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BBC - Spies, bikes and smuggled ink: Fighting pollution and the Stasi in the shadow of the Berlin Wall 9 November 2024 Sophie Hardach Eisenlohr spent as much time as he could outdoors, watching birds and beavers, camouflaging himself with a bedsheet in winter to observe animals in the snow. In theory, such a passion for nature should have been in line with East Germany’s stated goals: looking after the environment was enshrined in the GDR’s constitution. In practice, however, state-owned industries and the heavy use of lignite (brown coal) as an energy source polluted the air and water. The pollution was so bad that it harmed people’s health, and East German children grew up with poorer lung function than those in West Germany. Of course, democratic countries in the 1980s also had environmental scandals: West Germany dumped toxic waste in East Germany; French intelligence agents bombed a Greenpeace ship to clear the way for nuclear tests. But in East Germany, without a free press or freedom of opinion, highlighting even basic environmental problems was taboo. On days when West Berlin imposed a smog alert due to high levels of pollution, a newspaper in East Berlin reported “cloudless skies and sunshine”. Environmental data was considered a state secret in East Germany, activist gatherings were banned, and criticism of the state was punishable by up to 10 years in jail. “The basic formula of any dictatorship is, firstly, spreading lies and suppressing the truth.

And here’s a captivating recent interview with a Czech researcher about snitches and the secret police prior to the Velvet Revolution.

Also... be wary of “closed loop” being trotted out as some tech will save us cure-all for data center water concerns. Because of course it's not.

The zombie “they would’ve died anyway” garbage discourse has of course been used all along to excuse preventable pandemic deaths from covid, even when covid took the lives of young previously healthy people in fact. And it’s a recurring eugenics theme that really ramped up since the beginning of the pandemic, and shows no sign of abating. After all, we have a Great Barrington Declaration author in the U.S. federal government making decisions on public health.

It’s a despicable and immoral propaganda tactic. It will be used if I am harmed with a preventable contagious disease, it will be used if you are harmed with air pollution from a data center, and it will be used to excuse the deaths of our neighbors from heat waves. And that’s because preventable harm is being normalized. Even though there is no such thing as someone who’s got no risk. That’s a eugenics pseudoscience fantasy. There was somebody in the UK I remember in 2021 pointed out that “everyone is just one diagnosis away from being clinically vulnerable”. And it’s true that every cancer patient walked around with cancer for some period of time before having been diagnosed, even when diagnosed early in the best cases, and some of the conditions that make people most vulnerable from infections and air pollution and heat are known as “silent conditions” because they’re widely known to be way too often undiagnosed.

And here we have an op-ed from Norway about people who were “supposed to die anyway”.

Det er ikke hetebølgen som dreper Hetebølgene fremskynder bare naturens gang. De som skulle dø har uansett dødd og innhøstingen er overstått for denne gang. Av Elin Ørjasæter Oppdatert: 01.07.26 Nettavisen Norsk debatt.

I used Google Translate and this is it in English:

It’s not the heat wave that kills. Heat waves only speed up the course of nature. Those who were supposed to die have died anyway and the harvest is over for now. By Elin Ørjasæter (emphasis added)

This opinion piece is NOT worth reading in any language. The piece goes on to rail against journalists writing of heat concerns as doom seekers and suggesting people look for “balance” elsewhere than “MSM” (mainstream media). There was a distinct nod to this “climate anxiety” propaganda talking point; purporting to be coming from a joy and happiness perspective in embracing denial, which sounds like a familiar form of political abuse of psychology toxic positivity, leveraging hopium in a ridiculous way.

It reminded me a little of an opinion piece by some guy in the Poconos, Lucian K. Truscott, IV from early 2024, where he was writing about being a liberal but joining with maga to not bother anymore with covid vaccinations, supposedly in order to live in harmony with his Trumpy neighbors in Milford Pennsylvania. I can only guess this senior feared being accused of the fake condition they call Trump Derangement Syndrome, more than risking the very real severe effects from covid that could be prevented, even if only with vaccine updates. Vaccine updates that he never would’ve needed to tell anybody about anyway, since there’s no compulsion to disclose medical information to whatever Q-pilled neighbors he might see at the Market32 grocery store in Matamoras. Yet he felt compelled to recommend this as sensible in a weird essay, and Salon for some reason decided to publish it.

In the end it’s all to suggest that if you fall asunder to any collective threat, it’s your own individual fault, because after all, “it’s mild”, so if you succumb, you were meant to. This is eugenics ideology. And these people who so often get their op-eds published somehow, seem to all work out of the same playbook.

I found out about the op-ed from Norway in a Bluesky thread, where the person notes the use of the word “harvested” to refer to the people killed by the heat wave, because it was reposted by George Monbiot talking about a neighbor who died in the heat wave. A few years back one of my neighbors, without AC, died in a heat wave, someone with disabilities, just as George Monbiot’s neighbor, and of course we knew it was the heat. The event may be coronary, but it’s the heat that brought it about and shortened their lives.

