This Week's Must Reads - 11-17 December 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 more comprehensive daily summaries WITH LINKS to each article will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity. Different electricity generating technologies are often compared using the Levelized Costs of Electricity (LCOE), which summarize different ratios of fixed to variable costs into a single cost metric. They have been criticized for ignoring the effects of intermittency and non-dispatchability. This paper introduces the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFSCOE), a novel cost evaluation metric that compares the costs of serving the entire market using just one source plus storage. Like LCOE, and in contrast to alternatives such as System LCOE, LFSCOE condense the cost for each technology into one number per market.

• 7,500 wind turbines in Spain to be dismantled within five years. Approximately 36% of energy-generating wind turbines in Spain will need to be decommissioned within the next five years as they become obsolete, predicts the Wind Energy Association (AEE). This translates to around 7,500 wind turbines and 20,000 blades turning into scrap that will have to be dismantled, transported, and processed, posing a significant logistical challenge. The challenging aspect of disposal is the fiberglass blades of the turbines, which only a few landfills accept.

• Now scientists say BREATHING is bad for the environment: Gases we exhale contribute to 0.1% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. A new study claims the gases in air exhaled from human lungs is fueling global warming. Methane and nitrous oxide in the air we exhale makes up to 0.1 per cent of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say. The new study was led by Dr Nicholas Cowan, an atmospheric physicist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh. 'Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which contribute to global warming,' Dr Cowan and colleagues say. 'We would urge caution in the assumption that emissions from humans are negligible.'

Covid

• Trebles all round for lawyers and Lefties! The Covid Inquiry is spending £750K a day on barristers and solicitors - while the beyond smug KC leads a team charging up to £220 an hour. The taxpayer-funded project was formally set up in June last year and began holding proper hearings under the watchful eye of retired Appeal Court judge Baroness Hallett just five months ago. By the end of September, it had already managed to chew through £56 million of public money. Today, that figure is closer to £70 million. But this is only the start.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Lockdown had ‘catastrophic effect’ on Britain’s poverty gap. Landmark report warns that UK is at risk of sliding back into the Victorian era. The study raises questions about the Government’s handling of the pandemic, finding that lockdown was particularly harmful for the least well off, where the gap between the so-called “haves” and “have nots” was blown wide open. It says: “During lockdown calls to a domestic abuse helpline rose 700 per cent; 1.2 million more people went on working-age benefits, 86 per cent more people sought help for addictions; prisoners were locked up for 22.5 hours per day. There is a growing gap between those who can get by and those stuck at the bottom.”

• Blaming the unvaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of political ideology and risk perceptions in the USA. Individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 (C19) experienced prejudice and blame for the pandemic. Because people vastly overestimate C19 risks, we examined whether these negative judgements could be partially understood as a form of scapegoating (ie, blaming a group unfairly for an undesirable outcome) and whether political ideology (previously shown to shape risk perceptions in the USA) moderates scapegoating of the unvaccinated. We observed that people hold the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated) more responsible for negative pandemic outcomes and that political ideology moderated these effects: liberals (vs conservatives) were more likely to scapegoat the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated).

• RAF intelligence officers joined Whitehall and Army in 'spying' on Covid lockdown critics - including David Davis and Peter Hitchens. The documents reveal defence chiefs privately conceded the military's work for the Government could pose a 'potential presentational risk of Defence 'spying' or conducting 'Psyops' on the UK'. But the MoD feared that if the Armed Forces did not help the Government's online monitoring, then 'harmful misinformation and disinformation' could spread.

• Third of millennials support closure of nightclubs as Covid cases surge. A survey by More in Common showed 33 per cent of those aged between 25 and 40 said they support the government reintroducing the closure of nightclubs as Covid cases surge. Up to 31 per cent of Generation Z (age 18-24) supported the same measure, compared with 27 per cent of Generation X (age 41-55) and baby boomers (age 56-74), and just 23 per cent of the silent generation (age 75+).

