The Digger

Tim James: A Perspective on the Ethics of Lockdowns POSTED  MONDAY 29TH JUNE 2020   HECTOR DRUMMOND This is an article by  Tim James . Tim manages legal liabilities arising from industrial disease cases.  All opinions expressed are strictly his own. In the ongoing debate over the merits of the United Kingdom’s various lockdown measures the focus has understandably been upon comparing the number of lives the lockdown has allegedly saved with the price that society and individuals have paid in return. It has been viewed in terms of a cost benefit analysis. However, there are more fundamental issues at stake which are frequently overlooked when making these comparisons: The ethics, morality and legality of the government’s actions should always be paramount. It is often claimed by lockdown supporters that those who oppose it are more interested in money than lives because the latter are seeking to protect the abstract and nebulous entity known as the eco...

An Interesting Juncture in History Charles Hugh Smith Just as the rewards of central-bank bubbles have not been evenly distributed, the pain created by the collapse of the bubbles won't be evenly distributed, either. We've reached an interesting juncture in history, and I don't mean the pandemic.  I'm referring to the  normalization of extremes  in the economy, in social decay and in political dysfunction and polarization. Let's ask a very simple question.  The S&P 500 stock index went up five-fold from its 2009 low at 667 to a recent high around 3,400.  Did your income rise five-fold since 2009?  Probably not. Houses that sold for $150,000 in 2000 are now valued at $900,000, a six-fold increase since 2000.  Did your income rise six-fold since 2000?  Probably not. State university tuition has risen about 2.5 times from 2004 to 2019.  Did your income rise 2.5-fold since 2004?  Probably not. Even burritos from the...

Mensch59 here. If the regular readers here are convinced that tyranny is here and the invented Covid "pandemic" is the vehicle or mechanism to establish tyranny on the most personal level (e.g. injections violating our bodily autonomy), then it's time to put the maxim "Actions speak louder than words" a part of your social practices. This is it folks. It's Showtime!! On a more personal note, as I was writing this and re-listening to the first portion of the video, I had a very strange/weird and literal sense of  déjà vu.   I swear that I had heard Pam speaking these words while I was sitting at my computer telling people that this is serious before. Oh well. Enough about me. On to Pam's version of Independence Day. Sources:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqf0Cl86QY&feature=youtu.be  and  http://wellnessforumhealth.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=cb70ab375662576bd1ac5aaf16b3fca4.301&s=0b024618ef41885623671a0a8f0882e7 ...

1 July 2020 An opinion piece by  New York Times  columnist Charles Blow appeared online Sunday under the headline, “Yes, Even George Washington,” calling for the removal of all public monuments to the first President of the United States, whom Blow has judged to be among the “amoral monsters” who led the American Revolution and helped found the country 244 years ago. “On the issue of American slavery, I am an absolutist: enslavers were amoral monsters,” Blow declares. His argument is an extension of that advanced in the  Times’  racialist 1619 Project, which claims that the aim of the American Revolution was to defend slavery against British plans for its abolition. Blow writes: “Some people who are opposed to taking down monuments ask, ‘If we start, where will we stop?’ It might begin with Confederate generals, but all slave owners could easily become targets. Even George Washington himself.” Blow then proclaims, with the special elegance that distinguishes...

Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London. 1 Jul, 2020 08:06 Black Lives Matter demonstration in Northampton town centre, UK on June 13, 2020 © Leila Coker/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images 200 Follow RT on Smashing up monuments and disowning the past isn’t the way to address racism and show respect to black people. Feeling guilty patronizes the victims and achieves little. It was widely reported in the media how on June 21, German authorities were shocked by  a rampage  of an “ unprecedented scale ” in the centre of Stuttgart: between 400 and 500 partygoers ran riot overnight, smashing shop windows, plundering stores and attacking police.  The police – who needed four...

Mensch59 here. Today is Canada Day. On a personal note, I just received my Conformation of Permanent Residency. I find the following article appropriate for the day and personally. As I posted elsewhere: " I for one will be happy to eat a large helping of crow if this SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it supposedly causes (Covid-19) turns out to be real. My gut feeling is that it is not and that a plethora of disease caused by influenza, other upper & lower respiratory infections which lead to viral pneumonia, air pollution is what "Covid-19" is. Obviously, I could be wrong. I'll wait for the medical scientific evidence that this new virus, SARS-CoV-2, is real. Until then, why not withhold judgement and remain in a state of healthy skepticism? The problem is that by the time the evidence comes in that there's no such virus (assuming that's the case), people will be queuing up for injections, COVI-PASSes, constant medical surveillance/testing and wil...