ASTRONOMY: Alien megastar more hungry than mysterious, scientists say it ate a planet.

You might recall last month’s report about a mysterious star which had “dimmed dramatically multiple times over the past seven years.”

Mystery solved?

Now a more convincing theory about KIC 84622852 suggests the star consumed a planet about 10,000 years ago.

“We propose that the secular dimming behavior is the result of the inspiral of a planetary body or bodies into KIC 8462852,” researchers from Columbia University and UC Berkley said in a new research paper.

If the star did consume a planet, it could explain the unusual light pattern, researchers said.

It would have caused Tabby’s Star to suddenly brighten erratically, especially if a detached moon system from the engulfed planet was still circling the star irregularly blocking its light. The star would show a dimming pattern of light as it returned to normal, the research suggested.

My money is still on an enormous mutant star goat.

HEALTH: Smartwatches Know When You’re Getting Sick Before You Do.

During tests on wearable tech to discover how they could be used in health matters, professor Micheal Snyder noticed the readings showed a higher than usual heart rate, higher skin temperature, and lower blood oxygen levels. The unusual activity was striking because he felt fine. The sudden onset of a low fever convinced him to see a doctor, and he wondered if it was the onset of Lyme disease, having recently spent some time in a rural area where he may have picked it up.

After taking the right antibiotic the symptoms cleared up, and medical tests soon confirmed his diagnosis had been correct. The wearable devices had given him enough pre-warning to catch a potentially very unpleasant disease early on, get the right treatment, and stop it before more serious problems occurred.

Snyder went on to write a paper on the subject, showing that elevated heart rate and skin temperature coincided with sickness in himself and three other people. Monitoring and noting abnormalities in both may help identify and pre-warn the wearer of changes in health.

Paired with smartphone diagnostic apps, and the free market will provide medical cost-savings long promised by Washington’s central planners.

UH-HUH: State Dept. Says It’s Going to Paris Conference to Defend Israel.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry is going to this weekend’s Middle East peace conference in Paris to defend Israel, despite the Obama administration allowing a resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass through the United Nations Security Council.

Kerry is going to Paris for the conference on what will probably be his last foreign trip as secretary of state.

Associated Press reporter Matt Lee asked Toner if Kerry was going to the conference to protect the Jewish state from an anti-Israel conclusion.

“I think we feel obliged to be there, to be part of the discussions, to help make them into something that we believe is constructive and positively oriented towards getting negotiations back up and running and doesn’t attempt to in any way kind of dictate a solution,” Toner said.

We’ll see.

DAVID SATTER: The ‘Trump Report’ Is a Russian Provocation.

The recently released report that asserts that Russian president Vladimir Putin has been “cultivating assisting and supporting Trump” for years and that the Russians have compromising information (kompromat) on him is, I believe, a deliberate Russian provocation. Trump has denounced the report as “fake news” and has even cited Russian denials of the report in his defense. His opponents suggest that the report is credible and are demanding an investigation of the allegations.

In both cases, however, the report is accepted as the product of a private investigation that may or may not have been honest rather than what I believe it to be — a carefully constructed attempt to disrupt American political life for years to come.

Moscow doesn’t need a Manchurian Candidate in the White House, and probably couldn’t get one anyway. But a politically paralyzed “main enemy” gives Putin the freedom of action and near-superpower status his country can’t earn on its own merits.

NICOLE KIDMAN: Support President Trump.

I did not see that coming.

MAD DUCK: Obama Kicks Cuban Refugees In The Teeth But Gives Money To Sanctuary Cities.

WHITTLE, OTT, GREEN: Meryl Streep wins the Golden Globe for Virtue Signalling, and this time there is an actual response. Can the glitterati handle a moving target?

Full Disclosure: I’m Green.

Update: Another gremlin may have infested the YouTube embed, causing the video to play incorrectly for some. Here’s a direct link for you.

DUDE: College Declares ‘You Guys’ to Be Offensive.

STARSHIP TROOPERS: Marines study sci-fi to plan for future battlefield needs.

THE SPY LEFT OUT IN THE COLD: UK PM May says Trump dossier author has not worked for Britain for years.

CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE DAY: Assange offering an extradition deal?

