Project Perjury

The Washington Post has a story about the Erie, Pennsylvania postal worker who claimed to not have not recanted his fantasy about overhearing a conspiracy to backdate ballots. For some unknown reason Project Veritas thinks the audiotape of the postal worker’s interview with investigators from the Post Office Inspector General’s proves the opposite of what it does. There is no coercion in the interview. The investigators repeatedly advise Hopkins of his right to not speak to them and his right to have a lawyer present. And in no uncertain terms, he recants his affidavit story, even claiming he didn’t read what the Project Veritas lawyers had written for him to sign.
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Of course, the MAGA cultists commenting on the Youtube

The Washington Post has a story about the Erie, Pennsylvania postal worker who claimed to not have not recanted his fantasy about overhearing a conspiracy to backdate ballots. For some unknown reason Project Veritas thinks the audiotape of the postal worker’s interview with investigators from the Post Office Inspector General’s proves the opposite of what it does. There is no coercion in the interview. The investigators repeatedly advise Hopkins of his right to not speak to them and his right to have a lawyer present. And in no uncertain terms, he recants his affidavit story, even claiming he didn’t read what the Project Veritas lawyers had written for him to sign.[embedded content]Of course the MAGA cultists commenting on the Youtube audio are aghast that an investigator would ask a

Crickets.UPDATE: George W. Bush: “I just talked to the President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden. I extended my warm congratulations and thanked him for the patriotic message he delivered last night.”

My friends, If you post endless copies of off-topic news articles and list of corona virus statistics to my substantive posts, I will simply hide all comments on that post. DO NOT DO IT! Effectively, all you do with those "comments" is to prevent conversation. If that is your intention, you are trolls. One way or the other it is SPAM. You are welcome to post whatever you want on an "Open Thread."

“I don’t know about the two gentlemen you mentioned.”

Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon join a long list of people Donald Trump doesn’t know about.
Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas
“I don’t know those gentleman. Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. I don’t know them, I don’t know about them, I don’t know what they do.”
Jeffrey Epstein
“I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him, I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”
Michael Flynn
“It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge, It would have been impossible for me to know this.”
Roger Stone

“Now you know Roger didn’t work for me in the campaign, Roger Stone didn’t work on the campaign, except way, way at

Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon join a long list of people Donald Trump doesn’t know about.Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas"I don’t know those gentleman. Now, it’s possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. I don’t know them, I don’t know about them, I don’t know what they do."Jeffrey Epstein"I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him, I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you."Michael Flynn"It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge, It would have been impossible for me to know this."Roger Stone"Now you know Roger didn’t work for me in the campaign, Roger Stone didn’t work on the campaign, except way, way at the beginning, long before we’re talking about… Roger is somebody that I’ve always liked, but a lot

Rudy Giuliani is Roger Stone without the boyish insouciance.

Have at it.

Spreadipus Rex seems to be suggesting that he deliberately infected himself and a whack of other people with the Covid "as your leader."

“The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease were incidents of half an hour.
But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal — the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were incidents of half an hour.But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep

People might have thoughts on the "debate" or anything.

The real story revealed by the New York Times Trump tax returns bombshell is not that Donald Trump paid no taxes in 10 out of 15 years or that he paid $750 in 2016 and 2017. The real story is that he doesn’t have net income to service his debt. There is nothing inherently illegal about that. He did it before in the 1980s and when real estate prices stopped rising in 1990, his creditors were left holding the bag.Hyman Minsky wrote about Donald Trump’s investment strategy in a 1990 talk, "The Bubble in the Price of Baseball Cards."One of the puzzles of the 1980s was the rapid rise in the financial wealth of Donald Trump, author of The Art of the Deal, and what else. Trump’s fortune was made in real estate. Many large fortunes have been made in real estate, since real estate is highly

The real story revealed by the New York Times Trump tax returns bombshell is not that Donald Trump paid no taxes in 10 out of 15 years or that he paid $750 in 2016 and 2017. The real story is that he doesn’t have net income to service his debt. There is nothing inherently illegal about that. He did it before in the 1980s and when real estate prices stopped rising in 1990, his creditors were left holding the bag.
Hyman Minsky wrote about Donald Trump’s investment strategy in a 1990 talk, “The Bubble in the Price of Baseball Cards.”
One of the puzzles of the 1980s was the rapid rise in the financial wealth of Donald Trump, author of The Art of the Deal, and what else. Trump’s fortune was made in real estate. Many large fortunes have been made in real estate,

It annoys me when people "comment" by pasting articles from the media that are unrelated to the original posts they are pasted to. The original post may get 500 or less visits and it is likely the irrelevant article is read by no one — and certainly not by me. So here is a space for readers to paste articles from the media that they perhaps think no one else has seen. If it is successful in diverting irrelevant pasting, maybe I’ll put up an open thread regularly.

