This Week's Must Reads - 19-25 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

• Climate Authoritarianism: WEF Wants 75% Fewer Private Car Owners By 2050. As the world witnessed with the covid pandemic, global institutions working with governments and corporations are happy to hype up false threats and inspire public hysteria if they think they can use that rising fear to whittle away our individual rights. The hype over “greenhouse emissions” is no exception. We have been hearing a lot lately about efforts to diminish or ban natural gas stoves in the US, to throttle agricultural production in Europe and to restrict meat in the public diet, but the most pervasive carbon restrictions are planned for cars and private transportation. The WEF has recently published a blueprint for reducing individual car ownership by 75% by the year 2050.

• UK Grid asks factories to use less energy next winter under blackout prevention plan. Scheme mirrors last winter's household focused programme that reduced power use. Households are also being asked to take part in the demand flexibility service again, which was first introduced last year. The Grid said the service helped to save more than 3,300 megawatt hours of electricity in total, roughly what it takes to power 9.9 million households at peak times for an hour.

• At the Paris Summit for A New Global Financing Pact, ECB President Christine Lagarde said “Climate change affects inflation and inflation is the beast that all central bankers…want to tame and discipline…it affects our balance sheet”.

Covid

• Critic of congressional probe into gain-of-function research helped fund Wuhan gain-of-function study. Peter Hotez, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine, has been a fierce critic of potential hearings next year into a possible lab origin of COVID-19 and whether the National Institutes of Health prematurely discredited the hypothesis. However, Hotez’s own 2012 to 2017 NIH grant for the development of a SARS vaccine had the stated aim of responding to any “accidental release from a laboratory,” in addition to a possible zoonotic spillover of the virus.

• Covid patients exposed to higher pollution levels ‘hospitalised for longer,’ says study. Experts find that, even at low levels, air pollution steeply increases risks for Covid-19 and other diseases. The study, published in the European Respiratory Journal on Wednesday, showed that patients exposed to fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide in the week before they were admitted were sicker and took longer to recover.

• Catching a COVID co-conspirator. Researchers identify an unexpected synergy between bacterial and viral molecules that causes severe inflammation in some patients with COVID-19. If bacterial components, such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS), leak out of the gut and into the bloodstream, pro-inflammatory cytokine production may surge—a problem often seen in patients with metabolic syndrome. Viruses can then exacerbate this underlying bacterial infection. “There has been accumulating clinical evidence linking LPS with severe COVID-19 cases,” said Peter Bond, a Senior Principal Investigator at A*STAR’s Bioinformatics Institute (BII).

• The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its declassified report on potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. It doesn’t contain any direct evidence that Covid began in the Wuhan lab.

• Was SARS-CoV-2 entirely novel or particularly deadly? As part of Pandata’s inquiry into the drivers of excess deaths, we take a step back and address the central theme of the Covid-era narrative: that SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus that is so deadly that drastic measures were needed to contain it.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The Covid inquiry’s verdict already seems to be in: we should’ve locked down even harder. Judging by its first week of hearings, it is going to fail in its duty to weigh up whether shutting down Britain did more harm than good. There is an urgent need to cross-examine the idea of lockdown and its associated restrictions. How did the models on which the closures were based compare to real-world data? Did skewed incentives push officials into excessive authoritarianism? Did scientists’ predictions match the actual development of the disease? Did facemasks work? Did closing schools make a difference? Were we right to insist on vaccinating young people who had already acquired natural immunity?

• Top Canadian Official Apologizes to Unvaxxed: ‘We Were Wrong’. Danielle Smith, the current premier of Alberta in Canada, has just done something remarkable. According to a new report from Revolver News, Smith took the bold and unprecedented step of apologizing to unvaccinated Canadians who’ve faced unfair treatment from the government throughout the “pandemic.” The top official has now promised that anyone who was terminated from their job because of their choice to be unvaxxed will be reinstated.

• New emails show COVID vaccine mandates were based on a lie. Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former NIH Director Francis Collins were aware of, and discussed, “breakthrough cases” of COVID in January 2021 — right when the vaccines became widely available. In her email, Walensky says that “clearly,” it is an “important area of study,” links to a study raising the issue, and assures the person she is sending it to that Dr. Anthony Fauci is looped into these conversations.

• Sharing and Collecting Covid Stories: For Those Who Were Burned. Traumatic times in human experience are often best understood, across cultures, through the sharing of stories. Thi Thuy Van Dinh has a few personal stories from the Covid restrictions. As a mother, daughter, and human, they illustrate to her that something is deeply wrong.

