This Week's Must Reads - 12-18 February 2024

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

Feb 18, 2024

I spend a lot of time each day gathering new information and interesting articles. I then pick the most fascinating 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 will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

Is CO2 Really a Pollutant? A New Study Says the Earth is Actually Greening. A new study published by the journal, Global Ecology and Conservation, claims that a phenomenon known as CO2 fertilization is contributing to a net greening of the globe. The findings suggest that increased CO2 has been a net gain for the environment, which would stand contrary to the claim that CO2 endangers public health; a claim that was made by Environmental Protection Agency president Lisa Jackson in 2009. More recently, legislation in the U.S. has described CO2 as a pollutant.
Mark Steyn and the death of justice. To the dismay of climate sceptics the world over, the long-awaited defamation lawsuit between climate scientist Michael Mann and conservative writer Mark Steyn ended last week with the jury in Washington DC finding against Steyn and co-defendant Rand Simberg and awarding more than $1million to Mann. It was a case that had enormous ramifications.
Scientists Try Risky Air and Water Experiments Hoping to Stop Climate Change. Scientists desperate to stop or reverse climate change are dumping chemicals in the ocean and spraying saltwater in the air. What can go wrong? Ironically, the short term risk is that one of these plans is actually successful. Data will be manipulated to show success if for no other reason than to get more funding. Then we will ramp up spending to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, messing with mother nature, only to encounter the long term risk.
ECB tells staff: If you’re not green, you’re not wanted. A top European Central Bank official stunned employees by saying people who don’t buy into the institution’s green objectives aren’t welcome to work there. Frank Elderson, one of six members of the ECB’s executive board, told an internal meeting: “I don’t want these people anymore.”
North Atlantic sea surface temperatures have been spiking again this year.

Covid

The Wuhan Cover-Up by RFK, Jr.: Review and Analysis. The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race is a crucial book for understanding how the Covid catastrophe happened. Some argue that RFK, Jr.’s new book is the most important Covid chronicle to date, although it ends at the beginning of 2020, before most of us were even aware that a “novel coronavirus” was circulating among us. The book explains the CAUSES of the global disaster, which all happened before March 2020. Everything after that are the downstream EFFECTS of what The Wuhan Cover-Up exposes.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

CDC plans to end five-day Covid isolation guidelines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reportedly planning to eliminate its recommendation that people testing positive for Covid-19 should isolate for five days – the first time its guidelines on Covid-19 have changed since December 2021. People with mild symptoms would be able to return to school or work if they are fever-free for at least 24 hours.
South Australian court rules employers who mandated COVID jabs can be held liable for injuries. The ruling implies that employers will no longer be able to claim that they are protected from compensation because they were complying with a lawful state government directive. Youth support worker Daniel Shepherd won an appeal against the state of South Australia after it had rejected his claim for compensation following a diagnosis of vaccine-induced pericarditis, a heart condition, which he contracted from a third dose of the COVID-19 jabs.
School closures may not have been necessary to prevent spread of COVID-19, researchers at McMaster find. The review was published Thursday in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health and examined more than 34,000 references, including databases, websites, and studies, related to transmission in child-care settings and schools across the globe. The results of the review appear to cast doubt on the necessity of the repeated interruptions to in-person learning during the pandemic.

