Freezing, Blustery Southern California Weather (VIDEO)

This is new, these "hard freeze" warnings.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Mitt Romney Interview with CNN's Jake Tapper (VIDEO)

Folks are pretty pissed off at Romney, who hasn't even been sworn in yet.

He had an op-ed up at WaPo yesterday, supposedly "scorching" President Trump. Maybe if Romney "scorched" the Democrats like he scorches Trump people wouldn't be so angry?

See, "Mitt Romney: The president shapes the public character of the nation."

Policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency. A president must also unite us, inspire us, and defend our vital institutions. https://t.co/jmIw8XbV4k

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) January 2, 2019

And at CNN tonight (I watched it):

Spending Less Time on Twitter

I generally don't make New Year's resolutions, because like most everybody else, I can't keep them.

I should try, though, to spend less time on Twitter.

The problem is that I really do use the platform as my primary source of news.

It's weird, but it's almost like reading the newspaper in the morning used to be (in the old days, especially before the web). I wake up and grab my phone, which might be 7 or 8 in the morning, but by then it's almost Noon in D.C., the center of all political happenings. I follow a lot of journalists, and all their tweets of current news get me caught up with the big stories.

Frankly, breaking news is on the platform. Happens all the time.

So, how do I break up with Twitter, at least a little bit, when I need some outlet for current, breaking news? I need news as part of my job, as part of my professional life as a professor of political science.

How do I break up, like Allie Beth Stuckey pledges she'll break up in 2019?

My goal for 2019 is to spend less time on this cesspool of a website.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) January 1, 2019

It's hard.

I haven't mentioned it, but I was locked out of Twitter for 12 hours last month because I tweeted Robert Stacy McCain's post stating "Jonathan Yaniv is Not a Woman."

(See also, Julie Bindel, "Meghan Murphy, Twitter and the new trans misogyny.")

It's ridiculous.

Not only is Twitter a hate dumb, it's an Orwellian thought-crimes nightmare of Silicon Valley tech-sector censorship.

I would say, "Who needs it?"

But I do, otherwise I'd have bailed out long ago.

In any case, I will be limiting my time on Twitter as much as I can.

If anything I should be blogging more, putting up more original essays and linking to the considerable amount of really excellent old school blogging content that's still out there.

I'll try to do that.

Thanks for reading for the new year, 2019!

I'll of course be posting a lot on books and my Amazon sales, because it's fun. But I want to do more old fashioned blogging, with original content and really excellent link-arounds.

More later.

Thanks again!

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name

At Amazon, Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won't Tell

Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

*BUMPED.*I

'm just seeing that this book is something of a collector's item.

An older used Bantam paperback is going for more than a brand new Penguin classics edition.

At Amazon, the Bantam paperback, Graham Greene, The Quiet American.

And the Penguin classic is here.

Joachim Fest, Hitler

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Joachim C. Fest, Hitler.

Amid Shutdown, Toilets Overflow at Joshua Tree National Monument

The Los Angeles Times had a piece the other day touting the free admission to Joshua Tree, and now, not so much.

See, "Amid government shutdown, Joshua Tree campgrounds will close as toilets near capacity":

At Joshua Tree, the fun is over. Blame the federal government shutdown - and feces. https://t.co/9NPAbn9RQr

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 31, 2018

The fun is over at Joshua Tree National Park. Blame feces.

Campgrounds at the park will close at noon Wednesday, park officials said, citing health and safety concerns over the park’s vault toilets, which are near capacity.

Park visitor centers, flush toilets, water-filling stations and dump stations are all closed because of the federal government’s partial shutdown. Vault toilets — the waterless bathrooms in which visitors can relieve themselves into a sealed container that is buried underground — had remained open. But with no workers to pump out the waste, those are being closed now as well.

But the park left the main gates open and let cars stream in for free, as there are no government employees to charge the typical $30-a-car entrance fee.

Some rangers remained to patrol the 1,235-square-mile park, a popular winter destination for hikers and rock climbers.

Park officials said Monday in a news release that human waste in public areas, off-road driving and other infractions are becoming a problem as the government shutdown drags on.

The park’s restrooms and visitor centers have been closed and trash collection suspended since the partial shutdown began Dec. 22, but the park itself remains open.

At Joshua Tree, the Indian Cove and Black Rock campgrounds will be open for day use only, from sunrise to sunset. Rattlesnake Canyon will be closed to reduce the number of search and rescue events for rangers already spread thin, park officials said.

Some local volunteers have been doing their part to clean up the park and restock toilets.

