Yule Amid the Blooms

From Victoria:

When magnate William Bowers Bourn II and his wife, Agnes, selected a picturesque parcel of land, midway between San Francisco and San Jose, on which to build their country house, they chose Willis Polk, an eclectic architect with a penchant for combining styles, to design the residence. Completed in 1917, the estate was bestowed with the unique name, Filoli—an acronym for Bourn’s personal motto: “Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.”

 For the gardens, the Bourns turned to a master of many trades, Bruce Porter. Along with landscape design, his talents extended to painting, stained glass work, and art critique. His ambitious plans for Filoli, which included many elements found in classic English estates, evolved from 1917 to 1929 and continued to flourish through both the Bourns’ residency and that of its subsequent owners, the William Roth family. Mrs. Roth donated the house and a portion of the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1975; the Filoli Center later purchased the remaining acreage. (Read more.)

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Covid Relief Package?

 From The Election Wizard:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Sunday evening said lawmakers have reached a long-awaited coronavirus relief bill that is expected to be voted on later Monday.

According to a tweet from Ryan Fournier, the COVID relief package gives $10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan...."The Associated Press reported that if the deal is finalized, it will be the largest spending measure, which combines the COVID-19 relief with a $1.4 trillion government-wide funding plan that the New York Times referred to as a $2.3 trillion behemoth.” (Read more.)

Meanwhile, more GOP lawmakers are behind the electoral challenge. From The Epoch Times:

Another member of Congress has pledged to challenge the Electoral College vote submissions when the Joint Session of Congress meets Jan. 6, joining several others who said they will do so. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) wrote in a letter to Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) that “I intend to object to the certification of the Electoral College vote submissions on January 6th, and I respectfully ask you to stand with me.”

Neither Cornyn nor Cruz have publicly said whether they would challenge the votes. The process requires at least one House representative and one senator.

“We must stand up for the tens of millions of Americans who want answers to the irregularities surrounding this election,” Gooden said in his letter. “It is our duty to ensure the integrity of our election is unwavering, and the American people deserve to feel confident their vote matters.” Gooden furthermore noted that allegations and reports of voter fraud are looming over the validity of the Nov. 3 presidential election. (Read more.)

 

From The National Pulse:

White House Advisor Peter Navarro released an exclusive update to his “Immaculate Deception” election fraud report describing how in Michigan the number of potentially illegal ballots is over two times greater than Joe Biden’s alleged margin of victory. Navarro, the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, details in the memo addressed to “War Room and American Republic” how election fraud tainted nearly 400,000 ballots in the critical swing state of Michigan. (Read more.)

 

From OANN:

 The lawmakers reportedly implored President Trump not to give up on his fight for election integrity heading into the vote count. Meanwhile, Gaetz has called for Republicans to fight the stolen election results until the very end.

“Democracy is left undefended if we accept the results of a stolen election without fighting with every bit of vigor we can muster,” he stated.

The Constitution sates one lawmaker each from the House and Senate must object to the results in order for the full Senate to vote on the validity of the outcome. The House and Senate will meet January 6, 2021 to tally the Electoral College’s votes. (Read more.)

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The Reign of Terror in Vienna

 From Charles Coulombe at Crisis:

Despite authorities’ initial claim that the murderer was a one gunman, according to the Viennese daily Der Standard: “It is known that several jihadists met in July 2020. They are said to have been in a Whatsapp group in which IS terrorist videos were shared.… The network in Austria was also tight. Arrested the night of the attack, a total of at least 20 people are being investigated, some of whom have a relevant criminal record. There are now ten people in custody. Their main hearings will take place in a month to see if they can stay in prison.” Shortly afterward, the government ordered six mosques that the gunmen had frequented to be closed.

Severe as the lockdown has been, while the Austrian churches remain open, the bishops themselves forbade public Masses (which, however, resumed on December 7). This past week, church visitors in Vienna have been aware of a renewed police presence around churches—and assumed it had something to do with enforcing the Covid lockdown. As it happens, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, the new taskforce shall be keeping an eye on things until after Christmas for the express purpose of preventing further terrorist attacks on churches.

On November 11, in the wake of the shooting and subsequent investigations, Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz made a remarkable announcement: “In the fight against political Islam, we will create a criminal offence called ‘political Islam’ in order to be able to take action against those who are not terrorists themselves but who create the breeding ground for such.” (Read more.)

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Before They Were Themselves

 From Wonders and Marvels:

In the summer of 1817, two men hiking in the Scottish countryside ducked out of a rainstorm by huddling close together beneath a nearby thicket. One of the men pulled his thick tartan cape over the head and shoulders of the other, protecting them both from the wind and the wet until the storm had passed.

