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.