Mounties Enforce The New Normal In Manitoba

As reported here, "Under new lockdown restrictions in Manitoba, no more than five people can gather in one location, including if they remain in their cars." However, a church in Steinbach, MB elected to hold a drive-in service in violation of the order. The RCMP, of all agencies, then blocked the highway leading to the church parking lot to prevent this.

From episodes like this, it seems like Canada is an order of magnitude crazier than the US on COVID restrictions, and the US is pretty crazy. But in the US, police agencies began to recognize even last spring that hauling moms off in cuffs for taking their kids to the playground was a bad look, and they dropped it. Now, poliec agencies back off this sort of thing, with the chiefs saying in one way or another that they don't enforce health orders.

Manitoba borders the US states of Minnesota and North Dakota and has had 16,483 COVID cases total, with 301 deaths. for a case fatality rate of about 0.02%. Manitoba's population is 1.359 million, which I believe gives a 2020 COVID death rate of about 22 per 100,000, which is roughly comparable to the overall 2018 Canadian death rate from seasonal flu and pneumonia of 23 per 100,000.

But this results in the national police being called in to block church attendance. Poor Steinbach, which with a population of less than 20,000 is the third largest city in Manitoba, seems to have become a focus for provincial indignation. "Steinbach late to recognize COVID-19 threat, some residents say," reads the CBC headline.

The Mounties blocked vehicle access to an anti-lockdown protest there Nov 14, while health officials issued fines to inividual protesters, apparently for not wearing masks or social distancing. In the US, enforcement of mask and social distance rules at protests is nugatory, and in fact, the epidemiological effect of non-socially distanced protests hasn't been publicized, if it's been measured at all.

Press coverage of COVID case rates in Canada appears to be even more hysterical than in the US. But we're looking at a global phenomenon that I'm beginning to think is basically a moral panic. I'll have more to say about this.

Another Free-Exercise Petition Goes To The Supreme Court

On Nov 23, the Thomas More Society announced that it had filed a petition for Writ of Certiorari with the US Supreme Court on behalf of South Bay United Pentecostal Church in San Diego. This is essentially a renewal of a petition for certiorari that the court deniedd in a 5-4 vote last May.

The announcement quotes special counsel Charles LiMandri, “Governor Newsom, in revising his reopening restrictions under his new California ‘Blueprint’ framework, has not only continued his disparate treatment of places of worship but has exacerbated the discrimination by targeting a core practice of South Bay’s religious expression – the ability to raise one’s voice to worship God in song." This has been a concern I've had since the start of lockdowns, that government assumes the ability not just to limit or prohibit attendance at religious services, but to regulate liturgical practice.

Choral singing, chanting, congregational responses, use of pew hymnals and missals, and processions have all been effectively banned, with no justification. Singing was banned universally due to anecdotal evidence from a single Mt Vernon, WA choir practice, when plain evidence from the Southern California megachurches that have not implemented COVID restrictions and continue to sing is that, even without masks, normal liturgical practice does not spread the disease.

The Nov 25 decision by the Supreme Court staying Gov Cuomo's esecutive orders indicates that the court will tend to strike down disparate treatment, especially in cases where any specific attendance limits are imposed on churches and synagogues, but no equivalent limits are placed on "essential" businesses. The Thomas More suit notes that Newsom's color-coded controls have no provision for returning to full liberty and only permit 50% church capacity at the lowest risk tier.

(In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles, it appears that the diocese at least is no longer imposing numerical limits on outdoor mass attendance, although singing and other liturgical practices continue not to be used. Indoor masses are still prohibited. This is an indication of the vague and arbitrary nature of such controls.)

It interests me that, as flights delivering COVID vaccine begin, health departments have been making no announcements of how they plan to implement vaccinations, or how they may affect COVID restrictions going forward. It seems clear that authorities will be slow and very reluctant to relax controls, no matter the effectiveness of vaccines.

This is going to be a long and difficult fight. It's nevertheless encouraging that political authorities are forced to recognize that the population will not be docile going forward.

Canada Isn't The US

Toronto is less than a hundred miles from Buffalo, but I couldn't help but notice a contrast. Over the US holiday, photos and videos of Toronto police arresting restaurant owner Adam Skelly for trying to reopen his barbeque vent viral. Commentators saw at least eight units and ten officers on the scene, which was little short of a SWAT deployment. Skelly was unarmed and faced charges like operating a business without a license.

A week ago in Buffalo, three sheriff's deputies and a health inspector entered a gym to try to disperse members who were holding a meeting. It sounds as if the members had had some type of legal advice, as they shouted at the deputies that they were in effect conducting a warrantless search, and under the US Fourth Amendment, they were trespassing on private property. After some shilly-shallying and scolding from the health inspector, they were prevailed upon to leave the building and then the parking lot.

Nobody was cuffed and hauled away to jail like Skelly.

Skelly's public statements in the days prior to his arrest indicate this was an event he planned and staged for the express purpose of becoming a martyr. This is exactly why in general, US police agencies have avoided this type of confrontation, and many sheriffs and police chiefs have explicitly said they do not enforce health orders. I'm puzzled that Toronto authorities allowed themselves to be put into the situation of creating both a martyr and a leadership figure, when equivalent attempts to do this sort of thing in the US created folk heroes like Karl Manke, the Owosso, MI barber, and Shelly Luther, the Dallas salon owner.

(For that matter, although an internal review, a review by another police agency, and yet another review at the provincial level, of the May 4 violent takedown of the Lethbridge, AB Star Wars trooper were promised, I've found no reference to any such review being published or even conducted in the nearly seven months since that happened. Canada, I fear, isn't the US.)

Although the Los Angeles County health department just tightened its latest restrictions to prohibit any gatherings of people who aren't members of the same household, it explicitly excepted both protests and church services, which it said are "constitutionally protected rights". The addition of church as an express exception is completely new, and it reflects a well-founded fear of an active citizenry, as well as the newly rediscovered role of the US Supreme Court.

I don't believe I would be happy living in Canada.

Another Free-Exercise Case Goes To The Supreme Court

In yesterday's post, I mentioned a petition for injunctive relief that's gone to the court from a New Jersey SSPX priest and an Orthodox rabbi. I covered this case in its initial phase on my old blog here. In another case, Harvest Rock Church of Pasadena, CA has petitioned for injunctive relief pending appeal in its federal lawsuit against California lockdown orders. This is the same type of relief the court granted the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and the New York synagogues Wednesday night.