• The Covid inquiry is ignoring the one number that would blow lockdown out of the water. This sham inquiry is achieving nothing apart from protecting reputations and lining lawyers pockets. The single most revealing exchange in the Covid inquiry took place on Monday. Rishi Sunak highlighted a study that suggested more quality adjusted life years (QALYs) would be taken by the first lockdown than the virus itself. This was a significant admission, and one that we might have assumed KC Hugo Keith would want to explore further. Instead, he shut the Prime Minister down with unerring speed, stating that he was not interested in this approach – inaccurately labelling them as “quality life assurance models”.

• Britain is paying the deadly price for telling the public to ‘protect the NHS’. Thousands are dying from preventable causes and missed diagnoses. Too few are willing to ask why. One of the most controversial slogans during the lockdowns was telling people to stay home to “protect the NHS”. This was deeply resented by actual NHS chiefs, who saw this as a hideous inversion of their duty. “The NHS is there to protect people, not the other way around.”

• White House Covid Task Force Members Cashed in on Pandemic Panic. The White House Coronavirus Task Force was spun up on January 29, 2020. Shortly thereafter, the federal government began to deploy countless billions of dollars to pharmaceutical companies with the ostensible hopes to mitigate a much-hyped incoming pandemic. Now, almost four years later, our hindsight presents a much clearer picture to the fog of virus mania we experienced in real time. Instead of mobilizing an effective public-private response to the advertised problem, Operation Warp Speed and the Task Force served as a vehicle for further panic and the facilitating of taxpayer cash that ended up enriching the pharmaceutical industry.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Warren Buffet Selling $28.7 Billion in Stock Rings Alarm Bells Over Economy. According to the company's earnings, the Nebraska-based firm of the legendary investor and billionaire, known as the Oracle of Omaha, sold a net $10.4 billion of stock in the first quarter of the year. In the second quarter, it sold close to $13 billion of shares and bought less than $5 billion. In the third quarter, it sold about $5.3 billion worth of stocks. For Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University who served on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, Buffett's and Berkshire Hathaway's "recent lightening up on stocks and accumulation of a pile of cash—$157 billion—is consistent with the fact that stocks are relatively pricey right now." But it's also, crucially, a sign "that a recession is right around the corner," Hanke told Newsweek.

• The delinquency rate on credit card loans from small lenders has spiked to a level not seen for at least 30 years.

  

• Argentina’s Milei Devalues Peso by 54% in First Batch of Shock Measures. Argentina devalued the peso by 54% and announced a swath of spending cuts as the first steps of President Javier Milei’s shock-therapy program, moves welcomed by the International Monetary Fund. The newly inaugurated administration weakened the official exchange rate to 800 pesos per dollar, Economy Minister Luis Caputo said in a televised address after the close of local markets on Tuesday. It was 366.5 per dollar before the address.

• The American Dream Now Costs $3.4 Million. The classic "American Dream" including two kids, a house, and car costs more than most make in a lifetime. The cost of raising two children to the age of 18 is now estimated at over half a million dollars ($576,896). The average lifetime cost of a home including a mortgage with a 10% down payment and a 30-year fixed rate of 7.2% is now about $796,998.

• Mortgage affordability is the worst since 1981 when mortgage rates hit 18%. Financing a home used to be a staple of the American Dream, but much has changed since the pandemic. High interest rates, rising property values, and declining real income have made owning a slice of America harder than ever. According to Creditnews Research, mortgage affordability today is the worst it has been since 1981 when mortgage rates hit a record high of 18.38%. But how can this be when current rates are less than half that? The answer lies in a concept called mortgage burden. For the average homebuyer, the mortgage burden is the ratio of mortgage payments to income.

• The New York Fed Has Extended Its Half Trillion Dollar Bailout Facility to a Sprawling Japanese Bank You’ve Never Heard Of. Quietly, on December 1, the New York Fed published the following statement on its website: “The Norinchukin Bank, New York Branch, has been added to the list of Standing Repo Facility Counterparties, effective December 1, 2023.” The Standing Repo Facility (SRF) is a permanent $500 billion bailout facility created by the Federal Reserve and operated by the New York Fed – the private regional Fed bank where multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bank bailouts have become a regular feature of its operations.

