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Winds of Winter is not the only George R.R. Martin project that might go unfinished. On Tuesday, the Santa Fe Historic Districts Review Board turned down the famed fantasy author’s application to build a castle on his property.

Martin and his wife, through their Water Gardens Trust, had applied to build a home and seven-sided tower-like structure which would house a library, the Daily Mail first reported. That tower, in order to accommodate a stairwell and elevator, was six feet higher than what was allowed in the historic district in which the structure would be located.

Housing the elevator within the proposed tower (the application calls it the “Water Garden Keep”) would forestall the need for “unsightly box-like protrusions” on top of the Martins’ castle, their application says. It also says the elevator is necessary to accommodate the couple’s limited mobility.

The proposed castle had been revised substantially since it was first proposed (and rejected) in January 2020. Publicly viewable arched windows were removed, the Water Garden Keep’s exterior was changed from stone to a stucco adobe finish, and the building’s parapet was changed from a Gothic to Pueblo style.

These changes were enough to make the structure compliant with the district’s design standards, but the board still got to decide whether the tower deserved an exception to the district’s height limit.

Asked by a board member what the architectural style the proposed keep would be, Historic Preservation District Manager Lisa Roach replied: “It’s not a typical proposal that we see. It’s an accessory structure is all I can say.”

The structure’s unusual nature is what ultimately doomed it with both the board and the neighbors.

“It is a medieval castle, and I don’t understand how we could possibly approve it in this style,” said board member Frank Katz, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.

The New Mexican also reports that 40 neighbors in the surrounding area signed a letter opposing the project, writing that “the fact remains that the proposed building is still a prominent castle in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Santa Fe.”

Another neighbor compared the proposed project to the fictional castle Winterfell, telling the Daily Mail that “all it’s missing is Jon Snow and a couple of dragons.”

Perhaps if Martin had a few dragons at his disposal he would have been able to fend off the opposition to his project. Instead, a historic review board is telling him his castle is not quite up to code.

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According to the LSAC, the average age of law students is about twenty-three. We can estimate that most 1Ls were born in the late 1990s. I think we can also safely assume that most of these students have no living memory of September 11, 2001. They know about 9/11 as a historical event, the same way I know about JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, or the sinking of the Titanic.

I was born in 1984. I was seventeen on 9/11. I hope to do my role for as long as I can can. This morning I posted my annual remembrance of September 11, 2001. But in time, it will fade.

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This week, the British government announced limits on gatherings of people who don’t live together to groups of no more than six. Although the restriction seriously attacks freedom of assembly, it barely raised an eyebrow in an era of similar intrusions. How could it stand out when countries around the world are tightening the screws on speech, movement, business, and social connections in the name of public health?

As many people feared, the COVID-19 pandemic—or rather, the government response to it—is proving quite deadly to liberty. And too many people seem happy to go along.

“From Monday, we’re introducing the ‘Rule of 6’,” tweeted Matt Hancock, U.K. Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. “If you meet socially in groups of more than 6, you will be dispersed, fined & possibly arrested by the police. If we work together in the national interest, we can defeat this unprecedented #coronavirus.”

The “Rule of 6” does allow for some exceptions, including “protests and political activities,” but only subject to government guidance that makes in-face meetings privileges under nanny’s scrutiny.

While authoritarian governments commonly criminalize gatherings of potential dissidents, meeting to oppose the current batch of seat-warmers in favor of your own lot is essential to the democratic experience in nominally free countries. It’s also a fundamental right to gather with friends, co-religionists, colleagues, and family as part of civil society—the sections of the world that matter, beyond the boundaries of government.

But Britain’s restrictions on assembly pale in comparison to the pre-crime arrests police in the Australian state of Victoria made of those who just advocated public demonstrations against government policy.

Zoe Buhler, a pregnant woman who had called on social media for peaceful protests against the state’s draconian pandemic lockdown, live-streamed her own arrest. Police hauled her off even after she offered to delete the offending post.

At least Buhler’s door is still on its hinges. Victoria police broke into James Bartolo’s home and tackled him to the floor. Again, his crime was openly advocating protest against government policy.

The protests proceeded anyway, in defiance of the law. Of course, attendees criticizing government policy were arrested.

These days, you don’t have to assemble or even advocate assembly to get arrested in France; you just have to insult a mayor. The elevated penalty of community service plus a €7,500 fine for those who express “contempt” for mayors is being imposed after local officials complained of 233 physical attacks, up from 198 during the same period last year.

Then again, France has always frowned on harsh words directed at government institutions and officeholders, criminalizing speech defined as defamation and contempt. The extraordinary circumstances of COVID-19 provide an opportunity to impose extraordinary penalties further shielding the delicate feelings of government officials from the scorn of their subjects.

