“…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.”…”

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Stephen Green:

AND HE MUST WEAR THE CONE OF SHAME: San Francisco Orders Property Owner to Build Exact Replica of Demolished Home.

Back in late 2017, Ross Johnston tore down a two-story home he owned in the city’s Twin Peaks neighborhood, intending to build a larger house on the same site.

The destruction of the home—known as the Largent House and designed by famed architect Richard Neutra back in the 1930s—angered neighbors who bemoaned the loss of a historic building. It also pissed off city officials, who had issued permits for the house to be substantially redesigned, not demolished in its entirety.

On Thursday, the city’s Planning Commission made what the San Francisco Chronicle is calling an “unprecedented” decision. In a 5–0 vote, it ordered Johnston to build an exact replica of the house he destroyed, save for the addition of a new plaque explaining the details of the building’s demolition and reconstruction.

Mao would have understand the purpose behind the plaque.

Editorial of The New York Sun:

“…When General Flynn comes up for sentencing tomorrow, the right move would be for the federal judge to reject the general’s guilty plea and throw out the case altogether. Is that likely to happen? Rarely say never, the editor warned. It’s our view that it should happen, though, after the release Friday of new details of the questioning of General Flynn by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The release of those details was ordered last week by a no-nonsense United States district judge, Emmet Sullivan, who is due tomorrow to decide the sentence for General Flynn for violating section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code. This has long been recognized as an outrageously vague statute that all too often tempts prosecutors who are stuck making a better case.

The information released last week suggests this is just what happened in respect of General Flynn, who was misled by the FBI about the interview in which he supposedly lied. Not only could the judge in the case reject General Flynn’s guilty plea but he could cite none other than the most liberal Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

This was pointed out last week by our columnist Ira Stoll, in his blog FutureOfCapitalism.com. He notes that the law to which General Flynn pled guilty provides up to five years in prison for anyone who “knowingly and willfully” makes any materially false statement “in any matter within the jurisdiction” of any of the three branches of the federal government.

The susceptibility of Section 1001 to abuse was, Mr. Stoll points out, nailed as far back as 1998 by Justice Ginsburg in a case called Brogan v. United States. She warned that the law’s “encompassing formulation arms Government agents with authority not simply to apprehend lawbreakers, but to generate felonies, crimes of a kind that only a Government officer could prompt.”

The New York Sun’s columns, Mr. Stoll reminds us, reprised this problem in 2004, when the feds used Section 1001 to bake their pie against Martha Stewart. That was in an editorial called “Martha Stewart and the Law.” We also carried an op-ed by a former deputy Whitewater prosecutor, Solomon Wisenberg, noting the “potential for abuse of this statute” even for normally honest prosecutors.

Justice Ginsburg reckoned that Section 1001 creates the prospect that “an overzealous prosecutor or investigator — aware that a person has committed some suspicious acts, but unable to make a criminal case — will create a crime by surprising the suspect, asking about those acts, and receiving a false denial.” It’s uncanny how clearly she foresaw the kind of trap that ensnared General Flynn.

The justice practically begged Congress to address the flaw, but the legislature shrank from the task. Hence the chance for Judge Sullivan. He certainly has the backbone. He famously set aside a jury’s conviction of Senator Ted Stevens, after learning of prosecutorial misconduct in concealing evidence from the defense. Judge Sullivan held several of the prosecutors themselves in contempt.

General Flynn’s sentencing is a special moment in this special prosecution. His was among the first cases launched by Special Prosecutor Mueller. The sentencing hearing is the last chance to stop the injustice of the tactics used to destroy him and his career. Mr. Stoll reminds us that Judge Sullivan’s first name — Emmet — is Hebrew for “truth.” It’s a good name to live up to…”

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WALTER RUSSELL MEAD:

“…President Trump’s abandonment of democracy promotion and human rights is among the most striking of his departures from the post-Cold War American foreign-policy consensus. To the despair and fury of liberal internationalists and neoconservatives alike, Mr. Trump often appears determined to conduct American diplomacy as if human rights abroad were not a concern.

But the human-rights recession in U.S. foreign policy was already under way when the president took office. It isn’t hard to see why: Efforts to base America’s foreign policy on human rights and democracy hadn’t been yielding their desired results for some time.

Think back to 2011, when President Obama knew where the arc of history was headed and planned to steer American policy accordingly. As the Arab Spring toppled Hosni Mubarak, Ben Rhodes told reporters the administration believed “there is not going to be a return to the way things were in Egypt.” The people had spoken, tyranny was broken, and Egyptian democracy was here to stay.

