Issue 38 - Fill your pantry and pack your freezer

Here comes trouble

Author

Jesse Hirsh
April 26, 2024

Welcome to issue 38! We hope we’re not too late in helping you plan for the impending compounded pandemic. Alarmist, perhaps. Yet would you prefer to be safe rather than sorry?

Table of Contents

The Cats Were All Dead

Many of you reading this issue were also subscribers to this newsletter when it was published by substack and went by the name Metaviews. It was a fun but weighty daily newsletter, and we’re proud, if you can put it that way, that we told you to stock up on food and essentials a couple of weeks before pandemic lockdowns caught the world by surprise.

Tragically we’re writing to tell you again, that this may be one of those moments. While lockdowns are no longer politically feasible or logistically possible, we have reason to believe that H5N1 is far more widespread than is currently being recorded or reported.

Let us also not forget that the current pandemic has not ended, in spite of collective wishful thinking and delusion. Instead we’re now facing what could be described as a compounded pandemic that adds influenza to the mix.

Vets in the US are starting to report some really disturbing signs that suggest we’re on the verge of a really nasty episode. To quickly summarize the post above:

At farms where vets were asked to treat sick cows, they also found that the humans were sick, and the cats were dead. Only in retrospect, after testing, did they realize the culprit was H5N1. The bad news this means it is already actively spreading across species, including humans. The good news is the humans didn’t die. However many of the humans who were sick, had no contact with the cows. This is a highly infectious airborne virus.

The other disturbing bit of this report was the level of H5N1 found in (randomly tested) milk. While you cannot get infected from consuming this milk, it is a metric of how wide the virus has already spread in the dairy industry.

The problem of course, is we’ve effectively sabotaged our institutional means of tracking and responding to this emerging threat. At this point we’re relying upon veterinarians and epidemiologists to sound the alarm. Although who would respond to such an alarm is anyone’s guess.

H5N1 update: We have to do better, faster

H5N1—also known as bird flu—continues to spread among animals and, for the first time, is spreading among cows. Thankfully, the risk to the public is low, but the more the virus spreads, the more chances it has to mutate and jump species to spread among humans. Given H5N1’s high mortality rate, we don’t want this to happen.

yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/h5n1-update-we-have-to-do-better

An interesting dynamic to keep an eye on: while the covid pandemic was initially spread by elites travelling the world to and from resorts and events, this next one may be spread by migrant farm workers who are just as global, yet often without access to adequate health care.

The US Should Ban TikTok

While we love TikTok, as it really is the best media (and education) platform out there, it also totally makes sense that the US ban it. Not because TikTok is bad per se, but because it is a legitimate threat to the US as we know it.

The US Intelligence Community is not stupid. Their briefings have clearly created a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington. For good reason. Narrative control is one of the most powerful things around. What it is, and why it matters is something we’ve alluded to previously, and we’ll write more about in the future.

The larger question is now that the US is on the road to banning TikTok, will other countries follow? Canada? UK? EU member states?

For Canada, it would be a stupid move, even if it makes absolute sense for the US. UK, definitely makes sense. EU, no, not at all. What’s the difference you ask? Something for us to explore in the future, ya.

Spyware As A Service

Speaking of China, fellow Eco Punk Greg Walton gave us a heads up about a new report he authored detailing the rise of spyware as a service.

We’ve often written about the role this kind of application plays in product development and exports. Test out the tech on a minority population that cannot fight back, and then export the capabilities to other regimes and markets.

From the Executive Summary:

In February 2024 a leak of documents from i-Soon, a Chinese cybersecurity firm tied to the nation’s security apparatus, gave new evidence of People’s Republic of China’s (China or PRC) large-scale and shadowy cyber espionage activities. The data dump provides valuable insight into the priorities of the Party state in hiring hackers to target peripheral communities, including the Tibetan exile administration in Dharamsala, Uyghurs in the diaspora, pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong, as well as official entities in neighbouring countries such as the Mongolian police, and India’s customs agency.

The leak demonstrates both operational continuity and a steady evolution in China’s strategic deployment of targeted surveillance technology. For long-time observers, the leak provides significant evidence confirming that China’s targeting of vulnerable individuals and groups through commercial Chinese cybersecurity companies extends well beyond PRC borders, infiltrating hundreds of official and individual systems.

Examination of the i-Soon files reveals that the Tibetan administration in exile and the Dalai Lama’s Private Office in India were among the targets of sophisticated cyber espionage. i-Soon, whose biggest clients included the Chinese police, the People’s Liberation Army, the Ministry of State Security and the Tibetan regional authorities based in Lhasa, harnessed advanced technological capabilities for data mining and communication pattern analysis.

OK Shroomer

Fellow Eco Punk AnnA Melnikoff is officially launching The Vibrational Apothecary this weekend.

For those of you in Toronto or able to travel on short notice, you can buy tickets here.

Do the Democrats Want to Win?

Instead of a music video to end this issue, please watch this TikTok vid and listen to the argument presented. What do you think?

@crutches_and_spice

But am i wrong

Hey you kids! Get off of my lawn!

Leon had his balls removed

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