One possible difference among the suits is that Harvest Rock Church has been deliberately violating the California orders, while as far as I can determine, the other churches and synagogues have not. An argument the Catholic diocese made in its case was that it had been following the existing rules prior to Gov Cuomo's red-light order, and in following those rules, it had seen no COVID cases. The court in its opinion recognized this argument in the diocese's favor.

Harvest Rock is in a different position, since it's one of three Southern California megachurches that resumed worship last May without masks or social distancing. All three claim that there have been minimal p;ositive tests among their thousands of attendees since that time, and apparently no hospitalizatins. (I assume that local media would cover more numerous positives or any hospitalizations heavily if they took place.) How the court will react to this difference remains to be seen.

It isn't entirely clear if in fact the New York synagogues had been violating previous, less restrictive COVID orders prior to Gov Cuomo's imposition of "red zone" orders. Certainly the implication of Cuomo's remarks, as well as press coverage, was that the Jews had somehow been wrecking things for everyone else and needed to be curbed, so this may have been an issue.

The conundrum at the basis of all COVID restrictions is that they don't seem to have any effect on testing rates in particular. The states with the tightest new restrictions had had stringent ones before the latest spike. Most of California already prohibited indoor church services and required masks and social distancing. Choral singing and congregational response were also prohibited. There have been equivalent, though looser, controls over most other acitivity, including retail shopping. In California, masks are ubiquitous.

Yet the response of civil authorites has been to scold the population for not being safe enough, when it appears that people have been following all appropriate guidelines, and in fact nobody seems to be asking why, if the guidelines are being followed, cases are spiking. If the only answer is to tighten controls still more, that will simply mean an indefinite renweed stay-at-home lockdown, which is in fact what's being threatened, with the implication that this is the fault of the citizenry, who will deserve it.

At the same time, the authorities seem generally to be aware that a new lockdown will probably result in civil unrest. In addiiton, If COVID control measures continue to be arbitrary and ineffective -- as they're more and more appearing to be -- this will damage the ability of health officials to control future epidemics. That so far, there's been no effective leadership in this area at either the state, national, or global level has been the unacknowledged crisis of 2020.

Supreme Court Stops New York Restrictions On Churches And Synagogues

This is being widely covered, for instance here, so I'm not going to go into specifics. On one hand, this is something that should have been done last May, when the court refused to hear similar California cases, at least psrtly on the basis that Gov Newsom loosened the restrictions once the suits were brought.

But that didn't deal with the reality that all such restrictions are subject to the governor's whim,. and six weeks later, Newsom simply reimposed the restrictions he'd lifted. Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent from the new ruling said that Cuomo had lifted the strictest restrictions as soon as the suit was filed, but the majority recognized that Cuomo, like Newsom, could pull the same ploy and issued an injunction against enforcing them, whether he'd temporarily lifted them or not.

For the court to deal with this has been overdue, since such extreme restrictions are in force elsewhee. The court''s decision noted inconsistencies in capacity limits for houses of worship vis-a-v9is other indoor activities. Whether this line of reasoning can be applied to other cases remains to be se4n.

In addition, the court noted that the houses of worship had not seen COVID cases under the prior, looser restrictions. This is one argument that the California megachurches that have not followed the governor's directives have made: for months, with thousands attending church services without social distancing, there has been negligible transmission. Whether this will affect their legal cases remains to be seen.

But at least this is a belated start.

The Thomas More Society has brought a very similar motion for injunctive relief to the Supreme Court in a New Jersey case. The New York restrictions were much more extreme -- limits of 10 or 25 attendees -- while the New Jersey restrictions are more common in other states, 25% of capacity up to a numerical limit. But the suit alleges that churches are being held to different standards from other activities.

We'll have to see what develops.

No, The Kraken Isn't Just Sleeping

The web has been pretty much empty of intelligent commentary since the Trump legal team's disavowal of Sidney Powell. There's a consensus among a few people like Rush Limbaugh and Robert Barnes that the November 19 news conference, in which Giuliani effectively endorsed Powell's unsubstantiated theory that Dominion voting machines switched millions of votes from Trump to Biden, only to fire her days later, was a disaster. But other questions need to be asked.

Trump won a close election with a popular vote minority in 2016. In 2020, he ran almost exactly the same strategy, which the Democrats anticipated, and lost a close election trying to win exactly the same states. Both years, he ran against weak, out-of-touch, sick Democrat candidates who campaigned far less than he did. The evidence we're starting to get, and the opinions of commentators like Alan Dershowitz, is that although there was vote fraud in 2020, it was what we've always expected from big-city machines, and it wasn't enough to overturn the margin of victory. What was the difference between 2016 and 2020?

Nobody's asking questions about this. Rather than mourn the dead kraken, why not try to figure out what went wrong and how we can fight going forward?

What was the difference between Trump and Reagan, who won a credible victory in 1980 but a landslide in 1984? Even George W increased his margin of victory in 2004 vs 2000. Trump seems never to have aimed in that direction, apparently expecting to carry the same states he carried in 2016, with only head fakes to Minnesota and New Hampshire. But he lost key states he'd carried in 2016, and the kraken, now dead, can't be blamed.

One thing that strikes me is that both Reagan and Bush Jr had solid and trustworthy advisers, Reagan with the "kitchen cabinet" who'd accompanied him from California. Reagan also had input from the Wall Street Journal, Arthur Laffer, William Buckley, and the National Review contingent at the time. Bush Jr had a cadre of neoconservatives, many from NR and WSJ, as well as Vice President Cheney. Those were wrong on Iraq, but their mistakes didn't come out before 2004. Junior had also been a frequent visitor at the White House with his father.

I suspect one thing that will come out about Trump is a complaint that was also made about Newt Gingrich, whose career prematurely flamed out in the 1990s. Gingrich, it was said, tended to take the advice of the last person who'd talked to him. I bet something like this happened with Trump. That Sidney Powell was able to hijack the post-election legal effort is probably a symptom -- she had a superficially good idea that she couldn't back up if anyone pressed her at all.

I think one answer is that Trump was a talented political newcomer. Robert Barnes suggests there might be a parallel with the election of 1824, where Andrew Jackson was edged out in favor of the lackluster John Quincy Adams, and Jackson made a comeback in 1828. But Jackson was 57 in 1824, while Trump is 74 in 2020. Robust as he is now, he seems tired in the wake of the election, and I don't think he'll be the same man in four years.

Trump was able to recognize political trends that he didn't create, and they won't go away when he leaves office. He wasn't surrounded by advisers and cabinet who could support and extend his vision. But the constant commotion among his staff, right up to the November 19 press fiasco, is an indication he didn't have a fully mature set of advisers, which took him down. Among his failed instincts in hindsight was his adoption of Dr Fauci as administration spokesman on the COVID crisis. Commentators pointed out that Fauci had a record of poor performance during the AIDS crisis, but apparently Trump had no Washington hands to give him insight on Fauci when he needed it.

Robert Barnes and Richard Baris make the point that no Bush, McCain, or Romney could carry Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. They had hard enough times with Ohio and Florida. There needs to be some serious rethinking among the next generation of Republican hopefuls. Pretending the kraken is just sleeping will only delay the necessary tasks.

The COVID Data Makes No Sense

We've entered a season in which governors and local health authorites are reimposing COVID controls, with Michigan in near-complete lockdown, while most other states are falling into line with curfews, typically stay-at-home orders with the usual exceptions between 10 PM and 5 AM or whenever. I haven't heard any clear explanation for why people should not move around after 10, with a lot of questions about whether the authorities think if people just don't go out to bars, the cases will drop.

The problem is that public health authorities don't actually know how COVID is transmitted, and when it's transmitted, why so many cases are asymptomatic. An article in the Wall Street Journal is behind a paywall, but Instapundit has an excerpt: "Western nations face a big challenge in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic: Ten months into the health crisis, they still know little about where people are catching the virus. . . . Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health in the New York City mayor’s office, said 10% of the city’s infections are due to travel, 5% from gatherings, and another 5% from institutional settings such as nursing homes."

“The vast majority of the remainder—somewhere probably around 50% or more [isn't this 80%?] -- we don’t have a way to directly attribute their source of infection,” Mr. Varma said. “And that’s a concern.” So by shutting down synagogues nnd churches, New York is by its own numbers addressing 5% of the problem. By New York's estimate, curfews intended to limit people going to bars address the same 5%. The same applies to banning Thanksgiving.

At this point,, the COVID virus has been out-and-about for roughly a year, but despite legions of highly-paid health experts on the case, we know little more about it than we did a year ago, and the remedies proposed are the same as those imposed early this year -- basically, masks and lockdowns. But at this point it's received knowledge that the states with the strictest regimes, like New York, Illinois, and Califonrnia, also have the biggest increases in cases.

But by imposing restrictions on behavior that by New York's informed estimate causes only 5% of the problem, those restrictions are guaranteed to have almost no effect -- and this is what we're seeing. For that matter, the empirical evidence we see is that the California megachurches that have defied restrictions there and continue to worship as before have had negligible infections. Why isn't anyone asking these quesstions?

On top of that, although infections have increased in recent weeks, many of these are asymptomatic, snd COVID death rates actually continue to decrease. For those hospitalized, treatments have become steadily more effective, and public figures who report infections, including President Trump, recover with mild symptoms.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the whole strategy of masks, capacity limits, social distance, and lockdowns is there to give an impression that government is doing something, but the frenzy is having little actual effect. The curfews are an attempt to appear to be doing something without causing outright social unrest, which is what reimposing full lockdowns is likely to do. The curfews themselves have resulted in viral videos emerging from incidents across the country like the one below in Buffalo:

The problem is that the public is increasingly aware that curfews do nothing to limit COVID, and the increasing cases will result in reimposed full lockdowns, right around Christmas. The authorites already have gotten plenty of messages that the result will not be good.

Robert Barnes On Sidney Powell

Within hours of last evening's announcement that Sidney Powell was no longer on the Trump legal team, Robert Barnes appeared on the Viva Frei YouTube channel to provide his insights into what happened. I've already said here that Barnes has proven one of the best analysts available in the current election cycle. He's the best of some very bad choices, but I'll go into that below.

To summarize Barnes's account, his view of Powell's professional background is that she has no experience in election law and no experience in civil law, both of which are key in the Trump effort. She does specialize in criminal appeals, which made her the best possible attorney for General Flynn, and this made her reputation. But she's completely over her head in the current cases.

He also thinks stress and fame have affected her judgment. But also, she seems to have swallowed QAnon conspiracy theories, one of which would be that Venezuela controlled the election count via the Frankfurt server. (She seems to be on the verge of alleging this outright.) In his view, she hijacked the Trump legal effort over the week of November 16, leading up to the Thursday press conference, where she took equal precedence with Giuliani and Ellis. From Barnes's viewpoint, this was a "public relations disaster".

I've also on my old blog cited a YouTuve channel called Hard Bastard as another very good source of analysis. The Hard Bastard's view tracks pretty closely with Barnes.

The overall problem we continue to have is that corporate media has been losing credibility throughout the Trump administration, in an environment where the CIA, FBI, and other formerly authoritative institutions have demonstrably acted in bad faith. Conventional wisdom had Fox News as a potential counterbalance, but recall that Fox worked against Trump in 2016 as well -- Megyn Kelly's debate performance that year destroyed her reputaion and career..

Bloggers and social media haven't filled the gap. Just since yesterday, the bloggers have mostly stayed on Powell's side, continuing to hope she'll come up with the evidence she's promised. The few sensible opinions, like Barnes and Hard Bastard, are on YouTube, where there's generally no transcript, and the discussion is by its nature desultory. Thus it's hard to quote excerpts.

In addition, there's no pattern of independent daily commentary on the news cycle. There were no intelligent, unhysterical voices as of Tuesday when Powell announced the kraken had already been released. (Commenting on last night, another blogger said the kraken died.) A Barnes might have provided a better warning at the time. The Thursday press conference salvaged Powell's credibility in my mind, for instance. Commentary by someone other than the pretty boy Carlson could have helped.

One problem is that the good independent commentators like those above aren't professional journalists. Their work appears at best every few days, and in Barnes's case, it's across a number of platforms. We need a predictable pattern of credible, pertinent comment.

Trump Legal Team Apparently Disavows Sidney Powell

Info here. I'll be following up.

Dominion Sidesteps On Fox

A spokesman for Dominion Voting Systems appeared on Fox News today to repeat, pretty much verbatim, the claims Dominion has made on its website about its role in the election. The spokesman on Fox, Michael Steel, is identified as a principal with Hamilton Place Strategies. Hamilton Place's website says, "We understand complex topics, explain issues to target audiences, and persuade critical stakeholders." In other words, it's a PR firm. I'd suggest Dominion needs a crisis management firm instead, but that's just me.

What's interesting here is that Dominion's own executives backed out of testifying at a Pennsylvania House hearing on Friday, but today, they've delegated to a PR flack to make statements that we may reasonably assume Dominion's attorneys advised its executives not to make, as they could either be taken as admissions against interest or statements that could be used to challenge them on cross-examination. I suspect as well that Dominion was nevertheless under pressure to say more in response to the continuing controlversy, and the clearly scripted exchange witn the Fox talking head implies that the controversy isn't going away.

Maria Bartiromo had a good list of questions that ought to be asked of Dominion on her show this morning:

Thee are questions Michael Steel isn't qualified to answer and will at some point need to be posed with Dominion. All Steel did was dismiss legitimate questions like these as "conspiracy theories". It sounds as if Bartiromo is talking with some serious people, and these questins aren't going to go away.

The Kraken, The Golden Mountain, Evidence, And Tucker Carlson

I don't believe I've ever watched more than the briefest excerpts from Tucker Carlson's Fox show. Now and then I watched O'Reilly, and before that, Greta Van Susteren a little more frequently, and I probably liked her best because she wasn't a glamour queen, and she dressed appropriately. Tucker, I'm sure, is headed on that same journey from which news readers do not return.

I checked the web, and the jury is out on whether his hair is natural, although the question I would have is why, if it's natural, he wears it like a toupee. Why go out of your way to look phony? Checking Wikipeida, he's the son of Richard Warner Carlson, an even better-connected media maven, so my guess is he's always had an easy ride, and he wouldn't know authentic if it walked up and shook his hand.

I listened to outtakes from his show on YouTube with his challenges to Sidney Powell to show him "evidence". One thing I noticed is that, although he's 51 years old, he speaks, or actually reads from the teleprompter, in a snotty puerile singsong. I'm not sure why anyone ever watched the guy, but they're right to ditch him now. So the kerfuffle with Sidney Powell on Thursday and Friday nights over whether she has "evidence" is, it seems to me, just evidence of a shallow, entitled guy who's realizing that not everyone just turns over whatever he wants.

I notice commentators, even semi-conservative ones, insist that affadavits aren't "evidence". I've sat in on enough court cases, as a witness, juror, and spectator, to know this simply isn't true. My wife, a retired attorney, sent me a link to this website, which says that affadavits, while considered weak evidence, are in fact used in court, especially when seeking temporary restraining orders, which are exactly what the Trump legal team is seeking in its initial filings.

So an affadavit is exactly what Sidney Powell did, by her account, send Carlson, along with a YouTube video outlining the Trump team's theory of the case. My guess is that Carlson was looking for a much bigger scoop to resuscitate Fox's (and of course, his) ratings, and that's not what he got, so he lashed out on national TV. Powell, an adult, had the overall case in mind, and she wasn't going to telegraph legal strategy by releasng anything prematurely. She has plenty of other platforms to present her case, and she's using them. Carlson hates this, as it puts him behind Newsmax and the others.

The main Trump team, where Powell works, is focused on what seems to be called the "Dominion" strategy, which is that machines, software, and personnel from Dominion Voting Systems actively worked to switch votes from Biden to Trump over the night and early morning of Nov 3-4, in sufficient numbers to invlidate the results of the election. I would say there are two sub-parts to this strategy, one I would call the kraken, the overall plot, and the second I would call the golden mountain, the Frankfurt server that is, among other things, alleged possibly to contain evidence of a 400-plus vote Trump Electoral College victory.

I posted on this possibility last Monday. Since then, leaks have gradually come out that suggest the Larry Johnson version I discussed then is the closest fit to what may have happened. Powell herself has alluded to such a server's existence over the course of the last several days. Yesterday, Emerald Robinson of Newsmax appears to have had independent confirmation that "a piece of hardware has been secured" from Germany.

Dominion updated its home page yesterday to include, among other things, a more specific statement that "There have been no 'raids' of Dominion servers by the U.S. military or otherwise, and Dominion does not have servers in Germany." But the Larry Johnson version does not attribute any specific ownership to the hardware that, through the leaks we've had, was seized, but the Johnson version suggests it/they was/were on US government property in Frankfurt, which is how US authorities could seize it/them.

Powell and Giuliani have referred to "Scytl servers" in Frankfurt. Exactly why they're referring to them that way isn't clear, although they've been consistent in that usage. Scytl's November 13 press release does acknowlege that there were in fact servers owned by Scytl in Frankfurt, but "Servers in Frankfurt were used for a specific project for the European Parliament in 2019. These back-up servers were closed in September 2019." In addition, Scytl says, "The U.S. military has not seized anything related to Scytl in Frankfurt, Barcelona or anywhere else." Neverthless, this wording does seem extremely careful, and the Johnson version implies that, although the US military was involved in the Frankfurt seizure, it did not itself seize the hardware.

Detectives on true crime shows often say that when they get suspects to tell them lies, it's as valuable as a direct confession. I wonder if this is the case here. We'll find out more in coming days and weeks.

The Dominion Incompetence

One thing i'm doing to work my way though the current uncharted territory is to rely on my own life experience. I've never been in politics, and I've never canvassed an election. I spent most of my career in the corporate world, and due to the unstable tech environment of the 1980s and 90s, I worked for several companies that went belly-up. Corporate sinking ships are something I'm familiar with. So what can I apply to situations like Fox News, Dominion Voting, or Smartmatic that can give me clues to what's going on, irrespective of the election?

One thing I learned in that corporate environment was the need to maintain situational awareness and, as contingency planners might put it, always have an updated backup copy of your resume offsite. Inevitably I began to learn the signs that my employer was going south, just to know it was time to polish the resume again. A big sign was corporate whistling-past-the-graveyard in PR statements, or in worst cases, outright lies.

So let's look at Dominion Voting in the past several days. They haven't changed the angry all-caps assertions on their home page that I noted on Thursday, including 1) VOTE DELETION/SWITCHING ASSERTIONS ARE COMPLETELY FALSE. But this story reports,

Santa Clara County, California, as part of its agreement with Dominion Voting Systems, stipulates that the company's software must allow county staff "to adjust tally based on review of scanned ballot images."

. . . "This is normal," [the county spokeswoman] said. "Anybody who has Dominion has this. We’re not the only county that has to adjudicate ballots."

Sidney Powell, in her numerous recent interviews, has begun to point to training materials from Dominion that document such capabilities, something I predicted last week.

Smartmatic has a similar problem. I've already cited its statement, still on its site, that "Smartmatic has never provided Dominion Voting Systems with any software, hardware or other technology." But this story reports that in 2007, Smartmatic sold its subsidiary Sequoia Voting Systems to Dominion. Web references to the announcements of this transaction have been scrubbed, but as usual, nothing really disappears from the web.

Leaving the election completely aside, if I were working for either Dominion or Smartmatic, this would be a sign for me to update that offsite contingency resume and start checking the job sites. Election schmelection, this is a sign of either gross incompetence or deliberate coverup, and the company will be heading south sooner than anyone expects.

The angry public statements from both companies are an indication they're in what they may fantasize as "crisis management" mode, but the only way you succeed with crisis management is to be completely transparent. Clearly neither is doing this.

In fact, I would say this provides insight into why Dominion withdrew from testifying in a Pennsylvania House committee hearing yesterday, at a time when, from a crisis management standpoint, the company should be wanting to get its side of the story out.

It's hard not to conclude that Dominion's lawyers told its executives not to make public statements. But why lawyer up? I think the problem their lawyers see is that their involvement in the election could become a criminal matter. That's fine, but what's happened clearly is that the company's executives have dropped the shareholders' interest -- being transparent to allow the enterprise to continue -- in favor of their own -- saying nothing for the public record to reduce exposure to criminal prosecution.

The Dominion board should terminate everyone involved in that decision for conflict of interest, but that's not going to happen. They're incompetent as well.

One way this relates to the election is that neither Smartmatic nor Dominion is a reliable partner for the Democrats. Beyond what they've said on their websites, which is proving untrue, the companies won't be able to provide public support to the position that the election was fair.

More On The Next Enrons

It looks like Fox's prime time hosts are under pressure. Overnight, it seems a kerfuffle has arisen over whether, by Tucker Carlson's account, Sidney Powell "got angry and refused to provide evidence for voting software flipping votes" when he requested it.

Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox, interviewed Powell on the phone this morning, and Powell replied

I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. . . But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.

It looks like Maria Bartiromo is getting off the reservation, and she and Fox will almost certainly come to a parting of the ways. Bartiromo has a serious journalistic career behind her, and I assume she has fallbacks if this happens. Tucker, on the other hand, is a pretty boy, not much different in his way from Megyn Kelly, and if he leaves Fox, the multimillion-dollar money spigot will be turned off, likely without anything like the settlement Megyn got. UPDATE: Don Surber comments, "If Fox dumped O'Reilly who built that time slot, Fox will not hesitate to dump Carlson."

And at this point, I'm not sure how many Megyn style settlements they can pay. (Bartiromo, of course, won't get anything like that anyhow and will just have to go on working for a living.) Fox is making it plain that it wants to go from the market leader to a third-place CNN wannabe. Leaving the election entirely aside, I've got to question what's on their minds just as a business decision.

My guess is that the word has gone out to the prime time hosts -- Hannity may not be in the same boat here -- that there are going to be cuts, and they'd better be on their best behavior. Based on my last post, Laura Ingraham is clearly nervous.

But Fox's audience is already leaving for Newsmax and OAN, while CNN's won't go over to Fox.

But it also looks like Dominion Voting has writen off its chances as a continuing enterprise. It pulled out of testifying before a Pennsylvania House hearing this morning, which will do nothing but continue to destroy its business reputation in any conventional sense. It presumably has lost any chance of ever selling another Dominion machine, at least under that brand.

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.

Let's Not Forget The Bigger Battle

The outcome of the November 3 election has little direct effect on an issue that's been simmering for much of the year, the arbitrary and inconsistent COVID restrictions imposed by the states, over which (so far) the president has little direct control. At my old blog, I covered the ongoing legal campaign to limit extra-legislative actions by state, county, and municipal authorities to override First Amendment rights of speech, assembly, and free exercise of religion using the largely manufactured COVID-19 "pandemic", for instance in this post from October 19.

The status of various cases moving through federal and state courts is very mixed. The most important cases are currently an opinion by Judge William S. Stickman IV in the federal Western District of Pennsylvania courts effectively declaring the Pennsylvania COVID restrictions unconstitutional. I covered this in my old blog, for instance here. HIs order is stayed pending appeal.

Another case is a ruling by a Sutter County, CA judge invalidating many California COVID restrictions based on the idea that the governor modified state laws in several areas without going to the legislature to change them. I covered this in the old blog here. This is also in limbo.

These issues have tended to fall off the radar during the election crisis. The COVID crisis, though, emerged under President Trump, but in his capacity as president, there was little he could do about it. The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution reserves the rights not designated to the federal government in the Constitution to the states or the people. The ability to regulate local health rules seems to be generally subject to the Tenth Amendment and is delegated to state legislatures.

Thus as understood up to now, the president has no authority to impose national lockdowns or mask mandates, nor to override them in the states. The efforts to go to the US Supreme Court are an attempt to use that court's authority to declare various arbitrary or discriminatory state measures unconstitutional.

Among the most recent cases that are making their way to the Supreme Court are lawsuits by ultra-Orthodox synagogues in New York State, as well as the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, intending to overturn COVID orders by Gov Cuomo that severely restrict attendance at "houses of worship" in order to reduce the number of COVID cases in specific areas. So far, all these cases have been rejected by lower federal courts, but in recent days, both the Roman Cathlic Diocese and the synagogues have now asked the US Supreme Court for an injunction to overturn those limits.

In the Diocese of Brooklyn case, Justice Breyer has ordered the state to file a response by Wednesday, Nov 18.

It does appear that more governors and other local authorities are recognizing that COVID measures are unpopular. Ohio Gov DeWine has announced a curfew, but not a fuil lockdown, apparently on the theory that people spread positive test results by going to bars and getting drunk. Califonria Gov Newsom has announced he's considering a similar measure, but again, not a full lockdown.

On Tuesday morning, Dr Fauci said on CNN "he 'can’t understand why there’s pushback' against the health orders. He argued the measures are important because 'they save lives.'”

Whatever. At least something's sinkng in. But this is going to be a long struggle, in the end more important than a single election.

"The Kraken Was Released Several Days Ago"???

Via Gateway Pundit, I see that Sidney Powell has tweeted, in response to someone urging her actually to release it, "The Kraken was released several days ago," with a quote from scripture. But a number of intelligent commentators have already been giving her the benefit of the doubt, expecting the real kraken would appear as she could release more evidence. Now, apparently what we see now is what we get.

I'm starting to lose confidence.

The video below from Robert Gruler, while again giving Powell the benefit of the doubt, is also increasingly skeptical:

At about 25:00, he makes an important point: a certain part of the Powell-Giuliani argument is that key Deep State actors in the FBI and CIA worked against Trump throughout his administration. The difficulty with this, according to Gruler, is that Trump was their boss. If he didn't like what they were doing, he could fire and replace any of them, as in fact he did sporadically. But the Trump team's argument is hinging more and more on the idea that, according to Powell, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of votes were stolen via a widespread conspiracy involving the voting machines.

And as Gruler and other commentators have pointed out, just recounts and audits simply won't be enough to reverse the results. You've got to establish a massive conspiracy, someting close to Jason Bourne level, involving CIA and FBI complicity.

As Gruler says, this isn't totally beyond the realm of possibility -- but there's a very short time to make this more credible than it currently is, and I'm losing confidence in Powell's ability to bring this off.

Sidney Powell Continues To Tease

As I've said, one of the best commentators on the surrent cycle is Robert Barnes. He appeared on the Viva Frei YouTube channel Sunday night to discuss developments, and they had a segment on Sidney Powell and the kraken:

Although Barnes has tweeted that he's now on Trump's electoral team, the indication he gives is that he's working in Georgia and hasn't spoken with Powell, and he doesn't know what the kraken specifically is. He and David, the Viva Frei host, agree that Powell is a prominent and reputable attorney who appears confident in the knowledge of circumstances she hasn't yet explanied very fully, but they also agree that time is running out.

In two appearences yesterday, Powell left me concerned that whatever legal atrategy she's following, it doesn't appear to be fully coherent. She went on Lou Dobbs to discuss an affadavit from a founder of Smartmatic that outlined a system capability of recording votes by individual voters, but changing them without an audit trail:

She went on Mark Levin to say essentially the same thing. One thing that concerns me is that she's veered away from Dominion to go into Smartmatic without explaining why she's doing this, or even if she fully understands that these are two different, and competing, products. Clearly both Dominion and Smartmatic are in crisis mode due to their portrayal in the current controversies. Smartmatic issued the following statement on its website:

• Smartmatic has never owned any shares or had any financial stake in Dominion Voting Systems. Smartmatic has never provided Dominion Voting Systems with any software, hardware or other technology. The two companies are competitors in the marketplace.
• Smartmatic does not have any ties to any governments or political parties in any country. It has never been owned, funded or backed by any government.

As David of Viva Frei has pointed out, affadavits themselves don't do much, and they can simply be contradicted by affadavits from the other side. If Powell has an affadavit from someone saying this is what Hugo Chavez wanted the product to do, that's interesting. But the question still remains of whether the product actually does that, separate from any capability of the Dominion system, and whether this function, assuming it exists, was actually employed in specific circumstances that can be proven in the US on the night of November 3-4.

This isn't a kraken, at least not yet. Since Powell is a competent attorney, she must certainly understand this. And time is running out.

Smartmatic's statement can certainly have been weasel-worded. It doesn't deny, for instance, that it has the capability to switch a voter's vote without keeping a record. And if this capability is in the system, we must assume there's at least the possibility that any totals collected by a Smartmatic system can be invalidated. This would probably be the end of both Smartmatic and Dominion as brands, so it's reasonable to see that they'd both be in crisis management mode.

(At minimum, large numbers of Dominion employees have deleted their Linkedin profiles since November 4, which should give an indication of current circumstances' impact on both companies, whether or not it's deserved. These companies may becme the next Enrons if things keep on this way, regarless of the election's outcome.)

However, Powell and the Trump election team need more than what's been disclosed, whatever happens to Dominion and Smartmatic. They implicitly recognize that to overturn the election, they will need to invalidate hundreds of thousands of votes. The only serious way to do this will be effectively to throw out large numbers of votes collected in both Dominion and Smartmatic machines.

At about 14:50 in the YouTube at the top of this post, Barnes says that unlike historical recounts, where about 1/100th of 1% of votes are changed, in 2020 Michigan recounts, 5-6% have been changed. This is better than a few hanging chads, but it's probably not enough by itself to change the overall result.

So, Just What Is Sidney Powell's Kraken?

My earlier post today discussed a pretty simple evidentiary question that might be used to establish that election data was unlawfully manipulated on Novembr 3-4, and it could conceivably be used to challenge election results during an audit or recount. I also assume the Trump election team is on top of this. But is it a kraken?

I'm wonderimng if there's more than meets the eye here. On Friday, Rep Louie Gohmert told Chris Salcedo on Newsmax that computer servers were seized by a US Army force in Frankfurt, Germany. The report suggested they were owned by a Spanish company, Scytl. Gohmert, Sidney Powell,, and attorney L Lin Wood all issued cryptic tweets referring to this alleged raid.

The raid, or at least specific details of it, were then fact-checked by corporate media and designated false. The AP said,

False. Both the Army and Scytl told The Associated Press the claim is not true. Furthermore, Scytl does not have offices or servers in Frankfurt, Germany.

Scytl itself announced, in part:

• We do not have servers or offices in Frankfurt
• The US army has not seized anything from Scytl in Barcelona, Frankfurt or anywhere else

However, this may be carefully weasel-worded. Two posts at the Gateway Pundit suggest that whatever the details, a server in frankfurt was seized, whoever owned it or used it. This post says, quoting a "source":

The US government, once they determined that this Dominion server was involved in switching votes, then the intelligence community began a search for the server and discovered that the server was in Germany. In order to get access to that server and have it available for use in a legal manner they had to have the State Department work in tandem with the Department of Justice. They had to request that the government of Germany cooperate in allowing this seizure of this server.

The appropriate documents required to affect that kind of seizure were put in place, signed off on, and it appears there was also US military support in this operation. The US military was not in the lead. But this helps explain why Esper was fired and Miller and Kash Patel were put in place — so that the military would not interfere with the operation in any way.

An article by Larry Johnson, a highly controversial former CIA and State Department analyst, also at Gateway Pundit, added further possible details:

The U.S. Army did not conduct a raid in Germany on either Sctyl or Dominion offices or servers. They are foreign nationals and we must operate in accordance with German law. Moreover, the U.S. Army does not have law enforcement powers with respect to such entities.

So what happened? I am reliably informed that a unit under the command of USEUCOM (i.e., United States European Command) did in fact conduct an operation to take control of computer servers. But these servers belong to the CIA, not Dominion or Sctyl. The U.S. military has full authority to do this because any CIA activity in the European theater is being conducted using military cover. In other words, CIA officers would be identified to the German government (and anyone else asking) as military employees or consultants.

. . . I also have confirmed what Jim Hoft reported the other night–the CIA’s Gina Haspel was not informed in advance of this operation. Based on this fact, I think it is correct that action was taken in Germany on territory under U.S. control and that a CIA facility was targeted.

I also have learned that FBI Director Christopher Wray was excluded from this operation.

So the debunking fact checks from corporate media are literally true, but apparently something did happen in Frankfurt, and something was seized and taken away, probably by the Justice Department. There's pobably a great deal else we don't yet know, and may never. But it sounds like we're in Jason Bourne territory.

And if there's just a back door to Dominion software, why did Sidney Powell say Gina Haspel should be fired immediately?

[It] makes me wonder if the CIA has used [Dominion] for its own benefit in different places. And why Gina Haspel is still there in the CIA is beyond my comprehension. She should be fired immediately.

Now, that would be a kraken.

Sidney Powell And The Kraken

Over the weekend, Sidney Powell, a prominent attorney best known as Gen Flynn's lawyer but currently working with the Trump election team, teased that she would "release the Kraken" regarding election fraud. On Sunday, she gave at least two interviews with additional details. The more informative was on OAN, as reported at Gateway Pundit. Referring to a system capability allegedly available with Dominion voting machines, she said

Sidney Powell: They can watch the voting real time. They can run a computer algorithm on it as needed to either flip votes, take votes out or alter the votes to make a candidate win… It’s massive criminal voter fraud, writ large across at least 29 states… It’s obvious the algorithm and the statistics that our experts are tracking out are batches of votes and when the votes changed. It’s going to blow the mind of everyone in this country when we can get it all together and can explain it with the affidavits and the experts that have come forward.

I spent most of my career in IT, often in documentation and security. To demonstrate this more conclusively, Powell would need, first, to show that this is a documented feature of the product. If so, this should be fairly easy to point out, since it would be a sales feature covered even in marketing brochures, and it would need to carry detailed specs and operating instructinos for use by operators during an election. There are potentially thousands of customers for such a system worldwide, and each customer would need multiple people on staff who would need know how to operate such a feature.

So I've got to assume that if this is true, there must be product manuals out there, even on line. (In this day and age, almost certainly on line.)

Second, the system must have audit trails that document when and where every vote was received and how it was counted. If indeed blocks of votes were switched, which is what Powell clearly alleges at OAN. the audit trail would report this event and who did it. Normal computer security controls limit an extremely powerful capability like switching blocks of votes to specified "superuser" IDs. You would normally want such a capability to be strictly limited to a small number of higher-level users, if only to prevent ordinary clerks from inadvertently switching votes.

As someone who's worked with such features in the real world, I recognize that not all organizaions are this careful, and low-level people can certainly do high-level things -- but the action will have been recorded, even if the actor isn't easily identifiable.

It does sound as if Powell has some familiarity with the product featues and how they operate. If the set of circumstances she outlines is credible, it ought to be possible to discover them pretty much as a routine matter in an election challenge or recount. If such actions were taken -- the scenario she outlines would suggest some person, signed on to the system, reviewed projected electoral results and then acted, using the documented system feature, to switch votes in order to change the projected results. This would have been done at an identified time, in an identified transaction, and probably by an identified user.

If that's the case, this would indeed be a Kraken. We'll have to see how this plays out. However, I saw a reference, which I'll need to track down, to the head of Trump's electoral team being a computer security specialist. Sounds reasonable, but all this needs to be filled in much more fully in coming days.

UPDATE: This interview on OAN indicates, in part, that the "superuser" type ID that can change results is widely available, which would be one of the first issues I would look at. But again, any action taken by a user should be recorded on an audit trail.

The 1824 Election And Plans B, C, D. . .

Robert Barnes's offhand remark anout the 1824 and 1876 elections brought me to think for rhe first time about actual US elections that weren't resolved in the Electoral College as outlined in Article II, Section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution. The 1824 election is so far the only one that was resolved in the House as specified in the Twelfth Amendment. As I said yesterday, of the two candidates with the most votes, John Quincy Adams was selectd over Andrew Jackson, who went on to win the 1828 election.

All four of the candidates in 1824 were Democrats, by the way. Exactly what went on in the House is a different subject that I won't discuss here, except to say that 1824, being pre-Reconstruction, must not have been governed by the same behind-the-scenes forces, such as the post-Civil War industrial fortunes, that governed 1876-77.

But let's look at the bigger picture. In its first 100 years, the US had not two, but three elections that weren't resolved via the Article II,Section I straight electoral vote that's taught in civics class. These were `1824, 1860, and 1876. The proximate cause of the Civil War was the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, which the Confederate states didn't recognize. Thus each of those elections was resolved in a different way, which we might call Plans B, C, and D.

But then it took another 123 years, up to the election of 2000 and Bush v Gore, for a presidential election to be resolved in a way other than straight Article II, Section 1. The country weathered assassinations, scandals, depressions, and two world wars without the need to deviate from the civics class procedure, which had been a fairly regular thing by 1876. Why is this? The issue of slavery had been resolved ten years earlier via the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederate surrender, and the Fourteenth Amendment, but apparently there was unfinished business.

And when the unfinished business was resolved, there was effective political stability for more than 100 years. Nothing perfect, mind you, but in the Ferdinand Lundberg paradigm, a plutocracy based in post-Civil War fortunes achieved a concursus bonorum that did impose order, especially over the immigrant population of the late 19th century. In fact, the consensus was also able to accommodate the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. To the Progressives, the Rockefellers were major villains, but they prospered throughout.

Lundberg, though, is anything but a systematic thinker. Exactly how this was done is still something of a mystery, and it's hard not to think the plutocracy was assisted by a highly capable and well-paid managerial class. Look at Henry Clay Folger, who, while president of Rockefeller's Standard Oil, was nevertheless just hired help in Lundberg's paradigm, but he became a major collector of Shakespeare manuscripts who endowed the Folger Shakespeare Library.

But the election of 2000 looks like it may have been a signal that the 1877 settlement that appears to have initiated the period of plutocratic stability that Lundberg discusses is reaching the end of its useful life, and however the 2020 election is resolved, many commentators have said that whichever candidate wins whatever process resolves the current impasse, half the country will come away believing the winner was not legitimate.

But after all, this will just be a continuation of the situation we saw in 2016, where a Deep State, acting on behalf of what Ferdinand Lundberg would insist was the post-Civil War consensus, refused to accept Trump's election, which itself was anomalous, since he won an electoral majority but lost the popular vote.

This suggests a realignment has been taking place, but it's nothing new. The Civil Rights movement, which began in the late 1940s and achieved great success in the 1950s, revived the Reconstruction agenda. In the 1970s, the South switched sides from Democrat to Republican and thus effectively accepted Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, barely exists now. That issue was finally settled.

What else is happening?

Rutherford B Hayes And The Compromise Of 1877

An offhand remark by Robert Barnes a week ago planted a seed in my thinking: he said the current contested election cycle should be compared to the contested elections of 1824 and 1876. Now, maybe I wasn't paying attention in American History class, but I don't think much was ever said about either of these elections. In the 1824 election, none of the candidates, led by John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, achieved a majority in the Electoral College. Under the provisions of the Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution, the election went to the House of Representatives, where Adams was selected. I may discuss this separately in greater depth.

The 1824 lection was the only contested election to go to the House. A similar disputed electoral result of 19 votes in 1876 was resolved by an ad hoc commission. Rutherford B Hayes, who had already been nominated as a compromise candidate by the Republicans in 1876, was awarded the 19 disputed votes, plus an additional vote from a disqualified Oregon elector, by the commission, in a deal called the Compromise of 1877. The selection of Hayes, a Republicasn, was part of a deal that includedd the removal of federal troops who were protecting Reconstruction governments in Southern states, which effectively ended Reconstruction and tacitly returned the South to Democrat control.

If I try to put this in the overall context of Ferdinand Lundberg's paradigm of post-Civil War US politics, I think it fits. The 1877 Compromise allowed the industrial revolution to extend into the Southern states, most immediately in the ability to exploit coal and lumber in the border states to benefit Northern capital and industry. This was accomplished with Northern capital under an agreement that allowed it to be done with Southern Democrat support.

The tensions this created for the freed African=American slaves and their descendants in a Southern society run behind the scenes by rich Northern liberals is brilliantly depicted in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. I think in broad outlines, Ferdinand Lundberg would agree that this was a major component of the political settlement that emerged in 1877. whereby Northern capital would tolerate segregation, and in fact enable poor conditions for African-Americans in Northern cities, in return for a free political hand elsewhere.

It occurs to me that another historical trend that was contemporary with the 1877 settlement was the rise of "new style" liberal Protestantism as expressed by figures like Henry Ward Beecher. This was also in many ways a project of post-Civil War capital, with the adoption of Gothic church architecture and the hihgly popular Anglo-Catholic style in the Episcopal Church.

The one area where I would take exception to Robert Barnes's insight, though, is that the 1824 and 1876 eections were disputed but resolved in peaceable settlements. But the 1860 election was also disputed. That was a very different matter, and it wasn't resolvd in a compromise. Abraham Lincoln was neither John Quincy Adams nor Rutherford B Hayes.

Where To Find The Best Analysis Of This Election Cycle

So far, the single best commentator on the current election cycle and its potential aftermath is the attorney Robert Barnes, who by his account for much of his life has had a sideline of betting on elections. He doesn't have a blog, he doesn't normally write for independent media, and he doesn't have his own YouTube channel.

However, he regularly appears in joint YouTube videos with Richard Barris, an independent pollster and under-the-radar pundit who has a YouTube channel called People's Pundit Daily.

Barnes also appears in joint YouTube videos with a Montreal attorney on a channel called Viva Frei. Before the current election cycle, Barnes also offered insights there into well-publicized cases involving the Covington, KY Catholic schoolboys and General Michael Flynn.

The Viva Frei commentator, as in the video above, also offers independent commentary on the current election cycle without Barnes.

However, for the past several days, Barnes has gone silent, which suggests he's very busy with something. Another attorney who's given good recent commentary on the current state of legal play is Robert Gruler on the YouTube channel of R&R Law Group, a criminal defense practice in Arizona.

There's a very good analyst of the specific legal actions under way in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania by a pseudonymous writer who goes by the name Shipwreckedcrew at the Red State blog, for instance here.

In trying to build my own model of events that can help me put things into place as they occur, I've started with a remark by Robert Barnes on Richard Baris's stream in the days immediately after the election that, although the Trump campaign can insist on recounts and recanvasses in the critical states, the level of manipulation has created a "mess" that can't be rectified by what might be called "point solutions". The problem goes beyond x votes miscounted in precinct y, or x * a votes miscounted in z precincts.

And even if the problem could theoretically be addressed by recanvass or recount, there's no time to accomplish this credibly before the elections can be certified and the electors vote on the president. Thus, while the Trump campaign may make a good-faith effort to accomplish this, the ony effective strategy will be either to have the US Supreme Court (or applicable state supreme courts) declare enough state elections invalid to result in neither presidential candidate receiving an electoral majority, with the outcome resolved in the House of Representatives -- or to have the state legislatures involved name their own slates of electors, as opposed to the slate elected in the invalid elections.

I'll have more to say on this view of the state of play as events develop.