Let’s start with the claim that Assange wants Chelsea Manning pardoned or given clemency and released in exchange for his surrender to authorities in the United States. Isn’t it odd that he’s bringing this up only days after the White House floated a trial balloon suggesting that Manning might be in line for just such a favor in the next few days? For the complete background on that story and its possible implications, read Ed Morrissey’s analysis from Wednesday. Obama ostensibly has political reasons to do it – i.e. tossing a huge bone to the LGBT community on his way out the door – but he also has a serious beef with Wikileaks in general over all of the leaked email brouhaha and Manning is irreversibly tied to Assange. But if Manning were already in line for possible release, what benefit accrues to Assange in exchange for giving himself up?

Unless, of course, this was part of a prepackaged deal. We all found it shocking that Obama would even be considering releasing Manning, LGBT benefits aside, but if there was a possible deal with Assange in the works behind the scenes, was this the reason for the trial balloon? And if so, was Assange worried that the deal was going sour, leading to his decision to blast out the tweet to try to move things along?

Read the whole thing, and remember that anything is possible in the Mad Duck’s final days.

DAN MITCHELL: The Left’s Siren Song of Coerced Equality.

Traditionally, folks on the left favored a conventional welfare state, which revolved around two components.

1. Means-tested programs for the ostensible purpose of alleviating poverty (e.g.., Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, etc).

2. Social-insurance programs for the ostensible purpose of alleviating sickness, unemployment, and aging (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, etc).

This agenda was always a bad idea for both macro and micro reasons, and has become a very bad idea because of demographic changes.

But now the left has expanded its goals to policies that are far more radical. Instead of a well-meaning (albeit misguided) desire to protect people from risk, they now want coerced equality.

And this agenda also has two components.

1. A guaranteed and universal basic income for everyone.

2. Taxes and/or earnings caps to limit the income of the rich.

Taking a closer look at the idea of basic income, there actually is a reasonable argument that the current welfare state is so dysfunctional that it would be better to simply give everyone a check instead.

But as I’ve argued before, this approach would also create an incentive for people to simply live off taxpayers.

The real goal of course isn’t an ever-more generous welfare state, or even “income equality.” The real goal is power — and concentrating it into fewer and fewer hands, all located in Washington, D.C.

I’M NOT OPPOSED TO THIS: You Know What Banks Need? Slot Machines, Miniskirts and Chocolate.

It’s tough being a small-bank operator in Japan. Customers are rapidly aging. Companies are stockpiling cash rather than borrowing. Big Japanese banks are seeking growth in the U.S. and elsewhere, but that’s far beyond the means of smaller banks such as Mr. Tsuchiya’s.
…
To make its ATMs even more fun, OKB gives customers a chance to win cash prizes in slot, roulette, dice and pinball games when they deposit or withdraw money. “We’re not a bank, we’re a service company,” says Mr. Tsuchiya. “If you’re going to go to the bank, it should be fun.”

Among the bank’s other innovations: Women can get loans to finance divorce proceedings, undergo infertility treatments or get plastic surgery.

This seems like exactly the kind of exciting deregulation opportunity President Trump should look into.

SORE LOSER: Holder Vows to Fix ‘Biggest Rigged System in America’

FAKE HATE: Black Teenage Girl Cited for Sending Out Racist, Threatening Tweets.

We don’t get to retire Jon Gabriel’s tweet quite yet.

TRANSPARENCY: Obama’s Science Officer Defies Court, Keeps Private Emails Secret.

A federal appeals court ruled in July 2016 that Holdren must release to a lower magistrate all work-related emails on the account. The emails are being sought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market nonprofit foundation.

White House officials told the court there are no undisclosed work-related emails, but CEI disputes that contention. (RELATED: DOE Does Little To Stop Senior Officials From Using Private Emails)

“CEI contends that OSTP is attempting to re-litigate the issue on which it already lost in the circuit,” CEI said in a statement Wednesday. “Moreover, OSTP’s has provided no reason to believe that Holdren has in fact forwarded all of his relevant private emails.”

Laws are for the little people — at least until January 20.

PRIVACY: Throwing up a peace sign is one of the most dangerous things you can do.

“Just by casually making a peace sign in front of a camera, fingerprints can become widely available,” Isao Echizen, a researcher from NII, told a local Japanese newspaper this week, PhysOrg reports. He also explained that if the lighting is right in a photo, even a smartphone camera could potentially capture enough fingerprint data to recreate a user’s biometric identity.

According to the story, countermeasures are already being developed.

HE WHO TROLLS LAST… When Trump Tweets, the Left’s Outrage Machine Shudders.

