COOLING OFF PERIOD: The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare.

Start with the EPA. To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with “science,” EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy. In fact, under Obama, EPA’s principal role on the “science” has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming orthodoxy. For example, when a major new Research Report came out back in September claiming to completely invalidate all of the bases on which EPA claims that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare, and thus to undermine EPA’s authority to regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act, EPA simply failed to respond. In the same vein, essentially all prominent global warming alarmists refuse to debate anyone who challenges any aspect of their orthodoxy. Well, that has worked as long as they and their allies have controlled all of the agencies and all of the money. Now, it will suddenly be put up or shut up. And in case you might think that the science on this issue is “settled,” so no problem, you might enjoy this recent round-up at Climate Depot from some of the actual top scientists. A couple of excerpts:

Renowned Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson: ‘I’m 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side. ‘ . . .

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘Global warming is a non-problem’ – ‘I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.’

Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years.

Read the whole thing.

The real “problem” of course is that Trump fights like a Democrat, and the climate justice warriors infesting the EPA are incapable of countering their own tactics.

TO SERVE AND PROTECT: Indiana Town’s Entire Police Force Quits, Citing Requests to ‘Do Illegal, Unethical and Immoral Things’

THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Evernote backs off from privacy policy changes, says it ‘messed up’

The changes to the privacy policy were to come into effect on Jan. 23.

By late Thursday, however, O’Neill was taking measures to fix the crisis caused by the proposed policy change. “We announced a change to our privacy policy that made it seem like we didn’t care about the privacy of our customers or their notes. This was not our intent, and our customers let us know that we messed up, in no uncertain terms. We heard them, and we’re taking immediate action to fix it,” he said in a statement.

The Redwood City, Calif., company will make machine learning technologies available to its users, but employees will be not be reading note content unless users opt in, Evernote said in a blog post.

Good.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN? Facebook now flags and down-ranks fake news with help from outside fact checkers.

“We’re not looking to get into the grey area of opinion,” Facebook’s VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri tells me. “What we are focusing on with this work is specifically the worst of the work — clear hoaxes that were shared intentionally, usually by spammers, for financial gain.”

And who is to be entrusted with sorting the real news from the fake?

“Snopes, FactCheck.org, Politifact, ABC News, and AP.”

This should be fun.

SEATTLE CORNERBACK RICHARD SHERMAN: “Why I Hate Thursday Night Football,” calls it a “poopfest.”

Thursday

Game day. This is what you live for. But this time, your body isn’t ready. You’re still sore from Sunday’s game. You’re going to go out there and compete and give everything you have, because that’s what you do. But your body just won’t have as much to give as it would have had on a full week’s rest.

That’s why the quality of play has been so poor on Thursday nights this season. We’ve seen blowouts, sloppy play and games that have been almost unwatchable — and it’s not the players’ faults. Their bodies just aren’t ready to play. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Cowboys-Vikings game a couple of weeks ago was the best TNF game we’ve seen this season. You know why?

Because they both played on Thanksgiving the week before, so they each had a full week off.

Thursday Night Football is just another example of the NFL’s hypocrisy: The league will continue a practice that diminishes the on-field product and endangers its players, but as long as the dollars keep rolling in, it couldn’t care less.

Maybe the NFL’s social justice warrior stuff is just a cover for how badly the league treats its players.

DOESN’T EVERYTHING? Does Cajun music really get better after beer?

HUFFPO: North Carolina Republicans Lost An Election, So Now They’re Trying To Undermine The Results.

Who do they think they are — Democrats?

LUIS AND THE REAL GIRL: Lawmaker’s Inflatable Sex Doll Gift Sparks Outrage.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND OBAMACARE STATISTICS: It’s Not True ObamaCare Insures 20 Million.

The Department of Health and Human Services claims that 20 million people have gained health coverage since the enactment of Obamacare in 2010 through early 2016.

Of those people, 2.3 million are said to be young adults (ages 19 to 25) that gained coverage between 2010 and 2013 as a result of the Obamacare provision allowing them to stay on their parents’ plan until age 26.

The remaining 17.7 million people gained health insurance from Obamacare’s first open enrollment period between October 2013 and early 2016.

