This Week's Most Popular Must Reads - 27 May - 2 June 2024

A summary of this week's most interesting news, studies, reports and articles

Naked Emperor: Exposing the Narrative

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Climate Change

• Beef Carbon Reduction scheme opens today for NI farmers. The scheme encourages farms to reduce the slaughter age of clean finished beef cattle to improve the efficiency of the beef sector and reduce livestock emissions. It is being implemented initially over a four-year period and will incentivise a progressive reduction in the age at slaughter each year. Agriculture Minister Andrew Muir said “This innovative approach signals a shift in how we deliver support to decarbonise and protect our environment, thereby contributing to meeting the targets set by the Climate Change Act (NI) 2022”.

• Jo Nova raises concerns about the potential interference of offshore wind turbines with marine radar systems, which could pose significant safety risks for ships navigating near wind farms. A 2022 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the US found that the steel towers of wind turbines can reflect electromagnetic waves, interfering with ships' navigational radar systems and obscuring nearby boats. Additionally, the rotating blades can create a Doppler-like effect, distorting radar signals and producing false images on radar screens.

• Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems. Observations show no increase in damage or any danger to humanity today due to extreme weather or global warming. Climate change mitigation means curtailing the use of fossil fuels, even though fossil fuels are still abundant and inexpensive. Since the current climate is arguably better than the pre-industrial climate and we have observed no increase in extreme weather or climate mortality, we conclude that we can plan to adapt to any future changes. Until a danger is identified, there is no need to eliminate fossil fuel use.

• Met Office Warns: Extremely Wet Summer…After Warning Droughts Would Become More Frequent. Climate change causing both wetter and drier summers? UK’s Met Office warned government that the 2024 summer could see 50 days of rain!In the summers of 2018 and 2022, for example, Europe was hit by drought, and government-paid experts and media blamed man-made climate change. Many claimed that drought would be the future for British and European summers.

• 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

• The NIH-EcoHealth Alliance Cover-Up. Under heated questioning from the Select Committee, Morens variously took on the affect of a confused grandfather who could not understand how email works, occasionally could not hear, selectively heard feedback from the speakers, was very tired, was only just joking in his emails, did not understand common English words, did not understand basic federal policies and procedures for government employees, could not follow questions, and even denied that the emails said what they said. It was a remarkable display of obfuscation.

• Fauci & Co. need to pay a price for funding Wuhan lab research — and trying to cover it up. Bad enough that Anthony Fauci and other top officials flouted the law by funding gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID bug is believed to have originated. But their attempt to cover it all up only compounded the horror, making it more difficult for honest researchers to understand the virus’ origins. Now that it’s all in the open, those officials need to pay.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty And A Bird Flu Crisis Are Both Arriving At The Same Time. Health officials are issuing very ominous warnings about the potential for an H5N1 pandemic among humans at the same time that the WHO is preparing for a vote on the global pandemic treaty at the 77th World Health Assembly at the end of this month. The global pandemic treaty will give the World Health Organization far more authority than it had during the last pandemic, and a lot of people are deeply concerned about how that power will be used during the next major health crisis.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) failed to reach a consensus on the draft of its controversial 'Pandemic Treaty' after two years of negotiations. The treaty aimed to centralise pandemic management, giving the WHO unprecedented power over lockdowns, vaccinations, border closures, and other measures.

  However, several countries, politicians and experts opposed the power grab, arguing that it would undermine democratic rights and sovereignty.

• BLM Versus Lockdowns: Four Years Later. Beginning in March 2020, Florida attorney Daniel Uhlfelder dressed as the Grim Reaper to shame parents who brought their children to local beaches. Instead of questioning his sanity or explaining that sunlight killed the virus, liberal news outlets celebrated this unhinged lawyer, his cloak, his scythe, and his ideology. But there was a notable carve-out to Uhlfelder’s attitude toward public gatherings - he celebrated millions of citizens gathering across the country after the death of George Floyd. He personally attended BLM rallies in Florida and endorsed marches in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. These socially fashionable beliefs apparently warranted a departure from his zealous advocacy for lockdowns.

