The Digger

Hey Diggerers! James sent me an email with this Jimmy Dore episode, with newscasters from all the channels delivering the same line. LOL! Thanks, James! Hilarious Newscaster Montage Shows How The Media Controls The Masses Which prompted me to rewatch an old favorite: Charlie Brooker On British And American TV News The Glenn Beck clips leave me roaring:  Feeling the need for even more comic relief, I dug up some episodes of my first and enduring media crush, Felix the Cat! Felix The Cat Compilation (1936) (Remastered) (HD 1080p)   Anybody got any favorite funny vids they'd like to share? Go for it!

August 02, 2019 " Information Clearing House " -  Ever since  Imran Khan  became the 22 nd  Prime Minister of Pakistan in August 2018, the winds have changed. While his predecessors, though generally leaning eastwards, have often wavered between the US and the China orbit, Khan is in the process of clearly defining his alliances with the east, in particular China. This is for the good of his country, for the good of the Middle East, and eventually for the good of the world. A few days ago, RT reported that China, in addition to the expansion of the new port in Gwadar, Balochistan, has entered agreements with Pakistan to build a military/air  base  in Pakistan, a new Chinese city for some half a million people, as well as several road and railway improvement projects, including a highway connecting the cities of Karachi and Lahore, reconstruction of the Karakoram Highway, linking Hasan Abdal to the Chinese border, as well as upgrading the Karachi-Pesh...

August 02, 2019 " Information Clearing House " -    I am Russian. That’s how I feel and therefore, that’s what I am. I was born in Russia, in the Soviet Union – in what was and still is a stunningly beautiful city on the Neva River called Leningrad. For some reason, out of the almost 20 books that I have written, only 2 (if I am not mistaken) have been translated into the Russian language and published in Russia. How come? My books are available in about 40 languages. Even in Turkey, in the Turkish language, five have been printed. Perhaps during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin era, Russia and I drifted apart. Not fully, but to a great extent. I am an internationalist, an anti-colonialist fighter. I have worked in about 160 countries, writing about the horrors that are being spread by Western imperialism. I was screwed many times, battered and injured, tortured and even condemned to death. My Russia is a Russia of principles, of justice and courage. My grandparents fough...

Race Hustle When the shining city is at hand, a special slum will be built for me and my meanness. I will be the person, if that’s what I am, in the slum; there will be one of everything; one rat, one tin can. … I will behave poorly. — Thomas McGuane, Ninety-two in the Shade After two double rounds of Democratic Party debates, one thing is for sure: the characters onstage are followers, not leaders, and they’re following each other off a cliff like so many Wile E. Coyotes, while the Golden Golem of Greatness streaks, beeps, and tweets across the buzzard flats below like the fabled Roadrunner. In an epic and bizarre case of mimesis, the Democratic Party is mau-mauing itself into America’s political slum, complete with a rank-and-file demographic dependent on government largesse and an infestation of bad ideas, like the scurrying rats and cockroaches of the ghettos they pander to so relentlessly. The candidates themselves are so terrified of being a few syllables away from get...

July 30, 2019 " Information Clearing House " -    Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. That point inevitably arrives on the liabilities side of the economy’s balance sheet. But what of the asset side? One person’s  debt  is a creditor’s claim for  payment . This is defined as “savings,” even though banks simply  create  credit endogenously on their own computers without needing any prior savings. When debts can’t be paid and debtors default, what happens to these creditors? As President Obama showed, banks and bondholders can be bailed out by new Federal Reserve money creation. That is what the $4.6 trillion in Quantitative Easing since 2008 was all about. The Fed has spent the last few years supporting stock market prices (and holding down gold prices) by manipulating the forward option markets. But this artificial life support to keep the debt overhead afloat is nearing the reality of the debt wall. The European Central Bank has almost run out o...

From  Information Clearing House [If the video doesn't work for you, go to the Information Clearing House site, hyperlinked to above, or to https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Df4R-xdKvpM  - the function for putting up videos isn't working on this blog.] The global expanse of US military bases is well-known; but it's actual territorial empire is largely hidden. The true map of America is not taught in our schools. Abby Martin interviews  history  Professor Daniel Immerwahr about his new book, 'How To Hide An Empire,' where he documents the story of our "Greater United States." Posted July 30, 2019

Hello Diggerers! When reading the news this morning, I was so disgusted and dismayed by it and by what NPR calls "the idea stream" (last I checked, anyway, which was many years ago) that I reread this story by one of my most-loved writers, Anton Chekhov. It's   pretty long for a "short" story, so see if you can make it through, given the shortening of attention span we've been talking about, which I'll readily admit to. It's available from this wonderful site, https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/ The URL to the story is  https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/166.htm

Things to Come “American exceptionalism has led to a country that is exceptionally un-self-aware.”  — Peter Thiel The economic contraction ahead will put this borderline psychotic country through some interesting ch-ch-ch-changes. Mr. Trump now fully owns the Potemkin status quo of record stock markets poised against a withering rot of human capital at the core of an industrial society in sunset mode. Leadership at every corner of American life — politics, business, media — expects an ever-higher tech magical updraft of fortune from an increasingly holographic economy of mere fugitive appearances in which everybody can get more of something for nothing. The disappointment over how all this works out will be epic. Globalism is wobbling badly. It was never what it was cracked up to be: a permanent new plateau of exquisitely-tuned international economic cooperation engineered to perfection. It was just a set of provisional relations based on transient advantage. As it tur...

Eight days ago eleven Palestinian buildings containing seventy family apartments located in the illegally Israeli occupied East Jerusalem village of Wadi al-Hummus were  demolished in a military-led operation  by more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers, policemen and municipal workers using bulldozers, backhoes and explosives. Residents who resisted were beaten by the soldiers, kicked down flights of stairs and even shot at close range with rubber bullets. The soldiers were recorded laughing and celebrating as they did their dirty work. Occupants who did not resist and who held their hands up in surrender were also not spared the rod, as were also foreign observers who were present to add their voices to those who were protesting the outrage. The injuries sustained by some of the victims have been photographed and  are available online . Twelve Palestinians and four British observers were injured badly enough to be hospitalized. The British reported that they were “stamped...

The Democratic presidential candidates: A socialist appraisal 19 July 2019 The  World Socialist Web Site  has begun an occasional series of articles profiling the major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the   2020   elections.  WSWS  writers will examine the political history and program of each candidate, making the case for a socialist alternative for the working class to both the Democrats and the Trump administration.   Profiles of   Elizabeth Warren   and   Pete Buttigieg   have already been published   . Among the two dozen candidates now running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, California senator Kamala Harris has regularly polled among the top five contenders for the party’s nomination since announcing her candidacy last January. Then California Attorney General Kamala Harris posing for a photo with US Border Patrol agents at the US-Mexico border fence in 2011 [Credi...