The Digger

June 20, 2019  Early this morning Iranian air defense  shot down  a U.S. high attitude reconnaissance drone: DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have shot down a U.S. “spy” drone in the southern province of Hormozgan, which is on the Gulf, the Guards’ news website Sepah News said on Thursday.State news agency IRNA carried the same report, identifying the drone as an RQ-4 Global Hawk. “It was shot down when it entered Iran’s airspace near the Kouhmobarak district in the south,” the Guards’ website added. bigger A later statement by the IRGC  detailed  the incident: The American UAV took off from an US base in the south of the Persian Gulf at 00:14 am today morning and contrary to aviation laws, it shut off all of its introduction equipment and proceeded from the Strait of Hormuz to Chabahar with complete secrecy.The unmanned aircraft while returning to the west of the region towards the Strait of Hormuz, violated the territorial integri...

June 18, 2019 From flimsy false flags in the Gulf to the signing of Assange’s extradition warrant, Craig Murray reviews the abuses of power made  obvious in the past two weeks.  By  Craig Murray CraigMurray.org.uk S tanding back a little and surveying the events of the last couple of weeks, gives a bleak view of the current state of Western democracy. We have seen what appears to be the most unconvincing of false flags in the Gulf. I  pointed out  why it was improbable Iran would attack these particular ships. Since then we have had American military sources pointing to video evidence of a packed small Iranian boat allegedly removing a limpet mine from the ship the Iranians helped to rescue, which was somehow supposed to prove it was the Iranians who planted the alleged device. We also have had the Japanese owner  specifically contradict  the American account and say that the ship was hit by flying objects. The Iranians certainly h...

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for Taliban’s spokesman in Qatar, said in a tweet on Tuesday that besides accepting the withdrawal of its troops, the US has vowed not to do any interference in Afghanistan’s affairs in the future. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ June 19, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Islamabad (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 19th June, 2019)  The United States has agreed to completely withdraw its troops and not to interfere in Afghanistan in future. Amid reports about a possible meeting between the US and the  Taliban  in  Doha  next week, a  Taliban spokesman has said that “the  United States  has accepted to withdraw  all  its forces  from Afghanistan”. Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for Taliban’s spokesman in Qatar, said in a tweet on Tuesday that besides accepting the withdrawal of its troops, the US has vowed not to do any interference in Afghanistan’s affairs in the future. He also said that the pr...

"We hear a great deal these days about how the right’s hostility to “identity politics,” inflamed by advocates like BreitbartNews, its erstwhile editor Steve Bannon, and Fox News, enabled the rise of Donald Trump. In this framing, the election of 2016 was a populist backlash of ordinary voters against an increasingly aberrant left that has allowed itself to be distracted by narrow questions about groups whose niche concerns do not rightly pertain to the proper functioning of democracy. Their identity-based complaints are marginalizing the left, leaving it out of touch with the troubles of Middle Americans, who primarily worry about how to pay the bills, but who are also concerned with the degradation of national values. Identity politics—according to this telling—fosters a series of peripheral grievances that, in travestying political norms, pose a dangerous threat to these values. This argument is made not only on the right. Liberal academics like Francis Fukuyama at Stanford ...

"Hundreds of cops are found to be members of racist, misogynistic and homophobic Facebook groups where they mocked black shooting deaths and laughed about violence against women but only ONE has been fired. By Dailymail.com Reporter 20:52 EDT 14 Jun 2019, updated 11:36 EDT 15 Jun 2019 23k shares 352  comments Latest From MailOnline Depraved sex cult leader Keith Raniere is found guilty on all counts: Jury takes just four HOURS to convict Nxivm founder after... Cory Booker calls for reparations for the 'stain of slavery' and Jim Crow as Democrats hold hearing on compensation for... Some of the named officers work in jails, schools, airports, on boats and trains  150 involved with violent anti-government groups such as the Oath Keepers Some groups named are White Lives Matter and DEATH TO ISLAM UNDERCOVER They trade anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and Islamophobic memes Louisiana prison guard was a member of 56 extremist groups, inclu...

I can't get the video to post, so you'll have to get to it through  the URL.  Or the link below. Posted on   June 19, 2019   by  Yves Smith I’m sticking out my neck a bit in commenting on this detailed analysis of California’s current and likely future energy mix, and why its heavy emphasis on solar is not a good idea. The video is short and information-rich, making good use of graphics, and a lot of the data displays would be lost in a transcript, so it’s worth watching. However, because it is so data driven, it buries its conclusions. The video shows that over-reliance on solar undermines its economic attractiveness because it requires too much in the way of storage, both to shift supply to peak demand times during the day, as well as over the course of the year. A second issue is that the lack of enough in the way of a steady base supply. That results from the planned phase-out of nuclear, which currently supplies about 15% of California’s power, a...

Who knew that these mid-cycle days of the long emergency (i.e. the collapse of techno-industrial economies) would feature the willful abandonment of reason by the thinking class of Western Civ, and America extra-specially? Reminder: the basic catalyst for collapse is  over-investments in complexity with diminishing returns . The rest follows from there. Another name for  diminishing returns  is blowback. The Internet is certainly the most complex assembly of human thought in human history and it is blowing back ferociously on humanity in ways that are far from obvious. It has set in motion countless recursive feedback loops of misinformation, disinformation, and ideas that are simply bad in the sense that they don’t comport with reality. Hence, the new elastic meaning of the concept known as “truth.” Capital T  Truth  used to be mankind’s conduit to reality. To even state it that way now may invite censure for sexism, since the word “man” has lately been bu...