The Digger

Black Swans, Dead Cats, Live Bats, and Goodbye to All That James Howard Kunstler Had enough excitement yet? At least the stock markets are following an established script: the bubble pops, the elevator drops, for a while it stops… and then investments sink to the deepest sub-basement, where they linger for a long, long time. Hello, next great depression…. We know how that story goes, even if it hurts. This corona virus is something else. It engulfs whole populations in a fog of confounding narratives. Is it no worse than a bad common cold, except for old folks already half-gone with chronic illness? Or does it really slam people even in the midst of life? Well, Wuhan hospital director Liu Zhiming, 51, went down two weeks ago, and gastroenterologist Xia Sisi, 29, and Dr. Peng Yinhua, also 29, and some prominent Iranian politicians, and lots of very sick healthcare workers from Korea to Italy. Whatever corona virus is, I’m not persuaded that it’s a hoax. One monster banging a...

Pure Efficiency Kills Matt Stoller In 2018, the Health Industry Distributor’s Association’s Linda Rouse O'Neill  complained  about Trump tariffs on China at a hearing held by the government office that handles trade. She was there to oppose proposed tariffs on things hospitals needed, like gloves, needles, surgical kits, anesthesia products, sutures, wound care, vaccines, diagnostic kits, etc. Her rationale was very familiar to anyone who studies antitrust or trade policy: efficiency. “We have become very highly efficient and lean and mean when it comes to supply chain and that is because we have also gone global,” she said. “Some of our successes include actually reducing the costs of some of these products from what they were sold a couple of decades ago. And we've only been able to do that because of the efficiency and the ability to source products from China.” Trump’s policy goal with his tariffs was to move supply chains, but the reality, O’Neill said, is th...

 • MARCH 11, 2020  •  Is the planet under the spell of a pair of black swans – a Wall Street meltdown, caused by an alleged oil war between Russia and the House of Saud, plus the uncontrolled spread of Covid-19 – leading to an all-out “cross-asset pandemonium” as billed by Nomura? Or, as German analyst Peter Spengler suggests, whatever the averted climax in the Strait of Hormuz has not brought about so far “might now come through market forces”? Let’s start with what really happened after five hours of relatively polite discussions last Friday in Vienna. What turned into a de facto OPEC+ meltdown was quite the game-changing plot twist. OPEC+ includes Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Essentially, after enduring years of OPEC price-fixing – the result of relentless US pressure over Saudi Arabia – while patiently rebuilding its foreign exchange reserves, Moscow saw the perfect window of opportunity to strike, targeting the US shale industry. Shares...

The MH17 Show Trial Isn’t About Justice Or Closure, But Information Warfare Andrew Korybko The MH17 tragedy is back in the news after the start of this case’s  show trial  in the Netherlands, which isn’t about bringing the alleged perpetrators to justice or helping the victims’ families find closure, but waging information warfare against Russia in an attempt to “conclusively” pin the blame for this crime on its supposed proxies in Eastern Ukraine so as to ruin President Putin’s international reputation once and for all. The world is once again talking about the MH17 tragedy after the start of this case’s show trial in the Netherlands, where four of the alleged perpetrators are being accused of murder. It’s unlikely that they’ll appear before the court, so the entire process is more about show than substance. In case the reader doesn’t remember exactly what happened on that fateful summer day on 17 July, 2014, the author recommends that they review his most ...

Another article on government and corporate reactions to COVID-19 that raises some good questions... COVID-19 and Total Social Control: ‘This is No Futuristic Scenario’ MARCH 11, 2020  BY  21WIRE   3 COMMENTS It’s not difficult to see exactly how governments and selected corporations are using the threat of pandemic to lock-down various aspects of society and force the public into accepting various restrictions and medical protocols. Will the current crisis be used to institute mandatory vaccinations? What other new control measures will be implemented? William Engdahl NEO Every day world mainstream news reports more people in more countries diagnosed “positive” for the coronavirus illness, now called COVID-19. As the reported numbers grow, so does widespread nervousness, often in the form of panic shopping for masks, disinfectants, toilet paper, canned goods. We are told to accept the testing results as science-based. While it is next to impossible to get a...

Do We Want Dystopia?  On nightmare tech as the fulfillment of warped desire Stefan Beck I nasmuch as there are canonical texts of American education, Aldous Huxley’s  Brave New World  is one of them. But students may wonder why their teacher presents as “dystopian” a text that reads, in 2020, like an operating manual for the technocratic American Dream. The taming of reproduction and heredity by science; the banishment of boredom, discomfort, and sorrow by entertainment and pharmacology; the omnipresent availability of attachment-free sex; the defeat of death, sort of, by blissed-out euthanasia: Huxley foresaw not our fears but some of our deepest aspirations. To read and teach  Brave New World   as dystopia is at best an oblivious atavism, at worst a piece of deluded self-flattery. As a character (not even an especially bright one) observes in Michel Houellebecq’s  The Elementary Particles  (1998), “Everyone says  Brave New W...