Today's Must-Reads - 7 June 2023 - Zero Covid Holdouts - AI Investment Advice - 30,000 Canadians Euthanised - Largest NATO Military Exercise - Kiev Planned Dam Explosion - Downplaying Vaccine Deaths

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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Covid

• Querying the existence of a covid ‘pandemic’. HART would like to outline their official position on the existence of a ‘global pandemic’ in 2020. It was no more novel than numerous other viruses which emerge each year in terms of the ability to be recognised by our immune systems. It was no more lethal than bad influenza viruses of the past and was less lethal than seasonal influenza for the young. In reality it was a treatable, seasonal respiratory virus mostly affecting the old and infirm.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Research: Herd immunity, vaccination and moral obligation. “The strength of a moral obligation for individuals to contribute to herd immunity through vaccination, and by extension the acceptability of coercion, will depend on how ‘herd immunity’ is interpreted as well as facts about a given disease or vaccine. Among other things, not all uses of ‘herd immunity’ are equally valid for all pathogens. The optimal conditions for herd immunity threshold effects, as illustrated by measles, notably do not apply to the many pathogens for which reinfections are ubiquitous (due to waning immunity and/or antigenic variation). For such pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, mass vaccination can only be expected to delay rather than prevent new infections, in which case the obligation to contribute to herd immunity is much weaker, and coercive policies less justifiable.”

• We need open dialogue about handling of COVID-19 outbreak (Commentary). While The Republican’s recent coverage of Martin Kulldorff’s talk in Northampton might be considered balanced, because approximately the same number of words were used to describe the doctor’s and sponsor’s positions and then a counter position, it fell short of this practice.

• China abandoned ‘zero covid.’ But some don’t want to leave it behind. Gugu is a “zero covid” holdout, the name given to people in China who are still maintaining the strictest of infection control measures on their own, even as the rest of the country has moved on. She wears a face mask outside and keeps a separate room in her apartment where she uses ultraviolet lights to disinfect anything brought in from outside. “It’s like a quarantine ward,” she says.

• America's COVID Response Was Based on Lies | Opinion. The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns' critics, alongside absurd denials of officials' own incessant demands for them.

• Private schools pocket millions in Covid loans denied to state schools. Ministers’ own schools were among those that received millions while state schools faced bankruptcy. Private schools were handed more than £157m in government-subsidised loans during the pandemic, under a scheme that barred state schools from applying, openDemocracy can reveal.

• PETER HITCHENS: Why do, even now, so few accept that lockdown was like burning down your home to destroy a wasp's nest? A report published yesterday — hundreds of pages of devastating detail from experts at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and Lund University in Sweden — concluded the supposed benefits of lockdown were 'a drop in the bucket' when compared to the costs.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Wells Fargo to take a $60M loss on 13-story office tower in SF. The San Francisco-based bank has chosen a buyer for its 355,000-square-foot building at 550 California Street, expected to sell for between $42.6 million and $46 million, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The pending deal works out to between $120 and $130 per square foot. Wells Fargo bought the building in 2005 for $108 million, or $304 per square foot.

• SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world. The emergency order was filed late Tuesday night and would also force the repatriation of “fiat currency and crypto assets deposited, held, traded, and/or accrued by customers on the Binance.US crypto asset trading platform.”

• JPMorgan is developing a ChatGPT-like A.I. service that gives investment advice. “It’s an A.I. program to select financial securities,” said trademark lawyer Josh Gerben. “This sounds to me like they’re trying to put my financial advisor out of business.”

Health

• A line in the sand for euthanasia - Canada is killing with kindness. Canada legalised euthanasia six years ago through the Medical Assistance in Dying bill (MAiD). Since its inception, over thirty thousand Canadians have been euthanized. The number has increased by about a third each year. By 2021 states sponsored homicide accounted for over 3% of all deaths. For comparison diabetes accounts for 2.5% and influenza and pneumonia together accounted for less than 2% in 2020.

  

Military

• Air Defender 23: The Huge Military Air Defence Exercise Planned In Europe Next Month. The largest exercise of air forces in NATO's history will involve 10,000 participants and 220 aircraft. This is unprecedented. Between June 12-23, twenty-five nations will participate in the largest-ever military exercise in the European airspace.

Politics

• Twitter To Publish All Government Censorship Requests. Showing that transparency is a two-way street, Elon Musk announced that Twitter will publish government censorship requests, including calls for deleting tweets or banning accounts based on claims of alleged disinformation, the German daily Exxpress reported on Sunday, June 4th. “We’re going to publish all government censorship requests and whether or not we complied with them,” the Twitter CEO wrote.

• Joe Biden bribery allegations involve Ukraine, first raised with FBI in 2017, key investigator says. Informant was deemed reliable enough to be paid $200,000 by bureau over several years. “This form 1023 involves a business person from Ukraine, who allegedly sent a bribe, a substantial bribe to then Vice President Joe Biden.”

• British-based Global Disinformation Index developing conservative news "blocklist". The government is contributing to a widespread international attack on free speech by funding a UK-based organisation that works to disrupt online advertising revenues for many right-of-centre publications (Daily Sceptic, Epoch Times, Reclaim the Net, Washington Examiner).

• Like, Totally Orwellian: Nearly A Third Of GenZ Favors 'Government Surveillance Cameras In Every Household'. "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?" asks a new survey from the Cato Institute. Of the responses, 29% of those aged 18-29 said yes.

Ukraine

• Kiev's Long-Term "Last Resort" Plan To Blow-Up The Kakhova Dam Exposed. A day after Ukraine's much-heralded counter-offensive appears to have failed, almost before it had even begun, a major dam in the Russian-occupied region of Kherson is suddenly bombed, prompting mass evacuations as floods spread across the region. However, as Raul Ilargi Meijer writes, twice last year, Ukrainian officials discussed Kiev's plans to blow up the dam.

• U.S. had intelligence of detailed Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline. The CIA learned last June, via a European spy agency, that a six-person team of Ukrainian special operations forces intended to sabotage the Russia-to-Germany natural gas project. The European intelligence reporting was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends.

Vaccines

• Canada - Privy Council advocated downplaying COVID vaccine injuries or deaths. A secret Privy Council office memo recommended that any COVID vaccine-related injuries or deaths be carefully managed with “winning communication strategies” as to not “shake public confidence,” according to Blacklock’s Reporter. The May 2021 memo released through access-to-Information legislation came five months after the Department of Health licensed the first Pfizer-BioNTech pandemic vaccine.

• Some Sudden Deaths Caused by COVID-19 Vaccines, Autopsies Confirm. Eight people who died suddenly after receiving a messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccine died due to a type of vaccine-induced heart inflammation called myocarditis, South Korean authorities said after reviewing the autopsies. “Vaccine-related myocarditis was the only possible cause of death,” Dr. Kye Hun Kim of the Chonnam National University Hospital and other South Korean researchers said.