• Hundreds of Public Submissions to Covid Inquiry Censored by Australian Senate Committee. Among the 477 censored submissions was the Canberra Declaration’s lengthy report, which included whistleblower testimonies from Indigenous Australians who reported severe human rights abuses during the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Canberra Declaration co-founder Warwick Marsh has labelled the suppression of the documents “unprecedented”. “I have been making submissions to parliamentary inquiries for over two decades, and in my experience, this censorship is unprecedented.”

• 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

• Nearly 80% of Americans now consider fast food a 'luxury' due to high prices. Has a trip through the drive-through become an extravagance? The vast majority of Americans say so. A recent nonprobability survey conducted by LendingTree found 78% of consumers now consider fast food to be a "luxury" purchase due to how expensive the meals have become. Half of those polled said they view fast food as a luxury because they’re struggling financially. This is especially true among Americans who make less than $30,000 a year (71%), parents with young children (58%), and Gen Zers (58%).

• The war on America’s working class. Batya Ungar-Sargon’s first book, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, was a barnstormer of a read. This was partly because it was punching up and pointing out the hypocrisy of America’s super-privileged woke journalists. Reading Ungar-Sargon’s new offering, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, was an entirely different experience. Here she explores, largely through interviews, the lives of those living at the opposite end of the social ladder to America’s cultural elites. She arrives at a distressing conclusion: for countless hard-working people, the American Dream is increasingly out of reach.

• Britain’s Technocrats: The Economics of Truth. Economics is tailor-made for technocrats. It revolves around systems, and systems are everything for our current hyper-managerial class of social engineers. Once a system is in place, whether it works or not takes second place to its complicated maintenance. The subsequent problem for the technocrat task force is how that system is presented to non-specialists, particularly when it does fail, and the answer is always obfuscation by complexity. Part of technocratic best practice is to introduce as much complexity as it takes to protect the economic system from the comprehension of ordinary citizens. By performing this act of consecration, the technocrat becomes the equivalent of the priest in the medieval church, the only one in the congregation who can understand Latin.

• Tim Morgan suggests that the upcoming UK general election is unlikely to resolve any economic challenges, as the current government has been trapped by a failed neoliberal economic approach and opposition parties are hesitant to challenge this established paradigm.

• US job postings declined again, reaching levels close to those during the pandemic.

• ‘How can you tell me it won’t lead to stagflation?’ Jamie Dimon says ‘extraordinary’ government spending has him bracing for high inflation and unemployment. It's a warning Dimon has issued before, previously saying he fears America is headed for a repeat of the 1970s when everything "felt great" and then quickly about-turned to a period of high unemployment and inflation paired with low demand, also known as "stagflation."

• 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.

Health

• Chinese scientists cure diabetes using stem cells in world first. Scientists in Shanghai achieved a historic breakthrough after successfully eliminating a long-term patient’s type 2 diabetes through a pioneering cell therapy treatment. The 59-year-old patient of 25 years received a transplant of pancreatic cells derived from his own stem cells in 2021. He is now insulin independent. This marks the world’s first successful use of stem cell-derived islet transplantation to cure diabetes. The achievement, published on Cell Discovery on April 30, comes after over a decade of research at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital.

Middle East

• A joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian looks at Israel's covert, multi-agency operation to undermine the International Criminal Court's probe into alleged war crimes. For nearly a decade, Israel's intelligence apparatus has been surveilling ICC prosecutors, Palestinian human rights workers and even victims of settler and military violence, in a desperate attempt to derail the investigation and evade accountability. The underhanded efforts, which could amount to prosecutable offenses against the administration of justice, have been micromanaged from the very top by a Prime Minister "obsessed" with thwarting the probe.

Politics

• Special Ops Soldier Shoots Illegal Chechen Photographing His Kid, Then it Gets Weird. On May 3rd, 2024, a U.S. Army Special Forces colonel living in Carthage, NC saw what appeared to be a man trespassing on the colonel's property, photographing the officer's children. Reports say two Chechen men who spoke only broken English were on the property in two locations. A scuffle broke out between the colonel and Ramzan Daraev, 35, of Chicago. The Army officer fired at and killed Daraev at close range. The other Chechen was located in a vehicle elsewhere on the property. He was interviewed and, somewhat astonishingly, released by law enforcement. The FBI was called (uh-oh) and offered linguistic help.

