This Week's Must Reads - 10-16 July 2023

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

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 best articles and information from this week. This weekly summary is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but daily summaries will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• [2019] Debunking The 97% Climate Consensus Myth Touted By Activists, Media. This erroneous and totally misleading figure was obtained from four different studies, all of which were flawed. The first was done in 2004 by Naomi Oreskes, who is not a scientist. She examined the abstracts [summaries] of 928 scientific studies that she had found by putting in the search term “global climate change.” This yielded only 8% of the results she would have obtained from the search term “climate change”, thus leaving out hundreds of studies focusing on natural causes of climate change.

• The complex beliefs of the covid and climate cults. Ideologies built on sand. In order to fully believe in the covid cult there were numerous beliefs all of which had to be believed. Disbelieving any one of them would cause the whole house of cards to collapse. It is only necessary to introduce doubt on one of the beliefs for the whole net zero scheme to collapse.

• What If This Travel Chaos Is Deliberate? But let’s just pretend that a cabal of evil geniuses are secretly plotting to get rid of domestic travel via plane. They wouldn’t have to abolish it outright. They would only need to create conditions to cause enough suffering so that people gradually decline to use the service. Instead of five trips in a year, people reduce their travel to only essentials, taking cars, trains, and buses when possible.

• Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. The left claims to hate austerity and yet its eco-dystopia would plunge millions into poverty. There are countless contradictions on what passes for the left these days. We’re against sexism, they cry, and then they’ll while away entire days hounding every uppity broad who dares to question the trans ideology. We’re anti-racist, they say, even as they yell ‘Uncle Tom’ at any person of colour who deviates from their white liberal orthodoxies. Be kind, they tweet, in between their venomous crusades against TERFs, gammon, boomers, deplorables, ‘semi-fascists’, you name it.

Covid

• Scientists downplayed COVID lab leak theory for fear of ‘s–tshow’ if China was deemed responsible for releasing virus. A co-author of the March 2020 Nature Medicine article “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and other scientists who collaborated on the paper privately worried about the “s–tshow that would happen” if “China in particular” were deemed responsible for COVID escaping one of their research labs, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic majority revealed in an interim report Tuesday.

  

• An email from Fauci in February 2020 reveals that he thought Covid may have been created in Wuhan because they are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Covid Censorship Proved To Be Deadly. Government and social-media companies colluded to stifle dissenters who turned out to be right. In the wake of the 1986 Challenger space-shuttle explosion, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman knew that the truth would both fuel progress and soothe the nation’s sorrow. “For a successful technology,” he said, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” For three years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear, illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. Digital censorship supercharged the effort to hide reality, but reality is getting its day in court.

• The Trillion-Dollar Grift: Inside the Greatest Scam of All Time. The pandemic relief was the biggest bailout in history, and it opened the door to wide-scale fraud the likes of which no one had ever seen — more than three years later, we still don't know how much damage was done. The money flowed like an open spigot and saved the livelihoods of millions of people. But Talcove was right. While many breathed sighs of relief, others saw the crisis as an opportunity — a chance to steal millions.

• Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw. On May 8th, one week after the fall 2023 enrollment deadline, SCU quietly updated its COVID vaccine policy to require one bivalent dose for incoming freshmen (but not returning students) regardless of how many COVD vaccines they had previously taken. SCU backdated this announcement to May 1st thinking no one would take notice, but in private emails from incoming students we learned that some were furious.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Federal debt explodes by $1 trillion in five weeks since deal suspending limit became law. According to Treasury Department data, the total national debt stood at $32.47 trillion on July 6, $1 trillion more than the $31.47 trillion level last seen on June 2. The national debt had been stuck at or near that June 2 level for months because the government had hit the debt ceiling and was legally prohibited from borrowing any more money.

• US 30-year fixed mortgage rate has reached a new high of 7.38%.

• Brazil’s CBDC pilot contains code that can freeze or reduce funds, dev claims. Pedro Magalhães, a blockchain developer who claims to have reverse-engineered Brazil’s pilot CBDC has found code that would allow accounts to be frozen or drained at will. The problem, Magalhães explained, is that the code lacks specificity about the circumstances under which the tokens can be frozen and, above all, who holds the power to execute them.

• UN asks Putin to extend Black Sea grain deal in return for SWIFT access. Russia has threatened to ditch the grain deal, which expires on Monday, because several demands to dispatch its own grain and fertilizer abroad have not been met. The last two ships traveling under the Black Sea agreement are currently loading cargoes at the Ukrainian port of Odesa ahead of the deadline.

