This Week's Must Reads - 12-18 June 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

• IN-DEPTH: Wildfires Exacerbated by Poor Forest Management, Professors Say. While there have been suggestions that wildfires are becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change, environmental and economic professors interviewed by The Epoch Times say the number of fires has been decreasing for decades, and that the cause of the fires in many cases can be attributed to poor forest management.

• Britain fires up coal plant as solar panels suffer in hot weather. Rush to turn on air conditioning during heatwave causes spike in demand for electricity. High temperatures over the weekend also reduced the amount of energy generated from solar panels. Output on Sunday was almost a third lower than a week earlier, despite temperatures climbing above 30 degrees celsius across large parts of the country. Solar panels are tested at a benchmark of 25C. For every degree rise in temperature above this level, the efficiency is reduced by 0.5 percentage points.

• How Tobacco Companies Are Crushing ESG Ratings. S&P Global made headlines this month when it gave Tesla, the world's largest manufacturer of electric cars, a lower environmental, social, and governance score than Philip Morris International, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes. How could cigarettes, which kill over eight million people each year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars? It may have something to do with the tobacco industry's embrace of corporate progressivism.

Covid

• The real Covid conspiracy - Supine scientists such as Jeremy Farrar are being let off the hook. Farrar was at the centre of this deceptive web, spinning lines to impede unfettered debate on the origins of the biggest public health crisis for a century. Along with two of his Wellcome Trust colleagues, he joined 24 other scientists to sign a key letter in The Lancet journal sycophantically praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later discovered to have been covertly organised by Daszak, who had spent years working with his friend Shi Zhengli, the celebrated lead researcher into bat coronaviruses at WIV.

• Three things to watch as US intelligence prepares for Covid ‘lab leak’ reveal. No later than Sunday, America’s director of National Intelligence must make public all 'information relating to the origins of Covid-19'. By the time the deadline is reached, it will have been 1,265 days since news of a “mystery pneumonia” first emerged from Wuhan – and for much of that time a small group of US intelligence officials have anonymously been briefing that the virus came from a lab. It would not be the first time a pandemic had been caused by a laboratory-related accident: the 1977-1979 Russian Flu pandemic is widely thought to have been sparked by the accidental release of a virus used in a US flu vaccine that had not been fully deactivated.

• China drops cremation data from quarterly report, raising questions about key Covid death indicator. Ministry of Civil Affairs scraps figure from delayed statistics release, and provinces also appear to be withholding the information. The omission makes it harder to understand impact of last winter’s Covid-19 wave, which swept the nation after Beijing’s U-turn on pandemic measures.

Covid Mandates

• New Normal Germany Blues. Given its history and the character of its denizens, Berlin felt like the last place on Earth that was ever going to go totalitarian again … and then it did. In the blink of an eye. Like someone had flipped a big “fascism on” switch. Constitutional rights were abruptly cancelled. Protests against the New Normal were banned. The German media started pumping out propaganda like a Goebbelisan keyboard instrument. Public displays of conformity were mandated. “The Unvaccinated” were banned from society. Hate drunk mobs of New Normal Germans began hunting down maskless people on trains. By the end of it, the government was making plans to forcibly “vaccinate” the entire population.

• Pregnant nurse who's about to be fired: Why is COVID vaccine still mandatory? A London Health Sciences Centre nurse set to be fired this week has made a rare public appeal to the hospital’s top boss to save her job. Sandra Hartman, 35, is eight months pregnant and has declined the COVID-19 vaccine, which the hospital requires all staff to take even after pandemic-related restrictions have been largely lifted.

• Where Is the Silver Lining? The worst thing they ever did was to give us Covid Hysteria. The worst thing they ever did was betray us, cast us out, and cause us to suffer, for suffer we did. For in suffering and in pain, we understand, we see clearly now. They have mobilised a generation of people who walk with their eyes open. We were blind for a long time, but now we see.

Culture

• Sharp decline in appetite for news in recent years, Reuters Institute says. The number of people taking a strong interest in the news has dropped by around a quarter in the last six years, a global study suggests. A report by Oxford University's Reuters Institute says 48% of people around the world are very or extremely interested in the news - down from 63% in 2017.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Big commercial real estate downturn could sink 300+ banks: Report. More than 300 banks have enough commercial real estate loans on their books to see their Tier 1 capital wiped out under a worst-case scenario, Richard Barkham, chief economist and head of research at CBRE, said this week during a conference hosted by the National Association of Real Estate Editors.

• US junk loan defaults surge as higher interest rates start to bite. There were 18 debt defaults in the US loan market between January 1 and the end of May totalling $21bn — greater in number and total value than for the whole of 2021 and 2022 combined, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis of data from PitchBook LCD. May alone saw three defaults totalling $7.8bn — the highest monthly dollar amount since the depths of the Covid-19 crisis three years ago.

