Curiously Curated Conspiracies, Cover Ups and Corruption. All content is 'for your consideration' only. "The Truth, when you finally chase it down, is almost always far worse than your darkest visions and fears." ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Erin Brockovich, who secured a historic $333 million settlement against PG&E in 1993 and was immortalized by Julia Roberts on the silver screen, has launched a new battle against the proliferation of AI data centers across the United States and beyond.
The Guardianreports that the environmental activist who became a household name after her work on the Hinkley, California, groundwater contamination case has identified what she describes as a threat on par with that scandal, only larger in scope. After receiving thousands of emails from concerned citizens, Brockovich has turned her attention to the rapid construction of massive AI data centers happening with minimal public input or environmental oversight.
The campaign began when Brockovich noticed an unusual pattern in her inbox. She received 30 emails from people in the same town, all expressing concerns about data centers. In April, she issued a public call on her website asking anyone with concerns about data centers near them to contact her. Within a month, 3,862 people responded. Brockovich characterizes the situation as “Hinkley on steroids.”
Using the information gathered from these emails, Brockovich created an open-source map documenting AI data centers across the United States. As of June 24, the map shows 33 AI data centers that are operational, 68 under construction, and 41 proposed. More than 7,000 reports have been submitted through her online form, revealing a pattern of construction happening largely without public knowledge or consent.
AI data centers are enormous in scale. Some stretch over hundreds of acres, and in May, Utah approved a center twice the size of Manhattan. According to Brockovich, many communities learn about these facilities only after construction has already begun, or in some cases, months after they have been approved by local officials.
A major concern for Brockovich is the secrecy surrounding the approval process. Data center developers often enter into nondisclosure agreements with local officials, making it impossible for residents to understand why projects were approved without environmental impact assessments or public input. Brockovich reports receiving emails from people whose local leaders are changing zoning laws to accommodate these facilities. “If data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?” reads one headline on her Substack blog.
Meta Platforms has instructed engineers in its Applied AI division to limit or restrict their use of Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex coding and agent tools, according to internal documents reviewed by The Information. The policy, driven by concerns over inadvertent model distillation, aims to prevent outputs from rival AI systems from contaminating Meta’s own training data and model development processes for its Llama family of models (which, quite frankly, could only help).
The move reflects the increasingly zero-sum nature of frontier AI development, where companies aggressively protect the provenance and purity of their training data while seeking to reduce reliance on competitor tools. Internal guidelines referencing the restrictions date back to at least May, with the policy actively in effect as of late June. Meta has not publicly confirmed or commented on the directive.
According to the internal documents, strict limits have been placed on how engineers in the applied AI division can use the rival tools. The stated goal is to block “inadvertent distillation” of competitor model outputs into Meta’s AI development pipeline. The scope is targeted: it focuses on engineers working directly on model building and applied AI initiatives rather than the entire engineering organization.
Claude Code from Anthropic and Codex from OpenAI are basically the industry standard now for professional developers engaged in agentic coding workflows. These desktop and app-based interfaces can plan, write, debug, and iterate on complex codebases, offering powerful assistance at relatively low individual subscription costs. That accessibility, however, has increased the potential surface area for the risks Meta is now seeking to contain.
DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature has been caught spreading the outrageous claim that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both died earlier this month from rabies, in what appears to be a successful campaign by internet pranksters to manipulate artificial intelligence systems using a technique known as “poisoning.”
Futurism reports that the false claim that Trump and Vance both died from rabies in early June represents yet another instance of AI systems amplifying misinformation without critical verification. According to the AI feature’s fabricated narrative, Trump had been deliberately bitten by Vance following advice from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who supposedly claimed the deadly infection could confer “superpowers.”
The misinformation traces back to a coordinated effort by the Reddit community r/poisonai, a group of approximately 45,000 users dedicated to posting absurd falsehoods in an attempt to trick AI systems into repeating them. The group’s self-described mission is providing “Accurate, Verified and Trusted information,” though this is itself part of the satirical nature of the operation.
