14 May 2023 - Must-Reads

A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles

Your new mission, if you choose to accept it, is to share these ‘Must-Reads’ as far and as often as humanly possibly.

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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

• While President Biden is cracking down on American power plants, China's carbon emissions continue to soar. In 2021, China's carbon emissions increased by 4.9%, while the United States' carbon emissions decreased by 2.9%. This is despite the fact that China has pledged to reach peak emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.

• Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows there has little, if any, warming since 1895. This is despite a huge increase in CO2. Whilst the trend line might be very slightly up over the whole period, you could equally argue that the trend over the last 40 years has been down.

  

• Months after President Joe Biden signed off on his climate bill — his potentially $1 trillion-plus, misnamed Inflation Reduction Act — Americans are cooling on global warming. So Democrats are looking to crank up climate alarmism by suggesting it’s not only a threat to the planet but to public health as well.

  Some even want to add it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mission.

Covid

• Self declared former Covidian now on #Teamreality, Kevin Bass looks at a recent study which shows there was a 5-fold decline in death rates from Covid in NYC. He suggests a good part of this decline was caused by the abandonment of early mechanical ventilation, thus much of the Covid panic was caused by the interventions of doctors themselves.

  

• The British Heath Foundation explores whether coronavirus is a disease of the blood vessels. This was another conspiracy theory that wasn’t allowed to be discussed because the only accepted narrative was that Covid destroyed the lungs.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Brownstone says the four pillars of medical ethics were destroyed in the Covid response. Clayton Baker argues that the COVID-19 response has violated basic medical ethics, such as autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence. He cites examples such as lockdowns, mass testing, and forced vaccinations and concludes by calling for a return to traditional medical ethics in the COVID-19 response.

• The Epoch Times attempts to explain why elite libertarians failed so miserably on Covid. Jeffrey Tucker says for three years, he’s been reluctant to say anything about the elephant in the room, the near-complete failure of libertarians to stand up to the lockdown and mandate regime. It was a moment in history that was tailor-made for them. Everything in their training taught them to be suspicious of government power and relentless in the defense of liberty.

• Ahmad Malik writes in TCW about the destruction of medical ethics and trust in the medical profession. Medical ethics are the moral principles by which doctors must conduct themselves, that govern the practice of medicine. The four pillars of medical ethics are Non-maleficence (to do no harm), Beneficence (doing good), Autonomy (giving the patient the freedom to choose freely, where they are able) and Justice (ensuring fairness).

• HART Group writes about Tedros, the Director of the WHO, declaring the Covid emergency over. It highlights the absurdity of bureaucratic regimes dictating when we should be scared or not scared of an endemic virus. Included in the announcement he said the emergency was over but “this virus is here to stay.” He said “I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency” “however, that does not mean covid-19 is over as a global health threat.” He finished, “If we all go back to the way things were before covid-19 we will have failed to learn our lessons.”

• But all the “experts” say we are still in an emergency. Science Media Centre report on expert’s reactions to the WHO announcement.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The theatre will continue to ramp up until the US government’s borrowing limit is raised. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with top Wall Street bankers in Washington next week as the Biden administration and Republican leaders scramble to reach a deal to avoid a debt default. It will be raised and then the whole process will start again.

• Bankruptcies are up 216% and we aren’t even halfway through 2023 yet. Chilling new data from the S&P shows corporate bankruptcy is soaring, yet the U.S. is not technically in a recession.

• Will corporate bankruptcies result in a US bankruptcy? US default insurance costs now eclipses that of Brazil, Mexico and Greece. Mounting investor anxiety about the prospect of a first-ever US default has made it more expensive to insure Treasuries than the bonds of — among others — Greece, Mexico and Brazil, which have defaulted multiple times and have credit ratings many rungs below that of the US’s AAA.

• Guess who is going to pay for the SVB clean-up. Of course it’s you, the general public. Would it ever be anybody else but you? The biggest US banks will be hit with nearly $16bn in extra fees over two years under a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation plan to recover its losses associated with rescuing Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March.

Politics

• Jonathan Rauch argues in his article "Critical Race Theory Has a Scholarship Problem" that CRT is an academic movement with a number of flaws. He says that CRT scholars often make sweeping generalizations about race and racism, ignore or downplay the role of individual agency, are hostile to empirical research, and dismiss any evidence that contradicts their theories. Rauch concludes that CRT is not a productive way to address racial inequality because it is too divisive, does not offer concrete solutions, and is based on a false understanding of race and racism.

• The Telegraph outline outrage over WHO advice on sexuality for infants. Their guide argues that ‘sexuality education starts from birth’.

  

Ukraine

• Off-Guardian reports on the lose-lose situation in Ukraine. While Ukrainians are dying, financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests. So says Frédéric Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank.

Vaccines

• It seems as though AstraZeneca is being thrown under the bus, which is fine, if it were not for that niggling feeling that it is to distract attention away from Pfizer and Moderna. The Daily Mail asks - How safe is AstraZeneca's Covid jab? What are the side effects? How many Brits have died from complications? Our forensic Q&A answers everything you need to know.

• They also report on the £1billion battle for Covid jab justice: How 90 British families left bereaved or disabled after getting AstraZeneca's vaccine are fighting for compensation to avoid financial ruin... and they insist they are NOT anti-vax.

• And a third article in 24 hours looks at the 'victims' of AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine - an 18-year-old aspiring paramedic, a rock musician and an award-winning BBC radio presenter.

• Following in the footsteps of the Pfizer data release, a federal judge in Texas this week ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make public data it relied on to license COVID-19 vaccines—Moderna’s for adults and Pfizer’s for children—at an accelerated rate, requiring all documents to be made public by mid-2025 rather than, as the FDA wanted, over the course of around 23.5 years

• As reported previously, a huge study shows that Covid vaccines are linked to untreatable eyeball clots. The authors found that “two years after vaccination, the chances of all subtypes… of retinal vascular occlusion increased significantly in the vaccinated cohort.”

• The Epoch Times requested CDC emails via a FOIA request. One email from Tom Shimabukuro at the CDC reveals that the strength of association (or the relative risk) was high for myocarditis, particularly in adolescents and young males after their second shot.