Health

• Revealed: pharma giants pour millions of pounds into NHS to boost drug sales. Observer investigation raises concerns about the influence of drugs companies in shaping patient care in services that use their products. Drug firms are simultaneously funding groups that lobby for greater investment in their disease areas, and in some cases are paying generous consultancy fees to influential ­healthcare professionals, including GPs who have worked as clinical leads for NHS England and have received as much as £480,000 each from industry since 2019.

• Guillain-Barré Syndrome: Health emergency declared in Peru. Peruvian authorities Saturday declared a 90-day nationwide sanitary emergency due to the “unusual increase” in cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome, it was reported in Lima. As per President Dina Booluarte's decree, some US$ 3.27 million will be allocated to improving patient care, reinforcing control on the number of detections, and drafting reports for the population and health personnel.

• Connected to this? AstraZeneca vaccine may increase risk of serious neurological condition. Scientists believe the jab’s Trojan horse delivery system could be causing a rise in Guillain-Barré syndrome cases.

• Risk of cancer and pregnancy complications up to 70% higher in neighborhoods where tap water is most contaminated with PFAS 'forever chemicals' — with counties in North Carolina and Iowa among worst-affected. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are microscopic, man-made chemicals that can take thousands of years to break down in the environment or in the human body, hence the name 'forever chemicals'. They have been loosely linked to a slew of serious health problems, but especially cancer and pregnancy complications.

• London at risk of major measles outbreak, UK Health Security Agency warns. Without an improvement in MMR vaccination rates, the capital could experience an outbreak of between 40,000 and 160,0000 cases, fresh analysis by the UKHSA suggests. Experts said an outbreak of this scale could lead to dozens of deaths and thousands of people hospitalised. Official data published on Friday revealed a steady rise in measles cases this year, indicating a resurgence of the illness. Between 1 January and 30 June this year there have been 128 cases of measles, compared with 54 cases in the whole of 2022, with 66% of the cases detected in London, although cases have been seen in all regions.

Politics

• Social media riot shutdowns possible under EU content law, top official says. Social media platforms like TikTok and Snapchat will face possible shutdowns when they don't crack down on problematic content during riots under the European Union's content law, Internal Commissioner Thierry Breton said Monday. "When there is hateful content, content that calls – for example – for revolt, that also calls for killing and burning of cars, they will be required to delete [the content] immediately," Breton said in the interview on France Info, citing the Digital Services Act which will impose new requirements on large platforms from August 25.

• G20 leaders plan round-the-clock disease surveillance system. UK science minister says ‘never again will we have to wait three months for China to mislead us’ on events such as the Covid outbreak. “One of the things that I flagged at the G20, and with India, is that we think about creating a global network of a few countries to run active biosecurity, pathogen monitoring, detection systems which utilise 24/7 data sharing,” he said.

• Prof Ashok Swain: the strange disappearance of the anti-war movement. The academic talks Nato, cluster bombs and escalation in Ukraine. A professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University in Sweden, he is one of the world’s leading experts on conflict resolution. His nation of residence is now set to join Nato, and he sat down with Freddie Sayers to unpick how Sweden’s proposed membership goes against its history of neutrality.

• NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is. NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Many observers expected NATO to close shop after the collapse of its Cold War rival. But in the decade after 1989, the organization truly came into its own. NATO acted as a ratings agency for the European Union in Eastern Europe, declaring countries secure for development and investment. The Czech Republic was a telling case. Faced with a likely “no” vote in a referendum on joining the alliance in 1997, the secretary general and top NATO officials saw to it that the government in Prague simply dispense with the exercise; the country joined two years later.

• House GOP plans to hold long-teased UFO hearing. A small but vocal contingent of the Republican conference has been pushing for a hearing after the Pentagon and other national security agencies have said in recent months that they are investigating unidentified aircraft and hundreds of new reports of UFOs. Senior Republicans have now tentatively slated such a hearing for the last week of July, according to two Republicans familiar with the hearing.

• Kamala Harris’ speech has been edited by the White House because apparently she made a mistake. “When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population [pollution], more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.  (Applause.)”

Science

• The Indian Ocean has a mysterious million-square-mile 'gravity hole' where sea levels are 300ft lower – and scientists finally think they know what caused it. Known officially as the 'Indian Ocean Geoid Low', it isn't a conventional physical hole, but rather a region of the ocean where gravity is lower than average. This dip in gravity means the water level is around 340 feet lower than the surrounding area – like a groove in a 'bumpy potato'.