The favored false narrative among these “AI poisoners” has been that JD Vance died of rabies on June 5, 2026. Community members have posted dozens of fabricated tributes and expressions of mourning, with some sharing fake screenshots of supposed Trump Truth Social posts eulogizing the vice president. The performance extends to comment sections, where participants maintain the fiction by expressing outrage at AI systems that correctly identify the claims as false.
“Google should really do something about this,” one participant wrote. “It is extremely insensitive for their AI to be treating this tragedy as something ‘fake’ or ‘satirical.’”
The campaign has achieved measurable success beyond DuckDuckGo. The browser Brave’s AI feature also began repeating the false claim about Vance’s death from rabies, which reporters were able to confirm independently.
“The release clears the way for a select group of more than 100 companies and agencies to gain access to the Mythos 5 model, two weeks after the administration imposed restrictions, amid fears that the software could be used to launch cyberattacks. But a second advanced Anthropic model, called Fable 5, remains blocked.
Meanwhile, pressure from the White House led Anthropic’s leading competitor, OpenAI, to limit the release of its most advanced model this week because of similar cyber concerns.”
Many of the topics I address are met with silence because they question the quasi-religious beliefs that underpin our entire way of life: the belief that Progress is inevitable because technology inevitably drives Progress–a belief structure I call The Mythology of Progress–and the belief structure that the desire to get rich inevitably drives innovation which then drives Progress.
Neither belief is actually grounded in science, but each is cloaked in the finery of science to mask their true nature, i.e. quasi-religious belief structures: the gods of technology and finance are real and powerful.
Questioning the existence of these gods is met with silence because if these gods are imaginary constructs of belief, then the entirety of Modernity collapses. And so we continue worshiping these gods with charts and spreadsheets and euphoric headlines announcing thousands of modular nuclear reactors are on the way to power super-abundance when there is not a single one that is functioning 24/7 reliably, safely and cheaply, and vast quantities of dollars are needed to dig up and process the fuel, construct the reactors and operate them. But never mind that, the gods have promised that technological Progress is unstoppable and inevitable.
The possibility that Anti-Progress might not just negate Progress but reverse it is strictly verboten, as is even recognizing Anti-Progress as a reality.
As a thought experiment, let’s consider two things:
1. Let’s define the highest value technology as devices that operate reliably with little maintenance for many decades, without extracting any money from their owners beyond operational expenses such as electricity or fuel.
For example, the coffee maker, rice cooker and microwave on our counter are 25+ years old and still functioning reliably with zero maintenance costs. Our 1998 car is 28 years old and has required only modest maintenance to date, and given its condition, it can easily function reliably for another 12 years, a 40-year period of service.
Why this is the highest value technology is self-evident: the devices make the highest and best use of the resources consumed in their manufacture because they are durable, long-lasting and require minimal maintenance. In financial terms, since the technologies don’t require the owners to pay any more than the purchase price and operational costs, the owners’ costs are predictable and modest, leaving all the income they earn beyond the purchase price and operational expenses available for other uses.
All technologies that fail to meet these standards are inferior or defective. That is also self-evident.
2. Let’s imagine a new law requires everyone to wear a Silly Hat in public. This requirement generates a vast and highly profitable surge in economic activity, pushing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), business profits, employment and taxes up.
The legal-regulatory sector is suddenly busy defining what qualifies as a Silly Hat, launching lawsuits challenging the laws requiring Silly Hats, codifying regulations regarding the safety and quality of Silly Hats, litigating claims of defective Silly Hats, hiring vast numbers of compliance, oversight and enforcement personnel, and so on.
The fashion industry leaps into action to design haute couture Silly Hats, designer Silly Hats, Silly Hats promoted by celebrities, Hello Kitty branded Silly Hats, and so on.
Retailers rush to market Silly Hats, offering discounts on cheap Silly Hats manufactured overseas, and promoted the “latest fashions” in Silly Hats.
