This Week's Must Reads - 15-21 April 2024

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 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

• Germany’s transport minister is threatening to ban driving on weekends to meet climate goals if the ruling coalition does not pass reforms to the Climate Protection Act by July. “The fact that the amendment is still not in force leads to considerable legal and factual uncertainties,” liberal politician Volker Wissing wrote in a letter to the parliamentary group leaders of the coalition, German outlet BILD reported Thursday. “This serves neither the climate nor the reputation of the federal government," he said.

• Dubai Grinds to Standstill as Cloud Seeding Worsens Flooding. Torrential rains across the United Arab Emirates prompted flight cancellations, forced schools to shut and brought traffic to a standstill. The heavy rains that caused widespread flooding across the desert nation came after cloud seeding. The UAE has been carrying out seeding operations since 2002 to address water security issues, even though the lack of drainage in many areas can trigger flooding. The Gulf state’s National Center of Meteorology dispatched seeding planes from Al Ain airport on Monday and Tuesday to take advantage of convective cloud formations, according to Ahmed Habib, a specialist meteorologist. The NCM on Wednesday said the seeding had taken place on Sunday and Monday, and not on Tuesday.

• [2023] UK’s DARPA-inspired ARIA is exploring how to control the weather, geoengineer climate. The UK research agency published an opportunity space document entitled, “Managing our climate and weather through responsible engineering,” which was authored by ARIA program director Mark Symes. Under the “core beliefs” section that underlies this research opportunity, Symes writes: “Through carefully-considered engineering solutions it may eventually be possible to actively and responsibly control the climate and weather at regional and global scale”.

Covid

• How Ivermectin Trials Were Designed to Fail. The use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 is an ongoing debate. The central conflict is that while many doctors have reported success in using ivermectin, some studies published in major journals suggest it is in fact ineffective. Even as the FDA recently has been removing misinformation it posted about ivermectin, the agency has maintained its original position regarding its effectiveness, namely that there isn’t evidence. People who trust ivermectin claim the studies showing ineffectiveness are fraudulent, while people who are skeptical of its use for treating COVID-19 view it as an anti-science conspiracy theory.

• ‘Sweden has been vindicated on Covid’ - Martin Kulldorff on why lockdowns were a disaster for public health. Almost as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, governments began locking down. These measures, we were told, might have been insanely authoritarian and historically unprecedented, but politicians were just ‘following the science’. We simply had to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. And yet, in Sweden, ‘the science’ looked very different. The nation refused to go into full lockdown, insisting this would be better for health in the long-run. It made itself a global pariah in the process. So, four years on from the first lockdowns across the West, has Sweden’s more liberal approach been proven wrong or vindicated?

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Exactly What Are WHO Member States Voting for? With Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) negotiating new agreements to centralize management of pandemics with an annual budget of over $31.5 billion, it would be reasonable to assume that everyone was clear on what a pandemic actually is. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Although countries will be voting in two months on a new Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) to grant the WHO wide authority over pandemic management, there is no universally-agreed definition of “pandemic.” What degree of severity is required? How widespread must it be? What proportion of the population must be at risk?

• What authority would scare and shame an already frightened population? When citizens have amended their lifestyles in order to function under difficult circumstances, what government would seek to actively disrupt these necessary and understandable adaptations? And what government believes that a fearful population during a ‘pandemic’ is not acceptable, and opts to instil panic instead? A recently published paper by HART member, Dr Gary Sidley, has revealed that such a regime is our very own UK Government, aided and abetted by their advisors and behavioural science experts.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Lockheed Martin has won a $17 billion contract to develop the next generation of interceptors to defend the United States against an intercontinental ballistic missile attack, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said on Monday. The interceptor program is aimed at defeating current ballistic missile threats and future technological advances from countries such as North Korea and Iran. The win represents a shot in the arm for Lockheed after the United States said it wanted to reduce F-35 orders, and the Army in February abandoned development of a Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, a next-generation helicopter for which Lockheed had submitted a design.

• US Treasury Yields are on the rise again.

  

• Tesla to cut 10% of global workforce. Tesla is cutting more than 10 per cent of its workforce — at least 14,000 jobs — as a worldwide EV slowdown and brutal price war hit the American automaker. “We have . . . made the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by more than 10 per cent globally . . . this will enable us to be lean, innovative and hungry for the next growth phase cycle,” wrote Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk in an internal memo to employees seen by the Financial Times.

• The market cap of the largest stock relative to the 75 percentile stock has risen past the level seen during the Great Depression.

