Today's Must-Reads - 3 June 2023 - Lockdowner New CDC Director - Secret Unit To Curb Lockdown Dissent - Secret CIA Boss Trip to China - AI Drone Simulation Killed Operator? - Gonzalo Lira

A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering new information and interesting articles. I then pick the most interesting topic and write about it but that leaves a lot of information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the latest articles and information that I’ve found. Today, this is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but on other days will be for only paid subscribers.

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Climate Change

• Ireland’s mooted cow massacre is a warning to net zero Britain. The collateral damage of net zero is now getting uncomfortably close to home. First Dutch farmers were threatened with compulsory purchases to satisfy EU emissions targets, fomenting a new revolt in the process. Now it’s Ireland’s turn, where the government is reportedly looking at plans to cull around 200,000 cows to meet its climate targets. The scheme would be a bit like voluntary redundancy, with farmers offered financial inducements to give up their cows.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• New CDC Director Is Another Lockdowner. In the old Soviet Union, citizens were not required to be a member of the Communist Party. But if you were not, you could never expect to rise far professionally or socially. You would never be the head of a department in university, a factory manager, much less the General Secretary. They were always recruited out of the party. That’s Jeffrey Tucker’s best read on why Mandy Cohen is being pulled away from her perch in North Carolina, where she led a catastrophic pandemic response, to be the replacement for Rochelle Walensky as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is a faithful member of the lockdown party and thus demonstrates her willingness to do it again should the occasion arise.

• UK Ministers had ‘chilling’ secret unit to curb lockdown dissent. Critics of Covid restrictions targeted by counter-disinformation team at the heart of the Government. The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic “threats” and was used to target those critical of lockdown and questioning the mass vaccination of children. Documents revealed under Freedom of Information (FoI) and data protection requests showed that the activities of prominent critics of the Government’s Covid policies were secretly monitored. An artificial intelligence (AI) firm was used by the Government to scour social media sites. The company flagged discussions opposing vaccine passports.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Late payments on commercial mortgages are piling up as higher rates and weakening property prices bite into the sector. "Ongoing stress caused by higher interest rates, uncertainty around property values, and questions about fundamentals in some property markets are beginning to show up in commercial mortgage delinquency rates," MBA's head of commercial real estate research Jamie Woodwell said in a statement.

Health

• Chemical found in common sweetener damages DNA. A new study finds a chemical formed when we digest a widely used sweetener is "genotoxic," meaning it breaks up DNA. The chemical is also found in trace amounts in the sweetener itself, and the finding raises questions about how the sweetener may contribute to health problems. At issue is sucralose, a widely used artificial sweetener sold under the trade name Splenda. Previous work by the same research team established that several fat-soluble compounds are produced in the gut after sucralose ingestion. One of these compounds is sucralose-6-acetate.

• Pesticide firms withheld brain toxicity studies from EU regulators, study finds. The same studies were submitted to US regulators and some are relevant to safety levels, the researchers say. The researchers described the omissions as “outrageous”, concluding that “apparently non-disclosure is a problem that is not rare” and that there could be “no reliable safety evaluation of pesticides by EU authorities without full access to all performed toxicity studies”.

Politics

• I will give myself some credit for getting British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak’s, cringy video removed. No 10 tweeted the achievements Supreme Leader Sunak had ‘achieved’ this month. It was titled “Your priorities are our priorities. This month, every month.” I replied to the video and within minutes in had been deleted. Rishi is definitely reading the Naked Emperor’s newsletter! Probably my proudest moment. You can watch the deleted video here.

  

  

• CIA chief made secret trip to China in bid to thaw relations. Bill Burns is the most senior Biden administration official to have visited the country. Five people familiar with the situation said Burns, a former top diplomat who is frequently entrusted with delicate overseas missions, travelled to China for talks with officials. Another person stressed that Burns did not have any diplomatic engagements, and only met intelligence officials.