Not to be outdone, the finance sector quickly generates a bubble in stocks relating to the manufacture and marketing of Silly Hats. The Silly Hat Index soars, minting thousands of mega-millionaires.
I think you see where this is going: the entire economic boom generated by completely needless Silly Hats is real, but the hats have no real value. Okay, now please take a deep breath.
I consider it self-evident that much of our economy is nothing more than Silly Hats that we call something else that sounds less silly. The percentage of our economy that actually produces life’s essentials is a fraction of the share devoted to marketing, PR, unproductive “engagement,” legal and regulatory busy-work, meetings, junkets, conferences, billions of needless communications, shadow-work required to deal with all the needless complexity generated by all this needless activity, and so on.
By the standard of high-value technology defined above, our economy is a wasteland of throw-away products and planned obsolescence run amok. Those who claim today’s coffee makers, rice cookers, microwaves and autos will all last 30 or 40 years are delusional, as new appliances fail in a few years and the electronics in vehicles will fail long before 28 years of service, never mind 40 years of service, and the repair or replacement of these components are outrageously costly.
The big-picture lesson from the Covid era should have been obvious. It should have screamed loud and clear to every freedom-loving American: The power elites who run things at the local, state and federal levels want to tag and track our movement, but not just our movement. They want to track our diet, our healthcare, our purchasing habits, our use of energy, our online comment history, our very thoughts.
They want all of it. And if they get their way, you will own nothing. Literally nothing. Even if you technically own an asset, you will not control it, so do you really own it?
Your bank account will be theirs, programmed to be switched on or off at their pleasure, based on your compliance with the dictates of the surveillance state. Your car will be theirs, able to monitor your eye movements, your posture and who knows what else in real time, and be remotely disabled at their pleasure, thanks to Joe Biden’s remote vehicle kill switch law. Your ability to eat healthy food will be gone, thanks to Donald Trump’s granting of legal immunity to Bayer/Monsanto, protecting it from lawsuits based on the harmful effects of bioengineered food laced with chemicals. Same for your healthcare. Your online speech. Even your thoughts. They will own it all if they succeed in bringing in the long-planned AI-powered digital control grid that is currently under construction in the form of 6G wireless networks along with thousands of AI data centers, Flock cameras and other devices.
Flock Safety, the online security company based in Atlanta, has more than 89,000 vertically integrated and fully internet-connected cameras stationed in more than 5,000 communities nationwide and growing. The invasiveness of their cameras is also growing, with the ability to not only see but to hear everything going on for miles through its Raven Audio Detection Program. Flock is also now selling mobile cameras to law-enforcement agencies that will serve as “first responders” based on suspicious activity picked up under the company’s Falcon Drone Program.
U.S. intelligence assessments warn that China is combining artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and military-civil fusion in ways that could significantly expand its biological warfare capabilities.
The United States government has long assessed that China operated an offensive biological weapons program from the early 1950s through at least the late 1980s. Two facilities in Beijing and Lingbao City, according to the State Department, weaponized ricin, botulinum toxin, anthrax, plague, cholera, and tularemia during that period. China acceded to the Biological Weapons Convention on November 15, 1984, which prohibits the development, production, and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons.
Beijing has consistently maintained it has never possessed such weapons and is in full compliance. The State Department’s position, however, is that China likely continued operating an offensive program after signing the convention and that the earlier program was never verified as dismantled, a requirement the treaty imposes on all signatories. Beijing canceled a bilateral BWC-related meeting with Washington in early 2022 and has declined to provide the treaty’s required disclosures.
Georgia is reportedly struggling to meet the growing water demands of AI data centers, as Atlanta planners urge operators to prioritize community needs and reduce consumption — even as water usage varies widely across facilities.
“There’s no easy answer for how much water data centers are requesting,” Celine Benoit, principal planner for the Atlanta Regional Commission and Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, said, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Benoit, who was speaking at a conference hosted by the American Water Works Association on Monday, added that Georgia residents are unfamiliar with AI data centers and oppose them based on the facilities’ water and energy demands.