• UK: Gilt Rates Spike and No Apocalyptic Headlines Sighted - Rates Are Now Higher Under Hunt Than Kwasi. Remember when gilt rates spiked and Rishi and the media said Truss and Kwasi had crashed the economy? The two-year gilt rate off which typical two-year fixed-rate mortgages are priced are higher today and nobody seems bothered; no headlines, no apocalyptic pronouncements in the FT. Last night the Chancellor promised tax cuts are coming, and nobody said it was reckless this morning!

• China Throws Weight Behind BRICS Expansion, Eyes Challenge to US Dollar Dominance as Bitcoin Gains Momentum. China has announced its intention to support the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) major plan to expand the five-member grouping with “like-minded partners”.

• China gives green light to nuclear reactor that burns thorium – a fuel that could power the country for 20,000 years. Thorium MSRs are a type of advanced nuclear technology that use liquid fuels, typically molten salts, as both a fuel and a coolant. They offer several potential advantages over traditional uranium reactors, including increased safety, reduced waste and improved fuel efficiency. Thorium is also a more abundant resource compared with uranium, and China has significant thorium reserves.

• BlackRock files for spot bitcoin ETF, with Coinbase as a crypto custodian. The firm filed an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch the iShares Bitcoin Trust. If approved, the ETF would allow easy access for investors to get exposure to crypto in a product from one of Wall Street’s largest companies. “The Shares are intended to constitute a simple means of making an investment similar to an investment in bitcoin rather than by acquiring, holding and trading bitcoin directly on a peer-to-peer or other basis or via a digital asset exchange,” the filing said.

• Germany Warns of Industry Shutdown If Russian Gas Stops Flowing. Germany may be forced to wind down or even switch off industrial capacity if Ukraine’s gas transit agreement with Russia isn’t extended after it expires at the end of next year, according to Economy Minister Robert Habeck. Rules on sharing the burden of potential gas shortages in Eastern Europe would have to be respected, meaning Germany would have to export gas there to offset the deficit and manufacturers in Europe’s biggest economy could have their supply restricted or cut, he added.

Defence/Military

• Several US government agencies hit in a global cyberattack. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “is providing support to several federal agencies that have experienced intrusions” impacting vulnerable software exploited by the hackers,” stated Eric Goldstein, the executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, in a statement to CNN on Thursday. “We are working urgently to understand impacts and ensure timely remediation.”

• DOD Committed to Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence. The Defense Department is prioritizing ethical considerations and collaboration in its approach to developing and fielding military applications of artificial intelligence, a top Pentagon technology official said today.

• [A reminder that the biggest NATO exercise is still taking place]. Germany hosts biggest ever air exercise of NATO forces. Allied air forces began the largest deployment exercise in NATO’s history on Monday (12 June 2023). Twenty-five nations are taking part in the two-week long “Air Defender” exercise, with around 10,000 personnel and 250 aircraft. The drills are aimed at boosting interoperability and preparedness to protect against aircraft, drones and missiles attacks on cities and critical infrastructure. Other training events will include supporting ground troops and evacuation missions. Air Defender will run until 23 June.

Health

• Study: Estimation of Excess Mortality in Germany During 2020-2022. The results show that the observed number of deaths in 2020 was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation; approximately 4,000 excess deaths occurred. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number and even more than four times the empirical standard deviation in 2022. These findings indicate that something must have happened in spring 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the early COVID-19 pandemic so far.

• Record Low Autopsy Rates in the US: Why It Matters and What It Reveals. The autopsy rate in 2020 reached a record low of 7.4 percent, marking the lowest rate between 1972 and 2020. According to the report, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant decrease in autopsy rates, particularly for COVID-19 deaths. The autopsy rate for COVID-19 deaths in 2020 was only 0.9 percent.

• At least birth rates are up…oh wait. New South Wales sees a 20% drop in births in one year.

  

Politics

• Political satirist CJ Hopkins facing criminal prosecution. The Berlin Prosecutor’s Office has charged political satirist (and frequent OffG contributor) CJ Hopkins with: “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” The charge relates to CJ’s promotion of his 2022 book The Rise of the New Normal Reich, which has already been banned by Amazon in several European countries, and the cover art of which features a swastika.

• WHO Member Says Agency Needs To “Nullify The Conspiracies” About Covid Vaccines. A call to crack down on the dissent as the WHO is set to be granted new powers to target speech. The WHO, an unelected global health agency, is less than a year away from finalizing an international pandemic treaty/accord and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). These two instruments will collectively give the World Health Organization vast new powers to target misinformation and increase its surveillance powers.

• What I Can Say and What I Cannot Say. Right here we see the power of government as government – and government alone – gets to decide who, in fact, is the “experts.” The government bureaucrats are the lone experts. People who disagree with them are not…It’s not just the big companies and players who are rewarded for speaking only “permitted” speech; just about everyone who goes along with The Current Thing receives benefits.