They were Washington Irving and Walter Scott, although even they hardly knew it yet.

At the time, Washington Irving was just another struggling American expat, desperately trying to beat the post-war economic slump and save the floundering family business abroad. He had always been a lousy student, despite having (eventually) passed the bar, and though he now gamely embarked on a crash course in bookkeeping and business, it would not be enough to save the business from bankruptcy.

And he knew it.

He’d been living on the residual fame of his earlier literary success for years now, having achieved some fame and notoriety as the barely pseudonymous author of A History of New York, the book that gave us the words Knickerbocker and Gotham as synonyms for New York. Following that, he had served as the editor of a reasonably successful American literary journal, mostly confining himself to pirating and reprinting works from England before they were published in America, and writing sentimental biographies of the naval heroes of the War of 1812.

It was hack work, but he didn’t honestly have much else to do. And he needed the money.

When his brother Peter’s shipping business in Liverpool starting circling the drain, he tried to help. He wasn’t much good at it, though, which was depressing, and he took to brief respites of travel during which he might forget his troubles and scribble down half-formed bits of ideas in his journal.

The writing wasn’t coming easy for him these days, either.

A friend had given him a letter of introduction to Walter Scott, who was living about twenty miles southeast of Edinburgh, and who had expressed himself an admirer of Irving’s History of New York. Irving set out for Edinburgh, determined to make the man’s acquaintance if he could.

Scott was not yet Sir Walter Scott. He had not yet published Ivanhoe, or Rob Roy, or Kenilworth. He was widely acclaimed as a Romantic poet, though, and it was in this role that Irving knew him. Admired him. Okay, he idolized him. Irving disliked Coleridge, disliked Wordsworth, disliked Shelley. But Scott, he adored.

So he appears on Scott’s doorstep, letter in hand, heart pounding, waiting to see if his idol will deign to see him.

He does more than that. Scott insists that Irving join him and his family for breakfast, then keeps him as a close companion for the next three or four days, introducing him to his daughters, showing him the local landscape, and going over with him the drafts of Rob Roy that he was finalizing at the time.

The incident of the rainstorm, the thicket, and the tartan cape was one that Irving would retell over and over throughout his life. He always felt that Scott had taken him under his wing — literally and figuratively — from that time on, and counted his friendship as among the most important and influential in his life. (Read more.)

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Beijing ‘Substantially Involved’

  From The Epoch Times:

Beijing was “substantially involved” in the U.S. 2020 elections on multiple levels, according to China analyst Gordon Chang, who has described the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) infiltration of American “elite” circles as an “espionage emergency.”

“I think China clearly interfered,” Chang, the author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” told NTD’s Focus News.

Chang, who has spent decades studying China and writing about the threat of the CCP, explained how leading up to the Nov. 3 presidential election, the trend of Chinese propaganda was that former Vice President Joe Biden should receive the Democratic Party nomination over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). State propaganda later favored Biden over President Donald Trump, Chang said.

“We also know that China tried to cause chaos. Large Chinese networks like ‘Spamouflage Dragon’ relentlessly attacked the president on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter,” Chang said, referring to a pro-Beijing spam network that targeted Trump in the run-up to the election.

“We know that the social media platforms have taken down a massive number of fake Chinese accounts,” Chang said. “Twitter in June alone took down 174,000 fake accounts, so we know that they were actively involved, and we have a number of indications that it was not to help the president.” (Read more.)

 

More from The Epoch Times, HERE.

 

From Team Candace Owens:

He promised that what is usually a routine ritual — the certification by Congress of the results of the Electoral College vote — will be anything but business as usual. Numerous affidavits testifying to various types of election fraud have been filed in courts in several swing states. These affidavits indicate that those who witnessed conduct believe that fraud took place but those allegations have yet to be proven through either the courts or law enforcement. Gaetz made his loyalties and his plans clear on Saturday.

“Donald Trump won a landslide election among people who actually showed up and voted. Think about that,” he said.

“And you know what? The farther you got away from the validation of the voter and their identity, the more Joe Biden’s margins went up. I mean, with the people whose votes weren’t validated who came in by the mail, Joe Biden was getting vote totals that would have made Bashar al-Assad blush,” he said in a reference to the Syrian President. Gaetz implied that the fix was in long before Election Day. (Read more.)

 

From Uncovered DC:

Jeremy Peters of the New York Times asked why so many of the court cases are being dismissed and why so many people, including Attorney General Barr, do not seem to agree that there was widespread, significant evidence of fraud. Peters also seemed to insinuate that the investigation is a sham designed to undermine election integrity, and said that investigations are just an “ever-widening effort by people to undermine the integrity of the election that’s grown from the Democrats to Republicans and state legislatures, many of whom supported and voted for Trump, to Trump’s own justice department and his own attorney general and his own three Supreme Court justices, which he has hand-picked.” 