Economy/Energy/Finance

Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End. In a cavernous production hall in Düsseldorf last fall, the somber tones of a horn player accompanied the final act of a century-old factory. There have been numerous iterations of such finales over the past year, underscoring the painful reality facing Germany: its days as an industrial superpower may be coming to an end. Manufacturing output in Europe’s biggest economy has been trending downward since 2017, and the decline is accelerating as competitiveness erodes.
America is driving Germany’s deindustrialisation. The cat is out of the bag. After months of denial, it is now conventional wisdom that Germany — and Europe more generally — faces deindustrialisation due to the end of cheap Russian piped gas. In Germany everyone is pointing fingers. The nation’s climate agenda is “more dogmatic than any other country I know,” Siegfried Russwurm, head of Germany’s main industry association, told the Financial Times. This talking point has started circulating widely in America and has spread to Europe via Right-wing commentators on social media. But it is a distraction — the Americans are becoming increasingly savvy at using culture-war issues to cover up negligence towards their European allies.
Inflation rises faster than expected in January as high prices persist. The Labor Department said Tuesday that the consumer price index, a broad measure of the price of everyday goods including gasoline, groceries and rent, rose 0.3% in January from the previous month. Prices climbed 3.1% from the same time last year. Both of those figures came in higher than the 0.2% monthly increase and 2.9% headline figure forecast by Refinitiv economists.
US office vacancy rate has reached 19.6%.
12-storey Canary Wharf tower, London sold at loss of 60 per cent. 5 Churchill Place, a former office for investment bank Bear Stearns, was placed into receivership by a syndicate of lenders last year and its Chinese owners Cheung Kei Group, put the building on the market. The building was bought for close to £300m by the Asian property developer back in 2017. However, a report in React News said Menomadin Group, the business owned by Israeli entrepreneur Haim Taib, has agreed to buy the building for £110m.
UK economy contracts more than expected. The UK economy contracted more than expected in the last three months of 2023, highlighting the country’s fragile economic health as it approaches a general election. Gross domestic product fell 0.3 per cent in the final three months of last year compared with the previous three months, following a 0.1 per cent decline in the third quarter, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday.
Worse still, when looking at the GDP per capita, which is a better indication of real economic growth due to migration, GDP is down by 0.7%.
Japan slips into recession allowing Germany to overtake as world’s third largest economy. Gross domestic product (GDP) shrank at an annualized pace of 0.4% in the last three months of 2023, the Cabinet Office said on Thursday, after having contracted by an annualized 3.3% in the previous quarter. The decline was well below market forecasts. Economists polled by Reuters had expected GDP to grow by an annualized 1.4% quarter-on-quarter in the October to December months. The data confirms that Japan’s economy was the world’s fourth largest behind Germany in US dollar terms last year.
Jeff Bezos has sold another $2 billion of Amazon stock bringing his total sales since February this year, to $6 billion.
For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished. The country’s self-image as tolerant, decent and hard-working is being smashed. It’s only going to get worse. Britain’s decline over the past 25 years has been staggeringly rapid. Almost everything is getting worse, and almost nothing is getting better. Our public and private institutions are broken, presided over by an incompetent, selfish and narcissistic ruling class. Living standards, when adjusted properly for living and property costs, are declining.
Shipping costs are spiking again.
US Retail sales tumbled 0.8% in January, much more than expected. Consumer spending fell sharply in January, presenting a potential early danger sign for the economy, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Advance retail sales declined 0.8% for the month following a downwardly revised 0.4% gain in December, according to the Census Bureau. A decrease had been expected: Economists surveyed by Dow Jones were looking for a drop of 0.3%, in part to make up for seasonal distortions that probably boosted December’s number.

Health

Surprising Link Discovered Between Body Temperature and Depression. People with depression have higher body temperatures, suggesting there could be a mental health benefit to lowering the temperatures of those with the disorder, a new UC San Francisco-led study found. The study, published on February 5 in Scientific Reports, doesn’t indicate whether depression raises body temperature or a higher temperature causes depression.
Inside the plan to diagnose Alzheimer's in people with no memory problems — and who stands to benefit. In a darkened Amsterdam conference hall this summer, a panel of industry and academic scientists took the stage to announce a plan to radically expand the definition of Alzheimer’s disease to include millions of people with no memory complaints. Under the proposal, tens of millions of Americans with normal cognition would test positive for abnormal levels of amyloid or tau, the two proteins the tests look for, and the majority of them may never be diagnosed with dementia, studies suggest.
80% of Americans test positive for chemical found in Cheerios, Quaker Oats that may cause infertility, delayed puberty. The Environmental Working Group published a study in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology on Thursday that found a staggering 80% of Americans tested positive for a harmful pesticide called chlormequat. The “highly toxic agricultural chemical” is federally allowed to be used on oats and other grains imported to the US, according to the EWG. When applied to oat and grain crops, chlormequat alters a plant’s growth, preventing it from bending over and thus making it easier to harvest, per the EWG.
Why can’t we talk about how the birth control pill is harming women? There is no question about it: hormonal birth control increases the risk of depression, suicidal ideations, and suicide for women. Yet mainstream Media outlets such as NBC have labeled women who speak about this research as "alarmists." Why? It seems allowing women to access all of the information about the birth control pill threatens a "greater good" agenda being pushed. For anybody who knows the history of birth control, this secrecy and deliberate concealment of the dangers of the medication have characterized the pill from its conception, no pun intended. NPR journalist Erin Blakemore described the birth control pill's past as "one intertwined with eugenics and colonialism," and that's no exaggeration.

Middle East

Iran Launches First Long-Range Ballistic Missiles From Warship. The announcement came during naval exercises with the IRGC deploying two ballistic missiles from the Shahid Mahdavi warship. The IRGC claims that the missiles can strike targets up to 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles) away. The military maneuvers unfold amid heightened regional tensions following the eruption of the Israel-Hamas conflict on October 7.
Israel Was Behind Attacks on Major Gas Pipelines in Iran, Officials Say. The sabotage, which analysts said marked an escalation in the shadow war between Israel and Iran, caused sweeping disruption in several provinces. Israel has long targeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran — and assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists and commanders, both inside and outside of the country. But blowing up part of the country’s energy infrastructure, relied on by industries, factories and millions of civilians, marked an escalation in the covert war and appeared to open a new frontier, officials and analysts said.

