The Digger

Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair For most of us—excepting possibly Mussolini, Trump, and other bully boasters—the word  authoritarian  is a pejorative. In contrast, many of us want to define ourselves and our heroes as  anti-authoritarians , and this has resulted in some curious definitions of that term. The  American Heritage Dictionary  defines  authoritarianism  as “characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority . . . relating to or expecting unquestioning obedience.” Authoritarians with power demand unquestioning obedience from those with lower rank; and authoritarian subordinates comply with all demands of authorities. Lyndon Johnson, proclaiming his requirements for an appointee, famously stated: “I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.” By definition, both Johnson and his ass-kissers were  authoritarians . Dictionaries routinely define  anti-authoritarian  as sim...

September 04, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  Many have already noticed: The U.S. really, really doesn’t feel like the world leader, or even as a ‘first world country’. Of course, I write that sarcastically, as I detest expressions like ‘first world’, and the ‘third world’. But readers know what I mean. Bridges, subways, inner cities, everything is crumbling, falling apart. When I used to live in New York City, more than two decades ago, returning from Japan was shocking: the US felt like a poor, deprived country, full of problems, misery, of confused and depressed people, homeless individuals; in short – desperados. Now, I feel the same when I land in the US after spending some time in China. And it gets much worse. What the West used to accuse the Soviet Union of, is now actually clearly detectable in the United States and the United Kingdom themselves: surveillance is at every step, these days; in New York, London, Sydney, and even in the countryside. Every m...

This article is contributed by desultory, who writes that this is “a personal topic since my technology and that of people close to me have been ripped off. Info has been scarce, now starting to surface.” Thank you desultory. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ‘Hey there, do you sell the ‘Poisonivy Program’? How much do you sell it for? i wish to buy one which can not be detect and killed by the Anti-Virus software.” The email was sent to a Chinese cyber security company from a military officer in a special part of China’s People’s Liberation Army intelligence service, formally known as the Third Department of the General Staff Department. American intelligence officials know the spy service simply as 3PLA, and it has been one of Communist China’s most successful tools for stealing American military technology through cyber means. A second Chinese military intelligence-gathering arm is called the Second Department of the General Staff Department, or 2PLA. The Fourth Department, ...

Her novels imagine other worlds, but her theory of fiction can help us better live in this one. A paleolithic man crouches in the bushes, waiting for something to catch his attention. The tiniest movement kick-starts the bloodlust, that hard-wired desire to just fucking get it. He flings a projectile in its direction, an arrow or a spear maybe — weapons that create just the right amount of distance between his own body and that of his prey. This is important. If his aim is true, if the animal drops lifelessly to the ground, he will have accomplished two things: one, dinner. Two, and perhaps more important, he will have won. Human history, or so conventional wisdom goes, is a story of violent, merciless competition. We have come to embrace the idea that a succession of one thing defeating another literally is history, whether that’s between species, political leaders, or conflicting ideologies. In our inherited notion of human history, our caveman — and he is always a man — com...

On an otherwise unremarkable morning last year, I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. The caller ID said “Texas,” so I groggily answered thinking it might be a response to one of the hundreds of public records requests I had recently filed with Texas law enforcement. “I’m calling from the Sheriff’s Association of Texas,” the strong Western drawl on the other end said, “now, I’m tryina figure out why you’re harassing my sheriffs.” I told him that I was a journalist investigating how the departments work and their relationships with local jails. With strange confidence, he informed me that I was breaking the law. I laughed. Mainly because I knew that wasn’t true, and because by now I’ve developed a thick enough skin and a pretty keen sense for when I’m being intimidated versus when the person on the other end of the phone simply doesn’t know how to fulfill a records request, or understand why they have to. Government agencies, big and small, love to reject records ...

Part One “The 1619 Project,” published by the  New York Times  as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, presents and interprets American history entirely through the prism of race and racial conflict. The occasion for this publication is the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Port Comfort in Virginia, a British colony in North America. On the very next day, the slaves were traded for food. The Project, according to the  Times , intends to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” Despite the pretense of establishing the United States’ “true” foundation, the 1619 Project is a politically motivated falsification of history. Its aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an ...