In July, David Kaye, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, warned that “in the past three months, numerous governments have used the COVID-pandemic to repress expression in violation of their obligations under human rights law.” But the countries he cited were mostly the usual suspects, such as Belarus, China, and Turkey. To see Australia, Britain, and France take advantage of the pandemic to impose restrictions and penalties on free speech and assembly is to see established and theoretically stable liberal democracies follow a path blazed by authoritarian countries.

To-date, free speech seems safer for Americans than for some of our overseas friends—we can still say pretty much what we want about government officials and their policies. Events in Portland and elsewhere suggest that we can even gather to do so publicly, if sometimes more violently than might be advised.

Still, Americans have been subject to lockdown orders, travel restrictions, mask mandates, and other requirements and prohibitions supposedly intended to protect our health, but definitely injurious to our liberty.

“In halls of power across the country, the growing novel coronavirus pandemic has sometimes been used to stretch, bend or ignore established law and policy,” Jenny B. Davis wrote for the ABA Journal back in April, even before some of the worst strictures were in place. “Fundamental freedoms, privacy protections and access to justice have been curtailed in the name of public safety, with legal justifications ranging from appropriate to patently inaccurate.”

Alleged public safety measures, unrestrained by limits on power, can inflict their own costs on health as well as freedom.

“Dangers looms when one person tries to regulate the lives of millions,” writes physician assistant Jordan Warnsholz, who is suing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over her restrictions. “Whitmer’s orders are a case in point. One banned any ‘non-essential’ medical procedures and elective surgeries… There’s no doubt that banning these procedures harmed the health and safety of my patients.”

The damage is worse, though, when frightened people imagine that the curtailment of liberty is a good thing and become complicit in the oppression of themselves and their neighbors.

Pollsters find that a majority of Michigan voters actually approve of Whitmer’s heavy-handed mismanagement of the pandemic response. They also oppose repealing the 1945 law that allows the governor to unilaterally declare an emergency and rule without legislative input.

In Australia, Victoria’s voters also cheer on the restrictive regime under which they live. “Overall, public opinion seems solidly behind the curtailment of civil liberties that would have been unthinkable a month ago,” reports The Guardian.

It’s difficult to imagine government officials—having exercised unprecedented control over our lives, often to popular applause—willingly restoring our freedom. The big takeaway from the pandemic era might not be the ease with which governments steal away our freedom by invoking the alleged necessities of a crisis. The real revelation is how little effort it takes to make many people like it.

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Van der Valk. PBS. Sunday, September 13, 9 p.m.

When the opening moments of PBS’ set-in-Amsterdam cop series Van der Valk opened with a dramatic chase, bicycles careening around canals at a terrifying 12 miles an hour or less, I dropped my face into my hands. How many hours and brain cells of my life were to be lost to precious scenes of Dutch vegan dog-petting and tulip-sniffing?

The surprising answer is none at all. Perhaps the bike chase was just shot as a disguise to get the show past the PBS Dullard and Blandness Review Board before the real mayhem began, but Van der Valk is a pure, hard-boiled throwback to the days of Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson.

Bullets fly and corpses leak. Beautiful dames wander in for a roll in the hay with cops of either sex and then beat it, unless they get arrested first. Weirdness abounds. One detective, investigating a murder in the religious erotica community (that is not a typo), frowningly inquires of an art librarian: “I’m not imagining this am I? A nun picking penises off a tree?”

Even Van der Valk‘s own parentage is a bit on the weird side. It’s based on a 1960s series of homicide-squad mysteries by the British novelist Nicolas Freeling. After 10 books, Freeling so heartily detested his creation Piet van der Valk that he literally killed him off and made van der Valk’s wife Arlette the lead character.

The British viewing public must have disagreed. The novels featuring Piet inspired one Brit TV series in the 1970s and another in the 1990s.  The newest version, which PBS is screening under its “Masterpiece Mystery” brand, aired in Europe earlier this year.

That “Masterpiece Mystery” label is another bit of disinformation. Van der Valk will never be mistaken for the work of Agatha Christie or any of the other British drawing-room mystery novelists.

Van der Valk (played by the ruggedly handsome Marc Warren, who had a recurring role in a season of The Good Wife a few years back) and his squadmates are a surly, hard-drinking lot. (Scrambled eggs and beer are not unknown for breakfast.) They treat everybody—suspects, witnesses, even victims—with brutal disdain. That assuredly includes one another.

When his scruffy, skirt-chasing sergeant Brad de Vries (British TV regular Luke Allen-Gale) muses that he’s never heard of a library where one suspect is said to be a regular, van der Valk barks: “That’s because it’s full of books!”

