The Digger

 Source: OffGuardian R eady for another rendition of the “no one could have known” routine made famous by all the self-proclaimed liberals who shamelessly went along with the Neo-Cons planned and lie-supported destruction of the Middle East nearly two decades ago? As in “no one could have known” that by shutting down life as we know it to focus obsessively on a virus mostly affecting what is still a relatively small number of people at the end of their lives (yes, oh squeamish ones we must summon the courage to talk about Quality Adjusted Life Years when making public policy) we probably would: 1.  Cause economic devastation and hence excess deaths, suicides, divorces depressions in much larger numbers than those killed by the virus. 2.  Provide an already monopolistic and predatory online retailing establishment with competitive advantages in terms of capital reserves and market share that will make it virtually impossible at any time in the near or medium future for the...

 Source: AIER  (American Institute for Economic Research) I t’s happened to quite a number of us. We write against the lockdowns for all the incredible economic, psychological, and institutional carnage they have caused, and how they have shattered our expectations of our rights and freedoms, and our presumptions about what government has the power to do to us.  We can make a convincing case; we see no basis for disrupting social functioning in the event of a pandemic, no matter how terrible it is, as  I’ve been writing  since January 27, 2020. Indeed that original article assumed as a matter of argument that C-19 was going to be as bad as Ebola, which it very obviously is not.  As the pandemic unfolded, it became clear that there is an undeniable demographic to the C-19 virus threat, something we’ve known since perhaps February if not earlier. I believed at the time that the realization would cause policy to get smarter ( I wrote this on April 5 ). Rather ...

 Thanks to Maxwell for contributing this article. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ New York Times Monday, January 22, 2007   Dr. Brooke Herndon, an internist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, could not stop coughing. For two weeks starting in mid-April last year, she coughed, seemingly nonstop, followed by another week when she coughed sporadically, annoying, she said, everyone who worked with her.   Before long, Dr. Kathryn Kirkland, an infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth, had a chilling thought: Could she be seeing the start of a whooping cough epidemic? By late April, other health care workers at the hospital were coughing, and severe, intractable coughing is a whooping cough hallmark. And if it was whooping cough, the epidemic had to be contained immediately because the disease could be deadly to babies in the hospital and could lead to pneumonia in the frail and vulnerable adult patients there.   It was the start of a bizarre episode at the medic...

Some 671 mail sorting machines have already been decommissioned ahead of the upcoming presidential election, where record numbers of Americans are expected to vote by mail. With little explanation from management, United States Postal Service (USPS) machines are being disassembled across the country. A USPS worker leaked images of a newly decommissioned machine — capable of handling 30,000 pieces of mail per hour — to  NBC Montana . Local news outlet  KUOW   report  that 40 percent of the post sorting machines in the Seattle-Tacoma area have been recently dismantled, to the dismay of the local workforce. “It would take a crew of 20 to 30 people hand-sorting the mail all night to do what one of these machines can do in a couple hours…Our infrastructure doesn’t work without these machines,” one worker said. “In our meetings with management, the union has been given no rationale whatsoever,” he added. Newly appointed postmaster general Louis DeJoy also ordered the...