The Digger

Ort sent me this: a little bit of fun at the wokesters' expense, which I'm always up for. I'm just going to give you the link because it's a video in a tweet which won't transfer over to this blog, so here it is:  https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/26/tracey_ullman_hosts_woke_support_group_on_bbc_show.html  

What is most perilous for our country now, would be to journey through a second epic crisis of authority in recent times without anybody facing the consequences of crimes they might have committed. The result will be a people turned utterly cynical, with no faith in their institutions or the rule of law, and no way to imagine a restoration of their lost faith within the bounds of law. It will be a deadly divorce between truth and reality. It will be an invitation to civil violence, a broken social contract, and the end of the framework for American life that was set up in 1788. The first crisis of the era was the Great Financial Crash of 2008 based on widespread malfeasance in the banking world, an unprecedented suspension of rules, norms, and laws. GFC poster-boy Angelo Mozilo, CEO and chairman of Countrywide Financial, a sub-prime mortgage racketeering outfit, sucked at least half a billion dollars out of his operation before it blew up, and finally was nicked for $67 million in...

How Amazon Gains Control & Domination By Wolf Richter, editor at  Wolf Street . Originally published at  Wolf Street Amazon just gave us an update on how rapidly its own delivery system is replacing UPS, the US Postal Service, FedEx, and other carriers in delivering packages from an Amazon fulfillment center to the door of Amazon’s customer. The numbers show how big this system is already after practically no time of starting it up, how big the package volume is already, and how many drivers are already working in this system. This has huge consequences for the US logistics business, the companies that slug it out in it, such as UPS and FedEx, and that keep raising their published rates despite the dynamics of the market, which is facing Amazon’s creation, the mushrooming companies that Amazon is building up to get around the established carriers. Its purpose is twofold: One, bring down delivery costs. And two, gain control. Delivery costs  have...

The Loss of Fair Play Posted on   December 27, 2019   by  Yves Smith This site regularly discusses the rise of neoliberalism and its consequences, such as rising inequality and lower labor bargaining rights. But it’s also important to understand that these changes were not organic but were the result of a well-financed campaign to change the values of judges and society at large to be more business-friendly. But the sacrifice of fair dealing as a bedrock business and social principle has had large costs. We’ve pointed out how lower trust has increased contracting costs: things that use to be done on a handshake or a simple letter agreement are now elaborately papered up. The fact that job candidates will now engage in ghosting, simply stopping to communicate with a recruiter rather than giving a ritually minimalistic sign off, is a testament to how impersonal hiring is now perceived to be, as well as often-abused workers engaging in some power tit for tat when ...

Profs Urge NYTimes To Correct The Many Errors In Its '1619 Project' Authored by Jennifer Kabbany via The College Fix, Five historians have written a letter to the editor to  The New York Times  telling the “newspaper of record” to correct the major and serious errors that riddle its 1619 Project. The 1619 Project sought to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding,”  due to the arrival in that year of 20 African slaves to a Virginia colony. The correction request was signed by Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York and Gordon Wood of Brown University,  reports   The Washington Post. Their letter was published shortly after  The Wall Street Journal   reported  on several of those professors’ concerns about the project that had been circulating on social media. The  letter  stat...

The Madrid Climate Disaster By Peter Koenig December 24, 2019  Does anyone know what COP25 stands for? Probably very few. Its unimportant. As unimportant as the whole roadshow itself. Just for the hell of it, for those who read this article, COP means Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The 25 stands for the 25th year that such annual conferences have taken place – every year in another country – what a tourist bonanza for the hundreds, if not thousands of attendees and participants who travel – by air – many of them business class, to these most questionable, even useless conferences. The first of the COP summits took place in Berlin, Germany, in March 1995. The COP’s Presidency rotates among the 5 UN recognized regions and so do the conferences – to make “eco-tourism” most of the time for the same UN and government bureaucrats and jokers more attractive. I can’t help thinking of the enormous cost ...