Those were heady times. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was creating an “Islamist democracy” in Turkey. Aung San Suu Kyi was being compared to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for her reformist advocacy in Burma.

Also in 2011, the “international community” proposed a new concept to change the way the world worked: the “responsibility to protect.” The U.S. intervention in Libya, we were told, established a new principle in international law that dictators could no longer massacre their people with impunity.

This sunny worldview couldn’t long withstand the cold realities of geopolitics. After Libya, Mr. Obama’s appetite for human-rights interventions diminished abruptly. Here he was reflecting public sentiment. Americans still believed in human rights and democracy, but they had lost confidence in the ability of policy experts to advance these principles effectively on the world stage.

Meanwhile, the rise of powerful states actively hostile to open societies changed the international calculus. American human-rights sanctions mean less when Russia and China stand ready to lend autocrats a hand. And the U.S. cannot, for example, simultaneously undermine the military leaders of Thailand and ask them to help limit China’s influence.

In a world of heightened geopolitical competition, Wilsonian idealism began to seem at best a distraction and at worst an obstacle to sound strategic thinking. By 2016 many Americans were tired of spending money and sometimes blood on humanitarian interventions and democracy initiatives that rarely went well. This is one reason Mr. Trump, whose “America First” sloganeering seemed to some voters like a refreshing burst of common sense, overthrew both the Republican and Democratic establishments in 2016. The neoconservatives and liberal internationalists who staffed previous administrations were sidelined. The president delights in ostentatiously rejecting their advice.

But pure realpolitik is a strategic dead end. While the mix of overreach and underthink that characterized both parties’ Wilsonian foreign-policy consensus has been rightly repudiated, American foreign policy can’t operate without a moral component. To attract and hold allies, the U.S. must stand for something higher than its own wealth and power, and “Make America Great Again” plays better in Des Moines than Dusseldorf. Henry Kissinger learned in the 1970s that a democratic society cannot sustain a foreign policy that does not defer in some way to its people’s moral aspirations. The Khashoggi affair underscores this enduring truth.

Already, human-rights concerns are insinuating themselves back into the Trump agenda. China’s sins are not limited to mercantilist trade policies and intellectual-property theft. The ugly persecution of minority religious and ethnic groups, the suppression of dissent, and the bullying of smaller nations are also part of the American indictment. U.S. denunciations of human-rights violations in countries like China, Venezuela and Iran ring hollow unless Americans are seen to honor the standards we demand of others.

That said, the human-rights and democracy lobbies need to use their time-out wisely. Mistakes in foreign policy are unavoidable; the question is whether one learns from them. The Wilsonians need to develop a full and serious account of what went wrong over the past 20 years, then put forward a more modest and realistic approach to the moral goals that remain a necessary part of America’s role in the world…”

Original

GEORGE NEUMAYR:

“…The Comey-Mueller investigation into Trumpworld has proceeded like a Soviet show trial from the start, complete with confessions to crimes its targets didn’t commit. As they brag about these extracted pleas, Mueller and Comey sound less like guardians of democracy than the corrupt commissars of yesteryear, whose victims, as Pravda would duly report, had “incriminated themselves.” Mueller and Comey don’t have Pravda, but they do have CNN, which routinely trots out confirmed perjurer James Clapper to gush about the rectitude of their work. Without the slightest bit of embarrassment, CNN gives a platform to such monumental liars as Clapper to lecture Americans on the gravity of Michael Flynn’s “lying.”

The insufferable fraud Jim Sciutto, whose ludicrously mannered anchorman-ish style conceals his status as a former Obama political appointee, often interviews other Obama political appointees about the awfulness of Michael Flynn. All these weasels spent the Obama years lying their heads off. Yet now they play the shocked innocents, wondering how such a seasoned soldier and spy could do something as low as providing incomplete answers to FBI agents. Oh my, where could an Obama-era spy have learned such evasiveness? Whatever dishonesty Flynn exhibited, it couldn’t have exceeded the dishonesty of his questioners, whose account of the Flynn interview has been marked by nothing if not politicized fiddling, corrupt omissions, and after-the-fact duplicity.

Who interviewed Flynn? That pillar of probity, Peter Strzok, the agent who vowed to “stop” Trump’s candidacy and then spent hours before Congress lying about such biased texts. Every last Obama administration official connected to the Flynn affair is a busted liar, starting with Comey, who sent out perjurer Clapper to deny that the FBI had spied on the Trump campaign even as warrants to spy on Trump Tower sat on his desk…”

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Funny, worth clicking over.

“…From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others.

