The Digger

Subcomandante Bloomberg Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, folks, because the neoliberal Resistance is back, and this time they’re not playing around. No more impeachments and investigations. It’s time to go mano-a-mano with Trump, and they’ve finally got just the bad hombre to do it. No, not Bernie Sanders, you commies. A battle-hardened Resistance fighter. El Caballo Pequeño! El Jefe Mínimo! Subcomandante Michael Bloomberg! Yes, that’s right, Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire Republicrat oligarch, has mobilized a guerilla army of overpaid PR professionals, Wall Street sociopaths, liberal racists, and anti-outdoor-smoking fanatics, and is steamrolling toward the Democratic convention to buy a brokered nomination and save America from “Putinism.” He’s had it with you sugary-soft-drink-drinking, chain-smoking, gun-toting, Oxy-gobbling, Hitler-loving, Putinist peasants and your infatuation with Donald Trump. So he’s decided to transform the entire country into a sterile,...

Mapping out the Banking Elite’s Goal for a Cashless Monetary System Steven Guinness Part One Back in 2014 the Bank of England became the first central bank to publish research on digital currencies through their quarterly bulletin ( Innovations in payment technologies and the emergence of digital currencies ). A leading focus was on the use of distributed ledger technology, with the research declaring that ‘ the key innovation of digital currencies is the ‘distributed ledger’ which allows a payment system to operate in an entirely decentralised way, without intermediaries such as bank s ‘. One of the main draws of this technology is the belief that cryptocurrency and stablecoins offer a genuine route out of the traditional centralised model of banking that epitomises fiat currency. But is bypassing central banks and being able to make and receive payments independent of these institutions really what the rise in digital currencies is all about? Six years on fro...

The Potential Climate Consequences of China’s Belt and Roads Initiative By  Jan Ellen Spiegel  . Originally published at  Yale Climate Connections China’s Belt and Road Initiative is big. Really big. Potentially the most ambitious and widespread international infrastructure development effort  ever , involving rail lines, highways, power plants, pipe lines, ports, and more. Seriously –  ever . Given the Chinese government’s penchant for obfuscation and lack of transparency, it can be a little hard to tell just how precise the term “BRI”, as it is known, really is; or whether it’s more of a branding label slapped on anything that might fit. That said, BRI investment so far is estimated to be somewhere between $1 and $8 trillion, encompassing hundreds of projects, with 125 countries said to have agreements with China as of mid 2019 – though estimates now are around 140, involving projects worldwide. Among the many concerns BRI is generating around...

Go Forth and Multiply February 20, 2020     Posted by  Raúl Ilargi Meijer A few days ago, I was thinking of writing another corona article, focusing on two things: 1) the ease and speed with which the virus spreads -because I think that is hugely underestimated-, and 2) testing. But then the situation with the two cruise ships started going berserk. I had intended to use the Diamond Princess as a case for the ease and speed of infection, but it became clear quite rapidly that you can’t use the ship to prove any case, other than that people are completely nuts. But we already knew that. And while Dostoyevsky wrote some great books on the topic, it’s not a great framework for a piece on a virus. Unless perhaps if it infects the brain. Not that I don’t think the ship is still a good example to make the point, but too much plain bonkers stuff has been going on with and around it. The quarantine, the evacuations, the infection numbers, you name it. I’ll get...