This Week's Must Reads - 2-8 October 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 more comprehensive daily summaries will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• Pope Francis scolds U.S., ‘irresponsible’ Western lifestyle in climate plea. Warning that “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” Pope Francis issued a renewed call for climate action Wednesday, singling out the United States for “irresponsible” Western excess and decrying the “weakness” of world leaders for failing to take bold steps.

• Holidays could be restricted if personal carbon allowances are introduced, warns travel firm. A report by Intrepid Travel claimed drastic measures could be introduced as many popular holiday destinations face ‘extinction’. It predicted that “personal carbon allowances” may be introduced to reduce emissions.

• Drivers in Singapore must pay £88,000 for permission to own a car (and that does not even include the price of buying a vehicle!). When combined with a Toyota Camry Hybrid, registration fees and taxes, that totals £151,000, five times more than it would in the UK, and over double the average household salary.

Covid

• The Covid Cover-up. Health authorities and policymakers squandered public trust by lying to the American people. Top officials had firm ideas about what policies were needed to slow the disease, and they didn’t trust civilians to handle nuanced questions or awkward facts. Instead, they tried to nudge the public toward what they viewed as proper behavior through oversimplifications, half-truths, and noble lies.

• Rand Paul’s Expose Of Anthony Fauci Reads Like A Bioweapon Spy Thriller. Deception presents massive evidence for two propositions: Covid was created with U.S. funding, and Fauci covered up his responsibility for creating that situation. It’s an in-depth accounting of how one man — Anthony Fauci — may be responsible for not only creating the Covid-19 outbreak but for turning an accident into a global catastrophe.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Estimated 11,000 Ontarians died waiting for surgeries, scans in past year. The surgical waitlist in Ontario surpasses 200,000 people. This comes off the back of a 21-page report from CUPE’S Ontario Council of Hospital Unions that found hospital staff vacancies have grown dramatically, increasing 19 per cent over the last year, and currently 37,00 positions remain unfilled.

• Lockdowns have created a 'ticking cancer timebomb': Doctors warn it'll be YEARS before death rates return to pre-pandemic levels - because hospitals focused on Covid. The US could be on the precipice of a spike in cancer deaths in the years to come after preventative screening and early diagnoses plummeted during the pandemic.

• Sunak fails to hand WhatsApp messages from time as chancellor to Covid inquiry. Rishi Sunak has failed to hand over his WhatsApp messages from his time as chancellor to the Covid inquiry despite the high court ruling that ministers should disclose their communications for scrutiny.

• An analysis of studies pertaining to masks in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: Characteristics and quality of studies from 1978 to 2023. MMWR publications pertaining to masks drew positive conclusions about mask effectiveness >75% of the time despite only 30% testing masks and <15% having statistically significant results. No studies were randomized, yet over half drew causal conclusions. The level of evidence generated was low and the conclusions were most often unsupported by the data. The findings raise concern about the reliability of the journal for informing health policy.

• NZ doctors avoided Covid jabs while insisting the public had them. The New Zealand Ministry of Health granted vaccine exemptions to hundreds among its key staff whilst hypocritically insisting that the public be vaccinated. It seems that those granted exemptions were restrained by gagging orders so that they could not tell anyone that they had been granted exemptions: it was a secretive process that the Ministry of Health was anxious to hide from the public.

• Lockdown caused depression and suicides in the elderly, says Age UK. Charity tells the Covid Inquiry many older people self-harmed, suffered a ‘loss of confidence’ and ‘are still afraid to leave their homes’.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• If the bond markets aren’t scaring you yet, they should be. It’s Yield-mageddon in the US, as the post-COVID bill comes in for paying. In less than three months, long-term interest rates have risen nearly a full percentage point in the U.S., dragging up borrowing costs for governments, companies and households around the world. And they don’t show any sign of stopping yet.

