🔓📜 This Week's Most Popular Must-Reads - 5-11 August 2024

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

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• The $20 Trillion Carry Trade Has Finally Blown Up. The $20 trillion carry trade that the government of Japan has been engaging in for the past 40 years has been one giant ticking timebomb, one which can not be defused, and when it blows up, it's game over for the Bank of Japan.

• Who Caused the Ukraine War? The answer to this question matters enormously because the war has been a disaster for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that Ukraine has effectively been wrecked. It has lost a substantial amount of its territory and is likely to lose more, its economy is in tatters, huge numbers of Ukrainians are internally displaced or have fled the country, and it has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties. Of course, Russia has paid a significant blood price as well. On the strategic level, relations between Russia and Europe, not to mention Russia and Ukraine, have been poisoned for the foreseeable future, which means that the threat of a major war in Europe will be with us well after the Ukraine war turns into a frozen conflict. Who bears responsibility for this disaster is a question that will not go away anytime soon and if anything is likely to become more prominent as the extent of the disaster becomes more apparent to more people.

• Lost for 30 years in a freezer: The whole of Greenland melted away when CO2 was perfect — consensus broken. The Experts thought Greenland’s ice has been there for the whole Pleistoscene era, or the last 2.6 million years. It was just another useless consensus, stultifying science — feeding the myth that the climate was perfect until Big Coal screwed it up. Finally, 30 years after the famous GISP ice core was hauled out of the Greenland summit, someone has bothered to study the dirt at the bottom and found poppy seeds, willow twigs and insects there, where they were not supposed to be. They discovered a vibrant tundra ecosystem where there was supposed to be an ice-cap. The obvious conclusion is that cavemen didn’t cause it, and that there must be some huge other natural forces at work that we have no clue about. Our climate models didn’t predict this, because CO2 was low then and clearly, the models are hopelessly incomplete. We are babes in the wood on the third rock from the sun.

• Federal Air Marshal Whistleblowers Report Tulsi Gabbard Actively Under Surveillance via Quiet Skies Program. In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists.

• Met Office Admit Storms Were Much Worse In Past. Back to the Met Office’s State of the UK Climate 2023 report. Despite the plethora of silly names the Met Office has given every passing low-pressure system, and despite their persistent advertising of high wind speeds on top of mountains and clifftops as being representative, this new report admits that storms were much worse in the past.

• Civil War Comes to the West. This is the first of two essays. It deals with the reasons why civil war is likely to dominate the military and strategic affairs of the West in the coming years, contrary to the typical expectations of the future war literature, and generally the strategic logic which shall underpin such wars. The major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity. It is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.

• The Disunited Kingdom. We are dealing here with a dogmatic psychology of fixed course and immutable outline: a lawyerly, procedural mentality that cannot think beyond law and procedure, nor concede any ground to a grassroots popular opposition whose essential demands undermine the foundations of the British liberal-multicultural project. Starmer has what the Germans call sitzfleisch, the tough ass of the bureaucrat, developed in order to execute a managerial role and completely unfitted to statesmanship. Historically, democratically-elected governments have been able to weather unpopularity in a way that dictatorships can’t. But mass migration to Britain has not occurred democratically.

• How the health of your lungs is linked to the bacteria in your gut. The trillions of bacteria living in our gut have an extraordinary effect on our health. They’re in charge of digestion, breaking down the foods we eat and extracting their vitamins and minerals. A healthy, balanced microbiome also helps ward off infections and even lowers risk of certain diseases. Studies have revealed that people with respiratory conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer often have an imbalanced gut microbiome – a condition known as dysbiosis.

• An Open Letter To UK PM Keir Starmer. The left cannot tell the truth to the public because to do so would undermine its whole belief system. It is only through the truth that problems can be solved, and the economy and society improve, clearing to that truth in a path of prosperity. By contrast, by clearing of truth, left wing government follows a road to serfdom. With the Internet now offering competition of information, such that the system can clear to the truth rather than of it to the government created narrative, hopefully the time of big government, and the corruption that it is, will soon come to an end, before you do too much more damage.

• China’s super-secret space plane spotted above Europe. So little is known about Shenlong, China’s ultra-secret, reusable space plane that there aren’t even publicly verifiable photos of the experimental aircraft. But that doesn’t mean knowledgeable astronomy enthusiasts can’t catch glimpses of the vehicle as it orbits Earth, as was recently the case for Felix Schöfbänker in Upper Austria. China’s mysterious robotic vehicle has completed at least two confirmed missions since 2020, the second of which lasted 276 consecutive days in orbit above Earth. During that excursion, Shenlong deployed at least one free-flying object that experts believe may have been either a small satellite or external craft designed to monitor the plane itself. Its current mission began after launching from a Chinese space agency facility in the Gobi Desert on December 14, 2023. Since then it has released at least seven confirmed objects of unknown purpose into orbit.

• The State Is Not Your Friend! At some point, Westerners must accept that their governments are only gentler versions of the one-party dictatorships that rule over citizens in places such as China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran. If you’re a persecuted member of Germany’s conservative AfD political party, an incarcerated J6 protester still awaiting trial in D.C., or an online meme-maker convicted of “hate speech” in the U.K., the West’s rhetorical cheerleading for “democracy” over “authoritarianism” represents a distinction without much difference. Tyranny feels just as oppressive no matter which government places its boot on your neck.

• You will be refused bail even if you only watched riots from the sidelines, judge warns. A judge has warned that anybody present at a riot will be remanded in custody, even if they were only a “curious observer”. District Judge Francis Rafferty said that someone’s presence at a riot made them involved in the riot as he refused two bail applications. Refusing bail, the judge said: “Anybody involving themselves in this type of behaviour, this type of disorder, as an active participant or a curious observer can expect to be, save for the most exceptional circumstances, remanded into custody, and this defendant is remanded into custody.”