Van der Valk is more tolerant with his bisexual second-in-command Lucienne Hassell (Mamie McCoy, Wallander), which makes the rest of the squad wonder if they’ve slept together. It seems unlikely. Though Van de Valk occasionally falls into a hookup—his antennae immediately go up when he hears a female bartender declare that “All politicians should be shot!”—his taste in women pointedly excludes anything as normal as conversation. When he tries to kamikaze a blind date by declaring his profession as quantum physics, he’s horrified when the delighted woman squeals: “I’m completely obsessed with string theory!! Are you?”

The squad’s cases are as odd as they are, involving everything from renegade Transylvanian alchemists to “ethical fashion” designers whose aversion to killing animals pointedly does not cover one another. No show where a witness might casually declare that “I have one of my son’s fingers in the freezer” ought to be missed.

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From Smith v. Griffiths, decided Wednesday by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, the opening paragraphs:

This appeal arises out of a defamation action filed in the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County by Gerald I. Smith, Jr., appellant, against Brian Griffiths, appellee. Mr. Smith was a candidate in the 2018 Republican primary for the United States Senate in Maryland. He alleged in his complaint that statements made by Mr. Griffiths in an article posted on the political website blog “Red Maryland” were defamatory and “motivated by ill-will.” {Smith [argued] that the statements at issue concerned: (a) the five statements in Griffiths’ article that are not direct quotations from Smith’s own writing; (b) the separate statement in [an] email; and, (c) the headline “CRAZY.”} …

[We hold that,] because each statement at issue is either an assertion of fact or covered by the First Amendment conditional privilege and fair comment privilege, none of the statements provides a basis for liability….

In 2018, Mr. Smith was a Republican candidate in Maryland’s primary race for the United States Senate. Mr. Griffiths is a self-described “noted Maryland political commentator whose work has appeared in such publications as The Baltimore Sun [and] The Annapolis Capital” and is the editor-in-chief and a founding contributor of the political blog and newsletter Red Maryland….

After Mr. Smith filed his candidacy with the State Board of Elections, on January 30, 2018, Mr. Griffiths posted an article entitled “Conspiracy Theorist Files for U.S. Senate.” Initially, a Looney Tunes logo appeared at the top of the post, but Mr. Griffiths later deleted the logo and replaced it with the hand-written word “CRAZY.” The vast majority of the article quoted Mr. Smith’s own words, with Mr. Griffiths contributing only those sentences highlighted in bold below:

A conspiracy Theorist filed as a Republican for U.S. Senate today.

Gerald I. Smith, Jr. filed with the State Board of Elections and made a statement on Facebook that you have to see to believe.

* * *

Gerald Smith

It’s official[.] I’m running for U.S. Senate as a Republican in the state of Maryland. I’m the only Republican running thus far and hope it stats that way (the link below provides details on all the candidates running thus far). Chelsea Manning is running as a Democrat and I’ve already reached out to her campaign in hopes of doing some informal debates/discussions. Hopefully I can get some funding from the RNC and other organizations so I can establish a website which will al… See More

2018 Candidate Listing

The State Board of Elections provides all eligible citizens of the State convenient a…

14 Comment 2

* * *

Smith runs a website entitled “Human Rights Support” that explains … well, I’ll let Smith’s own words explain it.

U.S. Air Force Catholic senior leaders in conjunction with other senior government officials used former Air Force Major Gerald I. Smith Jr.’s 1989 religious event to plan and cover-up the worst tragedy in American history. Based on the timeline of events Catholics and others wanted to use Gerald’s religious events as an opportunity to make 9/11 appear as a religious Biblical event. The 1989 religious event that involved Gerald was reported to the Catholic Church by Catholic individuals who were also involved in the 1989 religious event. As sickening as this may sound based on the numerous horrific actions taken against Gerald it’s obvious numerous individuals have been involved in the planning and continued execution of one of the worst plans ever conceived in U.S. history.

Individuals like President Obama and Vice President Biden knew of this plan and did their absolute best to use Gerald Smith to achieve their personal political goals. Even while serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine from 1997-1999 many actions were planned against Gerald Smith. While Gerald was contemplating joining the military after receiving his MBA the Air Force and others planned Gerald’s first day in the military to be one week prior to 9/11. Shortly after 9/11 senior Air Force members were given the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff position along with other key government positions.