• Despite the Net Zero noise, global coal consumption hit a record high for every area of the world in 2023.

  

Health

• Long-Term ADHD Medication Use May Increase Heart Disease Risk: Study. A new study indicates that long-term use of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medication may increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and that the risk increases the longer the drug is used. The results of the study conducted in Sweden were published in JAMA Psychiatry, bringing to light the potential risks of long-term ADHD medication.

• Never seeing family or friends can lead to an early death. Researchers in Scotland have found a striking link between the lack of in-person visits from loved ones and an increased risk of death. This study, which scrutinizes the influence of social interaction on mortality, offers new insights into how social factors can impact our health. Social isolation has been a serious area of concern, particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, the study found a 39-percent increase in the risk of death for individuals who never received visits from friends or family.

• This is bigger than COVID: Why are so many Americans dying early? People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent. Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, “excess,” deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.

• Deaths of newborn babies hit 15-year high. Deaths of newborn babies have hit a 15-year high in Scotland amid concerns over “unusual trends” in infant mortality. Forty one neonatal deaths, defined as when a baby dies in the first 28 days of life, were recorded in the three months to the end of September. The number equates to 3.4 neonatal deaths per 1,000 live births, the highest rate recorded since September 2008. The figures come amid an expert review into unexplained spikes in neonatal mortality in September 2021 and March 2022, when 39 infants died.

• Births and fertility rates are also crashing in Germany.

  

• US millennial women are now more likely to die in their late 20s and early 30s than any generation since the World War II era: report. For decades, young women in the US saw sharp progress in their health and safety with each passing generation, but that momentum has now reversed for millennials. "Women today are more likely to die during their late 20s and early 30s than at any other point in the previous three generations," said the report. The death rate has risen in parallel with a startling increase in maternal mortality rates among women aged 25 to 34, with 30.4 deaths due to pregnancy complications out of 100,000 births for millennials, the report said.

Middle East

• No evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health. Mortality reporting is a crucial indicator of the severity of a conflict setting, but it can also be inflated or under-reported for political purposes. Amidst the ongoing conflict in Gaza, some political parties have indicated scepticism about the reporting of fatalities by the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH). The Gaza MoH has historically reported accurate mortality data, with discrepancies between MoH reporting and independent United Nations analyses ranging from 1·5% to 3·8% in previous conflicts. A comparison between the Gaza MoH and Israeli Foreign Ministry mortality figures for the 2014 war yielded an 8·0% discrepancy. Public scepticism of the current reports by the Gaza MoH might undermine the efforts to reduce civilian harm and provide life-saving assistance.

Politics

• Al Gore Says People Having Access to Non-Mainstream Information ‘Threatens Democracy’. Gore whined that social media had “disrupted the balances that used to exist that made representative democracy work much better.” The former Vice President said that functioning democracy relied on a “shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together collectively” but that “social media that is dominated by algorithms” upsets this balance. According to Gore, people are being pulled down “rabbit holes” by algorithms that are “the digital equivalent of AR-15s – they ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned!”

• Rumble Hit With “Unprecedented” Cyber Attack After Posting J6 Security Cam Footage. Last week it was revealed that the GOP-controlled Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight had created a new Rumble channel to post hours of security footage from Capitol Police taken on January 6, 2021. Shortly after, Rumble was hit by a massive and seemingly organized attack that left people unable to upload or watch content.

• Britain is being tricked into an EU army through flawed Brexit deal says new report. A report by the European Parliament into the Brexit deal struck between Britain and Brussels has highlighted that the UK could be tricked into becoming part of an EU army. The report into the UK's Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU lays out a roadmap on how cooperation already agreed over military movement in the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) agreement could see the UK pulled in further. PESCO is seen as the basis for an EU Army which has long been championed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

• UK could be brought to a halt 'at any moment' by cyberattack, report warns. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy says that large swathes of critical infrastructure are vulnerable to ransomware attacks. In its report, the JCNSS says the UK's regulatory frameworks are insufficient and outdated, and warns that large swathes of critical national infrastructure remain vulnerable to ransomware because they rely on legacy IT systems warning about ransomware attacks, particularly from groups linked to Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang.