Politics

Unhinged progressives are a gift to Trump. The woke zealotry of the Biden administration is turning vast numbers of Americans into reluctant Trumpers. In 1931, the slogan of the German Communist Party became: ‘After Hitler, our turn.’ This kind of wishful thinking is making a comeback in contemporary America. Prominent Democrats and the ‘progressive’ apparat of the Biden administration see the nomination of Donald Trump – their version of Hitler – as the best way to mobilise their shaky coalition and to keep hold of power. Biden’s supporters believe Trump is so odious that the American people will accept anyone – even someone as obviously mediocre as Joe Biden – to keep him out of power.
Biden Met Chinese Energy Bosses That Did Business With Hunter. Rob Walker testified during a closed-door hearing at the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees earlier this month as part of the House impeachment inquiry against President Biden. While he did not confirm the date, Walker said, according to a transcript of the interview, that Joe Biden met CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming, along with his son Hunter and his other business partners, at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., around 2017 when the elder Biden was vice president.
Global conflicts herald ‘dangerous decade’ — military think tank. The Hamas-Israel war, ongoing fighting in Ukraine and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific and Africa herald “what is likely to be a more dangerous decade”, a British military think-tank warned Tuesday. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said in its annual “Military Balance” report that the world has entered “a highly volatile security environment”, which is set to endure. The “era of insecurity” is resetting the global defence-industrial landscape, with the US and Europe ramping up production of missiles and ammunition “after decades of underinvestment”, the report added.
In Lawsuit Against Spying On Assange Visitors, CIA Will Invoke 'State Secrets Privilege'. The CIA plans to invoke the “state secrets privilege” to block a lawsuit against the agency for allegedly spying on Americans, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while he was living under political asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy. In December, United States Judge John Koeltl dismissed multiple claims brought by four American attorneys and journalists against the CIA. But Koeltl also determined that the Americans had grounds to sue the CIA for violating their “reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Putin says he prefers Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the White House. Mr Biden was the more experienced, predictable person, he said in remarks sure to raise eyebrows. The Russian president also remarked on his recent interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, saying he had found it disappointing because the questions had not been sharp enough.
Iran declares Antarctica its property in direct challenge to Biden, global treaty. Iran’s Navy commander announced in a televised broadcast last fall that the regime owns Antarctica and will build a military operation in the South Pole. "We have property rights in the South Pole. We have plan to raise our flag there and carry out military and scientific work," Iranian Navy Commander Rear Admiral Shahram Irani said in late September, according to a translation by the Washington D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded by the American Taxpayer. The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction. The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter. We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.
The EU isn’t about to collapse. It’s worse than that. The bloc is an economic and political disaster zone, incapable of reflecting the opinions of Europe’s voters. The disaster zone of the euro is going to blow at some point. Germany, its beneficiary for so many years, is mired in recession. Business confidence ratings are comfortably positive in Britain, seriously negative in the Eurozone.
[2023] A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century - Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation. Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
[2023] A survey of expert views on misinformation: Definitions, determinants, solutions, and future of the field. Experts lean strongly to the left of the political spectrum.
The Tory Appointee Holding Julian Assange’s Life in Her Hands. Judge Dame Victoria Sharp’s family have attained high-level positions in the British establishment after being appointed by Conservative ministers. One of his previous judges, Westminster chief magistrate Lady Arbuthnot, is married to a former Conservative defence minister and previously received financial benefits from partner organisations of the Foreign Office. Another past judge, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, is a long standing good friend of the British minister who enabled Assange’s arrest by forcing him out of his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
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Science