Its path — the steady case-by-case, decision-by-decision acceptance of a new forensic science by the justice system — is one that’s rarely, if ever, been retraced. But it reveals the startling vulnerability of judges, and juries, to forensics techniques, both before, and after, they’ve been debunked.

Although the reliability of blood-spatter analysis was never proven or quantified, its steady admission by courts rarely wavered, even as the technique, along with other forensic sciences, began facing increasing scrutiny.

In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”

Still, judges continued allowing spatter experts to testify.

Subsequent research, funded by the Department of Justice, raised questions about experts’ methods and conclusions. But little changed.

All along, attorneys like Bankston continued challenging the admission of bloodstain-pattern analysts. But they came to learn that a forensic discipline, once unleashed in the system, cannot easily be recalled…”

Original

“…A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640…”

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Antitrust Issues?

PETER BRIGHT:

“…This is a company that, time and again, has tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google’s online services when used in conjunction with Google’s browser, consolidating Google’s market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage. Each time, pushback has come from the wider community, and so far, at least, the result has been industry standards that wrest control from Google’s hands. This action might already provoke doubts about the wisdom of handing effective control of the Web’s direction to Google, but at least a case could be made that, in the end, the right thing was done.

But other situations have had less satisfactory resolutions. YouTube has been a particular source of problems. Google controls a large fraction of the Web’s streaming video, and the company has, on a number of occasions, made changes to YouTube that make it worse in Edge and/or Firefox. Sometimes these changes have improved the site experience in Chrome, but even that isn’t always the case.

A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge’s fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge’s battery-life performance and took it below Chrome’s. The change didn’t improve Chrome’s performance and didn’t appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome’s battery life was actually superior to Edge’s. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail…”

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 California Drops Plan To Tax Texting.

Comment of the day. Ed Driscoll:

SACRAMENTO HAS A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF DERANGEMENT

Welcome change.

“…Since his death in August, the one-time presidential candidate has been eulogized as a statesman, a lawmaker deeply involved in U.S. policy abroad and known for his often blistering opinions on foreign affairs. McCain played a particularly outsized role in international politics under President Trump, traveling abroad to reassure jumpy allies and publicly critiquing the president’s isolationist doctrine.

Inhofe, an Army veteran who previously had served as ranking minority member of the committee when Democrats last controlled the Senate, sees his role in more narrow terms: ensure that the U.S. military is adequately resourced, and leave foreign policy to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“My job is to make sure that when we get the information from the ones who are smarter than I am as to where our threats are, my job is to make sure we have the resources to build the military to confront that,” he told Defense One in an interview. “I try not to get into debates with people on the threat that they view. What I can do is say, okay, if that threat is correct, these are the resources we need…”

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“…If Congress and the White House don’t make a deal this week to stave off a , Saturday – three days before Christmas – could be the start of the third shutdown since President Trump took office less than two years ago.

It’s a Saturday in the middle of a more than weeklong holiday season. Will you have to worry whether presents and relatives can make the journey without problems?

The U.S. Postal Service anticipates that Monday will be its busiest day online, which would allow most priority and first-class to reach its destination by Thursday before any possibility of a shutdown. If you mail later than that, know that the Postal Service is an independent agency, so it won’t be affected in any government shutdown.

Peak travel is expected to hit Thursday, according to the American Automobile Association. That’s also when Congress members want to get out of town and be finished with their work for the year.

Even if Congress can’t stop another federal shutdown, air-traffic controllers still will be on the job after midnight Friday, and customs and border agents will continue working at border crossings.

Amtrak, a government-owned corporation, also will operate as usual.

The president traditionally decides whether federal workers get a paid holiday on Christmas Eve, this year on a Monday, according to FEDweek newsletter. President George W. Bush did so in 2001 and 2007; President Barack Obama also did in 2012.

If a shutdown occurs, federal employees deemed nonessential could get that day off anyway. Back pay is never guaranteed when the government is shuttered, but Congress previously has included that provision in its debt-ceiling bills…”

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Liz Sheld:

On Friday, a judge ruled that Obamacare or the ACA is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor agreed with a group of 20 states with Republican governors or legislatures that argued the constitutionality of the law’s individual mandate dissolved when Congress removed the tax penalty for the uninsured.

Of course, this will have to work its way through the court system, so there is no immediate change to your policy if you have purchased one. My premiums went up to $1500 monthly this year. What a great system. Thanks, Obama.

The Trump DOJ (that sounds so funny) will not appeal the decision since the administration is not looking to keep the law intact, but some of the states, led by California, will appeal.

Ed Driscoll strung this together: