In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 ...

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 processio...

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 l...

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 Roc...

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 ...

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-ci...

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...

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...

Info here . I'll be following up.

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 D...

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 ye...

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...

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,...

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 ASSERTIO...

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 wi...

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 ...

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...

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 argu...

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 changi...

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. Scy...

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 forw...

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'...

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 disq...

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...