“I want to extend a sincere thanks to local businesses, volunteer groups and tribal members who have done their best to assist in picking up litter and helping maintain campgrounds,” park Supt. David Smith said in a statement. “This is no reflection on their efforts and the park is very fortunate to have a community that exhibits the kind of care and concern witnessed over the last week.”

The lack of restrooms has been an issue at other national parks as well.

Yosemite National Park visitors using the side of the road as a toilet have prompted the park to close two campgrounds and a popular redwood grove for public safety reasons.

The park’s restrooms and visitor centers have been closed and trash collection suspended since the shutdown began, but the park itself remains open...

More.

Out in Paper: Neal Stephenson, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Neal Stephenson, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel.

Mackenzie Maynard's Wednesday Forecast

It's really cold.

I'm visiting in Yucca Valley and it's been in the 30s in the daytime, sheesh.

Here's the lovely new lady, Ms. Mackenzie, at ABC News 10 San Diego:

Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America

At Amazon, Sarah Churchwell, Behold, America: The Entangled History of 'America First' and 'the American Dream'.

President Trump Still Committed to Syria Withdrawal

At LAT, "Trump still committed to Syria troop withdrawal, despite mixed signals":

Lindsey Graham outlined three conditions he said Trump had set down for a full withdrawal:
-permanent destruction of the Islamic State militants
-protection for Syria’s Kurds
-curbs on Iran
Those requirements would be extremely difficult to meet. https://t.co/eqnQGgtJ1I

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 1, 2019

President Trump’s already confusing policies toward Syria have become even more difficult to parse, both in Washington and in the region convulsed by nearly eight years of civil war, after a flurry of contradictory statements over the last 72 hours.

On Sunday, Trump met with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a vocal critic of the president’s plan to pull troops out of Syria. After the meeting, Graham said he “felt a lot better” about the situation, describing the withdrawal plan as being “in a pause situation.”

Graham later outlined three conditions he said Trump had set down for a full withdrawal: permanent destruction of the Islamic State militants; protection for Syria’s Kurds, whose militias have been the main U.S. ally in the fight against Islamic State; and curbs on Iran. Those requirements would be extremely difficult to meet.

On Monday, Trump tweeted praise for himself, claiming he should be getting more plaudits for the decision to pull out — a move that has spooked Republican foreign policy hawks and prompted Defense Secretary James N. Mattis’ sudden resignation.

In his tweets, the president alluded for the first time to a timetable that could be slower than the 30-day withdrawal he first suggested.

“If anybody but Donald Trump did what I did in Syria, which was an ISIS loaded mess when I became President, they would be a national hero,” Trump wrote, referring to Islamic State.

“ISIS is mostly gone, we’re slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants......”

According to multiple administration officials, however, neither Graham’s comments nor Trump’s tweet mean that the president is abandoning his plan to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria.

What remains unsettled is how and when the withdrawal will take place, matters that national security advisor John R. Bolton will take up with the leaders of Israel and Turkey when he travels to the region for meetings this week. The administration’s special representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, is scheduled to accompany Bolton.

In the region, meanwhile, all the warring factions already have begun repositioning themselves for a Syria without the United States — while keeping an eye on the mixed signals from Washington.

Iran, which sees Syria as a crucial link to its allies in Lebanon, stands to gain from having U.S. forces out of the area. Its officials expressed satisfaction with Trump’s move.

A U.S. withdrawal will lead to “strengthening stability in the region,” Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, the Iranian armed forces chief of staff, said.

“America's withdrawal from Syrian territories is a humiliating retreat for Washington, which had put its forces in Syria without the permission of its government or people,” he said.

“Americans cause chaos everywhere they go,” he added.

By contrast, America’s main ally in the Syrian fighting, the Kurdish militia groups, have much to fear.

Under U.S. protection, the Kurds have carved out a de facto state covering a large swath of northern and eastern Syria, territory that includes roughly 90% of the country's gas as well as essential water and hydroelectric resources.

But they fear attack from Turkey, which is also a U.S. ally, but which sees the Kurds as a national security threat because of the large Kurdish minority in its territory.

The Kurdish areas are now under threat from all sides, which has caused Kurdish militia leaders to move closer to Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, who is allied with Iran and Russia and whose forces the U.S. has fought.

Protecting the Kurds has been a chief concern for U.S. military officials and for Graham.

After his meeting Sunday, Graham suggested that Trump would slow down the withdrawal to make sure the Kurds were not harmed.

“I think we’re in a pause situation where we are reevaluating what’s the best way to achieve the president’s objective of having people pay more and do more,” Graham said, referring to Trump’s call for Middle Eastern countries to pay the cost of rebuilding Syria after nearly a decade of war...

