For All Readers - Today's Must-Reads - 1 June 2024

Exposing the narrative with the latest news, studies, reports and articles!

NE - Naked Emperor Newsletter

Jun 01, 2024

Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights from across the globe!

Today, this is a slimmed down version for all readers but is usually for paid subscribers only.

Become a paid subscriber and join a group of independent thinkers who get the full scoop every day.

Climate Change

Polish workers are fighting the EU’s green tyranny. Solidarity – the trade union that brought down Poland’s Communist regime – is leading the charge against Net Zero. Earlier this month, the Solidarity farmers’ union held a mass demonstration in Warsaw against the European Green Deal. This is a set of EU policy initiatives designed to make the bloc carbon neutral by 2050. One of its main targets is Europe’s agricultural sector. Solidarity rightly considers these measures anti-worker, anti-development and undemocratic.
This Scottish City Just Banned SUV And Airline Ads. Here’s Why. Scotland's capital city has banned advertisements for airlines and sports utility vehicles, along with ads for cruise lines and oil and gas companies, in what campaigners are calling a "historic" step-up in action to tackle climate change. Edinburgh's council announced on Tuesday that it had moved to exclude adverts and sponsorships for "high-carbon products and services" that "undermine the council’s commitment to tackling the climate emergency."
Tonga’s volcanic eruption could cause unusual weather for the rest of the decade, new study shows. Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (Hunga Tonga for short) erupted on January 15 2022 in the Pacific Kingdom of Tonga. It created a tsunami which triggered warnings across the entire Pacific basin, and sent sound waves around the globe multiple times. A new study published in the Journal of Climate explores the climate impacts of this eruption. Our findings show the volcano can explain last year’s extraordinarily large ozone hole, as well as the much wetter than expected summer of 2024. The eruption could have lingering effects on our winter weather for years to come.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

UK pandemic deaths caused by euthanasia drug Midazolam, new research paper claims. An extremely well-cited Australian paper, published by the open-access journal Medical and Clinical Research claims that the pandemic in the UK from 2020-2022 was caused not by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but by euthanasia of elderly patients in hospitals and care homes using the sedative Midazolam, ostensibly to clear beds in a clogged NHS in anticipation of a COVID-19 epidemic that never materialised.

Economy/Energy/Finance

Japan Confirms It Spent A Record $62 Billion In Failed Attempt To Prop Up Yen. Confirming what everyone knew, this morning Japan's finance ministry confirmed that it spent a record ¥9.8 trillion ($62.2 billion) over the past month, but really on two occasions, in a failed attempt to prop up the yen after it fell to a 34-year low against the dollar, surpassing the total amount it used during the last intervention in 2022 to defend the currency, which also failed to prop up the doomed currency.
US pending home sales dropped by 7.7% in April - to their lowest since the pandemic.

US personal savings (green) versus credit card debt (red) paints a picture of the state of the economy.

EU states agree 'prohibitive' tariffs on Russia grain imports. The latest rounds of sanctions will "tackle illegal Russian exports of stolen Ukraine grain into EU markets," the EU's trade commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis, said on social media. The tariffs will also be applied to products from Belarus, which served as a staging ground for Russia's attack on Ukraine. But the tariffs will not apply to Russian grain transiting through the EU to countries outside the bloc, to ensure that food supplies for elsewhere, notably Africa and Asia, are not impacted. [Hello food inflation]
Germany Wants EU Push to End Last 20% of Russia Energy Imports. Europe’s top economy, along with the Czech Republic, is asking the bloc to set up a high-level working group to identify ways to phase out the remaining Russian gas supplies — including liquefied natural gas — as well as oil and nuclear material still coming to Europe, according to a letter seen by Bloomberg News. While the EU has managed to cut energy imports from what was once its biggest supplier by 80% since Vladimir Putin’s attack, many countries in the bloc remain reliant on Russian gas as well as radioactive material to fuel nuclear power stations. [Hello energy inflation]
Not what you’ve been told. The main problem with conventional economic theory is that it originated at a time when virtually the only energy used in the economy was provided by human and animal labour, and the nutritional energy which made that labour possible. We hear echoes of this era every time someone measures productivity by comparing economic output with hours of human labour. Eventually, economics will be redefined as the related study of thermodynamics and finance, and we’ll cease to describe behavioural observations about money as the “laws” of economics. For now, though, we can put ourselves in an advantaged position by bringing the material into our understanding of the economy.
Nowhere to run. What anyone who was paying attention in 2008 now understands is that there is no magic money tree… only banks. Banks create new currency when they make loans. And this applies internationally as well as domestically. When the debt-currency crisis first hit in the dotcom bust, companies were bailed out by banks at the cost of inflating an even bigger bubble. In 2008, that bubble burst and banks had to be bailed out by governments. This time around it is going to be companies, banks, and governments which need to be bailed out. And in the absence of space aliens, there is nobody big enough to do so. This, no doubt, is a key driver behind the growth of the BRICS trading system. It is very likely also why the UK Tory Party are going out of their way to lose the general election. But in the economic storm that is about to break there is nowhere to run.

