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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 08:00
A Biden impeachment is imminent. It appears they are settling on bribery: After nearly a year of investigation, House Republicans have decided to try to make bribery the downfall of President Joe Biden as they prepare to open an impeachment inquiry, according to interviews with top House conservatives and four senior aides. Key Republicans tell The Messenger they are honing in on what they say is a “pay-to-play” bribery scheme involving first son Hunter Biden’s business dealings when he worked for a Ukrainian energy company and his father served as vice president. “This is not, ‘Oh my God, you were in Washington, D.C., on January 6 so we’re going to send every frigging power of law enforcement after you or your family.’ This is literally: ‘There was money flowing to the son of the vice president turned president,’” Rep.
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 06:30
Elon Musk may have a nose for buying profitable businesses but in every other respect he is a flaming moron. How in the hell is it possible that someone such as he could have so much influence over world events? Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.” As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes. Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson, whose new book is set to be released by Simon & Schuster on September 12.
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 05:00
It makes a man woke and you know what that means. Excuse me? “It seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone,” Francis Scott Key wrote later. But when darkness arrived, Key saw only red erupting in the night sky. Given the scale of the attack, he was certain the British would win. The hours passed slowly, but in the clearing smoke of “the dawn’s early light” on September 14, he saw the American flag—not the British Union Jack—flying over the fort, announcing an American victory. Key put his thoughts on paper while still on board the ship, setting his words to the tune of a popular English song. His brother-in-law, commander of a militia at Fort McHenry, read Key’s work and had it distributed under the name “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” The Baltimore Patriot newspaper soon printed it, and within weeks, Key’s poem, now called “The Star-Spangled Banner,” appeared in print across the country, immortalizing his words—and forever naming the flag it celebrated. Does Tommy Tuberville have some kind of brain damage?
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 04:57
A new multicultural framework needs to recognise that the well-being of Australia’s multicultural communities is closely related to, and inevitably affected by, geopolitics, and by Australia’s foreign policy towards migrants’ countries of origin. It is no longer viable to conceptualise foreign policy and multicultural affairs as two separate entities. The Australian government is currently conducting Continue reading »
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 04:56
In matters of defence and national security strategy Australia has entered a period of great transformations. The AUKUS submarine project is the proximate cause: a vanity project born of fantasies so dense that, strategically speaking, it has created gravitational waves of a magnitude that warps everything it encounters. More precisely, it warps in ways that Continue reading »
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 04:54
In discussions of the upcoming referendum on establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, a question often raised is how will it make a difference? This has been difficult for advocates to address because instances of governments’ empowering our First Nations peoples are few and far between. There is, however, a valuable example in Continue reading »
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 04:53
One of the most important aspects of the government’s Fair Work Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill is the detailed provisions covering gig workers. Those provisions account for 100 pages of the 284-page bill. The ‘Loopholes Bill’ fulfils promises Labor made before the election to regulate two types of workers: road transport owner-drivers (one of the original Continue reading »
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 04:51
China’s economic growth rate may have slowed, but its global market competitiveness should not be underestimated. Its long-term vision and planning are bearing fruit in high-value green products today. China is getting ready to power general production using low-carbon energy in the foreseeable future. Domestic sales of passenger cars in the first six months of Continue reading »
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 04:50
In March of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published an article titled “A world war has begun. Break the silence.” which urgently warned of the US empire’s aggressive escalations against Russia and China. Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that Continue reading »
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 03:30
It works When you think that the Republicans are idiots for their outlandish repetition of outright lies and innuendo, think again. A majority of Americans will believe anything if enough people say it often enough, facts and details don’t matter: Most Americans say they think President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings with Ukraine and China while he served as vice president under Barack Obama, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. A majority, 61%, say they think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings, with 42% saying they think he acted illegally, and 18% saying that his actions were unethical but not illegal. Another 38% say they don’t believe Joe Biden had any involvement in his son’s business dealings during his vice presidency. Just 1% believe Biden was involved, but did not do anything wrong. A 55% majority of the public says the president has acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter Biden over potential crimes, while 44% say that he has acted appropriately.
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 03:00

Are you tired of not being rich?

Do you want to make thousands of extra dollars every month without breaking a sweat?

Great news: all you need to do is commit an extra forty to fifty hours a week to intense work outside your full-time job, and you, too, can make passive income.

I know, I know: it sounds too good to be true. At first, I couldn’t believe that I could make a comfortable living without giving up my free time. And you know what? I was right to feel that way. I couldn’t give up my free time—it had to be spent working. But that’s how you make passive income: by staying up twenty-four hours a day working nonstop, destroying your relationships with friends and loved ones, and eliminating any spare time you might have to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Some people have asked me, “Are you sure you understand what the word ‘passive’ means?”

And it’s during those moments that, instead of asking me a question like that, they could have been working to make even more passive income. Are you starting to get it? Are you starting to see the vision? Are you starting to believe?

Created
Fri, 08/09/2023 - 02:00
It appears that Trump is getting no love from the judge in his NY civil trial: A New York judge—unmoved by the incessant pleas from Donald Trump’s legal team to delay trial—made quick work of the former president’s last-minute request Tuesday night to push back his first big upcoming trial for bank and tax fraud. On Wednesday morning, Justice Arthur F. Engoron pulled out a pen and scribbled a nine-word remark at the bottom of the draft order that Trump’s lawyers wanted him to sign, rejecting it outright. “Decline to sign; Defendants’ arguments are completely without merit,” Engoron wrote, signing it with his trademark ligature “Æ.” The Trump family is now less than four weeks away from the start of a monumental civil trial in which AG Letitia James seeks to siphon at least $250 million away from the Trump Organization over accusations that it routinely inflated asset values and lied on official paperwork. Will he be called to testify? Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka? Could be …
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 01:10
I’ve signed an agreement to write a book about ActivityPub for O’Reilly Media. ActivityPub is the protocol for connecting social networks across the Web; it’s what currently underpins Mastodon and will be used by Threads.net. The book should be available sometime after summer 2024. The book will be a developer guide that will help programmers … Continue reading ActivityPub Book for O’Reilly Media
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 00:30
Plea deals offered and rejected Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff reminds those still on “formerly known as Twitter” that the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy could have taken plea offers. Seditious conspiracy is notoriously tough to prove, as the the Department of Justice found in the Hutaree Militia case. The Proud Boys may have betted their seditious conspiracy prosecution would fail too. Except theirs (and the damage they wrought) was so public and so thoroughly documented on thousands of video clips even before prosecutors obtained emails, phone records, and cooperation from witnesses, that there is little comparison to the Hutaree, “almost a gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” The “Boys” now have twice as much jail time than they might have to contemplate their miscalculation (if not their sins). And to ponder why that six-foot-three inches and 215 pounds of rippling man-flesh named Trump, to whom they pledged so much allegiance, passed on pardoning them on his way out of the White House.
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Fri, 08/09/2023 - 00:00
‘I am a better translator than he is,’ Willa Muir complained in a 1953 journal. For several generations the couple’s Kafka translations were the most widely read English-language versions. Early editions of The Castle were described as being ‘translated by Edwin and Willa Muir’, but by the 1970s the title page of the Penguin Classics edition had reversed the order of the translators’ names.