This Week's Must Reads - 14-20 August 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

• Nobel Prize winner Dr. John F. Clauser signs the Clintel World Climate Declaration. Clauser is the second Nobel Laureate to sign the declaration, Dr. Ivar Giaever was the first. The number of scientists and experts signing the World Climate Declaration is growing rapidly and now approaching 1600 people.

• [2009] Freeman Dyson Takes on the Climate Establishment. Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for insisting global warming is not an urgent problem, with many climate scientists dismissing him as woefully ill-informed.

• Airline Passengers Will Be Forced to Pay for $5 Trillion Carbon Cleanup. The aviation sector's plans to pass along the cost of decarbonization could add hundreds of dollars to the price of some flights.

• Hawaiian Electric Knew of Wildfire Threat, but Waited Years to Act. Four years ago, the utility said it needed to do more to prevent its power lines from emitting sparks. It made little progress, focusing on a shift to clean energy.

Covid

• Sen. Ron Johnson Says Pandemic "Preplanned By An Elite Group Of People" Who Conducted "Event 201". Senator Ron Johnson on Friday told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo that Covid-19, and its response, were "preplanned by an elite group of people" who conducted "Event 201".

• Greg Tucker-Kellogg publishes fraudulent study to attack ivermectin. Tucker-Kellogg aimed to review research conducted in Brazil and conclude that ivermectin was ineffective against Covid-19. In order to do so, he and his colleagues used fraudulent data with the aim of undermining the research.

• 'Real deal' Covid variant is now in Britain: Patient is hospitalised in London with heavily-mutated 'Pirola' strain - and experts think they caught it IN the UK. Pirola's official arrival comes as Covid cases take off once again, sparking concerns that the UK is on the brink of another wave just as the country heads into the winter when the NHS is busiest.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• ‘Ruthlessly enforced’ COVID vaccine mandate at Santa Clara University harms students, appeal alleges. A group of medical freedom experts and students are challenging aspects of Santa Clara University’s ongoing COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which includes requiring incoming freshmen to receive the shot.

• What If There Had Been No Covid Coup? Once the biowarfare cartel took over the pandemic response, there was only one objective: scare everyone as much as possible to gain compliance with lockdowns and make everyone desperate for vaccines.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• M2 contraction is reaching levels not seen for a century.

• US 30-Year mortgage rates rose over 7.5%, the highest level in 23 years.

• China trust giant’s missed payments alarm investors. One of China’s largest private wealth managers is triggering fresh anxiety about the health of the country’s shadow banking industry after missing payments on multiple high-yield products.

• Middle Class Meltdown: Thanks To The Reckless Policies Of Our Leaders, The Middle Class In The U.S. Is In Huge Trouble. The middle class in the U.S. has been steadily shrinking for decades, but in recent years our leaders have greatly accelerated that process.

• Shale Wells Are Losing Oil Output Faster Than Expected, Study Says. The steep drop in output from US shale wells is turning out to be worse than expected, forcing oil drillers to work even harder to keep production from slipping, research firm Enverus said in its latest report.

• China’s struggling property giant Evergrande files for bankruptcy protection in US. The company’s chapter 15 protection will protect its US assets while it attempts a restructuring deal.

• Turkey’s Erdogan fires statistics chief after inflation data shows 19-year high. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked the head of the state statistics agency, according to a decree published Saturday, after releasing data showing last year's inflation rate hit a 19-year high of 36.1 percent.

• Household Covid excess savings have now been exhausted.

• High interest rates are here to stay. The West may be about to experience a decades-long bear market. US mortgage rates hit a two-decade high yesterday. Take it as a sign of things to come. Not only will interest rates probably rise a bit more, but they may not then come down by much. In fact, we may be looking at the new normal.

Health

• DNA-testing companies like 23andMe sell your genetic data to drugmakers and other Silicon Valley startups. Perhaps you didn't intend for that spit sample you shipped off to be used for research on antacids.

• Diagnosis: Debt. More than 100 million people in America — a startling 41% of adults — are saddled with medical bills they cannot pay.

• More people than expected are dying in Canada in 2023 for reasons that are not yet clear. Hospitalizations are higher than during the first two pandemic summers, but are hovering around their lowest point since December, 2021.

• Even though America is richer than England, the average American has the same life-span as people in the town in England with the lowest life expectancy.

• California's doctor-assisted deaths surged 63% to 853 last year: critics say state law is unconstitutional, has made it too easy to get lethal drugs, and 'steers' disabled people to suicide.

• Overdiagnosis of Breast Cancer in Older Women—and Unnecessary Treatment—Is Widespread: Study. Over 240,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, and most will likely start treatment immediately. But according to new research, that may be a mistake.