Stephen Miller:

The anti-Trump group Grab Your Wallet called for a boycott of L.L. Bean stores, even though the company itself has offered no political position on Trump or anything else for that matter really. This is how it usually starts.

Suddenly, however, the left finds itself somewhat outmatched and ill-equipped, because now they are up against the most powerful pushback tool they’ve ever faced: Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to announce his support for Linda Bean. “Thank you to Linda Bean of L.L.Bean for your great support and courage. People will support you even more now. Buy L.L.Bean,” he wrote.

He also mistakenly included the twitter handle of a lobster restaurant in Maine, thinking it was the LL Bean company hashtag. So they are having a fun day now as well. You can bet a handful of left-wing websites are trying to figure out where the restaurant stands on gay marriage.

Trump is a master at branding. It’s one of the few things he’s managed successfully over the decades. His product launches fail, but the name and the branding carry on, and it carried him to the White House. Republicans in the primaries had no idea how to counter it. Hillary Clinton had no idea how to stop it. Trump knows he can tweet out support of a company, or insult them, and cause their brand to rise in prominence, their stocks to fall in value.

The Obama campaign took his powerful personal brand, wedded it to Big Data, and the result was a permanent political campaign which the GOP never did figure out how to fully counter.

Trump has done something similar, but he runs his permanent campaign more like a guerrilla action — a social media version of Mao’s Long March.

UPDATE (From Glenn): A reader emails: “Just spent >$500 with them online. On stuff I really don’t need. But it felt so good. Haaaaa! Eat that, boycotters!”

Question: When do businesses start deliberately trolling the left to reap the additional business it generates?

OH: Erdogan claims ‘Turkey Is Attacked by Terrorists Using Foreign Exchange Rates to Harm the Country!’

TRANSITION: Trump’s pick for CIA leader says he would refuse to restart enhanced interrogation techniques.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said Thursday he would “absolutely not” comply with any orders from Donald Trump to start using enhanced interrogation techniques again.

During his confirmation hearing, Pompeo told senators that as CIA director, he would not only commit to cross Trump, but that the president-elect would expect him to do so. Trump said during his campaign that he would consider resurrecting interrogation techniques like waterboarding.

“You have my commitment that every day, I will not only speak truth to power, but I will demand that the men and women … who live their life doing that will be willing, able, and follow my instructions to do that each and every day,” Pompeo said.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Your next home security system could deploy patrol drones.

Alarm has developed a machine learning algorithm, called the Insights Engine, that continually monitors sensors placed around your property to learn how things are normally run and to quickly identify unexpected events — say, a break-in or a water leak — when they occur. If the system does spot something out of the ordinary, it will deploy a swarm of autonomous UAVs built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight drone platform to investigate. These little fliers will swarm over the event site and provide live video feeds to your phone. You can also opt in to share that video data with either Alarm.com’s central monitoring facility or directly with emergency responders.

There’s a sitcom scene yet to be written with a sneaky teenager barely making their way back into the house late at night, pursued by security drones.

DAVID HARSANYI: The Comforting Fictions Of Obama’s Farewell Speech.

There was much to process, and many policy claims to debunk, but for me the most grating aspect of the address were the broader fictions Obama likes to repeat.

“When Congress is dysfunctional,” Obama explained, “we should draw our districts to encourage politicians to cater to common sense and not rigid extremes.” For the president, a “dysfunctional” Congress means a Congress unwilling to pass progressive legislation. That is not the definition of dysfunctional, I’m afraid. Nor is it the definition of extreme.

There is nothing in the Constitution instructing legislators to acquiesce to the president. In the near future, the GOP Congress will be passing tons of legislation, and I can assure you neither Obama, nor his many fans in the media, will be celebrating the fact that Congress is finally “getting stuff done” or “doing its job.” Progress will no longer be measured in the number of bills signed.

There’s one metric for a GOP Congress when there’s a Democrat in the White House, and a completely different metric for a GOP Congress with a Republican president.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Flipping A Switch In The Brain Turns Lab Rodents Into Killer Mice.

Willard Stiles could not be reached for comment.

REMEMBER EARLIER THIS WEEK WHEN WE LEARNED THAT TACO BELL CAN BE HEALTHY? Taco Bell is going national with fried chicken taco shell.

PIERS MORGAN: The only hookers in this story are the cheap, lazy journalists who ran with fake Trump sleaze to urinate on his presidency.