC News that the U.S. is preparing to withdraw a significant number of the roughly 2,000 troops that remain in Syria.

Trump has been telegraphing the move for most of the past year at campaign rallies and in other venues.

“We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS,” he said in March. “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.”

The only interest the US has in Syria is keeping the terrorist threat to us down, and if we can do that without boots on the ground, that would be great. Keeping Iran in check is more of an Israeli/Saudi interest, and their de facto alliance works well enough.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’m pretty agnostic on Syria, as noted below, but this is hard to argue with:

CHANGE: Navy To Begin Arming Subs With Ship-Killer Missile. “It’s a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes.”

The effort to bring a modernized Harpoon back to the submarine fleet coincides with the delivery of the first Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM) to operational Air Force units, a delivery announced Dec. 18. The precision-guided missile is designed to detect and destroy specific targets operating within groups of ships by identifying the target using links to drones or aircraft. An air-launched variant has been successfully tested aboard the Air Force’s B-1 bomber on a number of occasions, and it’s on schedule to achieve early operational capability on the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet in 2019. Contractor Lockheed Martin has also test-fired LRASM from the same Vertical Launch System tubes used on Navy cruisers and destroyers.

Over the last handful of years, the Pentagon has made a concerted effort to get its ship-killing ability back, first under Obama’s last Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his deputy Bob Work — part of what they called the Third Offset Strategy — and under Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, whose focus on “lethality” picked up the offset effort under a new tagline.

Good.

JOHN ELLIS: Meet the Left-Wing Troll Who Creates Fake News to Expose Conservative ‘Stupidity.’ “‘Say what you want about me being a monster. I’m pretty proud,’ Christopher Blair said.”