To those who don’t cherish every moment in this life on our only planet Earth, or who don’t see the value in the human lives of others, I guess it’s all just “deaths pulled from the future” as was said in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article from May 2020 that is now infamous to so many disabled people everywhere.

At least 400 people have died from coronavirus in Wisconsin. Here’s what trends are emerging. - John Diedrich, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel May 8, 2020 In Milwaukee County, the medical examiner reports seven cases of people who died and had COVID-19, but the cause of death was not from the virus. The causes included death from falls, heart disease and stroke, records show. Researchers will be studying if the COVID pandemic may be “pulling deaths from the future,” hastening the deaths of people who were nearing death, though that will be not evident for several months, Remington said. That was the case when Milwaukee’s water supply was contaminated with cryptosporidium in 1993, he said. Sixty-nine people died, mostly those with compromised immune systems and the elderly. Remington noted there was a dip in deaths later that same year. There is an indication that may be happening to some degree in Milwaukee County during the COVID-19 pandemic. (emphasis added)

We might expect this from the USA corrupted by the Great Barrington Declaration peeps, or from the long cringe coming from Sweden, in a way one wouldn’t necessarily from Norway. Since in 2023, some oddball Swedes were still suggesting covid as a sort of passive euthanasia.

Emil J. Bergholtz @EmilBergholtz 7:28 AM · Dec 11, 2023 “Någonting ska man avlida av .... hjälps över den där kanten mellan liv och död” och mycket annat. Translated from Swedish: “Something to die of .... is helped over that edge between life and death” and much more.

Swedish officials notoriously plotted to make school children sick on purpose in 2020, and indeed “helped” the elderly in long term care homes over the threshold from life to death by withholding effective and available treatment.

And now I can already see the use of “underlying conditions” being pulled out to excuse people getting sick from the various and sundry pollution from data centers.

We have here a story about bacteria from closed loop data center cooling discharge, which is significant enough that it has actually led to the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities terminating the data center’s discharge privileges and adopting a blanket policy of prohibiting wastewater from closed loop system data centers. Yet the article manages to describe the bacteria as typically harmless, and adds that it “mostly” only infects people who are “already sick”.

Laramie Boomerang - Cheyenne BOPU traces rare bacteria discharge to Meta data center contractor - Alyssa Tolman Wyoming Tribune Eagle Jul 4, 2026 “Cupriavidus gilardii is a rare type of bacteria found naturally in the environment, such as in soil and water, according to the National Institutes of Health. While it typically lives harmlessly in nature, it can occasionally act as an opportunistic pathogen, which means it mostly infects people who are already sick or have weakened immune systems. As a result, BOPU temporarily suspended Cheyenne’s reclaimed water irrigation program, permanently terminated Meta’s discharge privileges and adopted a new policy prohibiting wastewater discharges from data centers using closed-loop cooling systems and fill-and-flush systems, which involves circulating purified water to remove construction debris, flux residue and pipe scale, draining it and filling the loop with fresh coolant.”

And be wary of “closed loop” being trotted out as some tech will save us cure-all for data center water concerns; clearly.

Yes, it’s well understood that many harmful things are especially harmful to some people. This isn’t new. And being “already sick” shouldn’t mean we do nothing to stop preventable worsening, or else why does anyone ever go to the doctor ever? Prevention is good. And many of the harms that are especially dangerous to “vulnerable” people, are nevertheless also harming “healthy” people too. I don’t think anyone wants to be helped over that threshold. In some cases these harms are making well people into sick people! Just like covid, and a plethora of other infections have made many formerly not sick people into disabled people and people with ongoing chronic illnesses that are at high risk with covid and other infections.

For example, being exposed to pollution is known to be a risk factor for developing the risk factor conditions that make people more vulnerable to pollution!!

Washington Examiner - Trump administration loaning $17.5 billion to build 10 large nuclear reactors  By Callie Patteson Published June 23, 2026 10:18am ET "This was a key goal laid out by President Donald Trump last year in his plan to quadruple domestic nuclear capacity by midcentury to support surging energy demand brought on by increased manufacturing and data centers running artificial intelligence."

My letter to reps: 

I don't want my taxpayer money going to rich companies to build nuclear to make things cheaper for data center developers and their billionaire tycoon backers. Billionaires don't need more of our money to speculate with. 

POLITICO - ‘We are screwed’: People near data centers dread heat wave pollution Extreme temperatures threaten to strain the grid as data centers are increasing energy demand. What could go wrong? “To relieve some of the pressure, the Department of Energy granted permission Tuesday to the region’s grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to potentially force data centers to use backup diesel generators." (...) "Many data centers rely on backup diesel generators, which release planet-warming emissions and lack air pollution controls designed to safeguard public health. "