• NUJ expresses concern over detention of journalist Kit Klarenberg. The National Union of Journalists has expressed grave concern over the arrest of journalist Kit Klarenberg at Luton airport under counter-terrorism legislation. Klarenberg was detained by plain-clothes police officers and threatened with arrest if he failed to comply with requests for information. The journalist who has reported for news site The Grayzone, was forced to hand over his electronic devices, memory cards, bank cards and accompanying passwords.

• Trove Of Nearly 10K Hunter Biden Laptop Photos, Docs Appear On Organized Website. "It's taken us a couple of months to, one, go through the photos, about 10,000 of them, and redact the genitalia on the photos," said Garrett Ziegler (former Trump White House aide), adding "The number one thing we're about… is truth and transparency."

• Australia - Why you could soon be jailed for three years for making an offensive Facebook post - here's what you need to know. Queensland's Labor government has introduced a bill that would dramatically increase the maximum prison sentence for racist, anti-gay, anti-trans or seriously bigoted statements. Inflammatory Facebook posts would be a criminal offence with the legislation covering 'any form of communication to the public, including by speaking, writing, printing, displaying notices, broadcasting, telecasting, screening or playing of tapes or other recorded material, or by electronic means'.

• The BBC isn’t exposing disinformation. It’s peddling it. The state broadcaster says its new Verify service will subject its own journalism to more rigorous fact-checking. But a far less neutral agenda appears to be concealed beneath this lofty aspiration. If anyone assumed Verify would be scrutinising the long track record of the BBC and the rest of the UK’s establishment media in misleading audiences, they look set to be sorely disappointed. Even Spring’s job title connects disinformation specifically to social media rather than to the so-called “legacy media” to which she belongs.

Technology

• US air force denies running simulation in which AI drone ‘killed’ operator. An official said last month that in a virtual test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI had used “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal”. Col Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy an enemy’s air defence systems, and ultimately attacked anyone who interfered with that order. “The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat,” said Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. “So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” he said, according to a blogpost.

Ukraine

• Father of Gonzalo Lira, American jailed in Ukraine, speaks out against “political imprisonment”. US citizen Gonzalo Lira faces a long prison term in Ukraine for criticizing the country’s government. Shunned by the US government, his father is fighting to stop the “slow death of a son.” When US media have demonstrated any interest in the arrest of an American citizen, Gonzalo Lira, it has been primarily to celebrate his prosecution on the grounds that he has been “shilling for Putin.” The US State Department, meanwhile, refuses to answer questions about the disappearance of an American at the hands of a government substantially funded by Washington.

Vaccines

• Repeated COVID-19 Vaccination Weakens Immune System: Study. Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4, which can provide a protective effect. But a growing body of evidence indicates that the “abnormally high levels” of the immunoglobulin subclass actually make the immune system more susceptible to the COVID-19 spike protein in the vaccines, researchers said in the paper.

• COVID-19 vaccination-related myocarditis: a Korean nationwide study. Vaccination-related myocarditis incidence was significantly higher in men than in women and in mRNA vaccines than in other vaccines. Vaccination-related myocarditis incidence was highest in males between the ages of 12 and 17 years and lowest in females over 70 years. Severe VRM was identified in 95 cases (19.8% of total VRM, 0.22 per 100 000 vaccinated persons), 85 intensive care unit admission (17.7%), 36 fulminant myocarditis (7.5%), 21 extracorporeal membrane oxygenation therapy (4.4%), 21 deaths (4.4%), and 1 heart transplantation (0.2%). Eight out of 21 deaths were sudden cardiac death (SCD) attributable to VRM proved by an autopsy, and all cases of SCD attributable to VRM were aged under 45 years and received mRNA vaccines.

• Jamie Foxx Left 'Paralyzed and Blind' From 'Blood Clot in His Brain' After Receiving COVID-19 Vaccine, Source Claims. The Django Unchained star is said to be "partially paralyzed and blind," in addition to a series of other complications after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, Hollywood journalist A.J. Benza claimed after speaking to a source close to Foxx.