  

• James Webb Space Telescope finds possible evidence of dark stars. A trio of astrophysicists, two from Colgate University and the third from the University of Texas, has found possible evidence of dark stars, courtesy of data from the James Webb Space Telescope. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cosmin Ilie, Jillian Pauline and Katherine Freese, describe their study of data surrounding three galaxies spotted by the JWST and how they might relate to dark stars.

Technology

• The world's most powerful AI model suddenly got 'lazier' and 'dumber.' A radical redesign of OpenAI's GPT-4 could be behind the decline in performance. In recent weeks, users of OpenAI's GPT-4 have been complaining about degraded performance, with some calling the model "lazier" and "dumber" compared with its previous reasoning capabilities and other output.

• AI doomsday scenarios are gaining traction in Silicon Valley. For the past two decades, Yudkowsky has consistently promoted his theory that hostile AI could spark a mass extinction event. As many in the AI industry shrugged or raised eyebrows at this assessment, he created the Machines Intelligence Research Institute with funding from Peter Thiel, among others, and collaborated on written work with futurists such as Nick Bostrom.

Ukraine

• Cluster Bombs for Ukraine? A Warning From Kosovo. With Washington poised to ship cluster bombs to Kyiv, Declassified visits Kosovo to review the grim legacy of NATO firing this banned weapon in the Balkans. “In the village where we lived, there were nine bombs dropped by NATO in the space of two minutes,” Dzafer Buzoli recalls, as we discuss his traumatic childhood in Yugoslavia. A leading member of Kosovo’s Roma, his community went from pillar to post.

• Fearful Germany preparing to block Ukraine’s Nato membership bid. Nato’s allies insist the door is open for Kyiv to join, but many are deeply divided over how fast that step should be taken. An alliance source said Berlin would use the annual Nato summit in Vilnius, Lithuania this week to urge others to focus on security assurances, rather than membership proposals, to help Ukraine defend itself in the absence of accession.

• The Nato mindset leads to war. The Ukraine conflict is empowering the Alliance. In an interview on Sunday, Biden said it was “premature” to allow them to join in the middle of a war. The reason is fairly obvious. As the former US Nato ambassador Ivo Daalder put it: “Bringing Ukraine into the alliance is tantamount to joining the war.” Their membership would risk a direct, potentially nuclear, conflict between Nato and Russia on European soil. “If the war is going on, then we’re all in war,” Biden said, referring to the alliance’s commitment to mutual defence. “We’re at war with Russia.”

• Lavrov: No Choice But To Treat F-16s In Ukraine As Nuclear Threat. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reaffirmed while at the NATO summit in Vilnius that there "will be the transfer of F-16s [to Ukraine], likely from European countries that have excess F-16 supplies". "Moscow can’t ignore the nuclear capability of US-designed F-16 fighter jets that may be supplied to Ukraine by its Western backers," Lavrov said, per Russian media. He went so far as to say that it will be seen as a threat from the West "in the nuclear domain."

Vaccines

• [2022] - Effect of mRNA Vaccine Manufacturing Processes on Efficacy and Safety Still an Open Question. An October 2020 amendment to the protocol of the pivotal Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 (Comirnaty) clinical trial (C4591001) indicates that nearly all vaccine doses used in the trial came from ‘clinical batches’ manufactured using what is referred to as ‘Process 1’. However, in order to upscale production for large-scale distribution of ‘emergency supply’ after authorization, a new method was developed, ‘Process 2’. The differences include changes to the DNA template used to transcribe the RNA and the purification phase, as well as the manufacturing process of the lipid nanoparticles. Notably, ‘Process 2’ batches were shown to have substantially lower mRNA integrity.

• [2022] NY Health Commissioner says she blew hospitalizations out of proportion to push COVID shot for kids. Mary T. Bassett said rare incidents of pediatric hospitalizations were brought to the fore ‘to motivate pediatricians and families to seek the protection of vaccination’ for young children who face virtually no risk from COVID-19.

• How Long Will the Lies Persist? “Anyway, the lies are not going to stop,” Bill Rice Jr. writes in a brilliant piece yesterday, pointing out the long list of lies told by health authorities around the world on the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines. First we were told they would stop the spread, that there would be two shots, that they wouldn’t be mandatory. Then that more shots would be needed, that those unvaccinated were responsible for the continued spread, even as it turned out how the vaccines in fact increased the spread. We could go on and on.