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Niche news network Sky News Australia has applauded the Peter Dutton led Opposition for using leaked evidence from a criminal trial to target an alleged victim of sexual assault and those that may have helped them. ”Brilliant move, Mr Dutton,... Read More ›

From Ed Whelen on twitter: In today’s WSJ, Judicial Watch’s Michael Bekesha claims that Presidential Records Act gives an outgoing president complete authority to “decide what records to return and what records to keep at the end of his presidency.” Bizarro World account of PRA.  Bekesha makes wild wrong turn in his very first sentence. Indictment is *not* predicated in any way on PRA. As Andrew McCarthy  explains here classified docs Trump retained were *agency records* outside scope of PRA. Frivolous Trump Argument No. 1: Classified Intelligence Reports Compiled by Government Agencies Are ‘Personal Records’ under the Presidential Records Act | National ReviewAgency intelligence records are not even presidential records under the PRA, much less a president’s personal records. @mentionsPRA’s definition of “presidential records” excludes “agency records” from their scope. That of course doesn’t make them “personal records.” It instead means that PRA doesn’t govern them at all.

Noam Chomsky on Language, Left Libertarianism, and Progress (Ep. 182) Noam Chomsky Interviewed on Conversations with Tyler  June 14, 2023. Conversations with Tyler.  Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about […]

It’s a shame that we can’t even have audio recordings of the legal proceedings against Donald Trump since the events are of great political and historical importance but it does not appear that is going to be. So it will be up to media in the courtrooms to tell us what happened. I heard lots of bits and pieces yesterday but didn’t really have a sense of how it actually unfolded. This from Anna Bower at Lawfare is most straightforward narration of the arraignment yesterday that I’ve come across. (She waited in line for 27 hours to get in!) When I finally enter courtroom 13-3, 27 hours later, Trump is already seated at a table on the right-hand side of the room. Overhead, a warm white light appears to shine directly on the former president, casting his orange-blonde hair in a golden hue. He is, both literally and metaphorically, in the limelight. Yet it strikes me that Trump—the man who positioned bigness as a central issue of American politics (“hugely,” “bigly,” “little Marco”)—looks unmistakably small.  The courtroom is large, almost cavernous, adorned with slabs of creamy marble and caramel wood.

The statistical evidence clearly shows that China is the world’s number one economy. Unfortunately, the US and many commentators are unwilling to acknowledge that reality, but the future stability of the region depends on acceptance that we are living in a multipolar world. For the last hundred years America has been the world’s biggest economy, Continue reading »

As the new Australian Labor government took power following the 2022 election, its China policy barely changed and the “China threat” narrative continued unabated. I did not vote for the Labor party to see Australia’s government channelling the ousted Morrison Government! The very worst outcome for Australia would be to engage in a war against Continue reading »

One MIT-trained poet spent nine months trying to find out.

The post Does Dream Inception Work?  appeared first on Nautilus.

It is a sad fact that the White staff who take jobs in remote Aboriginal communities tend to socialise together after work, thus maintaining a clear social distance from the people they are working for, or working with, or working among. Close and trusting relationships between the locals and the strangers — teachers, health workers, Continue reading »

Mass surveillance and manipulation should not be allowed to become the new normal. The Robodebt controversy directly affected more than 470,000 people, some of whom reputedly took their lives as a result of the harassment they received to repay debts to the Australian Government that they never incurred. The policy, which was first implemented under Continue reading »

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Monday that parts per million of carbon dioxide in our planet’s atmosphere averaged 424 ppm in the month of May, reaching a level not seen for millions of years. In May 2022 it was only 421 ppm so this is a tremendous jump Continue reading »

London/Beijing– China has called on the United States to shoulder its responsibilities and pay its arrears to the UNESCO after Washington’s plan to rejoin the United Nations’ cultural and scientific agency was announced on Monday. “We hope this time the US decision is made out of a sense of responsibility and aimed at supporting multilateralism Continue reading »

Allow me to come clean: I worry every time Max Boot vents enthusiastically about a prospective military action. Whenever that Washington Post columnist professes optimism about some upcoming bloodletting, misfortune tends to follow. And as it happens, he’s positively bullish about the prospect of Ukraine handing Russia a decisive defeat in its upcoming, widely anticipated, sure-to-happen-any-day-now spring Continue reading »

Contemporary mainstream economics — still — focuses on studying what happens in abstract and unrealistic models. A deeper study of underlying causal mechanisms in the economy could make economic science more realistic. However, when faced with the monumental gap between empirical data and models, mainstream economists often resort to one of their four favourite strategies […]

Also, no Democrat has ever headed the FBI.

