PRIVACY? New York State To Motorists: All Your Info Are Belong To Us.

Beginning next month, all motorists who wish to travel through the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel or Queens Midtown Tunnel in New York City will have no choice but to hand over their location data to the government. Previously it was possible volunteer this information by way of “EZ Pass,” which motorists can purchase and install in their vehicles. However, those who wished not to utilize “EZ Pass” had the option of paying the old fashioned way, by handing over U.S. currency to attendants.

But now New York State is instituting a brand new “innovation” for these various crossings. No longer will there be any option available for those who’d prefer that the government not indiscriminately collect their data. As of January 2017, anyone traveling these bridges and tunnels will be forced forfeit their information by way of “scanning devices” which indiscriminately suck up the license plate information of every vehicle passing through.

Thus decrees King Cuomo II: “Customers who do not pay their tolls are subject to $50 violation fees, car registration suspensions, and other enforcement actions.”

Nanny-statists gotta nanny-state.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: SJWs Bully Steve Martin to Delete ‘Sexist’ Carrie Fisher Tribute.

Related: Cinnabon Caves to PC Police, Deletes Hilarious Carrie Fisher Tribute.

I barely bother with Twitter anymore. This is why.

Heckuva job, Jack.

PREPARING TO BATTLE SKYNET: A South Korean robot similar to the one imagined in the film “Avatar” takes its first steps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re6P7WP2N5w

ANTHONY BOURDAIN: The “utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes” helped elect Trump.

At least he understands he’s chosen the form of his destructor.

Read the full interview with Reason’s Alexander Bisley.

MEDICINE: New Brain Cells Help Fight Cancer.

The treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy, has been used for blood cancers, but its value for solid tumors is unknown. City of Hope has been testing injecting the cells directly into the brain.

First, [50-year-old brain cancer victim Richard] Grady had more surgery to remove three of his largest tumors. Then he got six weekly infusions of the cells through a tube into his brain, where the biggest one had been. No cancer recurred there, but the remaining tumors continued to grow, new ones appeared, and cancer spread to his spine.

Doctors decided on a bold step: placing a second tube in his brain, into a cavity where spinal fluid is made, and putting the cells there.

“The idea was to have the flow of the spinal fluid carry the T cells to different locations,” along the route the cancer had taken, Badie said.

After three treatments, all tumors had shrunk dramatically. After the 10th treatment, “we saw all the tumors disappear,” and Grady was able to cut back on other medicines and return to work, Badie said.

New tumors, though, have now emerged in different spots in his brain and spine, and he is getting radiation treatment. But his response to immunotherapy lasted more than seven months, and “for him to live more than a year and half” after starting it is amazing for a situation where survival often is measured in weeks, Badie said.

Amazing, indeed.

SO VERY VEGAS: Champagne vending machine in Las Vegas is only one of its kind in the United States.

THE LAST DAYS OF BARACK OBAMA: “There will surely be others like him, and that should frighten us more than it does.”

Kevin Williamson:

To be a republican in the 18th century was to be a radical. The American founders were deeply suspicious of pomp and circumstance: It is not mere coincidence that the ban on an official national church (that, and not having a manger scene at city hall, is what “establishment of religion” means) came in the first item on the Bill of Rights. Many republicans of the founding era were so suspicious of religious bureaucracies that it was not a foregone conclusion that the Catholic Church would be tolerated throughout the colonies. (Indeed, for a time it wasn’t.) And they were even more suspicious of the claims of royalty. In the person of the English king, they found a compound of those sources of suspicion: a hereditary monarch who was head of state and church both.

The idea that a large, complex society enjoying English liberty could long endure without the guiding hand of a priest-king was, in 1776, radical. A few decades later, it became ordinary — Americans could not imagine living any other way. The republican manner of American presidents was pronounced: There is a famous story about President Lincoln’s supposedly receiving a European ambassador who was shocked to see him shining his own shoes. The diplomat said that in Europe, a man of Lincoln’s stature would never shine his own shoes. “Whose shoes would he shine?” Lincoln asked.

As American society grows less literate and the state of its moral education declines, the American people grow less able to engage their government as intellectually and morally prepared citizens. We are in the process — late in the process, I’m afraid — of reverting from citizens to subjects.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Foolproof Holiday Cocktails to Help You Ring in 2017.

SO YOU’RE SAYING THAT 2016 IS PRETTY MUCH A NORMAL YEAR:

2016 UNGA Resolutions Against
Israel: 20
Syria: 1
Iran: 1
N Korea: 1
Russia: 1

Seems imbalanced.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 29, 2016

It’s almost as though the U.S. had some special role to play at the U.N., providing balance to an organization filled with oppressor-loving antisemites.

GOOD GOVERNMENT: 3 Albanian elected officials terminated for criminal records.

It would be nice if our own Justice Department looked into criminal matters at least up to Albania’s standard.

KERRY ON ISRAEL: An Alternate Universe.