However, it is important to note that the administration’s coverage estimates are based on survey data rather than calculating the actual change in coverage in different markets. Though surveys can provide useful information, they are not as precise as using enrollment data taken directly from insurance companies.

A recent analysis by The Heritage Foundation’s Edmund Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski uses the more accurate method, taking actual enrollment data from Medicaid and private insurance companies to assess the impact Obamacare has had on coverage.

The researchers found that just over 14 million people gained coverage from the end of 2013 to the end of 2015. Of those 14 million, 11.8 million gained their insurance through Medicaid and 2.2 million through private coverage.

ObamaCare was sold in part as the only way to “save” private insurance, when it fact its only real success was massively expanding the welfare state.

HEALTH: Genos Will Sequence Your Genes — And Help You Sell Them to Science.

AND THIS IS JUST THE TRANSITION: Taiwan Is Both Exhilarated and Unnerved by Trump’s China Remarks.

The president-elect stunned the world on Sunday by suggesting he might abandon the One China principle, the bedrock understanding under which the United States established relations with Beijing and cut official ties with Taiwan nearly four decades ago. His apparent willingness to rethink longstanding American policy that prioritizes China over Taiwan has energized Mr. Lin, 28, and many like him. But it has also left them anxious, and asking:

What does it mean for one’s homeland to be put on the table by Mr. Trump, an inveterate deal maker, in negotiations with China’s Communist leaders, who are not known for making concessions easily?

“Many people in Taiwan worry that once Trump takes office, he’ll make a U-turn,” Mr. Lin said. “We are suspicious of his motivations.”

There’s been a lot of that since Trump entered the race more than a year ago — some fair, some not. But if nothing else, Trump’s presidency promises to be exhilarating, and he’s already unnerved all the right people.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Malls should just name their public Wi-Fi networks “Danger” and be done with it.

Evan Robertson won his school science fair this year by proving just how thoughtless people can be on public Wi-Fi networks.

Evan, now 11, programmed fake Wi-Fi portals and took them to food courts shopping centers across the Austin, Texas, area and waited to see how many agreed to some pretty outrageous conditions. For the love of free internet access, they’d have to give their OK for the Wi-Fi owner to do things like “reading and responding to your emails, monitoring of input and/or output, and ‘bricking’ of your device.”

More than half of the shoppers shown these terms accepted them.

Attention holiday shoppers: public Wi-Fi networks are dangerous, especially during the Christmas season when so many people in one spot make for easy pickings, says Don Duncan, a security engineer with NuData Security.

Read the whole thing, which includes useful advice on how to stay wireless and safe during the holidays.

VIDEO: Tucker Twofer Tonight: One Heavy, One Light.

Maybe it’s just this lame season of The Walking Dead, but Tucker Carlson has become the best thing on TV.

THE SAME WAY THE AMERICAN LEFT DID: How Europe’s left lost the working class.

OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Now There Are Calls for Consent Before Kids Receive Hugs and Kisses from Grandma.

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

TERRORISM. EgyptAir crash: Explosives found on victims, say investigators.

A criminal investigation would now begin into the crash of the Airbus A320, Egypt’s civil aviation ministry said in a statement.

Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo plunged into the sea on 19 May killing all 66 people on board.

The cause of the crash has remained unclear.

No distress call was made beforehand but the cockpit voice recorder revealed the pilots had fought to put out a fire.

Automated electronic messages sent out by the plane showed smoke detectors going off in a toilet and in the avionics area below the cockpit, minutes before the plane vanished.

Recovered wreckage showed signs of damage caused by high temperature and there was soot on the jet’s front section.

It seems odd that no one has claimed responsibility.

CHANGE: FCC chairman to step down, handing GOP majority.

Ideally, the FCC would be stripped down to little more than a clearing house for the sale and allocation of useful radio frequencies.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? What Happens in Vegas, Stays in the Cloud: Wynn to Place an Amazon Echo in Every Room.

I’ll be at The Palazzo.

PRIVACY: Evernote’s privacy policy allows its employees to read your notes, and you can’t opt out.