• The rise of the self-censoring liberal. Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert has pulled her new novel because it is set in Russia. The Eat, Pray, Love author’s now-pulled novel is based on the true story of the Lykov family. The Lykovs spent more than 40 years living in the Siberian wilderness with little human contact, until their location was discovered by the Soviet authorities in the late 1970s. Gilbert claims she had been inspired to write the novel after isolating during Covid. It was due to be published early next year. So this week, in an online video, she said that due to commenters’ ‘anger, sorrow and disappointment’, she has decided to halt the novel’s release.

• Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92. Deeply disturbed by the accounting of American deceit in Vietnam, he approached The New York Times. The disclosures that followed rocked the nation. The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.

Science

• Scientists discover ‘magical’ material that’s stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum - and its potential is dizzying. Galvorn is the result of a more than $20 million investment from the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and others. The impact for consumers will be felt in the application. Lighter and faster vehicles, lighter wind-turbine blades, and higher conductivity in batteries to improve renewable power storage are all advantages Galvorn is set to realize, GreenBiz reports. It is already being used to help de-ice plane wings.

• Synthetic human embryos are created in the lab with NO egg or sperm: Scientists announce historic breakthrough raising hopes for new treatments for miscarriage and rare genetical disorders – but development poses huge ethical dilemmas. They were produced in a joint project between Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology and resemble embryos in the earliest stages of human development. They do not have the beginnings of a brain or a beating heart, but do include cells which would go on to form the placenta and yolk sac.

• A Chance Event 1 Million Years Ago Changed Human Brains Forever. Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn't dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years. Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly 'spiced up' within a short evolutionary period of time.

Technology

• Why AI Will Save the World. human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years. What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.

• Intel Enters the Quantum Computing Horse Race With 12-Qubit Chip. Intel has built a quantum processor called Tunnel Falls that it will offer to research labs hoping to make the revolutionary computing technology practical. The Tunnel Falls processor, announced Thursday, houses 12 of the fundamental data processing elements called qubits. It's a major step in the chipmaker's attempt to develop quantum computing hardware it hopes will eventually surpass rivals.

Ukraine

• Ukraine plays “Light Brigade” with British advice. American and European military observers in Ukraine described the Ukraine Army’s efforts of the past two days as a “suicide mission” that violated the basic rules of military tactics. “If you want to conduct an offensive and you have a dozen brigades and a few dozen tanks, you concentrate them and try to break through. The Ukrainians have been running around in five different directions,” complained a senior European officer.

• [2022] The Crisis in Ukraine Is Not About Ukraine. It’s About Germany and, in particular, a pipeline that connects Germany to Russia called Nord Stream 2. Washington sees the pipeline as a threat to its primacy in Europe and has tried to sabotage the project at every turn. Even so, Nord Stream has pushed ahead and is now fully operational and ready to go. Once German regulators provide the final certification, the gas deliveries will begin. German homeowners and businesses will have a reliable source of clean and inexpensive energy while Russia will see a significant boost to their gas revenues. It’s a win-win situation for both parties.

• The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage? As it stands, the U.S. government continuously pelts the American people with provable untruths in service of maintaining a war policy that bears almost no resemblance to how it was initially presented. And in the sectors of society allegedly tasked with scrutinizing government conduct, this is mostly met with a shrug.

• [Weird how the Ukraine counteroffensive ties in with the largest ever NATO operation - see above] As Ukraine Launches Counteroffensive, Definitions of ‘Success’ Vary. Privately, U.S. and European officials concede that pushing all of Russia’s forces out of occupied Ukrainian land is highly unlikely. Still, two themes emerge as clear ideas of “success”: that the Ukrainian army retake and hold on to key swaths of territory previously occupied by the Russians, and that Kyiv deal the Russian military a debilitating blow that forces the Kremlin to question the future of its military options in Ukraine.

Vaccines

• FDA admits it has no records indicating COVID-19 vaccine safety protocols were followed. From early in the pandemic, the government has been promising the public that it was taking COVID-19 vaccine safety “very seriously,” and that the vaccines had been subject to “the most intense safety monitoring program in U.S. history.” ICAN likes to confirm these claims for itself but when it tried to do just that, it uncovered that the FDA actually deviated from long-standing protocols concerning vaccine safety.

• [Kevin McKernan has stated that this should be SV40 promoters, not Green Monkey DNA] Green Monkey DNA Found in COVID-19 Shots. The COVID-19 shots are turning out to be more of a time bomb than ever imagined. This new discovery of the presence of green monkey DNA, including tumor-linked viral promoters, in the jabs has this microbiologist and immunologist calling for an immediate halt in the use of mRNA “vaccines.”

• mRNA vaccines fast-tracked for Australian agriculture. After the spectacular failure of mRNA vaccines in human trials, the agricultural industry is pushing ahead with mRNA vaccines for livestock engaged in the food industry. Whispers of stock ‘dying suddenly’ will no doubt become a complaint of farmers in the future, summarily ignored by government.