Georgia, which is prone to droughts, is one of the areas of the U.S. where data centers are being quickly developed, with the Atlanta area being the second largest data center market in the Unites States as measured by megawatts of power usage.
Proposed AI data centers need water ranging anywhere from 5,000 gallons to 9 million gallons per day, depending on the cooling system, as well as other factors, Benoit noted.
As drought continues to lay waste to the state, local Georgia utilities have pushed back against data center developers’ requests for massive water usage, saying they simply don’t have enough supply to provide millions of gallons per day, she added.
The government’s latest censorship Bill C-34 is framed as legislation necessary to protect children. However, it incorporates some of the worst elements of Bill C-63 – the government’s previous “Online Harms Act” that failed to pass – and adds new censorship powers.
The bill proposes regulating social media, online services, and AI chatbots through the creation of a Digital Safety Commission. The Commission will have broad discretionary power to force compliance from online services and compel the removal of any harmful or “hateful” material.
Controversially, the bill weakens the legal definition of hatred presently used by the courts, reducing the requirement from both vilification and detestation to only one of either vilification OR detestation. The result will be increased censorship and a substantial chill on controversial speech.
Importantly, existing laws capture almost all of the conduct outlined in the bill. This includes cyberbullying and non-consensual distribution of intimate images, terroristic or violent threats, hate speech under the Criminal Code, counselling self-harm (Criminal Code s.241), and possession and distribution of CSAM material.
The bill requires online service providers to create an age verification system. Though the bill doesn’t specify age verification methods, it will undoubtedly require service providers to collect biometric and/or behavioural information from both adults and children, engaging privacy rights and raising fears of security breaches. The effect will be to create a database of personal identifying information and to destroy online anonymity
Digital services that fail to comply with directives of the Digital Safety Commission will face substantial fines based on a percentage of global revenue.
“Laws protecting children from online harm and abuse are vital. However, for the most part, they already exist. All digital services like YouTube, X, Facebook, and TikTok have reporting and takedown policies and mechanisms for illegal or egregiously harmful material. Criminal charges for hateful or threatening posts are already commonplace. Of course, laws should be enacted to address any gaps, but online age verification for children will require age verification for everyone. So while the government frames the bill as a law to protect children, its effect will be to control digital access, comprehensively surveil and punish adults for online dissent. Together with Bill C-22, it establishes an online surveillance architecture that will negatively impact every Canadian’s right to free expression. Parliament should pursue targeted child-protection measures without undermining privacy, anonymity, and freedom of expression.”
We’re finally starting to see hints of relief when it comes to inflation. Prices at the pump are starting to come down, monthly core CPI momentum has slowed, used cars were down around 2% YoY, and food inflation is starting to moderate. On the other hand, there’s America’s massive explosion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure – which is beginning to push prices up on everything from electricity to smartphones.
On Thursday Apple announced a 15-25% price hike on Mac computers and iPads, after CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that the jump in costs was “unlike anything he had seen in any area in over 40 years.” An Apple spokesperson placed the blame on the “rapid expansion of AI data centers, which has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” causing component prices to surge.
As the Wall Street Journal notes;
The money pouring into the AI arms race is unprecedented. Analysts peg capital spending at five of the so-called hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Oracle—at $741 billion this year, according to FactSet, up nearly 75% from last year.
Where is all that money going? While much of the conversation is focused on what AI can do, the build-out itself is strikingly physical, said Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. -WSJ
AI data centers require specific, sophisticated equipment to ensure cool, stable operation – as well as electric and fiber-optic cables and backup generators in order to keep them running 24-7. According to the report, Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that the AI buildout could cost somewhere in the range of $8 trillion over the next six years. As such, the demand for components shared throughout the economy (memory, for example), the effects are now trickling down to consumer electronics – like iPads. Other companies such as Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony have all raised prices on devices.
Hellbound and Down 
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