The Lowdown | The Underground Bunker

Chinese government puts ‘citizen journalist’ in suspicious quarantine over virus reporting

It is difficult to obtain reliable biographic info on Chen Qiushi. From the videos he posts he looks even younger than his 34 years. He has a law degree, if we can go by a troll who posted multiple times on his videos (denounced as a government hack in replies), saying that Chen is only […]

Bad Vibrations: More Beach Boys agita, this time over Mike Love’s trophy hunters gig

[The president with Mike Love]

Brian Wilson is the best-known member of the Beach Boys, the 60s hit group with which he has had a contentious off-and-on relationship for years. Recently a petition was forwarded to him asking people to boycott the Beach Boys, and not even buy their old recordings any more. Wilson signed it, […]

Barring New Yorkers from Global Entry feels unconstitutional in a hundred ways

Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…

It’s being reported that the DHS is suspending the Global Entry program for New York State residents only. This feels unconstitutional in a hundred ways so settling on just one isn’t […]

Lloyd Evans: How to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses without fear

One of the things we like about Lloyd Evans is that he’s giving advice from his own experience, and he has so much compassion for others attempting to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion as he […]

April fools: Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman sentencing hearings set for cruelest month

[Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman]

Judge Nicholas Garaufis has announced sentencing dates for Nxivm leaders Keith Raniere and Clare Bronfman in the month April. […]

Just what the year 2020 needs: Locusts

Crises from all over the world seemed to be competing to grab the headlines in January: Australia’s devastating bushfires, the impeachment trial in America, Brexit finally becoming reality, and the coronavirus outbreak in China. But Africa, often starved for attention, has a growing crisis of its own: a swarm of locusts, already the largest in […]

Why scientists think they have identified the remains of Vesuvius victim Pliny the Elder

In the year 1900 Italian civil engineer Gennaro Matrone uncovered a cluster of bodies (73 eventually recovered) under volcanic rubble near the mouth of the Sarno River which flows from Mt. Vesuvius down to the Bay of Naples. This was only a few kilometers from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the twin towns famously buried in lava […]

Still awaiting sentencing, Keith Raniere and other Nxivm leaders are now being sued

[Sarah Edmondson vs. Keith Raniere]

After a highly-publicized trial that resulted in the conviction or guilty pleas of six Nxivm leaders who now await sentencing, they and numerous others are now facing another kind of fight in […]

From Nobel Peace Prize winner to genocide enabler?

The town of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh was once a popular trading post, named for Captain Hiram Cox of the East India Company in the early days of the British Raj, sited on a coast which boasts the longest stretch of sandy beach on the planet. The district was a violently contested no man’s land […]

The timing of the John Bolton book leak could not be worse for Trump’s legal team