How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background. An MIT study finds the brains of children who grow up in less affluent households are less responsive to rewarding experiences. “If you’re in a highly resourced environment, with many rewards available, your brain gets tuned in a certain way. If you’re in an environment in which rewards are more scarce, then your brain accommodates the environment in which you live. Instead of being overresponsive to rewards, it seems like these brains, on average, are less responsive, because probably their environment has been less consistent in the availability of rewards.”
Ancient retroviruses played a key role in the evolution of vertebrate brains. Researchers report that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin -- and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element or 'retrotransposon' is essential for myelin production in mammals, amphibians, and fish. The gene sequence, which they dubbed 'RetroMyelin,' is likely a result of ancient viral infection, and comparisons of RetroMyelin in mammals, amphibians, and fish suggest that retroviral infection and genome-invasion events occurred separately in each of these groups.
Stone Age Wall Discovered Beneath the Baltic Sea Helped Early Hunters Trap Reindeer. The discovery, named Blinkerwall, is made up of more than 1,300 stones and roughly 300 larger boulders, and it stretches for more than half a mile along the seafloor. Resting nearly 70 feet underwater in the Bay of Mecklenburg, the wall stands, on average, about 1.5 feet tall. Though the wall is now underwater, it was likely constructed during a period between 8,500 and 14,000 years ago, when the site was on dry land. Before that window, a massive ice sheet covered the region; and after, sea levels rose and flooded everything.
Researchers Discover Neurons That Can Predict What We Are Going To Say Before We Say It. A new study utilizing advanced Neuropixels probes, provides insights into how the brain’s neurons enable the formulation and verbal expression of thoughts, revealing the pre-verbal planning of speech sounds. With their technology, the investigators showed that it’s possible to reliably determine the speech sounds that individuals will say before they articulate them. In other words, scientists can predict what combination of consonants and vowels will be produced before the words are actually spoken. This capability could be leveraged to build artificial prosthetics or brain-machine interfaces capable of producing synthetic speech, which could benefit a range of patients.

Technology

Researchers demonstrate liquid metal RAM, bringing us closer to flexible, implantable hardware – and to our Terminator 2 nightmares. According to Jing Liu, one of the researchers at Tsinghua who worked on FlexRAM, this offers "a theoretical foundation and technical path for future soft intelligent robots, brain-machine interface systems, and wearable/implantable electronic devices." While this is a revolutionary achievement and may indeed put us closer to a sci-fi future, it's important to contrast this with the actual performance of FlexRAM today.
The US Navy is working on a radical new submarine that will slice through the ocean so fast that, even before you are halfway through watching ‘Oppenheimer,’ it will have zipped underwater from New York to London. The researchers are working on a technology called supercavitation that envelopes a submerged vessel inside an air bubble to mitigate drag. You’ll be surprised that the technology is not new. The Soviets developed it during the Cold War era for a torpedo named Shakval. The Soviet torpedo reached a speed of 370km/h (around 230mph), making it a lot faster than any other conventional torpedo.
Russia attempting to develop nuclear space weapon to destroy satellites with massive energy wave, sources familiar with intel say. The weapon is still under development and is not yet in orbit, Biden administration officials have emphasized publicly. But if used, officials say, it would cross a dangerous rubicon in the history of nuclear weapons and could cause extreme disruptions to everyday life in ways that are difficult to predict. This kind of new weapon — known generally by military space experts as a nuclear EMP — would create a pulse of electromagnetic energy and a flood of highly charged particles that would tear through space to disrupt other satellites winging around Earth.

Ukraine

Putin's suggestion of Ukraine ceasefire rejected by United States, sources say. Putin sent signals to Washington in 2023 in public and privately through intermediaries, including through Moscow's Arab partners in the Middle East and others, that he was ready to consider a ceasefire in Ukraine, the Russian sources said. Putin was proposing to freeze the conflict at the current lines and was unwilling to cede any of the Ukrainian territory controlled by Russia, but the signal offered what some in the Kremlin saw as the best path towards a peace of some kind. A third source with knowledge of the discussions said: "Everything fell apart with the Americans." The source said that the Americans did not want to pressure Ukraine.
Ukraine Reconstruction Costs Hit $486 bn. Ukraine needs almost half a trillion dollars to cover the reconstruction costs of Russia's invasion, the World Bank, European Union, United Nations and the Ukrainian government said Thursday. And Ukraine's Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said Thursday that confiscated Russian assets should foot most of the bill. Kyiv is trying to marshal international resources to help it rebuild the nation's cities, roads, bridges and energy facilities destroyed or damaged by Russia's two-year assault.

Vaccines

Cardiovascular effects of the covid vaccines. Covid vaccine harm is myriad and certain individuals have experienced a hugely debilitating syndrome of injury affecting more than one organ system. However, in terms of the sheer numbers affected the cardiovascular system is at the heart of the matter. There is strong evidence that the covid vaccines induce endothelial cell damage, intravascular inflammation and an increased risk of clotting. These are not mere theoretical risks but are supported by emerging evidence that points to mechanisms of harm which have led to the excess mortality.
Italy used 2M Covid jabs this winter. It’s locked into buying 40M more. Italy is on the hook to buy almost 40 million Covid vaccine doses over the next two years, according to government documents, despite vaccinations having slowed to a crawl and illustrating the soaring surplus from the binding EU contracts. The findings — first broadcast by Rai and corroborated by internal health ministry documents seen by POLITICO — show that Italy will receive deliveries of 36.7 million doses of the vaccine produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, and 2.9 million doses from Novavax. The shots will be delivered for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 winter vaccination campaigns.