Still more.

Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River

A report from the front lines of the illegal immigration wars.

At Amazon, Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border.

Yana Vozharovskaya

At Drunken Stepfather, "Yana Vozharovskaya Bikini of the Day."

And at Luv Celebs:

Yana Vozharovskaya – Maxim Australia Magazine (January 2019) #luvcelebs @ https://t.co/phVPZZ75Lu pic.twitter.com/TqjqJ1mYpm

— Ashly Parnell (@luvClebs) December 23, 2018

The Montavilla Initiative

I'm a bleeding heart on homelessness, mostly because the leftist media gets the story all wrong, all the time. As noted previously, the bulk of O.C. homeless have been regular white working-class folks, busted down after the 2008 crash. It's not all Latinos and other minorities. Go to Anaheim and see for yourself.

In any case, at the Los Angeles Times, "Neighborhood advocates or vigilantes? A group in Portland makes life tougher for the homeless" (via Hot Air):

The Montavilla neighborhood is a place just about anybody might want to live in.

It has an “almost suburban” feel, a city website notes, but it’s near downtown Portland, with a population that’s more diverse than the city as a whole. Homes range from pricey modern to modest bungalow; businesses of every stripe do a bustling trade.

Last year Montavilla made Lonely Planet’s list of the 10 best U.S. neighborhoods.

It also broke apart over homelessness and rising crime.

Like many American cities, Portland struggles with homelessness. What’s the solution to getting people off the streets? What’s the right balance between compassion and safety? Why does the world’s richest country have so many people living in tents?

Last month, Portland-area voters funded $653 million for affordable housing, on top of $258 million in 2016. These are major investments for a city its size. But relief may be years away.

In Montavilla, the debate over homelessness has taken on an edge in the last two years as a neighborhood patrol has marched up to the line of vigilantism — and, some say, crossed it. Experts say similar groups have sprung up in other cities, including Long Beach and the west San Fernando Valley, as a conservative, tough-love response to the problem.

In June 2017, the Montavilla Neighborhood Assn. passed a resolution asking the city to “cease further sweeps of [homeless] camps,” which could be “unconstitutional and human rights violations.”

That fall, a new board of directors was voted in that included Micah Fletcher, a survivor of last year’s infamous stabbings by a white supremacist on a light rail train. Around the same time, however, a new conservative nonprofit, Montavilla Initiative, formed as an alternative. Battle lines hardened.

Montavilla Initiative began doing its own foot patrols; the city-partnered neighborhood association stopped doing them.

Interactions between citizen patrol groups led by Montavilla Initiative and the area’s homeless are now at the center of the neighborhood’s divide. On the one hand, local officials and homeless advocates accuse Montavilla Initiative of harassing vulnerable homeless people. On the other, leaders of the nonprofit say homeless encampments foster crime, and they’re just trying to make the neighborhood safer.

Multnomah County official Kim Toevs said Montavilla Initiative members harassed people who use the county’s largest needle exchange site, part of a program that has operated for 22 years in the neighborhood. It offers addiction counseling, exchanges millions of syringes annually, and gives out naloxone, proven to save lives by halting overdoses.

The county had to hire extra security after seven visits by the group, officials said.

“What we see here, about [their] behavior, harassing our clients, and making them feel stalked and scared, is hateful action,” Toevs said.

Ibrahim Mubarak, executive director of a homeless advocacy group, Right 2 Survive, said Montavilla Initiative members are “running havoc on houseless people,” slashing their tents, throwing cold water on them, following them around. “They’re all about getting [homeless] people out of the neighborhood,” he said.

Mubarak later acknowledged, however, that he had not witnessed the incidents himself, and had no proof that they were committed by Montavilla Initiative. “This is happening in the neighborhood to those people, but we don’t know for sure that it’s Montavilla Initiative,” he said.

Of 15 homeless people interviewed for this article, many said they’re aware of what they call the “neighborhood watchers.” One voiced support, but most said they were afraid of them. They don’t seem to differentiate between the new, Montavilla Initiative patrols and the ones the neighborhood association used to do...

More.

Buh-Bye 2018 LOL!

From Roger Simon, at Pajamas, "Bye-bye, 2018 —The Year of Living Hatefully":

Bye bye, 2018 The Year of Living Hatefully https://t.co/CFSq8POwnq #RogerLSimon via @pjmedia_com

— Roger Simon (@rogerlsimon) December 31, 2018

In 1982 Peter Weir and Mel Gibson made a film adapted from a 1978 Christopher Koch novel, The Year of Living Dangerously, about an attempted coup in Indonesia in 1965.