• 'Strip Tony Blair of his knighthood': Declassified documents show former PM 'misled parliament'. Sir Tony Blair should be stripped of his knighthood as a result of his decision to take the UK to war in Iraq, MPs have heard. The Alba Party’s Neale Hanvey described the former prime minister’s accolade as “an insult to every single life lost” during the war. Mr Hanvey claimed declassified documents from 1998 show Sir Tony was determined to take military action, contrary to legal advice.

• Our civilisation is being destroyed by a monster that cannot be controlled. The horrifying truth about woke ideology has finally been revealed. It gives open support to genocide. For years now, those of us who warned of the devastating threat posed by the takeover of our institutions by woke ideologues were relentlessly attacked and ridiculed. There is no such thing as “woke”, we were assured by patronising Left-wingers, just “kind” people who “care” about others and who believe in “social justice”, fighting “prejudice”, “clarifying” history, embracing sexual “self-realisation”, “saving the planet” and promoting the fundamental “equality” of all human beings. Our warnings, if anything, understated the scale of the problem, and in particular the authoritarian, even fascistic, nature of “critical race theory” and “postcolonial theory”, other key components of this demented way of thinking.

• Congress approves bill barring any president from unilaterally withdrawing from NATO. The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden. The provision underscores Congress’s commitment to the NATO alliance that was a target of former President Trump’s ire during his term in office. The alliance has taken on revitalized importance under Biden, especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

• US Terror List Hit 2 Million People, Nearly Doubling In 6 Years. This revelation, derived from an extensive review of court records, government documents, and interviews with intelligence community leaders, paints a complex picture of national security measures and civil liberties. The Terrorist Screening Dataset, a consolidated watchlist of individuals deemed as known or suspected terrorists, has seen a dramatic increase in numbers. Launched in 2003 with approximately 120,000 individuals, it ballooned to 1.6 million individuals by 2017. As of the end of 2023, this figure has reached an astonishing 2 million, including, as we noted, thousands of Americans.

• Mark Zuckerberg building $100M Hawaii compound with massive underground bunker: report. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a sprawling $100 million Hawaii compound — complete with an underground bunker and its own food and energy sources — in a secret project suggesting the social media mogul is trying to conceal his doomsday preparations. The compound on Kauai island will consist of more than a dozen buildings with two central mansions that will be connected by a tunnel that leads to a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter with an escape hatch accessible via a ladder, Wired reported, citing building plans.

Science

• New understanding of ancient genetic parasite may spur medical breakthroughs. A multidisciplinary study published in Nature has elucidated the structure of the machinery responsible for writing much of our "dark genome"—the 98% of our DNA that has largely unknown biological function. These results may spur entirely novel treatments for autoimmune diseases, cancer and neurodegeneration. An international team of scientists from Rutgers and more than a dozen other institutions, including both academia and industry, have published the first high-resolution images and structural details of a virus-like element known as LINE-1. They describe it as "an ancient genetic parasite" that is one of the most common parts of human DNA.

• Biggest solar flare in years temporarily disrupts radio signals on Earth. A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare along with a massive radio burst on Thursday, causing two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was the biggest flare since 2017, and the radio burst was extensive, affecting even the higher frequencies.

• NASA study finds life-sparking energy source and molecule at Enceladus. A study zooms in on data that NASA's Cassini gathered at Saturn's icy moon and finds evidence of a key ingredient for life and a supercharged source of energy to fuel it. Scientists have known that the giant plume of ice grains and water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus is rich with organic compounds, some of which are important for life as we know it. Now, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini mission are taking the evidence for habitability a step further: They've found strong confirmation of hydrogen cyanide, a molecule that is key to the origin of life.