• Widow says husband was KILLED as punishment “for being unvaccinated”. Registered nurse Elena Vlaica, 46, has spoken out many times about the murder of her husband Stuart in hospital 17 months ago. She claims that 54-year-old Stuart, who’d been admitted to hospital with a possible chest infection, was bullied, humiliated, overdosed and experimented on before he was finally killed. A consultant started calling Elena on FaceTime every day. “He called me every day for 10 days at the same time. The language he used was strange. It was if he was MK Ultra brainwashed. He’d always start the conversation saying that Stuart was unvaccinated. He’d say three things over and over – Covid, unvaccinated, end of life. It was like some kind of NLP (neurolinguistic programming).

• The Most Important Meeting in the History of the World That Never Happened. In the third week of March a secret emergency meeting was scheduled to take place between President Donald Trump, the COVID Task Force, and eight of the most eminently qualified public health experts in the world. This elite group of scientists was slated to present the highest-level decision-makers in our government with an alternative POV to lock down; a much-needed second opinion on national turtling.

• Military Members Kicked Out For Refusing COVID Vaccine Seek To Have Their Discharges Upgraded. Service members who received general discharges when separated from the military for their refusal to obey the vaccine mandate say their transition to civilian life has been hampered because they were not given honorable discharges.

Culture

• Elon Musk recommends Jim Caviezel’s movie on child trafficking be streamed on Twitter. 'Sound of Freedom,' to be released on July 4, is based on the life of Tim Ballard, a former CIA agent who founded Operation Underground Railroad in 2013 to root out trafficking efforts across the world. Twitter owner Elon Musk has encouraged Angel Studios to stream Sound of Freedom, its upcoming movie about child trafficking starring Jim Caviezel, on the platform. “I recommend putting it on this platform for free for a brief period or just asking people to subscribe to support (we would not keep any funds),” Musk tweeted Tuesday night.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Deutsche Bank’s top minds put U.S. recession chance near 100%—and say avoiding a hard landing would be ‘historically unprecedented’. The German multinational bank's top research team believes Washington has sparked a boom-bust cycle that now is nearing its end stage. In its house view, the recession slated to arrive as soon as October is the inevitable consequence of a series of aggressive rate hikes designed to extinguish the very flames of inflation that policymakers ignited through their own actions during the COVID pandemic.

• Whistleblowing banker who went to prison speaks out. Johnson's lawyer Tony Woodcock, now retired but then a senior partner at prominent white-collar crime specialists Stephenson Harwood, sees his former client's prosecution as an outrage. Senior MPs including former Brexit secretary David Davis and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell have come to share that view after reading a book exposing the scandal. "In over 30 years in practice I never had a case in which I felt so powerless and bullied and where the smell of politics was so rancid. Hopefully all the evil lurking in the mud will be found out," Mr Woodcock says.

• Where Housing Prices Have Crashed and Billions in Wealth Have Vanished. In New Zealand, high interest rates have sent property prices sliding nearly 18 percent since November 2021. Over the last 18 months, homeowners and investors have lost billions of dollars in wealth after prices that spiked during the Covid pandemic started plunging as mortgage rates also soared. “If we listed it, say, two months before we originally did, it would have literally sold the next day,” Mr. Wilson said. [sound familiar?]

• United Nations Planning Digital ID Linked to Bank Accounts. The plan, which is similar to the system developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), is outlined in three new policy briefs from the UN titled, “A Global Digital Compact, Reforms to the International Financial Architecture, and The Future of Outer Space Governance.” The goal of the briefs is to advance UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s “vision for the future.” Officially titled “Our Common Agenda,” Guterres’ “vision” should be given the green light in September 2024 during an event dubbed, “The Summit for the Future.”

• [How many concerned their connection with Epstein?] JPMorgan Chase is fined by SEC after mistakenly deleting 47 million emails. According to the SEC, JPMorgan has been unable in at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory probes to comply with subpoenas and document requests for communications that had been permanently deleted.

Health

• Short daytime naps may keep brain healthy as it ages, study says. Brief doze may delay brain shrinkage, which occurs faster in people with neurodegenerative diseases. That is of interest, the team say, as brain shrinkage, a process that occurs with age, is accelerated in people with cognitive problems and neurodegenerative diseases, with some research suggesting this may be related to sleep problems.

• Heart deaths surge by more than 500 a week since pandemic. Experts say Britain is ‘in the grip of a heart and stroke care emergency’ due to NHS disruptions in care and increasing ambulance delays. The study of government data revealed almost 100,000 extra deaths among people with cardiovascular disease (CVD) since spring 2020. While excess cardiovascular deaths in the first year of the pandemic were linked to coronavirus infections, heart deaths have remained high since Covid deaths fell.

• Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why. Shanna Swan has been investigating the impact of chemicals on human fertility for decades. For more than two decades she has devoted her life to studying the effects of “endocrine disrupting” chemicals(opens a new window) (EDCs), which can interfere with the body’s natural hormones. These include pesticides, bisphenols(opens a new window), which harden plastic so it can be used in food storage containers and baby bottles, and phthalates(opens a new window), which soften plastic for use in packaging and products such as garden hoses. In recent years, traces of EDCs have been found in breast milk, placental tissue, urine, blood and seminal fluid.

Military

• Declassified files expose British role in NATO’s Gladio terror armies. Newly declassified British files shed disturbing light on the origins and internal workings of Operation Gladio, a covert NATO plot deploying fascist terror militias across Italy. Among them was a young Silvio Berlusconi, the media oligarch who served as Italian Prime Minister in four separate governments between 1994 and 2011. Listed as a member of the P2, the secret Cold War-era cabal of political elites devoted to Gladio’s aims, Berlusconi undoubtedly took some weighty secrets to the grave when he died this June 12th. Have spies in London applied these lessons in Ukraine?

News

• Missing Titanic Sub Once Faced Massive Lawsuit Over Depths It Could Safely Travel To. Court documents reveal a former OceanGate employee had several safety complaints over the tourist submersible—and then he was fired. Given the prevalent flaws in the previously tested 1/3 scale model, and the visible flaws in the carbon end samples for the Titan, Lochridge again stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths. The constant pressure cycling weakens existing flaws resulting in large tears of the carbon. Non-destructive testing was critical to detect such potentially existing flaws in order to ensure a solid and safe product for the safety of the passengers and crew.

• U.S. Navy Detected Titan Sub Implosion Days Ago. Underwater microphones designed to detect enemy submarines first detected Titan tragedy. The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications, according to a U.S. defense official. Shortly after its disappearance, the U.S. system detected what it suspected was the sound of an implosion near the debris site discovered Thursday and reported its findings to the commander on site, U.S. defense officials said.

Politics

• Jeffrey Epstein claimed to have set up meetings with senior UK ministers. JPMorgan report describes how sex offender offered to act as intermediary between Jes Staley and British government. A 22-page report by the bank, compiled following the arrest of its former client in 2019 and seen by the Financial Times, details how Epstein offered to connect Staley with UK chancellor at the time Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson, former business secretary and de facto deputy prime minister. In January 2010, just months after he was released from jail having served a sentence for sex crimes, Epstein wrote to Staley: “I’ve set up you and peter to meet in davos with darling,” a reference to the World Economic Forum that was taking place in Switzerland.

• The new world war on free speech. The Censorship Industrial Complex has taken root. The war on free speech is hardly a novel phenomenon, instead mutating over the centuries. What is new, however, is its global aspirations: today, the conflict takes the form of a world war. You can see its shadow in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every multinational organisation, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation, we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations and multilateral organisations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online.

• Beijing Plans a New Training Facility in Cuba, Raising Prospect of Chinese Troops on America’s Doorstep. Biden administration scrambles to forestall China’s ambitions in the Caribbean. China and Cuba are negotiating to establish a new joint military training facility on the island, sparking alarm in Washington that it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops and other security and intelligence operations just 100 miles off Florida’s coast, according to current and former U.S. officials.

• The 15-minute city is a working-class nightmare. A car-free lifestyle is only possible for those whose profession and income permit it. Many metropolitan progressives have sought to claim that these protesters were, if not sinister far-rightists, “petit-bourgeois”, not genuinely working class. But the reclassification of many workers who would have been employees in the past as contractors, by businesses seeking to minimise labour costs, has created a growing precariat of people who are nominally self-employed but part of the working class by any sensible definition.

• Fight this sinister power grab by the WHO, Part 2. The first part of this series of articles investigating the WHO power grab, focused on proposed amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR) that, if adopted in May 2024, present a serious threat to national and individual sovereignty. Since the publication of that article, there has been a development relating to the proposed, and separate, ‘WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ known as ‘WHO CA+’ with the publication of a new WHO CA+ Bureau Draft on June 2.

• Sanders Unveils Bill to Force Pentagon to Pass an Audit—or Return Part of Its Budget. "The Pentagon and the military-industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement for decades. That is absolutely unacceptable." In December, the Pentagon flunked its fifth consecutive audit, unable to account for more than 60% of its $3.5 trillion in total assets.