Politics

Prosecutors Got Trump — But They Contorted the Law. By any reasonable measure, the jury of Manhattanites who yesterday found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 charges did its job, and did it well. But that doesn’t mean that every structural infirmity around the Manhattan district attorney’s case has evaporated. Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.
The Trump show trial has fooled no one. This is blatant political persecution – and it will have grave consequences for democracy. Many commentators have pointed out at length the flaws in how this case was handled. This ranges from ‘flagrant violations’ by the prosecution during the trial to bizarre rulings from the judge, including blocking a witness who could have exonerated Trump from the charge of federal election violation. Even the very premise of the case – that categorising hush-money payments to his lawyer as ‘legal expenses’ was not only illegal, but also a felony – was patently absurd. The act of falsifying business records is itself usually just a misdemeanour, and was outside the statute of limitations anyway. But this was transformed into a more serious felony charge with some legal jiggery-pokery.
Jeffrey D Sachs - Presidents Who Gamble with Nuclear Armageddon. Each of the last five presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have brought us closer to the brink. We desperately need leaders with a knack for peace who can steer the nation, and the world, toward a more secure and less dangerous future.

Science

Hundreds of Huge Stars Disappeared From The Sky. We May Finally Know Why. When massive stars die, as we understand the Universe, they don't go quietly. As their fuel runs out, they become unstable, wracked by explosions before finally ending their lives in a spectacular supernova. But some massive stars, scientists have found, have simply vanished, leaving no trace in the night sky. Stars clearly seen in older surveys are inexplicably absent from newer ones. A star isn't exactly a set of keys – you can't just lose it down the back of the couch. So where the heck do these stars go?

Technology

How smartphones colonised childhood. Jonathan Haidt argues a toxic combination of safetyism and social media has shaped Generation Z. The kids are not all right. All over the Western world, today’s young people seem to be more fragile, anxious and depressed than any other generation in living memory. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that this is because childhood has been fundamentally ‘rewired’. Kids once enjoyed hours of unsupervised play. Now they are under almost constant surveillance from adults – except when they open up their phones.

Ukraine

Ukraine strike on Russian nuclear radar: the most serious escalation yet. Over the past week, another massive red line was crossed in the no-longer-so-proxy war between the West and Russia. On 23 and 28 May, Ukraine conducted long-range drone strikes on two Russian radar stations that are part of the country’s early-warning radar system designed to detect incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) — primarily nuclear-armed ones. Both of these attacks occurred deep in Russian territory — respectively 300 and almost 1,000 miles of Kiev-controlled territory — and at least one strike appears to have caused some damage. Such an attack on one of the pillars of Russia’s nuclear deterrence infrastructure marks the conflict’s most terrifying escalation yet, bringing the world another step closer to the verge of thermonuclear war.
The West is Hell-Bent on Provoking Russia Into Hot War. The warning by President Putin could not be starker: “In the event of the use of long-range weapons, the Russian Armed Forces will again have to make decisions about expanding the sanitary zone further (…) Do they want global conflict? It seemed they wanted to negotiate [with us], but we don’t see much desire to do this.”