Later in 2008 shortly after Gerald Smith was assigned to Ramstein Air Base Germany, the Air Force and others planned a needle stabbing incident against Gerald which led to religious visions – specifically Catholic. The first religious vision occurred on Columbus Day 2008. Based on many facts the timing of this Catholic vision for this day was by no coincidence. After Gerald Smith filed complaints with the Air Force and German police he encountered many years of severe harassment. The reprisal against Gerald included many illegal cruel actions to include being improperly referred to mental health where two Air Force Catholic mental health doctors tried to declare Gerald delusional. After hiring several lawyers, Gerald was the first person in the history of the Air Force to be returned to active duty with the false diagnosis of delusional. Gerald later went to Army doctors for further evaluation where it was determined there was “no evidence of medical or psychiatric issues.”

The harassment against Gerald Smith lasted until his separation from the Air Force which was on 31 March 2014. Due to the continued harassment both on the military base and in the Dover, Delaware community Gerald filed a federal lawsuit in the District of Delaware. The court documents regarding Gerald Smith’s case are publicly available via the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service. The complaint number is 15-112. Since the federal judge in Delaware did not approve Gerald’s motion for change of venue and also due to the outside influence of powerful individuals like Vice President Biden who was a U.S. Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, Gerald is planning to refile his federal lawsuit in Manhattan, New York district court sometime in 2017. Also due to the failure of the District of Delaware federal court to follow proper procedure Gerald asked the International Criminal Court for assistance where his case is currently under consideration. Click the “Human Rights Violations” tab above or the “Read More” button below to see the organizations and documents that Gerald reported the human rights violations to.

Needless to say that as a Catholic I really don’t have a lot of time for this type of what appears to be anti-Catholic nonsense or with somebody who was willing to collaborate with a traitor like Chelsea Manning.

There are still four weeks until the filing deadline; here’s hoping that we have a credible Republican candidate file between now and then….

You can see more in the opinion, but here’s a sample, about the “CRAZY”:

[T]he headline image “CRAZY” likewise is Mr. Griffiths’ commentary concerning statements made by Mr. Smith that are directly quoted in the article. As the circuit court held, “the image is within the purview of constitutional protection as an opinion[

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Two weeks ago, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the Governor of Florida made an illegal appointment to that court. Today, SCOFLA (as it is known) has ordered the Governor to make a new appointment by Monday. Here is a brief summary of the dispute:

The essentials of this case are straightforward. The resignation of former Justice Robert Luck created a vacancy in office; the constitution gave the Governor sixty days from January 23, 2020, to fill the vacancy by making an appointment from a list of certified nominees; and, at the time of the appointment, the appointee necessarily needed to be constitutionally eligible for the office being filled. Not having been a member of the Florida Bar for ten years, Judge Renatha Francis was constitutionally ineligible for the office of justice of the supreme court on the expiration of the constitution’s sixty-day deadline. And Judge Francis remains constitutionally ineligible now. Art. V, §§ 8, 11, Fla. Const.

The constitution’s sixty-day deadline to fill this vacancy in office expired many months ago. Yet the Governor has not satisfied his legal obligation to fill the vacancy by making a constitutionally valid appointment. This is true if one views the Governor as having made a null appointment on May 26 (because Judge Francis was and is constitutionally ineligible). It is also true if, as the Governor belatedly suggests in his response to the amended petition, the May 26 “appointment” was a mere “announcement” and not an appointment at all.1 Either approach leads to the same conclusion: the Governor has not complied with the constitution’s clear commands.

The Court defends its “formalism” with a citation to Justice Breyer. Just kidding. This is the sort of decision that would make Justice Breyer spin around in circles. Instead, they cite Justice Scalia.

The constitution’s ten-year Bar membership requirement and sixty-day appointment deadline are bright-line textual mandates that impose rules rather than standards and prioritize certainty over discretion. To some, enforcing rules like these might seem needlessly formalistic when the result is to preclude the appointment of an otherwise qualified candidate. But “formalism,” as Justice Scalia observed, “is what makes a government a government of laws and not of men.” Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law 25 (rev. ed. 2018).

Yet, the Court avoids an actual confrontation with the executive. They do not issue the writ. They merely hope the Governor will follow their ruling, on his own accord.

The Governor must fully comply with this order no later than noon on Monday, September 14, 2020. Because we believe the Governor will do so, we grant the amended petition for a writ of mandamus but withhold issuance of the writ. No motion for rehearing or clarification will be entertained by this Court.

Here, SCOFLA follows in the footsteps of Roger Taney in Ex Parte Merryman. He  merely sent Lincoln a copy of the opinion, hoping the President would comply. Of course, the Governor of Florida is a party to this case; Lincoln was not a party to Merryman. (See Seth Barrett Tillman’s excellent article).

Imagine if the federal Constitution had a similar provision, and the President was required to select a Supreme Court justice from an approved list within 60 days after a vacancy arose. Justice Garland, anyone?

H/T Michael Masinter

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