Amir Cohen:

Kerry’s speech was already going to be drowned out by the global din around United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, which passed in recent days after the U.S. abstained, and which among other things lumped Judaism’s holiest sites in East Jerusalem together with the West Bank and declared all of them occupied Palestinian territory. It has been criticized first, as a diplomatic gambit that detonated the peace process and second, as an abandonment of Israel contrary to decades of U.S. diplomacy aimed at blocking international assaults on the Jewish state.

The resolution presented another rhetorical problem for Kerry: to even get to the parameters he was going to have to get past those two criticisms. He needed to paint a world in which the UNSCR built on the peace process rather than detonated it, and boosted Israel rather than abandoning it.

He did exactly that, but at the cost of whatever relevance the speech might have had left, because the world he painted has very little in common with the one we live in. He couldn’t even craft a single version where everything fell into place, but had to leap from one alternate reality to another. Those who work on the Middle East as it actually exists don’t have anything in the speech for them.

This is perhaps not unexpected from the man who invented huge swaths of his Vietnam service record, then gained domestic fame by comparing his fellow U.S. troops there to Ghenghis Khan.

A LITTLE PIECE OF POLAND, A LITTLE PIECE OF FRANCE: Russia, Turkey, Iran are discussing chopping Syria into zones of influence.

Syria would be divided into informal zones of regional power influence and Bashar al-Assad would remain president for at least a few years under an outline deal between Russia, Turkey and Iran, sources say.

Such a deal, which would allow regional autonomy within a federal structure controlled by Assad’s Alawite sect, is in its infancy, subject to change and would need the buy-in of Assad and the rebels and, eventually, the Gulf states and the United States, sources familiar with Russia’s thinking say.

“There has been a move toward a compromise,” said Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank close to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

“A final deal will be hard, but stances have shifted.”

Assad’s powers would be cut under a deal between the three nations, say several sources. Russia and Turkey would allow him to stay until the next presidential election when he would quit in favor of a less polarizing Alawite candidate.

Makes one think of the Russo-Austro-Prussian partitions of Poland, but without any outright annexations.

This next part is rich:

The talks would be distinct from intermittent U.N.-brokered negotiations and not initially involve the United States.

That has irritated some in Washington.

“So this country that essentially has an economy the size of Spain, that’s Russia, is strutting around and acting like they know what they are doing,” said one U.S. official, who declined to be named because of the subject’s sensitivity.

Well, whose feckless posturing over Syria made that possible, Mr. Anonymous?

FASTER, PLEASE: Donald Trump Considers Moving VA Toward Privatization.

YOU ALL KNOW WHO SHE IS: The 8 Most Memorable Debbie Reynolds Movies.

YA THINK? Relations Between Obama and Netanyahu Have Hit Rock Bottom.

Though they’ve clashed bitterly before, mostly notably over Iran, the two governments seemed farther apart than ever after a speech Wednesday by Secretary of State John Kerry and last week’s United Nations resolution.

The key question for the Obama administration, newly willing to air grievances with Israel on live television, is why now?

My colleague Bill Whittle has compared Obama to Tolkien’s Balrog, lashing its whip at Gandalf in one last act of murderous defiance while falling to its doom.

THE FIX WAS IN: White House On Defense After Being Exposed as Architect of Anti-Israel U.N. Action.

Senior Obama administration officials are scrambling to provide explanations after multiple reports, including in the Washington Free Beacon, identified the White House as being a chief architect of a recent United Nations resolution condemning the state of Israel, according to conversations with multiple former and current U.S. officials.

On the heels of the hotly contested resolution, which condemned Israel for building homes in its capital, Jerusalem, senior Obama administration officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden, have been identified as leading the charge to ensure the anti-Israel measure won approval by the U.N. Security Council.

The administration’s denials of this charge broke down during the past several days as multiple reporters confirmed the Obama administration worked behind-the-scenes to help shape and forward the resolution.

Read the whole thing.

TAKE OFF AND NUKE THE SITE FROM ORBIT: Abolish the Department of Energy.

Peter Grossman:

The DOE was conceived in dark and pessimistic beliefs and forecasts that have proven totally wrong. As Obama might say, the DOE is on the wrong side of history. As it stands the department needs to either be rethought or retired.

The original legislation justified a Department of Energy because, 1) we were rapidly running out of fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas; 2) as a consequence of this we were becoming increasingly dependent on energy imports — dependence that made us vulnerable to embargoes and political blackmail; and 3) so therefore we needed “a strong national [read government-directed] energy program.”

Even before fracking proved the dire warnings to be utterly wrong, we had for the most part taken care of our energy dependence. We significantly reduced any possible vulnerability to an embargo by diversifying our suppliers; over sixty countries were supplying us with oil in the 2000s. Our No. 1 supplier? Canada. Mexico also has been in the top five. This information makes “foreign oil,” a bit less scary, no?

The Department of Energy was created to solve a problem that didn’t exist and protect us from a threat we didn’t need to worry about — so of course it can never be abolished.