• US-EU assets pushing color revolution in Georgia. Over 25,000 NGOs are active in Georgia, and most rely on funding from Europe and the US. A new bill aiming to reign in Western meddling has sparked furious anti-government protests explicitly encouraged by Washington. Many foreign-funded NGOs are explicitly concerned with integrating Georgia into the EU, NATO, and other “Euro-Atlantic” structures. Among them is the Shame Movement, which has been at the forefront of the recent unrest in Tbilisi. NED grant records indicate that it received just shy of $80,000 in 2021 for “engaging regional youth activists,” helping young Georgians address political “challenges” and advocate “for governmental accountability.”

• Russia and China Have Had Enough. Something very important happened earlier this week in Astana during the meeting of the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi went straight to the point: he called for SCO members to “maintain their strategic autonomy”, and “never allow external forces” to turn Eurasia into a “geopolitical arena.” Wang Yi detailed how “a few countries are pursuing hegemony and power, forming small cliques, establishing hidden rules, engaging in interference and suppression, ‘decoupling and cutting off ties,’ and even assisting the ‘three forces’ in the region”, thus attempting to suppress the strategic autonomy of the Global South.

• Joe and Hunter Biden used a visit to Sandy Hook memorial service to set up secret meet with Chinese over $10m-a-year deal, new emails reveal. The messages come from a fresh tranche of documents released by Congress on Wednesday, given to them by IRS agents who investigated the First Son. On December 12, 2017 Hunter wrote on the Chinese messaging app WeChat to Liu Yadong, a top executive at Chinese oil giant CEFC, to arrange a meeting with his father.

• RFK Jr. Eliminated from Libertarian Party’s Presidential Nomination During First Round of Voting. Kennedy received 19 votes, which represents about two percent. The candidate had accepted the nomination for the Libertarian Party and addressed the convention on Friday — despite previously saying he would not run as a Libertarian. The delegate who nominated him was met with loud booing from the rest of the convention.

• No, they’re (probably) not going to bring back National Service. This is simply confirmation that the powers-that-be have already decided Labour will almost certainly “win” the “election” in July. Sunak couldn’t more obviously have signaled the Tories are throwing the race if he’d included the re-introduction of slavery, cancelling Christmas and banning puppies in his manifesto. But it’s not just about throwing the vote, it’s also about controlling the conversation. Talk of national service sets up that the country is on some kind of war footing and sells the reality of an “impending WW3” narrative.

• Secret Service agents have met with local jail officials to prepare for the possibility of former President Donald Trump being incarcerated if he is found guilty in his ongoing criminal trial in Manhattan. If Trump is put in jail, I can see his popularity rising along with an increasingly fractured America.

  Trump's trial, centred on falsification of business records, could result in a prison sentence of up to four years per charge. Despite the Secret Service's preparations, the presiding judge has expressed reluctance to jail Trump, considering alternatives like probation or house arrest due to the complexities of imprisoning a former president.

• Von der Leyen could still be toppled - Pfizergate has revealed the EU's true nature. Nobody embodies the EU’s elite-driven nature better than its incumbent president, Ursula von der Leyen. And no action of hers embodies its warped excesses better than her decision, in April 2021, to single-handedly sign off on a €35-billion deal for the purchase of 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. According to one analysis, the price per dose she agreed was 15 times higher than the cost of production — meaning that the EU overpaid the vaccines by tens of billions of euros. Adding fuel to the fire, the New York Times later reported that von der Leyen had personally negotiated the deal via a series of text messages and calls with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

• Robert Fico’s failed assassination raises specter of Western plotting. Slovak PM Robert Fico’s independent stance earned him the wrath of NATO and the EU. Did a Western-directed plot to remove his troublesome government from office trigger his assassination attempt? The return of Robert Fico represented a significant broadside against ongoing US “democratization” of the former Soviet sphere. It opened up the prospect of further anti-NATO candidates and governments gaining office elsewhere in Europe, at the most inconvenient juncture imaginable for Brussels and Washington.

• 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.

Science

• So much for “peer review” — Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers. Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink. Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.

• We Used to Think Everybody Heard a Voice Inside Their Heads – But We Were Wrong. Only in recent years have scientists found that not everyone has the sense of an inner voice – and a new study sheds some light on how living without an internal monologue affects how language is processed in the brain. This latest study, from researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US, also proposes a new name for the condition of not having any inner speech: anendophasia. This is similar to (if not the same as) anauralia, a term researchers coined in 2021 for people who don't have an inner voice, nor can they imagine sounds, like a musical tune or siren.