  

• The Bitcoin Halving Crash Course – What Is It & Why It Matters. The significance of the halving is that every 210,000 blocks, the block reward is cut in half (hence, the “halving” or “halvening”). 210,000 blocks pencils out to about four years. It is this halving mechanism that creates the 21,000,000 BTC hard cap for Bitcoin. This halving – which will happen on Friday – is the fourth bitcoin halving – and it will take the block reward down from 6.25 BTC now, to 3.125 afterwards (it started at 50, then 25 in 2012, 12.5 in 2016, 6.25 in 2020, and so on). In previous cycles this has set up a “supply shock” for the price of Bitcoin – driving prices higher. Sometimes mind-bogglingly so.

• Banks saw their lowest YoY earnings gains for 40 years in 2023. Only 32% of banks reported YoY gains.

  

• US deficit poses ‘significant risks’ to global economy, warns IMF. The fund said in its benchmark Fiscal Monitor that it expected the US to record a fiscal deficit of 7.1 per cent next year — more than three times the 2 per cent average for other advanced economies. The US and China were among four countries the fund named that “critically need to take policy action to address fundamental imbalances between spending and revenues”. The others were the UK and Italy.

  Rampant spending by the US and China in particular could “have profound effects for the global economy and pose significant risks for baseline fiscal projections in other economies”, the IMF said.

• Average long-term US mortgage rate climbs above 7% to highest level since late November. Prospective homebuyers are facing higher costs to finance a home with the average long-term U.S. mortgage rate moving above 7% this week to its highest level in nearly five months. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage rose to 7.1% from 6.88% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.39%. After climbing to a 23-year high of 7.79% in October, the average rate on a 30-year mortgage had remained below 7% since early December amid expectations that inflation would ease enough this year for the Federal Reserve to begin cutting its short-term interest rate.

• Don’t expect your chocolate to be as cheap next year!

  

• China Outweighs G-7 as Leading Driver of Global Economic Growth. China will be the top contributor to global growth over the next five years, with its share bigger than all Group of Seven countries combined, according to Bloomberg calculations using International Monetary Fund forecasts. China will account for about 21% of the world’s new economic activity from this year through 2029. That compares with 20% for the G-7, and almost double the nearly 12% for the US. In total, 75% of global growth is expected to be concentrated in 20 countries, and over half in the top four: China, India, the US and Indonesia. India is expected to contribute about 14% over the next five years, up from almost 13% in the 2023-2028 period.

Health

• Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Overtreatment with drugs kills many people, and the death rate is increasing. It is therefore strange that we have allowed this long-lasting drug pandemic to continue, and even more so because most of the drug deaths are easily preventable. Drug usage is now so common that newborns in 2019 could be expected to take prescription drugs for roughly half their lives in the US. Moreover, polypharmacy has been increasing.

• Low-carb diets work. Why does the American Diabetes Association push insulin instead? For a glimpse into how big business influences the $4tn US healthcare system, look no further than the world’s most powerful diabetes advocacy and research non-profit, the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Numerous nutritional studies have shown that diabetes can be reversed through a strict diet low in carbohydrates, the macronutrient that people with diabetes cannot metabolize without the help of drugs. The ADA concedes this – but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the drug therapies or the foods and recipes that the organization recommends to people suffering from the condition.

• What is causing the big difference in life expectancy between England and the US? Especially in the bottom end of the income distribution.

  

• Thousands of everyday snacks that face being banned in multiple states because their ingredients are linked to cancer - including Flamin' Hot Cheetos, Lucky Charms and Gatorade. California's landmark 'Skittles Ban', set to go into force in January 2027, outlawed four additives — brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and Red 3. Those ingredients have been banned in Europe for years due to their links to kidney, thyroid and gastrointestinal cancer and mood disorders.

Middle East

• America Fueled the Fire in the Middle East. Iran’s decision to retaliate against an Israeli attack on its consulate in Damascus, Syria, by launching drone and missile strikes reveals just how badly the Biden administration has mishandled the Middle East. Having convinced itself on the eve of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel that the region was “quieter than it has been for decades,” U.S. officials have since responded in ways that made a bad situation worse.

• How woke leftists became cheerleaders for Iran. How quickly the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ lobby turned into frothing warmongers. No sooner had Iran began its criminal bombardment of Israel than these phoney peaceniks were leaping up and down with delight. This is ‘true solidarity’, said one ‘pro-Palestine’ group in response to Iran’s raining down of missiles on the Jewish State. We can now glimpse the truth behind their fake pacifism. We can see their yearning for war on Israel that they cynically dress up as a campaign for peace in Palestine. It’s not a ceasefire woke Westerners want – it’s the humiliation and taming of the Jewish nation.