FAKE NEWS: For the Obamas, looking cool is part of the job.

Don’t ever change, WaPo.

MAD DUCK: Another 1.5M acre federal land grab.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 2016 Extra ‘Leap Second’ Longer Because Of Ocean Waves.

Don’t forget to set your clocks back.

IMPORTING TERROR: Italy says another 900 migrants rescued off Libya, bringing year’s tally to its ports to 180,300.

As James Wheeler noted on Twitter, that’s exactly how Anis Amri made his way to Europe before killing 12 and injuring 48 others in the Berlin Christmas attack.

A CORPORATION OF ONE: U.S. companies that employ nobody but the owner soar, but some worry it won’t help overall job growth.

The number of businesses classified as manufacturers with no employees has been rising steadily since the depths of the recession. The tiny operations often make food, craft beer, toiletries or other niche products. Their growth stands out in a sector that has been shedding workers for decades.

U.S. food manufacturers with no employee but the owner nearly doubled from 2004 to 2014. One-worker beverage and tobacco makers expanded 150%. Such chemical manufacturers—a category that includes makers of soap and perfume—grew almost 70%.

In all, there were more than 350,000 manufacturing establishments with no employee other than the owner in 2014, up almost 17% from 2004, according to the most recent Commerce Department data. By comparison, there were 292,543 establishments with other employees, down 12%. The shift creates a challenge for building back the number of jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Technology is making it possible for almost anyone to become an entrepreneur, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing?

BREAKING: Syrian Government Announces Truce Backed by Russia and Turkey.

The announcement follows the retaking of all of Aleppo, once Syria’s industrial capital and a stronghold of the opposition, by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, and negotiations in Moscow that involved Mr. Assad’s government, Russia, Iran and Turkey — but, pointedly, not the United States.

Not included in the agreement is the Islamic State, which controls territory in eastern Syria and across the border with Iraq; the Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, which is strongest in the country’s northwest; and “groups linked to them.”

It was not clear which of the scores of rebel groups scattered across Syria had agreed to the cease-fire, nor whether those that had not been consulted would abide by it. Throughout the war, rebel forces have failed to form a united leadership, and infighting among groups has been common.

It was also unclear what criteria the Syrian military and its Russian allies would use to define groups “linked” to the jihadists. In the past, they have dismissed much of the armed opposition as “terrorists” who could not be distinguished from jihadist groups.

The fighting ain’t over yet.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Obamacare Didn’t Fail Because It’s Timid.

Judging from my interactions with readers and my friends and family who don’t happen to spend their days marinating in health-care policy, the view that Obamacare’s problems are due to Democrats not being sufficiently left-wing, or dishonest, is pretty common on the left. That makes it worth refuting, because — with all due respect to Kevin [Drum] — it’s completely wrong.

I agree that higher subsidies and a stronger mandate would have made Obamacare less of a policy train wreck; we probably wouldn’t be so worried about a death spiral if they had passed. On the other hand, it would have made the program much more of a fiscal train wreck. Kevin suggests that they should have just raised taxes on the rich, but for reference, the total repeal of the Bush tax cuts was projected to raise only about two-thirds of the amount needed. And since they were projected to expire, that was not a source of revenue that Democrats could use to fund Obamacare.

Funding this extra entitlement by tapping the rich would have been, to put it mildly, unpopular with an important part of the Democratic base: urban professionals. They would have, in the course of a few years, seen about 10 percent of their gross income, and a considerably larger fraction of their take-home pay, vanish. Nor would they be excited when politicians came back to them for even more money to pay for little incidentals like our growing entitlement gap.

Nor, as Kevin suggests, could Democrats have simply hand-waved the cost away.

ObamaCare locked in the insurance-for-everything model, while adding on layer after layer of bureaucratic complexity on top of 51 uncompetitive insurance fiefdoms — then sold in part on “cost savings.”

It was never going to work, but even many of ObamaCare’s critics were surprise by how quickly that became apparent.

THE QUESTION IS: WHY? German anti-terror services ‘ranked Amri a low threat’

Counter-terrorism officials have a detailed file on Amri, they knew he was tightly linked to Germany’s radical Islamist network and had looked up instructions online on how to build pipe bombs, the newspaper reported.

The latest version of their file on Amri, which included information on his eight different identities, was updated on December 14 — just five days before he allegedly killed 12 people in the Berlin attack.

Duesseldorf police deemed Amri a Salafist and radical fundamentalist, while Dortmund police had rated him a sympathiser of the Islamic State group.

Amri had been a regular guest at a religious school in a Dortmund apartment run by a notorious radical known as Boban S. that was believed to be a recruitment ground for jihadists.

Nevertheless, on an eight-point scale assessing an individual’s potential danger, with “one” the highest threat, counter-terrorism experts rated him a “five” — meaning they considered an attack possible but unlikely.

Amri’s file was filled with red flags, and Moroccan intel had warned Germany twice about him.