• Credit card losses are rising at the fastest pace since the Great Financial Crisis. Goldman Sachs predicts credit card losses will continue to climb through the end of 2024/early 2025. What is unusual is that the losses are accelerating outside of an economic downturn, the firm said. Credit card losses currently stand at 3.63%, up 1.5 percentage points from the bottom.

• Trucking employment in the US is falling off a cliff. Historically, the beginning of the fall precedes a recession.

  

• The giant asset price crash that nobody is talking about. Away from the limelight, a silent financial crisis is brewing. In the past week, the bond market sell-off has reignited anew, fed by the idea that though interest rates may now have peaked, central banks are likely to hold them at elevated levels for longer than previously thought – “Table Mountain” rather than the up and down Matterhorn profile once assumed.

• Why borrowing costs for nearly everything are surging, and what it means for you. At the center of the storm of this week’s market turmoil is the 10-year Treasury yield, one of the most influential numbers in finance. The yield, which represents borrowing costs for issuers of bonds, has climbed steadily in recent weeks and reached 4.8% Tuesday, a level last seen just before the 2008 financial crisis.

• Metro Bank plunges on talk of big fundraising to fix finances. Metro Bank (MTRO.L) shares closed down 26% on Thursday following reports it was exploring options to raise as much as 600 million pounds ($728 million) in debt and equity to bolster its finances, the latest in a string of setbacks to befall the UK lender.

• The collapse in Treasury bonds now ranks among the worst market crashes in history. Since March 2020, Treasury bonds with maturities of 10 years or more have plummeted 46%, Bloomberg says. That's just under losses seen in the stock market when the dot-com bubble burst. The bond rout is worse than the one seen in 1981 when the 10-year yield neared 16%.

• The US has added $275 Billion to the US debt in one day. It is on track to increase the total debt by $1 trillion in one month!

  

• The US housing market is so expensive that incomes would have to spike 55% for it to be considered affordable, industry exec says. Andy Walden, ICE vice president of enterprise research, said "If you look at home affordability itself, and what it would take to normalize the market today, it's a 35% correction in price, or a 4% decline in rates, or a 55% growth in income," Walden said.

• Be Prepared, Folks...Deflation, in size, is coming. It is inevitable for one reason above all others: The other alternative is the economic and political collapse of the nation. The market is telling you it will not be collapse - it will be deflation. Powell lacks the stones to publicly tell Congress to either cut the deficit spending or the market is going to take away the rate question from The Fed entirely and, in fact, it always has in that The Fed has always, historically, followed market rates.

Health

• [2009] Merck Created Hit List to "Destroy," "Neutralize" or "Discredit" Dissenting Doctors. Merck made a "hit list" of doctors who criticized Vioxx, according to testimony in a Vioxx class action case in Australia. The list, emailed between Merck employees, contained doctors' names with the labels "neutralise," "neutralised" or "discredit" next to them.

• Primodos: another example of MHRA’s failure to “put patients first”. UK took 20 years to withdraw drug after harms were first made known. Most people are aware of Thalidomide, many are aware of Valproate, but there are several other drugs that have caused birth defects in children that are less well known including Debendox, Carbimazole and Primodos. “Children were born with serious deformities due to the hormone pregnancy test drug Primodos, which was taken by expectant mothers between 1953 and 1975”.

• WHO: ‘Meat Supply’ Will Cause ‘Next Pandemic’. The globalist World Health Organization (WHO) has started warning that the “meat supply” will trigger the “next pandemic” by causing deadly pathogens to jump from animals to humans. This disturbing new narrative comes amid an already escalating war against agriculture and livestock farming over claims that producing meat and dairy products contributes to the so-called “climate crisis.”

Politics

• Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The CRTC is setting out which online streaming services need to provide information about their activities in Canada. The Canadian government has announced that all “social media services…[and] online services that offer podcasts must register” with the government.

• It’s time to admit it: Black Lives Matter hysteria made fools of us all. As a British protest organiser admits fraud, it’s hard to help wondering: what exactly came over us in summer 2020? Remember the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol? The one where the mob tipped the statue into the harbour? In court this week, one of its organisers admitted fraud, after £30,000 in donations from Black Lives Matter supporters went missing.