While it isn't clear yet whether we had an attempted coup in the USA in 2018 (or earlier), we did have a year in which people despised each other seemingly as never before in our country -- sometimes with reason but quite often not.

2018 was The Year of Living Hatefully -- one of them anyway.

Practically no one was happy. Or if they were, they didn't show it. All they wanted to do was vilify the opposition or even their neighbors.

Democrats hating Republicans (see the new movie "Vice") and vice versa were just the tip of a rancid iceberg. Never Trumpers hate Trumpers and the reverse, Sanders supporters hate Beto supporters, Antifa hate the bourgeoisie, the Proud Boys hate Antifa, FOX hates CNN and MSNBC hates FOX...It goes on and on. Families and friends split from each other. People shut up at work for fear they'll be fired. Thanksgiving is a festival of hostility, Christmas (when we're allowed to speak its name) is only slightly better.

Twitter has become axis mundi for hurling vicious insults at people you never met, or don't even know, while our college campuses -- suffused with reactionary "intersectionality"  -- have become ground zero for the promotion of competitive victimhood, another perfect excuse to hate the other without knowing him or her or "zhe."

That all this is happening in a country awash in affluence, also as almost never before, with close to full employment for all ethnic and racial groups, even some salaries rising after decades, is the cliché about not being able to stand prosperity on steroids. The way we are going utopia would be Hell.

So what's behind all this?

Before all Democrats scream Donald Trump and all Republicans shout The Media, allow me to remind everyone this has been going on for a long time. Calling 2018 The Year of Living Hatefully (or, perhaps more accurately, living in or through hate) is but the culmination of a trend that has been going on for many years.

There is and has been an emptiness in American society and I am going to suggest a cause I never thought I would, not because it is unique to me -- it hardly is -- but because I have, until relatively recently, been a rather typical agnostic of my generation.

It is the absence of God, augmented by the ongoing secularization of our culture largely perpetrated by that same generation (mine). We now almost have in America what the French call laïcité. It doesn't work there (they hate each other more than we do) and it won't here.

And before you go after to me to remind me that church- and synagogue-going people can be just as bad as everybody else, I will say, "Yes, of course," then continue on to say that the majority of believing religious people, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition (I don't know the others well enough to comment), tend not to live lives as dominated by hate.

They are the people we see in the old Hollywood movies that we like to watch over the holidays. They are Americans from an era that may never have existed but may actually have more than we realize. (Excuse the Zen-ish  deliberate contradiction.) It's Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life" or "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." You can bet he went to church. Why can't we be like that now?

As for whether 2019 will be any better in this regard -- most likely not...

Still more.

'So we have Andy Cohen, gleefully smiling as he grips his phallic-symbol bottle of popping champagne...'

My mom had CNN on when I was visiting over there yesterday. I saw all the previews for AC360's New Year's Eve gig with Andy Cohen, and I can barely recall who Andy Cohen is. I know Kathy Griffin is out, and no love lost there, dang! But Andy Cohen?

Ann Althouse has never heard of him. See, "Speaking of white men not 'reflecting the gender and racial diversity' we've come to expect in liberal America — see previous post — look at what just came in the email from CNN?"

I'm going over to my mom's for New Year's Eve dinner. I don't think I'll be be ringing in 2019, though. Either way, no Andy and Anderson for me. Pfft. (*Eye roll.*)

The Coming Age of Post-Truth Geopolitics

At Foreign Affairs, "Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War":

@BobbyChesney and I have a piece coming out in @ForeignAffairs on Deep Fakes in the January/February edition. For a preview, https://t.co/chl5MjoJ0X pic.twitter.com/oqrENugpa8

— Danielle Citron (@daniellecitron) December 11, 2018

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is nothing that persuades quite like an audio or video recording of an event. At a time when partisans can barely agree on facts, such persuasiveness might seem as if it could bring a welcome clarity. Audio and video recordings allow people to become firsthand witnesses of an event, sparing them the need to decide whether to trust someone else’s account of it. And thanks to smartphones, which make it easy to capture audio and video content, and social media platforms, which allow that content to be shared and consumed, people today can rely on their own eyes and ears to an unprecedented degree.