Democratic Despotism:
“We find latent in their conception of law— and some have been publicly preaching this view— that law emanates solely from the will of the majority of the people, and can, therefore, be modified at any time to meet majority wishes. This doctrine is absolutely totalitarian, and is contrary to our basic conceptions of the source of law. We have seen that our political system is predicated on the doctrine that there are some immutable laws of nature and certain other divinely sanctioned rights, which the Constitution and our tradition recognized as being above and beyond the power of the majority, or of any other group of individuals or officials of the Government. There are, also, other rights, which because of man’s historic

Democratic Despotism: "We find latent in their conception of law— and some have been publicly preaching this view— that law emanates solely from the will of the majority of the people, and can, therefore, be modified at any time to meet majority wishes. This doctrine is absolutely totalitarian, and is contrary to our basic conceptions of the source of law. We have seen that our political system is predicated on the doctrine that there are some immutable laws of nature and certain other divinely sanctioned rights, which the Constitution and our tradition recognized as being above and beyond the power of the majority, or of any other group of individuals or officials of the Government. There are, also, other rights, which because of man’s historic experience, that are specifically protected

My previous postings on "political correctness" and "cultural Marxism" have from time to time brought inquiries from researchers into the right-wing calumnies against the Frankfurt School. I carry no brief for Herbert Marcuse or Theodore Adorno, although I do have a soft spot for Walter Benjamin, who was not formally a Frankfurter even though he hob-nobbed with them.It so happens that one of my correspondents has written a brief essay defending the conspiracy theory that the Frankfurt School was a bought and paid for tool of the Comintern. The defense hinges on the fact that Frank Brooks Bielanski, who claimed "evidence" that the Institute for Social Research was a Communist front financed from abroad, was "director of investigations" for the O.S.S. and not some random F.B.I. special

[unable to retrieve full-text content]“Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance.” — Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” The photograph used in Andy Warhol’s 1964 print, “Race Riot” was taken by Charles Moore and was published in LIFE magazine in May of 1963. Warhol used it without permission […]

"Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance." — Guy Debord, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.”The photograph used in Andy Warhol’s 1964 print, “Race Riot” was taken by Charles Moore and was published in LIFE magazine in May of 1963. Warhol used it without permission and Moore sued. Eventually there was an out-of-court settlement. The scene depicted was not a "Race Riot" as Warhol’s presumably ironic title claimed. It was a police attack ordered by Police Commissioner "Bull" Connor on a nonviolent demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama.I remember these photos well because they appeared at the dawn of my political awakening. I was 15. The Warhol print sold in 2014 for $62,885,000. I had to stop myself when I started to

Giancarlo de Vivo, Contributions to Political Economy, Volume 38, Issue 1, 2019, Pages 59–73,  LINKAbstractThis paper considers a largely unknown pamphlet, originally published anonymously in 1821, and assesses its place in the history of classical and Marxian thinking about value, surplus value and profits. It identifies its author and outlines his career and background in the context of nineteenth-century British politics."The pamphletist is a neglected economist—he is even absent from Seligman’s famous 1903 article "On some neglected British economists," which deals with many of his contemporaries, with the intention of rescuing them from undeserved oblivion. All in all, we can say that the pamphletist, even though not completely forgotten, has not received the attention it [sic]

With a minimum of editing or preface, I am reposting this one from February 2009. Next year will be the bicentennial of the publication this astonishing but undeservedly obscure pamphlet. One "event" that I am conducting to celebrate the anniversary is posting of around 65 questions that I have mined from the text. I hope that there will be others but that sort of depends on gathering a critical mass of audience.  How is it that notwithstanding the unbounded extent of our capital, the progressive improvement and wonderful perfection of our machinery, our canals, roads, and of all other things that can, either facilitate labour, or increase its produce; our labourer, instead of having his labours abridged, toils infinitely more, more hours, more laboriously…?
Published anonymously in