Navarro responded to Peters with what few in the press seem to be willing to acknowledge: The Texas case that went to the Supreme Court was dismissed on standing, not evidence. Few of the other courts looked at anything but procedure. He added that few in the media have done their homework.

“I’ve literally read thousands of affidavits, I’ve read every single court case,” Navarro said. “I’ve looked at all the testimony that was done at the state legislature level and I can count on one hand the number of people who’ve done that in this country.”  He added, “The New York Times has the most power of any news organization in the world to do effectively a hard investigation of all of this. It simply has not done that . . . The knee-jerk reaction these days is to, if you’re on the left it’s like something that comes out that doesn’t fit your narrative, you knock it down.”

When asked by reporter Penny Starr from Breitbart News whether he thinks the report will change the outcome of the election, Navarro said that he hoped the report would “be a catalyst for a full investigation of all of these alleged election irregularities on a fast track and done before Inauguration Day.”

Sam Stein with The Daily Beast asked Navarro if the “political futures” of politicians like Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp should be “haunted” because of how they have handled electoral irregularities in their states. Navarro’s response was simply, “It should haunt this country.”

Navarro wrote the report as a private citizen because he believes that the piecemeal anecdotes and multiple lawsuits alleging election fraud failed to communicate a clear, centralized overview of the stunning evidence he has investigated. His goal was to prompt the media to explore with curiosity and to help the American people understand the gravity and scope of what has occurred. In short, he said it was a “theft by a thousand cuts across six dimensions and six battleground states rather than any one single silver-bullet election irregularity.”

His deep-dive examined six categories of irregularities in six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The check-marks in the tables denote widespread evidence and the asterisks denote that there is some evidence of fraud or irregularities. The six categories of irregularities were:

• Outright voter fraud
• Ballot mishandling
• Contestable process fouls
• Equal protection clause violations
• Voting machine irregularities
• Significant statistical anomalies

(Read more.)

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Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade

 There is now a huge database to trace the history of enslaved Americans. From Smithsonian:

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, a newly launched digital database featuring 613,458 entries (and counting), seeks to streamline the research process by placing dozens of complex datasets in conservation with each other. If, for instance, a user searches for a woman whose transport to the Americas is documented in one database but whose later life is recorded in another, the portal can connect these details and synthesize them.

“We have these data sets, which have a lot of specific information taken in a particular way, [in] fragments,” says Daryle Williams, a historian at the University of Maryland and one of the project’s principal investigators. “... [If] you put enough fragments together and you put them together by name, by place, by chronology, you begin to have pieces of lives, which were lived in a whole way, even with the violence and the disruptions and the distortions of enslavement itself. We [can] begin then to construct or at least understand a narrative life.”

Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Enslaved.org—described by its creators as a “linked open data platform” featuring information on people, events and places involved in the transatlantic slave trade—marks the culmination of almost ten years of work by Williams and fellow principal investigators Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University, and Dean Rehberger, director of Michigan State’s Matrix Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences.

Originally, the team conceived Enslaved.org as a space to simply house these different datasets, from baptismal records to runaway ads, ship manifests, bills of sale and emancipation documents. But, as Rehberger explains, “It became a project about how we can get datasets to interact with one another so that you can draw broader conclusions about slavery. … We’re going in there and grabbing all that data and trying to make sense of it, not just give [users] a whole long list of things.”

The project’s first phase launched earlier this month with searchable data from seven partner portals, including Slave Voyages, the Louisiana Slave Database and Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. Another 30 databases will be added over the next year, and the team expects the site to continue to grow for years to come. Museums, libraries, archives, historical societies, genealogy groups and individuals alike are encouraged to submit relevant materials for review and potential inclusion. (Read more.)

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A Grand Holiday

Christmas at Castle Howard. From Victoria:

For the past dozen or so years, Castle Howard has opened its gilded gates and invited the public to share in its grand Yuletide celebration. In 2018, the team of Charlotte Lloyd Webber and Bretta Gerecke orchestrated an extravagant jubilee based on “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” The pair brought their mutual backgrounds in theater design to turn a visit to the manor into a magical experience. With help from a brigade of craftspeople and volunteers, the beloved carol came to life. A 25-foot tree was showcased in the Great Hall, where thousands of shimmering fairy lights cascaded over the balcony, while a trio of French hens roosted in Lady Georgiana’s dressing room. A traditional Christmas Afternoon Tea was served in the elegantly appointed Grecian Hall. (Read more.)