Evernote’s CEO, Chris O’Neill, has responded to yesterday’s reports about the company’s privacy policy. His response both affirms and clarifies what was stated in our post above.

We recently announced an update to Evernote’s privacy policy that we communicated poorly, and it resulted in some understandable confusion. We’ve heard your concerns, and we apologize for any angst we may have caused. In response to the questions you’ve raised, let me be clear about what’s not changing and what is changing.

O’Neill goes on to explain that Evernote employees do not view the content of user notes except in very limited cases, such as where required by the law, troubleshooting, etc. The number of employees who are authorized to view this content is extremely limited by Evernote’s existing policies, and the CEO is personally involved in defining them. From this, users will not have the option of opting out of, and it’s been this way well prior to the recent privacy policy update.

What is changing, as O’Neill notes, is what we explained in our original post. Customers that opt in to machine learning may have their data viewed by Evernote employees to ensure that the features are working properly. However, O’Neill does clarify how this data will be accessed, and whether or not it is personally identifiable:

If you choose to participate in these experimental features, you’ll enjoy a more personalized experience. Select Evernote employees may see random content to ensure the features are working properly but they won’t know who it belongs to. They’ll only see the snippet they’re checking. Not only that, but if a machine identifies any personal information, it will mask it from the employee.

These are key details that were not properly explained in the initial update to the privacy policy, and it resulted in the outrage that we saw yesterday.

There would seem to be both plusses and minuses to Evernote’s terms of service, and it’s best that you know — stripped of the hype — exactly what you’re agreeing to.

ASIA PIVOT: South China Sea Artificial Islands Have Weapons Installed.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report late Wednesday that the anti-aircraft guns and close-in weapons systems designed to guard against missile attack have been placed on all seven of China’s newly created islands.

The outposts were built in recent years by piling sand on top of coral reefs followed by the construction of military grade 10,000-foot airstrips, barracks, lighthouses radar stations and other infrastructure.

CSIS based its conclusions on satellite images taken of the islands in mid-to-late November and published on the website of its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which has been tracking construction of hexagonal structures on Fiery Cross, Mischief and Subi reefs in the Spratly Islands since June and July.

China is engaging in the oceanic version of salami tactics, and they’ve already succeeded in slicing off The Philippines.

WELL, GOOD: Netanyahu and Sisi Building Strong Security Ties.

Israeli-Egyptian security cooperation happens behind closed doors through very sensitive channels. So much of our analysis of the operational aspects can only be inferred indirectly. The shape of this cooperation is governed by the terms of the 1979 peace treaty, which sets out limits on the scope of Egyptian military operations in the Sinai and creates demilitarized areas within it. The fact that Egypt has had as much latitude as it has in fighting the Islamic State and other groups in the Sinai without drawing Israeli’s ire, speaks volumes to the level of coordination that is presumably happening behind the scenes. We can assume based on those kinds of data points that it’s probably quite significant, given both countries’ shared animosity towards Hamas and ISIS, as well as other actors operating in the Sinai and the Gaza Strip.

Set aside the religious rivalry for a moment, and you’re left with the Middle East’s two most ancient and enduring cultures, and two neighbors with complementary security needs.

OR MOST ANYTHING ELSE: Desperate Democrats would subvert the Constitution to deny Donald Trump the Oval Office.

PEAK VOX:

lol: a double-bank shot Voxplainer. pic.twitter.com/9l6adYE7ZW

— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) December 15, 2016

I’m kidding, of course. It seems obvious that the kids at Vox still have a ways to go over the next four-to-eight years before they find the bottom of the deep end.

DHS CHIEF: ‘No Evidence That Hacking by Any Actor Altered the Ballot Count’

What’s a little fake news to overturn an election among friends of the Left?

HMM: Trump transition says request for names of climate scientists was ‘not authorized’

The Trump transition team appeared to back away from a controversial questionnaire sent to the Energy Department last week that had asked for the names of department staffers who had worked on several climate-change initiatives under President Obama.

“The questionnaire was not authorized or part of our standard protocol,” Trump’s transition team said in a statement to The Washington Post. “The person who sent it has been properly counseled.”

I’d like to know exactly what “properly counseled” entails before drawing any conclusions.