In the immigration handbook he wrote for then Alabama Senator Sessions, Stephen Miller cited U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner, Peter Kirsanow, who subsequently was considered by Trump during the transition as a potential nominee for Secretary of Labor. In Kirsanow’s June 4 feature for National Review, Flames from False Narratives, he claimed that Black men are not disproportionately the targets of police violence and that the perception they are is a fabrication perpetrated by Hollywood, the media, academics and politicians.To show that systemic police racism is a myth, Kirsanow presented a list of statistics compiled "from the 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey, Census data, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and other sources" and cited his dissenting statement 2018 U.S. Commission on

In the immigration handbook he wrote for then Alabama Senator Sessions, Stephen Miller cited U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner, Peter Kirsanow, who subsequently was considered by Trump during the transition as a potential nominee for Secretary of Labor. In Kirsanow’s June 4 feature for National Review, Flames from False Narratives, he claimed that Black men are not disproportionately the targets of police violence and that the perception they are is a fabrication perpetrated by Hollywood, the media, academics and politicians.
To show that systemic police racism is a myth, Kirsanow presented a list of statistics compiled “from the 2018 National Crime Victimization Survey, Census data, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and other sources” and cited his dissenting

Word is circulating that Stephen Miller is writing Donald Trump’s speech on race relations. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Trump’s “solution” to the current malaise in the U.S. will involve extending a ban on immigration and expanding enforcement and expulsion of undocumented individuals. This seems like a safe bet to me because Miller really is a one-trick pony and Trump relishes rehashing his greatest hits. Maybe Miller will toss in some “enterprise zones” or other ornamental trivia but the meat will be anti-immigration.
They playbook for this will be Miller’s Immigration Handbook for a New Republican Majority that he wrote for Jeff Sessions in 2015. Footnote 21 of that handbook states that, “Amnesty and uncontrolled immigration

Word is circulating that Stephen Miller is writing Donald Trump’s speech on race relations. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Trump’s "solution" to the current malaise in the U.S. will involve extending a ban on immigration and expanding enforcement and expulsion of undocumented individuals. This seems like a safe bet to me because Miller really is a one-trick pony and Trump relishes rehashing his greatest hits. Maybe Miller will toss in some "enterprise zones" or other ornamental trivia but the meat will be anti-immigration.They playbook for this will be Miller’s Immigration Handbook for a New Republican Majority that he wrote for Jeff Sessions in 2015. Footnote 21 of that handbook states that, "Amnesty and uncontrolled immigration disproportionately harms African-American

“Ryan is looking down right now, and you know that, and he is very happy, because I think he just broke a record.”
“Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country,”
Trump’s cynical invoking of George Floyd yesterday has a history that explains what he imagined he was doing. In the first week after his inauguration, Trump approved a Navy Seal raid on suspected positions of al Queda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in the village of Yakla in Yemen. His National Security Adviser, General Flynn had portrayed the proposed raid as a “game changer” that would contrast Trump’s toughness with Obama’s supposed indecisiveness.
The raid was a fiasco. AQAP had somehow learned of the impending raid and

"Ryan is looking down right now, and you know that, and he is very happy, because I think he just broke a record." 

"Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country,"
Trump’s cynical invoking of George Floyd yesterday has a history that explains what he imagined he was doing. In the first week after his inauguration, Trump approved a Navy Seal raid on suspected positions of al Queda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in the village of Yakla in Yemen. His National Security Adviser, General Flynn had portrayed the proposed raid as a "game changer" that would contrast Trump’s toughness with Obama’s supposed indecisiveness.The raid was a fiasco. AQAP had somehow learned of the impending raid and fortified their positions. Chief Petty

A very interesting paper (not peer-reviewed) by a team of Israeli scholars proposes that a more manageable exit from pandemic lockdown might be achieved by implementing a scheme in which employees go in to work for four days and then return to isolation for ten days before repeating the cycle. A variation on the proposal would have two staggered relays of workers cycling through the 14 day routine.
The research has been popularized in a New York Times op-ed and a Fast Company feature, so I would bother to discuss it here in detail. Not being an epidemiologist, I can’t vouch for the authors’ assumptions about average infectiousness. Obviously, implementing such a scheme out of the blue would present formidable challenges even assuming competent political