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Trump Camp Files Certiorari Petition to Supreme Court

 From The National Pulse:

The Trump campaign filed a petition for writ of certiorari to the US. Supreme Court aimed at reversing a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases that “illegally changed Pennsylvania’s mail balloting law immediately before and after the 2020 presidential election.”

The filing alleges the action was “in violation of Article II of the United States Constitution and Bush v. Gore,” and “represents the Campaign’s first independent U.S. Supreme Court filing and seeks relief based on the same Constitutional arguments successfully raised in Bush v. Gore,” according to the campaign’s press release. (Read more.)

From The Gateway Pundit:

The 2020 Election Results in Arizona clearly make no sense and therefore indicate fraud. We knew the results in Arizona were fraudulent when the totals for the state went on and on before the 2020 Presidential race was finally called for Biden. One outlet claims to have identified over 700,000 fraudulent votes. They did this by reviewing the data being reported the night of the election and the days after. This is similar to the data we used in identifying similar fraudulent activity in other states...(Read more.)

 

From Bob Ehrlich at Western Journal:

Off the top of my head, think of the Trump “dirty dossier” story, the Don Jr. met with a Russian spy story, the Putin helped Trump rig the voting machines in 2016 story, the Trump aides had regular contact with Russian agents story, the Mike Flynn setup, and so on. That a three-year, $35 million special counsel investigation failed to corroborate even one of these or dozens of similar CNN headlines was no big deal.

Indeed, for the NeverTrumpers, there was a huge upside. It read: Whatever. The good news is Trump will (soon) be gone. But Trump/Russia collusion was not the only phony narrative given legs over the past five years. Recall the allegation that the president had removed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s bust from the Oval Office; that he was suffering from mental illness; that he had told Michael Cohen to lie to federal investigators; that Don Jr. had obtained stolen Wikileaks material prior to public release; that special counsel Robert Mueller had issued a subpoena to Deutsch Bank regarding the president; that Russia had hacked into the U.S. power grid; and that the CIA had been forced to remove an agent from its Moscow office because Trump could not be trusted with sensitive information. All such items were incorrect, of course, but the attitude was (you guessed it): Whatever. The good news is Trump will (soon) be gone. (Read more.)

From The Epoch Times:

The analyst who led the forensic audit of Dominion Voting Systems in Michigan said on Friday the information state officials pushed to redact shows that the outcomes of races were changed.

“The original report had log evidence that we published in the report to show exactly what we did and exactly the findings. Now, those did ultimately get redacted. And so now, the complaint is ‘well, but there’s no real proof and Dominion says ‘no, these things can’t be done,'” Russell Ramsland Jr. said during a virtual appearance on Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports.”

“But at that point, Dominion’s argument is no longer with us. Dominion’s argument is with their own user’s manual and their own logs, because the logs—had they been able to be published—show very clearly that the RCV [ranked-choice voting] algorithm was enacted. It shows very clearly that the error messages were massive. It was very clearly [sic] that races were flipped,” he added.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Ramsland and his team at Allied Security Operations Group earlier this month audited Dominion machines and software in Antrim County, where officials on election night reported a win for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The officials later said the results were skewed and that President Donald Trump actually received more votes in the county. The audit was the first conducted post-election of Dominion products. It was part of a court case. (Read more.)

More HERE.

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Mass Surveillance

 From The Epoch Times:

The Chinese regime exploited vulnerabilities in the global mobile telecommunications network to conduct “mass surveillance” on Americans, according to a recent report by a cyber research firm. By analyzing signals data, the report by Washington-based Exigent Media found that Beijing, working through state-owned telecom operator China Unicom, was the leading source of attacks against U.S. mobile users over 3G and 4G networks in 2018.

The regime exploited well-known network vulnerabilities, which allowed it to track, monitor, disrupt, and intercept communications of U.S. phone subscribers while they traveled abroad. The vulnerabilities are centered around the legacy mobile SS7 signaling system, described in the report as “a patchwork system enabling network operators around the world to communicate with each other for international roaming services.”

The Chinese cyberattacks targeted tens of thousands of U.S. mobile users from 2018 to 2020, Gary Miller, the report’s author and a former mobile network security executive, told The Guardian.

“Once you get into the tens of thousands, the attacks qualify as mass surveillance, which is primarily for intelligence collection and not necessarily targeting high-profile targets,” Miller said. “It might be that there are locations of interest, and these occur primarily while people are abroad.”

That the attacks were routed through a state-controlled operator indicates a state-sanctioned espionage campaign, Miller told the outlet. (Read more.)

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