The Digger

"Outrage over  racial profiling  and the killing of  African Americans  by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the  Black Lives Matter  movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the  Ferguson, Missouri protests  that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was  subsequently not indicted . The precedents include the  Los Angeles  riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating  Rodney King . Those riots happened nearly three decades after the  1965 Watts riots , which began with  Marquette Frye , an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest. I’m a  criminal justice researcher  who  often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching

The Self-Destructive Trajectory of Overly Successful Empires Posted on June 14, 2019 by Charles Hugh Smith A recent comment by my friend and colleague Davefairtex on the Roman Empire’s self-destructive civil wars that precipitated the Western Empire’s decline and fall made me rethink what I’ve learned about the Roman Empire in the past few years of reading. Dave’s comment (my paraphrase) described the amazement of neighboring nations that Rome would squander its strength on needless, inconclusive, self-inflicted civil conflicts over which political faction would gain control of the Imperial central state. It was a sea change in Roman history. Before the age of endless political in-fighting, it was incomprehensible that Roman armies would be mustered to fight other Roman armies over Imperial politics. The waste of Roman strength, purpose, unity and resources was monumental. Not even Rome could sustain the enormous drain of civil wars and maintain widespread prosperity and enoug

While the United States has been intimidating dozens of countries all over the world, two cuddly Chinese giant pandas – a three year old male called Ru Yi, and a female one year younger, named Ding Ding – were settling down in their new home, inside the legendary Moscow Zoo. Chewing bamboo shoots, and obviously enjoying the unprecedented attention, two specimens of iconic Chinese bears, were ‘just there’, in a good mood, making the entire world around them kinder and more secure. As was reported by the RT: “Following the official talks at the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping went to the Moscow Zoo to meet the two giant pandas that have been handed to Russia by China as a “sign of respect and trust.” “When we talk about pandas, a smile appears on our faces,” Putin told the journalists during a press-conference…” While the pandas are well taken care of, two great countries – China and Russia – are now standing next to each other, united, and cooperating on countless fron

The Friends of the People caricatured by Isaac Cruikshank, November 15, 1792, Joseph Priestley and Thomas Paine are surrounded by incendiary items Beyond  Common Sense , most Americans know little about Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Few know that at the end of Paine’s life, he had become a pariah in U.S. society, and for many years after his death, he was either ignored or excoriated—the price he paid for  The Age of Reason  and its disparagement of religious institutions, especially Christianity. Early in  The Age of Reason , Paine attacks the hypocrisy of religious professionals: “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury.” If alive today, Paine may well have been even rougher on psychia

See the article on Medium where lots of photos are included: https://medium.com/@gmochannel/tiananmen-square-massacre-facts-fiction-and-propaganda-32fdf68ce72c “As far as can be determined from the available evidence,  NO ONE DIED that night in Tiananmen Square .” What?! Who would make such a blatant propagandist claim? China’s communist party? Nope. It was Jay Mathews, who was the Washington Post’s Beijing Bureau Chief in 1989. He  wrote  this for Columbia Journalism Review. Here are a few more examples of what western journalists once said about what happened in Tiananmen Square in June 1989: CBS NEWS: “ We saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel  — in short,  nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had occurred in [Tiananmen Square] ” — thus  wrote  CBS News reporter Richard Roth. BBC NEWS: “I was one of the foreign journalists who  witnessed the events that night .  There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square ” — BBC reporter, J