The post The Special Counsel Who Indicted Trump Is No Democrat. They Never Are. appeared first on The Intercept.

And the establishment is full MAGA Happy Birthday Donald Trump. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. A mere lad of seventy-seven, you have a very exciting year ahead of you, running for president for the third time while facing multiple felony charges in both New York and Miami (and very likely Washington DC and Atlanta too!) And you will be the center of attention once again, just the way you like it. Yesterday, Donald Trump was arraigned on 37 federal felony charges for his decision to abscond with extremely sensitive classified documents, store them haphazardly in his wide-open beach club and then refuse to give them back to the government when asked politely to do so. Unless the special counsel’s office has found some evidence that will explain this bizarre behavior we will probably be left arguing about his motives forever. Was it a psychological need to hoard them or simply a product of his extreme mental disorganization? Did he see a monetary value in them or perhaps he had it in mind to use them as leverage for his political future, as he did when he extorted the Ukrainian president to to help him sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign?

And it came to pass that God saw the suffering of the forty-year-old people from plantar fasciitis and said, Let there be a sandal so ugly that everyone shall resist its wearing. But then word will spread like fire from a burning bush that these shoes be a Godsend.

The Lord continued, The Birkenstocks shall be made of hardened cork from trees that grow along the angry seas from which I have brought many floods. They shall measure .00000001 cubits high by .000025 cubits long, and they shall be finished with the hide of male and female cows so that thou may walk as nature intended. And by nature, I really mean Me.

For the first three weeks of wear, thou shalt shed thy skin as blisters form on thine feet like one of my famous plagues. Thou shalt feel holey during the break-in period, and afterward, holy.

Thou shalt not swear; unless thou art swearing by thine Birkenstocks. Because as thy gait realigns, thou shalt find thyself also divinely cured of back pain.

House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith has expressed openness to the idea — saying he’s just asking questions.

The post House Democrats Refuse to Say Whether They Support Cluster Bomb Shipments to Ukraine appeared first on The Intercept.

Judge Michael Luttig: There is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president.  He has dared, taunted, provoked, and goaded DOJ to prosecute him from the moment it was learned that he had taken these national security documents.  On any given day for the past 18 months — doubtless up to and including the day before the indictment was returned — the former president could have avoided and prevented this prosecution. He would never have been indicted for taking these documents.  But for whatever reason, he decided that he would rather be indicted and prosecuted.  After a year and a half, he finally succeeded in forcing Jack Smith’s appropriately reluctant hand, having left the Department no choice but to bring these charges lest the former president make a mockery of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.  I’m actually pretty sure that ship sailed when they had to issue a warrant to get the rest of the documents. After all, they didn’t charge him for any of the documents he returned, even under a subpoena.

Former TUC General Secretary says the "ingenuity of working people" will prevail over anti-union legislation.

Just another word for nothing left to know MSNBC hosts often contrast the fact-based reality here on “Earth One” with the Bizarro World inhabited by the denizens of the Trump personality cult, a parallel universe of “alternative facts.” Dante Atkins this morning reminds Twitter that conservative reactionaries’ efforts to “control the narrative,” as it were, are about more than political spin. They are about more than creating a world where facts don’t matter. They are about imposing a reality where all knowledge is proscribed, by them, where freedom to know and do things is eliminated, where freedom means its opposite. When they rail against “grooming,” Atkins suggests, what they really object to “is existing in public, because merely existing in public imparts knowledge that they do not want you to have.” This is the impulse behind the religious right’s home-school movement. Should parents have the right to educate their own children?