Technology

• Ex-commissioner for facial recognition tech joins Facewatch firm he approved. Critics say Fraser Samson hiring is ‘outrageous conflict of interest’ as monitoring technology is rolled out in UK high streets. The recently-departed watchdog in charge of monitoring facial recognition technology has joined the private firm he controversially approved, paving the way for the mass roll-out of biometric surveillance cameras in high streets across the country. Sampson left his watchdog role on 31 October, with Companies House records showing he was registered as a company director at Facewatch the following day, 1 November.

• NASA’s Voyager 1 is in serious trouble and sending data in 1s and 0s that are indecipherable. NASA’s Voyager 1, an emblem of human ingenuity and curiosity, is currently facing significant challenges as it continues its 46-year-old journey into the depths of space. The probe, which has been a cornerstone in our understanding of the outer reaches of the Solar System, is now experiencing communication issues that have left NASA engineers grappling with a complex problem billions of miles away.

  

• How couples meet in the US.

  

Ukraine

• Ukrainian trial demonstrates 2014 Maidan massacre was false flag. A massacre of protesters during the 2014 Maidan coup set the stage for the oust of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. Now, an explosive trial in Kiev has produced evidence the killings were a false flag designed to trigger regime change. All these developments paved a path to the eight-year-long civil war in Donbas, which claimed the lives of over 14,000 and precipitated Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

• 400,000 Ukrainians Killed in Action Explains a Whole Lot. “In humanitarian terms, this tragedy has resulted in the Ukrainian nation being destroyed in a war that never needed to be fought,” Col. Macgregor said. Estimates of Ukrainians killed in action (KIA) range from a low of just over 30,000 to a high of over 400,000. Obviously, these two estimates can’t be reconciled. While 30,000 deaths is tragic, anything approaching 400,000 KIA and the accompanying hundreds of thousands of causalities is a humanitarian catastrophe that makes talks of continuing offensive operations next year, or even believing in a stalemate, wishful thinking that will result in even more fruitless Ukrainian deaths.

Vaccines

• Japan Approves World’s First ‘Self-Amplifying’ mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Without Published Efficacy or Safety Data. The latest iteration of the mRNA vaccine is even more potent than the present version, as it generates more spike proteins in the human body. Tokyo-based Meiji Seika Pharma received approval for manufacturing and marketing its Kostaive sa-mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, the company announced in a Nov. 28 press release. The mRNA in the vaccine is designed to self-amplify when delivered into cells, which generates a “strong immune response and the potential for extended duration of protection.” The vaccine is intended for primary immunization (2 doses) as well as booster immunization in adults. Kostaive is the "world's first approved product applying self-amplifying mRNA technology," according to the press release.

• CEPI partners with biotech Jurata Thin Film to create needle-free mRNA vaccines and improve access. Thermostable vaccine technology could end need for frozen vaccine storage, expanding global access to mRNA LNP vaccines and supporting future pandemic response efforts. Vaccine-loaded thin films administered under the tongue could help avoid complexities that can come with standard needle-and-syringe administration.

  

• 70 Percent of Deaths from Pfizer Vaccine in Japan Reported Within 10 Days of Jab: Study. Number of deaths within the first 10 days of vaccination was 'significantly higher' than those between 11 and 180 days among people aged 64 and under. After “unexplained deaths,” the biggest cause of death in this group was ischemic heart disease (27 deaths), cardiac arrhythmias (24), subarachnoid hemorrhage (20), and myocarditis/pericarditis (17). Autopsies were conducted in nine out of the 51 unexplained deaths.

• Getting your jabs will soon be 'as easy as booking a cab', say NHS chiefs. Easier access to vaccine records via the NHS app and one-stop-shops where people can get their shots alongside other health checks are among measures set out in a new vaccination strategy on Wednesday. "Through the NHS app, we'll make sure booking a jab can be as easy as booking a cab so millions more people can get vaccinated - users will be able to access their full vaccine status in a matter of seconds and book jabs with a simple swipe and tap."

• The rise in civilian labor force with a disability seems to have shot up since vaccination started but not Covid.