The Next Enrons

Regardless of the election's outcome, some corporations are going to be joining Enron in the industrial Great Beyond. Fox had been hurting its reputation for weeks prior to the election, especially with Chris Wallace's moderation of the first debate, but since calling the Arizona election on November 3, it's fallen behind CNN and MSNBC.

Here's a sign of the times:

I would guess that Ingraham is beginning to feel quite insecure in her position and is taking things out on whatever target she can find.

I noted the other day that both Dominion Voting and Smartmatic are likely to have their brands irreparably damaged in the current controversy and show signs that they're beginning to recognize that. Dominion's home page is now devoted entirely to denying allegations that have come up in recent days. It's dated most recentlyh November 17, which was Tuesday, and it contains, aomng other denials:

DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS CATEGORICALLY DENIES FALSE ASSERTIONS ABOUT VOTE SWITCHING AND SOFTWARE ISSUES WITH OUR VOTING SYSTEMS.

The problem is that the Trump team has been making entirely credible assertions that someone, quite possibly Dominion, or using Dominion capabilities, did in fact switch votes in specific cases in Georgia and Michigan, and such instances have been multiplying.

Dominion's reply is to cite now-fired DHS cybersecurity director Chris Krebs, who said, the 2020 general election "was the most secure in American history." In light of the substantiated allegations now in the public record, this assertion seems at best highly exaggerated -- and it leaves out the allegation from Rudy Giuliani in today's press conference that a senior Dominion manager went to Detroit on election night to facilitate in person the task of manipulating totals.

Smartmatic has left up the earlier "fact checks" on its website with no alteration.

Both compnies are apparently in a pseudo "crisis mode", trynig somewhat lamely to evade bad publicity. The problem for them is that as the scandal moves forward, their assertions will be dscreditied -- as it appears now that they're false, and their brands will become the punch lines of jokes.

Based on remarks at the press conference, Dominion employees are already bailing out, and as I noted the other day, hundreds are deleting their employment histories there from Linkedin.

Laura Ingraham, by the way, went to Dartmouth and worked on the Dartmouth Review as a protegee of Jeffrey Hart. None of this surprises me.

"The Golden Mountain Does Not Exist"

Among the more recondite pieces of knowledge I picked up as an elite-school undergraduate was a course in logical positivism, which can probably be characterized as a view that most philosphical problems can be traced to linguistic or grammatical confusion. An example I was given at the time was based on a dispute between Bertrand Russell and the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong over the meaning (or not) of the statement, "The golden mountain does not exist".

The basic problem is that you've mentioned something called "the golden mountain", which must exist in some form, because you're referring to it, and the listener can conceive of it, but then you're turning around and saying it doesn't exist. This is at best confusing, and how to resolve the problem, or not, is beyond the scope of this post.

But now corporate media has discovered a golden mountain that does not exist -- in this case a computer server connected in various accounts not with Scytl or Smartmatic, or maybe not the CIA, that was not seized in Frankfurt, not by the US Army, not just after the Nov 3 election, that most assuredly did not contain information that Trump was on a path to win, or had actually won, the Nov 3 election, not.

Informed sources in the intelligence community inform investigative reporter John Solomon that the non-existent golden mountain has maybe been confused with a different non-existent landfill in Saxony, which clears it all up.

Corporate media fact checks seem to lag behind the rumors. But here's an assertion by a Seattle TV station from a couple days ago on what doefinitely does not exist:

Did the U.S. Army raid Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany to find evidence that the election had been tampered with.

No. The former director of the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it was false. Both the U.S. Army and Scytl have denied this has happened.

One problem is that the conspiracy theorists who continue to insist the golden mountain exists keep expanding on what the golden mountain looks like. The link above says,

Rumors began flying today that President Trump not only won, but won big.

410 electoral votes big.

That is, according to a server that was allegedly seized in a raid this week from overseas.

I take no position on this pro or con. But I think back to my course in logical positivism and agree that there are problems with asserting that the golden mountain does not exist. Especially when people are so emphatic about how it doesn't.

UPDATE: Via Gateway Pundit, Sidney Powell responded to a question from the press:

Reporter Emerald Robinson: There were reports that a piece of hardware possibly a server was picked up in Germany. Is that true and is it related to this?

Attorney Sidney Powell: That is true. It is somehow related to this. But I do not know if good guys got it or bad guys got it.

So at minimum, the existence of a confiscated German server related to the election is confirmed as not not existing.

Attorneys Are Good At Keeping Secrets. Spies, Not So Much.

Since the start of the post-election controversy, I've noticed how little the Trump lawyers have had to say. By Nov 5, although Trump himself plainly said the election had been "stolen", the people on his team were unnaturally quiet, and they continue to be so. Let's consider their ranks include Rudy Giuliani, :L Lin Wood -- both with very high and gabby public profiles, but even they have cut back -- but also Joe DiGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Robrt Barnes. Barnes has appeared on YouTube, but he's restricted his remarks to general questions of election law, and he seems to imply he's working in a different area than Sidney Powell, which apparently excludes him from the kraken.

Only Giuliani and Powell have said anything about a kraken and what that may imply, but the implication of their public remarks seems to be that there are issues with a foreign server involved in the vote count. Last night, Giuliani repeated an allegation that votes were counted in Spain and Germany by Smartmatic and refers to efforts by the Trump team to investigate this in much greater detail. Over the weekend, Giuliani made remarks about Smartmatic (that Smartmatic owned Dominion) that have been contradicted by Smartmatic, but it's plain that in yesterday's interview he's continuing to focus on Smartmatic and a foreign connection to the vote count. L Lin Wood has tweeted in agreement with this narrative.

On November 17, Trump fired "the top cybersecurity official at the "the Department of Homeland Security, Chris Krebs, who oversaw efforts to safeguard the presidential election from foreign interference " It's easy to think Trump's firing of Krebs, and earlier Defense Secretary Esper, were acts of terminal pique, but other analysis I've linked here suggests, at least with some credibility, that the firing of Esper was to enable the Defense Department to assist in seizure of a Frankfurt server. By the same token, firing Krebs may have been to enable similar cooperation at DHS, not just to punish pre-election nonfeasance.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity "experts" have told investigative reporter John Soiomon that "Reports that the U.S. military recently seized computer servers in Germany for evidence of election fraud likely pertain to an earlier raid by German authorities over a different issue". They go on, "a group calling itself Distributed Denial of Secrets [DDoS] reportedly used a German computer server to share sensitive U.S. police material. . . . Prosecutors in the Saxony region of Germany seized the DDoS server in July."

Saxony isn't Frankfurt, of course, and July isn't a week ago. Remarks by Giuliani and Powell seem to refer to seizure of a Frankfurt server not long after Nov 3, so I'm wondering if someome is trying to fuzz things over. The implication I get from Giuliani and Powell, however cryptic some of their ramarks may be, is that there's a concentrated effort in the Trump team to develop a convincing body of evidence that very large blocks of data were manipulated on a foreign server over the night of November 3-4. It sounds as though people in government have tried to thwart this effort and perhaps misrepresent it to investigative reporters. It's certainly possible that the firings of Esper and Krebs were related to this.

The public efforts at challenging election certifications in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, while in themselves insufficient to overcome a deficit in the 400,000 range, may be separate indications of a larger strategy to demonstrate the effects of a single-point effort, possibly involving counts on a foreign server, to manipulate the overall election.

We'll have to see. But the members of the Trump legal team include highly capable former US attorneys who are, like all good attorneys, keeping very quiet.