Science

• A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus. By measuring inflated helium nuclei, physicists have challenged our best understanding of the force that binds protons and neutrons. Bira van Kolck, a nuclear theorist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said Bacca and her colleagues have exposed a significant problem in nuclear physics. They’ve found, he said, an instance where our best understanding of nuclear interactions — a framework known as chiral effective field theory — has fallen short.

• We Recovered Shock-Resisting Steel in the Debris Field of the First Recognized Interstellar Meteor, IM1. On Run 6 of the magnetic sled through the likely crash site of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1, the expedition research team recovered shards of corroded iron. At first, we thought it may be common industrial iron associated with human-made ocean trash. But when Ryan Weed ran the sample of shards through the X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analyzer, the most likely alloy it flagged is S5 steel with titanium, which is also known as shock-resisting steel.

• The billion-dollar search for immortality - There's nothing noble about cheating death. Home to one of the world’s highest concentrations of scientific talent, Altos Labs is pursuing a lavishly funded quest to unearth the secrets of ageing. The Stanford-meets-Soho House décor is enough to show that here, health is wealth. But even in the notoriously well-compensated field of biotechnology it stands out. Last year, the Silicon Valley venture revealed it had raised $3 billion from investors, making it one of the best-financed start-ups in history.

Technology

• AI: The worst-case scenario. Artificial intelligence’s architects warn it could cause human "extinction." How might that happen? One scenario is that malevolent actors will harness its powers to create novel bioweapons more deadly than natural pandemics. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into the systems that run the world, terrorists or rogue dictators could use AI to shut down financial markets, power grids, and other vital infrastructure, such as water supplies. The global economy could grind to a halt. Authoritarian leaders could use highly realistic AI-generated propaganda and Deep Fakes to stoke civil war or nuclear war between nations.

• Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’. The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications. There’s been some research into how using AI in their jobs will affect people mentally, but there isn’t yet an understanding of how simply living amongst so much AI-generated content and systems will affect people’s sense of the world. How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future?

• Will Artificial Intelligence Solve the ‘Socialist Calculation’ Problem? To get literary, perhaps we are on the verge of creating the Machines, the artificial intelligences that plan the global economy in Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Evitable Conflict” (which became the last chapter of his book, I, Robot.) The Machines perfectly calculate the needs of humanity and organize the economic order to best provide for them, in keeping with the first law of robotics, that “a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.”

Ukraine

• Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid. The Pentagon says it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years, resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine.

• How US and UK government propaganda specialists collaborated with Nazis in Ukraine. While Western media have belatedly been forced to concede that there are Nazi influences in Ukraine, many journalists have insisted that the visible fascist patches on uniforms are only there to troll Russians and that they are insignificant and a gift to Russian propaganda. Still, other journalists admit to asking Ukrainian service members to cover up their Nazi symbols. Yet, as we shall see, this collaboration goes much further.

• BlackRock, JP Morgan set up 'reconstruction bank' for Ukraine. BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are reportedly aiding the Ukrainian government in setting up a reconstruction bank that could see rebuilding projects being heavily invested in by private entities. The Financial Times noted that it would cost Ukraine roughly $411 billion to rebuild their country amid the onslaught of attacks by Russia, but the cost is continuing to increase. The Ukraine Development Fund is still in the early stages of setting up the reconstruction bank, but potential investors will get an inside preview of how things will look during a London conference that is set to take place this week.

Vaccines

• Scrapped Covid vaccine deal with Valneva cost UK taxpayers £358m. French firm Valneva was meant to make more than 100m vaccines at its West Lothian plant, but the deal was controversially scrapped in 2021. Financial records filed by Valneva show it has received hundreds of millions of pounds in non-refundable payments.

• Exposing the Vaccine ‘Military Machinery’ Behind the Global COVID-19 Response: Sasha Latypova. “What we found is [that] the whole representation of what is happening is a lie … The U.S. government is representing to the public that this is a health event and the response to a health event. But in fact, … this is a military operation.”

• Swiss Bombshell—First Prospective Study Shows Far Greater Myocardial Concern with mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Dose. Published earlier this year in French with an English translation, during last year’s European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress, Professor Christian Eugen Mueller, based in University Hospital Basel in Basel, Switzerland presented study results from the prospective investigation titled “Myocardial Inflammation/Myocarditis After COVID-19 mRNA Booster Vaccination.” The study results reveal the actual incidence of post-vaccination myocardial lesions is 2.8% vs 0.0035% of myocarditis in retrospective studies. Impacting women more in this research, this data is contrary to what has been described by the retrospective research and what has been captured by regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in mRNA vaccine package inserts.