• RAF’S Support For Israel Stretches Concept of Self-Defence. Rishi Sunak’s decision to deploy RAF warplanes to shoot down Iranian drones heading for Israel raises serious questions about international law and the spectre of Britain’s involvement in a widening conflict in the Middle East. The contents of Britain’s military cooperation agreement with Israel signed in 2020, and a defence pact signed a year later, are secret but they are not believed to require Britain to protect Israel if it comes under attack. A more recent “2030 roadmap for UK-Israel bilateral relations” vaguely commits London to “tackle shared threats” with Tel Aviv. Sunak justified the RAF’s deployment as “saving lives not just in Israel but in neighbouring countries like Jordan as well”.

• How the IDF weaponized autism. Leora Sali, a physicist in charge of the technology team for the Mossad, who has an autistic son, persuaded some IDF officers to put together a small team of researchers to explore how the IDF could use the special capabilities of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) subjects. The team identified Intelligence Unit 9900 as the perfect fit. Unit 9900 gathers visual intelligence, including geographical data from satellites and aircraft, and is responsible for mapping and interpreting the visual intelligence for troops on the battlefield as well as for senior commanders. A key 9900 task is to screen vast numbers of photos of the same subject matter in order to detect very small variations between them, such as a small pile of earth that was moved or a new dirt road seemingly leading nowhere. In dense urban settings, the changes are even harder to decipher.

Politics

• Universities must be freed from the grasp of 'safe space' bureaucrats. Recent events have demonstrated the need to re-establish free inquiry, free speech and academic freedom at universities throughout North America. But current efforts by academic administrators to remedy the situation are often missing the point. You cannot restore free speech by creating further restrictions on what speech is appropriate, and by focusing on what sanctions may be appropriate and when.

• Inside the disinformation industry - A government-sponsored agency is censoring journalism. The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. Alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the GDI receives money from the UK government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department. In the US, a number of media organisations have started to take action against GDI’s partisan activism, prompted by a GDI report in 2022 that listed the 10 most dangerous sites in America.

  

• The sinister censorship of NatCon Brussels - The technocratic elites are the true menace to liberty. European public life is in real trouble, if today’s goings on in the Belgian capital are anything to go by. This morning, Emir Kir, the mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in Brussels, sent in the cops to shut down the National Conservatism Brussels conference, a gathering of conservative and right-wing intellectuals, politicians and writers. As Nigel Farage took to the stage, police amassed outside with an order for the event to close, on the grounds it was ‘creating a public disturbance’.

• A war is brewing in the Pacific - Will Aukus make the same mistakes as Nato? The US may be losing ground to new global powers in many respects, but when it comes to the business of sowing conflict around the world, it remains unrivalled. As it slowly abandons Ukraine to its own fate, after playing a crucial role in triggering the conflict in the first place, and as it contributes to the dangerous escalation in the Middle East, it is also laying the ground for a future war with China in Asia. If all this feels familiar, that’s because it is. In many respects, what is happening with Aukus in the Asia-Pacific is reminiscent of Nato’s post-Nineties expansion towards Russia’s border. Even then, Nato claimed that its expansion was defensive in nature and shouldn’t be viewed as a threat by Russia.

• Even Orwell’s Thought Police didn’t go as far as Trudeau. Under the bill, anyone can accuse you of the ‘communication of hate speech’ and if the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal finds you guilty it can order you to pay up to $20,000 to ‘any victim’ and $50,000 to the state (on pain of imprisonment). No limit on how many times a malefactor can be ordered to pay these fines, obviously, so bankruptcy looms for Jordan Peterson. And it isn’t just stuff you’ve posted after the new law comes into force you can get into trouble for – oh, no – but anything you’ve posted, ever, dating back to the dawn of the internet.

• Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight deadline. The legislation approved 60-34 with bipartisan support would extend for two years the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden “will swiftly sign the bill.” One of the major changes detractors had proposed centered around restricting the FBI’s access to information about Americans through the program. Though the surveillance tool only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications of Americans when they are in contact with those targeted foreigners.

• Islamists and the woke Left are uniting to topple the West. A new force is emerging in our politics. It’s not the “far-Right populism” that so many seem to fear. Quite the opposite. And the first step to getting to grips with it is to describe it honestly. Where else have we seen this interweaving of far-Leftism, Islamism, and wokeism? Not so much in Davos. Much more on the streets of London protesting about Gaza. For if you look at those anti-Israel demonstrations, you see just those three elements. First, the convinced Muslims – whether just orthodox, fundamentalist, or genuinely extreme. Second, the old Leftists – communists, Socialist Workers, and the like. And finally, the fashionable supporters of woke causes, LGBT rights campaigners, identity politics believers. However unlikely it is that LGBT campaigners would be warmly received in Gaza, all show solidarity in their cause.

