A short story for a Saturday night, "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe.
It starts: "The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal . . . ."
Prince Prospero, "when his dominions were half depopulated, 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 seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.
This was an extensive and magnificent structure . . . ."
"It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained
his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence."
In the end, the revellers "acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night.
And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall."
"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
Donald Trump has managed to bring to life the short story.
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If you need any further evidence that Trump supporters are either fools or liars or both, simply follow their comments on Twitter today concerning the transfer of the Qanon Shaman to a halfway house.
They are claiming that he has been released, 14 months early, just weeks after @TuckerCarlson aired exculpatory January 6th video that his defense attorneys claim they never saw.
He's not being released. He is being sent to a halfway house. This is standard operating procedure for the federal prison system. He has served 29 months of a 41 month sentence. Typically, individuals are held in a halfway house for no more than 12 months.
I suspect that most people who read my posts believe that my characterization of the Republican Party as fascist is overwrought. And I know that my posts of source material, such as judicial opinions, is largely ignored.
However, I persist.
Here's a link to today's opinion by the NC S,Ct. holding that the NC voter ID law was nconstitutional. The court's opinion is about 58 pages. It details the efforts of the NC GOP to undermine the ability of the Black community in that state to wield electoral power.
As the Court states: "The right to vote is a fundamental right, preservative of all other rights. If the right to vote is undermined, it renders illusory all "[o]ther rights, even the most basic."
Judge Carter of the U.S.D.C. for the Central District of Cal., S.D., issued a ruling on John Eastman's claims of privilege as to various documents. You can read the entire opinion.
However, the significant takeaway for the larger issue of Trump's criminality is found on pages 16-17. There, the Court shows how, even after being warned by his lawyer,
Trump filed a federal complaint with "inaccurate numbers without rectifying, clarifying, or otherwise changing them" and filed a verification, under oath, that the information was either true and correct or believed to be true and correct, even though he knew that it wasn't."
I recently finished reading Blood and Ruins a masterful history of World War II by Richard Overy. The book is not merely a military history of the war’s battles. It also details the economic and social history of the war.
In the subchapter “Not Such a ‘Good War,’ he relates the responses of the British and US governments to the needs of Jews attempting to escape from the Nazis.
On page 624 he says:
[T]he United States government refused to make concessions to the particular crisis facing European Jews. When Roosevelt was pressured to allow easier entry for Jews after Kristalllnact, he merely commented ‘the time is not ripe for that.’
If you don't believe that Rand Paul is a liar and a nut, consider this: Today, he is attacking Anthony Fauci for covering up the origins of Covid, contending that it developed out of research in China funded by the US that Fauci had approved.
However, this peer-reviewed paper in Science concluded that: "[O]ur analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred via the live wildlife trade in China, and show that the Huanan market was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Further, this peer-reviewed article in Science traces the evolution of the Covid genome and concludes that: " As with other coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 emergence likely resulted from multiple zoonotic events."
Peter Genz retired as partner at King & Spaulding. He gave a presentation on "Reflections on How to Succeed in Mondern Day Tax Practice."
I believe that the presentation is of value not only to lawyers who don't intend to go into tax practice, but those who intend to go into any practice area.
Indeed, the presentation would be helpful to non-lawyers, such as CPAs, and, in fact, to those who may not be young, but may be, ahem, of a certain age.
With Mr. Genz's kind permission, I have posted the slides from his presentation.