• Cancer among younger Americans is on the rise, new study shows. Some of the biggest increases were seen in women and in younger people diagnosed with gastrointestinal and breast cancers.

Politics

• Germany considers ban on far-Right AfD. Call to 'defend democracy' as party surges to 21pc in opinion polls. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, warned in a speech to the country’s domestic intelligence agency that “we all have it in our hands to put those who despise our democracy in their place”.

• America is now a zombie state. Demonic nihilism has infected the nation. The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce.

• Hawaii governor says state is looking to 'acquire land' that was destroyed in fires. He also announced a moratorium on any out-of-state property sales.

• Pandora’s Jar is Opened Again. We have had another experience with Prometheus and Pandora in the past few years. Some created a dangerous virus only because they could. Some created a dangerous vaccine only because they could. Others exploited both the pandemic and the vaccine to exalt their status and wealth and power, and to unleash the miseries locked in a jar. Prometheus has given us fire. Pandora has followed. Thus the terror of civilization.

• UK population collapse ‘good for the planet’ as number of births hits 20-year low. Birth rate slump in West will address overconsumption, former government adviser says. Professor Sarah Harper CBE, founder and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a former government adviser, said falling birth rates in the West were “good for… our planet”.

• Jeffrey Epstein referred Obama White House counsel to JPMorgan as potential customer. Sex predator Jeffrey Epstein was involved in establishing the client relationship between Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and JPMorgan Chase in February 2019, four months before he was arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges, a new court filing revealed.

• The United States and its allies must be ready to deter a two-front war and nuclear attacks in East Asia. This report summarizes the results of a study focused on two of these emerging and interrelated challenges to deterrence in East Asia.

Science

• Arithmetic has a biological origin – it’s an expression in symbols of the ‘deep structure’ of our perception. Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true. By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, the authors have recently shown that arithmetic has biological roots and is a natural consequence of how perception of the world around us is organised.

• Physicists Just Figured Out How Wormholes Could Enable Time Travel. Distinct from spherical contortions of spacetime we might attribute to black holes, the ring wormhole proposed by Gibbons and Volkov connects patches of the Universe (or different universes, for that matter) that are what we call flat.

• World’s first commercial thorium reactor approved in China. The decision comes two years after researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics unveiled a prototype, which was billed as the first reactor that did not require water for cooling.

• Phage: The most abundant life form on Earth has a unique license to kill. Researchers estimate there may be as many as ten million trillion trillion phages on Earth — that's 10 with 30 zeros after it. Bacteriophages, known simply as “phages” for short, are viruses that infect and kill bacteria.

Technology

• [2011] US spy operation that manipulates social media. Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda. The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.

• Chinese military says it’s figured out how to build laser weapons that can fire indefinitely. The new Chinese cooling system, according to the report, would use gas that blows through the weapon to remove excess heat and allow for weapons to shoot precise laser beams for an indefinite amount of time without losing power or getting distorted.

• YouTube to Censor Content Contradicting WHO Guidelines. YouTube has introduced a new “medical misinformation policy” that will censor any medical or health-related content that doesn't align with claims made by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Ukraine

• Zelensky Called Him a Criminal. Now Ukraine Calls Him for Guns and Ammo. In its hunt for weapons, Ukraine has rolled back anticorruption rules and turned to people once seen as relics of an anything-goes era.

• Russia got richer even as the war in Ukraine raged on last year, while the West shed trillions of dollars of wealth. Russia added $600 billion of total wealth, the Swiss bank found in its annual Global Wealth Report, published Tuesday.

• Biden sends F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine despite saying this would lead to World War 3. A US official announced on Thursday that the Biden administration has approved the sending of American F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands.

• Zelensky holds court with Ukraine’s most notorious neo-Nazi. Western media has dismissed evidence of neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine by citing President Zelensky’s Jewish heritage. But new footage published by Zelensky shows the leader openly collaborating with a fascist ideologue who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

• Ukraine intelligence agency says sea drones carried out Kerch Bridge attack. Spy chief says remotely controlled drones, developed internally, were behind 17 July attack.

Vaccines

• mRNA Vaccination: Incomprehensible Secrecy Continues. Two professors say that too many questions about risks remain unanswered. The authorities refuse information and protect the manufacturers.

• Ex-medical chief Jonathan Van-Tam takes job with Covid vaccine giant Moderna. Move may spark fresh questions over ‘revolving door’ between government and business.

• Contamination of mRNA Vaccine, the Threat of “SV40”. Pfizer apparently used the simian DNA tumor virus SV40 (promoter and enhancer sequences) to upregulate the synthesis of the genetic code. These potentially oncogenic pieces of DNA should be dissolved with enzymes and washes in the mRNA purification process.