Therein lies a great danger. Imagine a video depicting the Israeli prime minister in private conversation with a colleague, seemingly revealing a plan to carry out a series of political assassinations in Tehran. Or an audio clip of Iranian officials planning a covert operation to kill Sunni leaders in a particular province of Iraq. Or a video showing an American general in Afghanistan burning a Koran. In a world already primed for violence, such recordings would have a powerful potential for incitement. Now imagine that these recordings could be faked using tools available to almost anyone with a laptop and access to the Internet—and that the resulting fakes are so convincing that they are impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

Advances in digital technology could soon make this nightmare a reality. Thanks to the rise of “deepfakes”—highly realistic and difficult-to-detect digital manipulations of audio or video—it is becoming easier than ever to portray someone saying or doing something he or she never said or did. Worse, the means to create deepfakes are likely to proliferate quickly, producing an ever-widening circle of actors capable of deploying them for political purposes. Disinformation is an ancient art, of course, and one with a renewed relevance today. But as deepfake technology develops and spreads, the current disinformation wars may soon look like the propaganda equivalent of the era of swords and shields.

DAWN OF THE DEEPFAKES

Deepfakes are the product of recent advances in a form of artificial intelligence known as “deep learning,” in which sets of algorithms called “neural networks” learn to infer rules and replicate patterns by sifting through large data sets. (Google, for instance, has used this technique to develop powerful image-classification algorithms for its search engine.) Deepfakes emerge from a specific type of deep learning in which pairs of algorithms are pitted against each other in “generative adversarial networks,” or GANS. In a GAN, one algorithm, the “generator,” creates content modeled on source data (for instance, making artificial images of cats from a database of real cat pictures), while a second algorithm, the “discriminator,” tries to spot the artificial content (pick out the fake cat images). Since each algorithm is constantly training against the other, such pairings can lead to rapid improvement, allowing GANS to produce highly realistic yet fake audio and video content.

This technology has the potential to proliferate widely. Commercial and even free deepfake services have already appeared in the open market, and versions with alarmingly few safeguards are likely to emerge on the black market. The spread of these services will lower the barriers to entry, meaning that soon, the only practical constraint on one’s ability to produce a deepfake will be access to training materials—that is, audio and video of the person to be modeled—to feed the GAN. The capacity to create professional-grade forgeries will come within reach of nearly anyone with sufficient interest and the knowledge of where to go for help.

Deepfakes have a number of worthy applications. Modified audio or video of a historical figure, for example, could be created for the purpose of educating children. One company even claims that it can use the technology to restore speech to individuals who have lost their voice to disease. But deepfakes can and will be used for darker purposes, as well. Users have already employed deepfake technology to insert people’s faces into pornography without their consent or knowledge, and the growing ease of making fake audio and video content will create ample opportunities for blackmail, intimidation, and sabotage. The most frightening applications of deepfake technology, however, may well be in the realms of politics and international affairs. There, deepfakes may be used to create unusually effective lies capable of inciting violence, discrediting leaders and institutions, or even tipping elections.

Deepfakes have the potential to be especially destructive because they are arriving at a time when it already is becoming harder to separate fact from fiction. For much of the twentieth century, magazines, newspapers, and television broadcasters managed the flow of information to the public. Journalists established rigorous professional standards to control the quality of news, and the relatively small number of mass media outlets meant that only a limited number of individuals and organizations could distribute information widely. Over the last decade, however, more and more people have begun to get their information from social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, which depend on a vast array of users to generate relatively unfiltered content. Users tend to curate their experiences so that they mostly encounter perspectives they already agree with (a tendency heightened by the platforms’ algorithms), turning their social media feeds into echo chambers. These platforms are also susceptible to so-called information cascades, whereby people pass along information shared by others without bothering to check if it is true, making it appear more credible in the process. The end result is that falsehoods can spread faster than ever before.

These dynamics will make social media fertile ground for circulating deepfakes, with potentially explosive implications for politics. Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election—spreading divisive and politically inflammatory messages on Facebook and Twitter—already demonstrated how easily disinformation can be injected into the social media bloodstream. The deepfakes of tomorrow will be more vivid and realistic and thus more shareable than the fake news of 2016. And because people are especially prone to sharing negative and novel information, the more salacious the deepfakes, the better...

Keep reading.

Alexis Ren Luisda (VIDEO)

More of Ms. Alexis, the freakin' hottie.

How My Brooklyn Literary Friendships Fell Apart in the Age of Trump

This is an excellent read.

At Quillette, "Confessions of a ‘Soulless Troglodyte’: How My Brooklyn Literary Friendships Fell Apart in the Age of Trump."

"...he was kind enough to thank me in the book’s acknowledgements. But the novel didn’t sell well. And Daniel found a way to blame the bad numbers on Trump’s presidency." https://t.co/P6yxc3fdAy

— Quillette (@QuilletteM) December 21, 2018