Today's Must-Reads - 9 June 2023 - Climate Mental Health - Secret Unit Monitoring Telegram - Faltering Health Technocracy? - Assange Appeal Rejected - Internet Apocalypse - Parallel Universe Contact

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

• Climate change is harming my mental health. Jennifer is one of a growing number of people who have experienced "eco-anxiety" - a chronic sense of hopelessness and fear of environmental doom. "It presented itself as depression and anxiety," she says. She felt completely paralysed and often unable to get out of bed. It was during what she describes as her "eco-grief" that 33-year-old Jennifer decided she could not have children. She says: "I don't feel like I can have children, because a) the world can't cope and b) I would feel guilty bringing any child into this world."

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• During the pandemic C.J. Hopkins wrote the book “The Rise Of The New Normal Reich”. This is a book freely available to buy on Amazon. As you would expect, CJ has tweeted about his book which, according to him, has caused the Berlin State Prosecutor’s Office to launch a criminal investigation…“for the 'crime' of tweeting the cover art”. He says he could potentially go to prison for three years.

• Would the lockdowns have happened without Zoom? The laptop class would never have survived without it. One of the central mysteries of the pandemic is why countries worldwide simultaneously decided to jettison a century of experience managing respiratory-virus pandemics, usually with an approach akin to the focussed-protection model proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration, in favour of lockdowns and school closures. While the cause is undoubtedly multifactorial, one of the underappreciated enabling factors is the availability of technologies like Zoom, which made lockdown economically manageable for one crucial subset of the population – the laptop class.

• Secret government unit collected Telegram posts about Covid policy critic. The Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), which was set up by ministers to tackle supposed domestic “threats”, amassed posts from Telegram about Prof Carl Heneghan, an epidemiologist who was critical of lockdown measures, data released by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) revealed. The document showed that the CDU logged what were described as “sample Telegram posts” which made reference to the scientist’s views, including on the efficacy of face masks in stopping the spread of coronavirus.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The Fed's new emergency loan facility just hit $100 billion in usage — it lets banks receive par for their devalued assets in secret. Banks are turning 50¢ into $1 without other banks knowing they're distressed and backing away. Band-aid for now, but hidden risk is spreading.

  

Health

• Is the Plan to Impose a Public-Health Technocracy Faltering? The earlier draft WHO treaty was a more ambitious version and described how countries should respond to a future pandemic by frequently using words such as “shall” and “will” — but now some of those have shifted to “urge” and “support”, says Kelley Lee, a global-health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. She also flagged language that would allow nations to opt out of directives in the document: the phrase “as appropriate”, for example, appeared 47 times. She says that this would give the member states of the World Health Organization (WHO), who are meant to sign the agreement, the ability to prioritize national interests over collective action.

Politics

• UK: Julian Assange dangerously close to extradition following High Court rejection of appeal. In a three-page written decision issued on 6 June, a single judge, Justice Swift, rejected all eight grounds of Assange’s appeal against the extradition order signed by then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel in June 2022. This leaves only one final step in the UK courts, as the defence has five working days to submit an appeal of only 20 pages to a panel of two judges, who will convene a public hearing. Further appeals will not be possible at the domestic level, but Assange could bring a case to the European Court of Human Rights.

• Truly Unprecedented: The Taliban Drugs Ban v2.0. With the Taliban having exceeded expectations and reduced poppy cultivation to levels not seen since 2001, there is now a real need to understand the potential effects of the drugs ban on Afghanistan, the region, and further downstream.

  

• RFK Jr.’s rising profile sparks Democratic jitters. Democrats are growing concerned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s profile is rising just as President Biden embarks on a challenging campaign to keep the White House out of Republican control. “Democrats would be foolish to mock or belittle RFK Jr. Every time we make fun of those who hold fringe positions, we lose,” said Michael Ceraso, a Democratic strategist and former campaign aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “The Democratic Party acting smug never works.”

Science

• NASA mission to prevent 'internet apocalypse' which could leave people offline for months. NASA's Parker Solar Probe has successfully traveled through solar wind, gathering valuable insights into the sun's workings to prevent a potential "internet apocalypse" which could disrupt communication networks and power grids on Earth.

• Researchers At Large Hadron Collider Are Confident To Make Contact With Parallel Universe In Days. the astoundingly complex LHC “atom smasher” at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, will be fired up to its maximum energy levels ever in an attempt to spot - or even generate - tiny black holes.

  If successful a totally new universe will be exposed – modifying completely not only the physics books but the philosophy books too. It is even probable that gravity from our own universe may “transfer” into this parallel universe, researchers at the LHC say. The experiment is assured to intensify alarmist critics of the LHC, many of whom at first warned the high energy particle collider would start the end of our universe with the making a black hole of its own.

Technology

• Scammers can turn your profile picture into deepfake porn and blackmail you, FBI warns. Social media users are being urged to check their privacy settings - as the FBI has warned that criminals could be turning your profile pictures into deepfake porn to blackmail you. They're able to use AI image generators to take your photographs and create convincing fake images featuring your face.

• OpenAI Hit With First Defamation Suit Over ChatGPT Hallucination. OpenAI LLC is facing a defamation lawsuit from a Georgia radio host who claimed the viral artificial intelligence program ChatGPT generated a false legal complaint accusing him of embezzling money. The first-of-its-kind case comes as generative AI programs face heightened scrutiny over their ability to spread misinformation and “hallucinate” false outputs, including fake legal precedent.

Ukraine

• Taibbi: Does Anyone Believe American Propaganda Anymore? A new Washington Post article about Nord Stream throws Ukraine overboard and absolves the United States, offering another version of reality we'll have to strain to take seriously. The Kakhovka dam just exploded in Ukraine, flooding a huge territory and causing another insane ecological disaster. Russia and Ukraine spent yesterday trading accusations, while the U.S. leaked it was “leaning towards Russia as the culprit of the attack.”

• Ukraine dam’s reservoir can no longer cool nuclear plant: operator. The reservoir which had been created by the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine can no longer supply water to cool reactors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the dam’s operator said Thursday. Ukrhydroenergo’s chief executive Igor Syrota said the water level at the reservoir had gone “below the critical point of 12.7 metres (42 feet)”. This means it could no longer supply “the ponds at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station to cool the plant”, he said on Ukrainian television.

• Germany fines woman €900 for saying Russian invasion of Ukraine was ‘necessary’. The country has some of Europe’s most stringent laws regulating what people can say and do in public. A Ukrainian woman has been fined €900 in Germany for condoning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making her the latest person to fall foul of Germany’s strict propaganda laws. A court in Cologne found that Elena Kolbasnikova had “posed a threat to public peace” by giving a speech at a pro-Russian protest in which she described the invasion of Ukraine as “necessary”.

• Nato members may send troops to Ukraine, warns former alliance chief. A group of Nato countries may be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine if member states including the US do not provide tangible security guarantees to Kyiv at the alliance’s summit in Vilnius, the former Nato secretary general Anders Rasmussen has said. Rasmussen, who has been acting as official adviser to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on Ukraine’s place in a future European security architecture, has been touring Europe and Washington to gauge the shifting mood before the critical summit starts on 11 July.

• Judge Napolitano discusses what is really happening in Ukraine with former British ambassador, Alastair Crooke. Is the Ukraine/Russia war changing global order?