Science

• [February] It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life. For too long, scientists have been content in espousing the lazy metaphor of living systems operating simply like machines, says science writer Philip Ball in How Life Works. Yet, it’s important to be open about the complexity of biology — including what we don’t know — because public understanding affects policy, health care and trust in science. “So long as we insist that cells are computers and genes are their code,” writes Ball, life might as well be “sprinkled with invisible magic”. But, reality “is far more interesting and wonderful”, as he explains in this must-read user’s guide for biologists and non-biologists alike. When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, many thought that it would prove to be an ‘instruction manual’ for life. But the genome turned out to be no blueprint. In fact, most genes don’t have a pre-set function that can be determined from their DNA sequence.

• Gobekli Tepe: Gradual evolution? Or transfer of technology? Or both? The transfer didn’t begin with Gobekli Tepe – which is itself 7,000 years older than Stonehenge. It didn’t even begin in the Neolithic. It began millennia earlier with Late Epipalaeolithic cultures, one of which has, since the 1920s, been referred to as Natufian. Of course, we don’t know what it was called by its own people, or even if it consisted of a single culture or multiple different cultures sharing similar lifeways. Future discoveries may force further revision of the picture, but it is beginning to look very much as though the earliest surviving evidence for the deliberate use of geometry and an architectural plan, so typical of Gobekli Tepe 11,600 years ago, comes down to us from the Natufian culture somewhere around 14,300 years ago.

• The Secret to the Strongest Force in the Universe - New discoveries demystify the bizarre force that binds atomic nuclei together. The strongest force in the universe is called, aptly, the strong force. We never get to witness its fearsome power because it works only across subatomic distances, where it binds quarks together inside protons and neutrons and joins those nucleons into atomic nuclei. Of the four basic forces of nature, the strong force is by far the most potent—it’s 100 trillion trillion trillion times stronger than the force of gravity. It’s also the most mysterious. Despite knowing roughly how it compares with the other forces, scientists don’t know precisely how strong the strong force is.

Technology

• Canada is making cars with eye monitors and kill switches. This includes a camera that monitors a driver’s eye and head movements 24/7 to see if they may be intoxicated or drowsy, as well as infrared sensors that can measure and analyze the breath of a driver to determine the carbon dioxide and alcohol levels to calculate whether they’re above the legal limit. Despite ostensibly being intended to increase safety, the myriad ways that this sort of technology could be expanded, manipulated, and abused are obvious—not to mention it could get things wrong even when it does work as advertised. But that isn’t stopping countries around the world from mandating this technology be installed in all new vehicles.

• Larry Sanger remembers the promise of the web. He co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, with the hope that it could sustain a “free and open” Internet—a place where information, dissent, and creativity could thrive. At Wikipedia, he proposed a system of rules that encouraged users to “avoid bias” and maintain a “neutral point of view.” That Internet is gone. “We know that there is a lot of backchannel communication and I think it has to be the case that the Wikimedia Foundation now, probably governments, probably the CIA, have accounts that they control, in which they actually exert their influence.”

• A new wave of wearable devices will collect a mountain on information on us – we need to get wise about the privacy implications. Web and mobile services try to understand the desires and goals of users by analysing how they interact with their platforms. Smartphones, for instance, capture online data from users at a large scale and low cost. Although wearables are commercially focused on health monitoring, researchers have long envisioned capturing other kinds of data on a user. A computer that could collect useful information related to a person’s brain activity, heart and skin function, or their movement patterns would be able to understand a huge amount about the user.

Ukraine

• US general says Russian army has grown by 15 percent since pre-Ukraine war. Gen. Christopher Cavoli also the supreme allied commander of Europe at the Western security alliance NATO, told lawmakers at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Russia is recruiting 30,000 soldiers per month. “The size of the Russian military is bigger today than when the war started,” he said. The growing Russian military points to the challenge for Ukraine and its Western allies in fending off a larger army that continues to grow. “The army is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” he said in written testimony. “Over the past year, Russia increased its front line troop strength from 360,000 to 470,000.

Vaccines

• mRNA-LNP COVID-19 Vaccine Lipids Induce Complement Activation and Production of Proinflammatory Cytokines. A small fraction of people vaccinated with mRNA–lipid nanoparticle (mRNA-LNP)-based COVID-19 vaccines display acute or subacute inflammatory symptoms whose mechanism has not been clarified to date. These findings suggest that the inflammatory Adverse Events of mRNA-LNP vaccines are due, at least in part, to stimulation of both arms of the innate immune system, whereupon C activation may be causally involved in the induction of some, but not all, inflammatory cytokines.

• Former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen links excess deaths to Covid vaccinations. MP Andrew Bridgen has drawn links between a recorded rise in excess deaths in the UK and Covid vaccinations, describing it as “the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory”. Mr Bridgen also accused nurses who were working during the pandemic of performing TikTok dances while patients died. Opening the debate on the Covid-19 pandemic response and excess deaths, the Independent MP argued there would be “less groupthink” if more MPs had a science background.