• Sweden and the lethal complacency of the elites. It’s not racist to talk about the crisis of integration – it’s essential. Are we allowed to talk about Sweden yet? Now that the Swedish army is being asked to help cops with a surge in gangland killings, can we ask if perhaps there is something rotten in the state of Sweden?

• Donald Trump Followers Targeted by FBI as 2024 Election Nears. The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.

• Crisis-hit NHS board offer reparations to ‘make amends’ for slavery links. NHS Lothian accused of ‘expending scarce resources’ on non-urgent project after report finds hospital profited from plantation. An NHS Lothian report found that, in today’s money, the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh had profited by almost £40 million from slavery, including through ownership of a small Caribbean slave plantation, left to it in a surgeon’s will in 1750.

• Bank of England boss finally admits 'Project Fear' Brexit warnings were all wrong. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has stunned Remainers in an interview admitting that Project Fear against Brexit was wrong. He said: "If you go back to the period after the referendum, there were pretty dire predictions about the consequences of Brexit for the financial services world, for the City of London. And I think so far those effects have been smaller.” He then went on to admit that EU regulations did not suit the UK. “You know, I’ve always said, not everything about EU regulation was best-suited to any national circumstances."

• FBI knew all about Joe and Hunter’s business dealings, laptop authenticity — and did nothing: files. Within several days of The New York Post breaking its blockbuster 2020 story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the FBI received a flash drive containing emails and text messages from the cellphones of one of Hunter’s business partners, confirming the contents of Hunter’s computer were real and not “disinformation,” as the FBI led social media and the public to believe.

Science

• [January] Scientists Want to Use People As Antennas to Power 6G. Why? Because your body is pretty great at harvesting wasted energy. We don’t yet know exactly how 6G wireless technology is going to work. But researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst believe using humans as antennas to power 6G may be the most viable way to harvest additional energy that would otherwise get wasted.

• How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science. Especially in climate and Covid research, abuse of peer review and self-censorship abound. Scientists were aghast last month when Patrick Brown, climate director at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., acknowledged that he’d censored one of his studies to increase his odds of getting published. Credit to him for being honest about something his peers also do but are loath to admit. Scientific journals and preprint servers aren’t selective about research quality. They’re selective about the conclusions.

• Earth has just started emitting Giant Magnetic Waves from its Core. The interior of the Earth is everything from peaceful. The world is teeming with activity deep below our surface, from plate tectonics to convection currents that move through the heated magmatic fluids deep beneath the crust. Scientists have discovered something inside Earth that has never before been observed through satellite data analysis: a novel kind of magnetic wave that circles the surface of our planet's core every seven years.

• A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant. Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.

• Independent age estimates resolve the controversy of ancient human footprints at White Sands. Traditionally, researchers believed that humans arrived in North America around 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. Recently, however, evidence has accumulated supporting a much earlier date. In 2021, fossilized footprints from White Sands National Park in New Mexico were dated to between 20,000 and 23,000 years ago, providing key evidence for earlier occupation, although this finding was controversial. Pigati et al. returned to the White Sands footprints and obtained new dates from multiple, highly reliable sources (see the Perspective by Philippsen). They, too, resolved dates of 20,000 to 23,000 years ago, reconfirming that humans were present far south of the ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum.

Technology

• 23andMe User Data Stolen in Targeted Attack on Ashkenazi Jews. At least a million data points from 23andMe accounts appear to have been exposed on BreachForums. While the scale of the campaign is unknown, 23andMe says it's working to verify the data. There also seem to be hundreds of thousands of users of Chinese descent impacted by the leak.

• Gang violence pushes Sweden to consider face biometrics as surveillance cameras multiply. The Swedish government is rushing to prepare the public for expanded police use of biometric systems including those monitoring from traffic stanchions and drones. The kind of facial recognition authorized is unspecified in the report, but the references to drones and traffic cameras appears to indicate an intention to use live, rather than just retrospective, facial recognition.