• A 26-year study of wolf behaviour and blood analysis of 229 wolves has revealed that infection with the mind-altering parasite Toxoplasma gondii significantly impacts wolf behaviour and pack dynamics in Yellowstone National Park.

  Wolves infected with T. gondii were found to be 46 times more likely to become pack leaders, 11 times more likely to leave their pack and venture into new territory, and more prone to risk-taking behaviour. This increased boldness and aggression in infected wolves could be attributed to higher testosterone levels caused by the parasite.

• Ancient Egyptians performed cancer surgery, 'extraordinary' new evidence indicates. Scientists "could not believe what was in front of us" after discovering dozens of cutmarks consistent with a surgical intervention to treat cancer - on one skull dating back as far as 2687 BC. Scientists already knew from their texts that ancient Egyptians were exceptionally skilled with medicine - and could treat diseases, traumatic injuries, build prostheses, and put in dental fillings. But an international team of researchers studied two human skulls, each thousands of years old, and found "extraordinary" evidence of attempts to treat cancer.

• Archaeologists uncover new evidence for prehistoric comet. If you wanted evidence that a giant comet wiped out the wooly mammoth, you might look for a giant crater. But so far, you’d be out of luck. But Christopher Moore, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina, says that by looking below the surface, you can find strong evidence for the Younger-Dryas impact hypothesis, which states that large comet fragments hit Earth or exploded in the atmosphere shortly after the last ice age, setting off cataclysmic changes in the environment, crater or not.

• The Sun Has a Mysterious Heartbeat, And We May Finally Know Why. The heartbeat of the Sun is a complex, multi-rhythmic affair, beating in different ways according to various periodicities. We don't know what drives many of these solar heartbeats, but new findings revive and strengthen a link with the planets of the Solar System. The Sun's 11-year activity cycle – known as the Schwabe cycle – can be at least partially explained by a gravitational interaction between the Sun and Venus, Earth, and Jupiter, the new research suggests.

• 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

• 'I was misidentified as shoplifter by facial recognition tech'. Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch. She says after her bag was searched she was led out of the shop, and told she was banned from all stores using the technology. Facewatch later wrote to Sara and acknowledged it had made an error. Facewatch is used in numerous stores in the UK - including Budgens, Sports Direct and Costcutter - to identify shoplifters. Between 2020 and 2022 the Metropolitan Police used live facial recognition nine times. The following year the figure was 23. Already in 2024 it has been used 67 times, so the direction of travel is clear.

• How the rise of cheap drones is transforming warfare. Fatal attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East, harassment of ships in the Red Sea and the balance of power in Russia's war against Ukraine share a dangerous common thread: the rise of cheap drones. This evolution of warfare, driven by accessible and inexpensive materials, is upending decades of U.S. military planning, spending and dominance. "The threat is complex, it is ubiquitous, and it is really transforming what the battlespace looks like," said U.S. Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo.

• Why ‘artificial intelligence’ keeps getting dumber. The disastrous launch of Google’s AI Overviews has exposed the fundamental flaws of generative AI. AI’s hallucination problem is consistent across all fields. It pretty much precludes generative AI being practically useful in commercial and business applications, where you might expect it to save a great deal of time. A new study of generative AI in legal work finds the additional verification steps now required to ensure the AI isn’t hallucinating cancel out the time saved from deploying it in the first place.

Ukraine

• US Weapons Accuracy Drops to 10 Percent in Ukraine Due to Jamming. Many high-tech US weapons systems in Ukraine are now useless due to jamming signals by Russia. The success rate for the U.S.-designed Excalibur shells, for example, fell sharply over a period of months — to less than 10 percent hitting their targets — before Ukraine’s military abandoned them last year, according to the confidential Ukrainian assessments.

• Nato has just 5% of air defences needed to protect eastern flank. Lack of systems required in case of war lays bare vulnerabilities, according to alliance’s own assessments. According to people familiar with confidential defence plans drawn up last year, Nato states are able to provide less than 5 per cent of air defence capacities deemed necessary to protect its members in central and eastern Europe against a full-scale attack. One senior Nato diplomat said the ability to defend against missiles and air strikes was “a major part of the plan to defend eastern Europe from invasion”, adding: “And right now, we don’t have that.”

• 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.”