MBW - 4/1/2022
Good morning friends. Last day of the week and your daily digest is ready.
News Briefing
•Russia drafts 134,500 conscripts but says they won't go to Ukraine. More on this here.
•The Russian media regulator threatened Wikipedia with fines Thursday of up to 4 million rubles (about $49,000) if it doesn’t delete information about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that diverges from the Kremlin’s version of events. More on this here.
•Ukrainian Mi-24s helicopters hit oil storage facilities in the town of Belgorod, Russia in the second such attack in the last two days:
Another video:
•Ukrainian president Zelensky says that two generals who turned out to be traitors were stripped of their rank. Andriy Olehovych Naumov, former head of the main internal security department of the Ukrainian Security Service and Serhiy Oleksandrovych Kryvoruchko, former head of the SBU in Kherson. Full video address:
•In other news, Washington, D.C., police found five fetuses in the home of an anti-abortion activist on Wednesday. The activist, Lauren Handy, sat outside her home as officers brought out coolers containing the fetuses. More on this here.
•President Biden announced the release of a million barrels of crude oil every day for the next six months from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help cool oil prices, the largest such release from the stockpile in history. More on this here.
•A Swedish Supreme Court judge fined for stealing meatballs from shop. More on this here.
Experimenting with Viruses
If you still believe that there is no chance that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but originated instead in the wet market, then you need to read this article by Vanity Fair. It just dropped yesterday. A great piece of investigative journalism. A bit long but totally worth it. Otherwise you can wait until next week for us to summarize it for you.
Today I ran into an article in the Guardian from 2014. Everything predicted there turned out true. Crazy.
It is about a 2014 report published by researchers at Harvard and Yale universities in the US. They warned that controversial experiments on mutant viruses could put human lives in danger by unleashing an accidental pandemic.
According to the authors of the report, the benefits of the work are outweighed by the risk of pathogenic strains escaping from laboratories and spreading around the world. They calculated that if 10 high-containment labs in the US performed such experiments for 10 years, the chance of at least one person becoming infected was nearly 20%. If an infected person left the laboratory, the virus could then spread more widely.
From the article: "We are not saying this is going to happen, but when the potential is a pandemic, even a small chance is something you have to weigh very heavily," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard School of Public Health, who wrote the report with Alison Galvani, an epidemiologist at Yale.
Lipsitch and Galvani were most concerned about what are called gain-of-function studies, which aim to create highly virulent strains of viruses in secure laboratories so their genetic codes can be studied.
The rational for gain-of-function studies has been twofold. If scientists could work out which mutations made a virus more dangerous to people, they can improve surveillance by looking out for those mutations in natural strains. The work could also help to steer vaccine development. But Lipsitch argued that neither justification stood up: surveillance was not good enough to use the information, and vaccine developers could do without it, he said. Full article here.
Benching
Urban Dictionary defines ghosting as:
When a person cuts off all communication with their friends or the person they're dating, with zero warning or notice before hand. You'll mostly see them avoiding friend's phone calls, social media, and avoiding them in public.
When this term came along a few years back, many felt relieved. At least now the whole thing had a name. But if you have been away from the dating scene for a while, ghosting is not the only phenomenon you missed. There’s a new kid in town and its name is benching.
Benching is when someone you’re interested in stops actually hanging out with you or committing to dates, but continues to text, tweet, or snapchat you.
Think of playing team sports. When you’re benched, you’re not actually playing. But you’re still on the team, ready and waiting for when the coach decides to bring you back into play. It’s also known as being kept on the hook, left on backburner, or simply being led on.
According to dating experts, online dating has made it easier than ever to bench people. One can send a nice message and keep people interested with a few taps of the thumbs. It requires minimum effort (and commitment!) from the bencher and keeps options open with the benchees.
Nowadays people have more dating choice than ever before, but it’s actually more of a hindrance than a help as too much choice overwhelms us and makes it harder to make a decision, and thus, benching.
Michael Shellenberger
Michael Shellenberger is a climate and environmental activist but not the type you’d think. He maintains that climate alarmism propagated by sensationalist mainstream media and ruthless and dogmatic climate activism are suffocating real solutions to the challenges of climate change. In his book ‘Apocalypse Never’, Shellenberger credibly shows that even the actual IPCC reports (UN climate reports) are less alarmist than the "Summaries for Policy Makers" and the media. He is also very much in favor of nuclear energy which is a no-go for most fervent environmentalists.
Furthermore, he has written extensively about the homelessness problem that American cities face. Shellenberger main point is that the homelessness crisis is mostly a drug and mental health crisis.
In his latest book, ‘San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities’ he focuses extensively on San Francisco and the insane situation with homeless encampments created by its progressive elite.
Shellenberger was a Democratic candidate for Governor in the 2018 California gubernatorial election, placing ninth in a field of twenty-seven candidates. He is running as an independent in the 2022 gubernatorial election. He was recently on the Joe Rogan Experience where he laid out his plan on how to tackle the homeless crisis. It’s an interesting take:
Pics, vids & memes
Another level of WTAF
Camera falls from plane and lands in pig pen.
From Reddit: What's crazy is when it gets all slow and trippy looking- the camera is spinning at very close to the frames per second of the recording. So that thing is spinning 24-60 times a second(or whatever the recording is).
Basically extremely coincidental to spin at that exact rate so consistently. Then to survive and land lens up with a pig nearby? Awesomely impossible.
Legend
No European publication will show this graph. The truth is that the EU never recovered from the 2008 crisis.
A reminder:
This hit home.
Indian CEOs in the US
Baklava with pistacchio
That was it for today folks. Make sure to subscribe for our newsletter. Have a great weekend. Peace.