• AI facial recognition: Campaigners and MPs call for ban. Police and private companies should "immediately stop" the use of facial recognition surveillance, says a group of politicians and privacy campaigners. They have raised concerns around human rights, potential for discrimination and "the lack of a democratic mandate". It comes after the government announced plans for police to access passport photos to help catch criminals.

Ukraine

• British troops could deploy to Ukraine for first time to train soldiers, says Grant Shapps. Shapps, who met Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, for talks in Kyiv earlier this week, said the proposal being discussed would reduce the reliance on the UK and other Nato members’ bases. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Shapps also disclosed that he talked to Zelenskiy about how the navy could help to defend commercial vessels from Russian attacks in the Black Sea.

• Jeffrey Sachs: NATO Expansion & Ukraine’s Destruction. Ukraine is being destroyed by U.S. arrogance, proving again Henry Kissinger’s adage that to be America’s enemy is dangerous, while to be its friend is fatal. The Ukraine War will end when the U.S. acknowledges a simple truth: NATO enlargement to Ukraine means perpetual war and Ukraine’s destruction.

• Leaked U.S. strategy on Ukraine sees corruption as the real threat. A report obtained by POLITICO details specific plans to reform Ukrainian institutions and warns Western support may hinge on cutting corruption. The “sensitive but unclassified” version of the long-term U.S. plan lays out numerous steps Washington is taking to help Kyiv root out malfeasance and otherwise reform an array of Ukrainian sectors. It stresses that corruption could cause Western allies to abandon Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion, and that Kyiv cannot put off the anti-graft effort.

• Nato won’t win a long war in Ukraine. An Afghanistan-style conflict could cripple Europe. As grand acts of foreign diplomacy go, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent trip to Washington will make the history books for all the wrong reasons. From the moment his jet touched down, the Ukrainian president was greeted with a lukewarm reception, and was even denied a request to address a joint session of the US Congress.

• Dutch defense chief says supporting Ukraine is 'very cheap way' to ensure Russia not threat to NATO. 'We cannot pretend that we'll just wait and see how the American elections are going,' says Kajsa Ollongren. The defense minister highlighted that if the US support for Ukraine falls, that would be "substantial."

• Military briefing: Ukraine provides ideal ‘testing ground’ for western weaponry. Kyiv’s defence minister says allies are gaining priceless intelligence about the performance of their munitions. Experts had long suspected the Patriot was capable of shooting down a Kinzhal, but it took the Ukrainian military to demonstrate it. They have since intercepted more than a dozen. Kyiv’s western allies “can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded”, Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview. “For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground,” he added.

Vaccines

• Assessment of Myocardial 18F-FDG Uptake at PET/CT in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2-vaccinated and Nonvaccinated Patients. Vaccinated patients had overall higher myocardial FDG uptake compared to nonvaccinated patients. Compared to nonvaccinated patients, asymptomatic patients who received their 2nd vaccination 1-180 days prior to imaging showed increased myocardial FDG uptake on PET/CT.

• [2020] The Effect of Influenza Vaccination for the Elderly on Hospitalization and Mortality. An Observational Study With a Regression Discontinuity Design. The data included 170 million episodes of care and 7.6 million deaths. Turning 65 was associated with a statistically and clinically significant increase in rate of seasonal influenza vaccination. However, no evidence indicated that vaccination reduced hospitalizations or mortality among elderly persons. The estimates were precise enough to rule out results from many previous studies.

• What the shot?! Would Australians have consented if they knew the potential risks? The bombshell discovery of DNA contamination in mRNA Covid shots has shocked and alarmed scientists around the globe. They are calling on regulators to urgently stop the injections and conduct a full safety evaluation. Many worry that DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines could bring with it a truckload of serious risks and potential adverse outcomes, including the possibility of genomic integration. That is, the DNA in the injection becomes a part of the DNA of a person’s cells.