This Week's Must Reads - 22-28 January 2024

A summary of this week's most interesting news, studies, reports and articles

Jan 28, 2024

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

The dark side of environmental activism. In times of growing concerns about climate change, environmental activism is increasing. This study examined associations between environmental activism, the dark triad traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism) and left-wing authoritarianism (i.e., antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship). Results showed positive associations between environmental activism and Machiavellianism, narcissism, antihierarchical aggression, and anticonventionalism. These findings suggest that environmental activism, in addition to its potential positive outcomes, may also have a dark side in terms of activists' personality.
“Growing your own vegetables is bad for the planet”. Another blatant step in the plan to control our food. Apparently, a new study from the University of Michigan has found that “urban gardening” is 5 (or maybe 6, they’re not sure) times worse for the environment than “conventional crops”. The details aren’t the point. The point is yet another weapon in the war on food. More regulation, more commercialization, less freedom, all in the name of “fighting climate change”.
The end of the world is not around the corner. Environmental predictions about the End Times have a long and embarrassing history. Today, we’re told the world is no longer reckoning with mere climate change, but with ‘climate catastrophe’. Not global warming, but ‘global boiling’. Scarier still, the narrow window for saving humanity from eco-armaggeddon is apparently always just about to close shut. Or so scientists and activists say.

Covid

University keeps prominent Covid-19 scientist’s emails under wraps. The emails of a prominent Scottish scientist who dismissed fears that Covid came from a Chinese laboratory are being kept secret over concerns for his safety. The University of Edinburgh has refused to release the correspondence of Andrew Rambaut, a globally renowned virologist, about the source of the pandemic.
The Story of the Decade. New documents strengthen—perhaps conclusively—the lab-leak hypothesis of Covid-19’s origins. Both Beijing and Washington have covered up information about the origin of SARS2. Washington’s obfuscation has been aided by the puzzling inability of its 17 intelligence agencies to discover documents in the U.S. government’s own possession, and by a mainstream press too opinionated and ignorant of science to understand the story of the decade. U.S. responsibility lies in having allowed two senior health-research officials, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, to promote gain-of-function research (enhancing natural viruses) for years without adequate safety oversight or scientific consensus.
Pentagon Report Predicts New Age Of COVID Bioweapons And Brain Chip Warfare. The year is 2028, and a new and highly infectious coronavirus has struck the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed in the South China Sea. As the world grapples with this emerging pandemic, confusion runs rampant among officials at the CIA, CDC, and DOD, who bicker over the most effective response strategies. Meanwhile, China, seemingly immune to the novel virus, seizes the opportunity to launch a full-scale assault on Taiwan, capitalizing on the global chaos. This scenario, initially conceived by Pentagon researchers, may sound like science fiction, but military strategists believe that a "coronavirus bioweapon" may lurk on the horizon.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

To Get US Residency Requires the Covid Jab. There is a continued requirement that any legally immigrating person coming to the US from another country and seeking residency is absolutely required to get the Covid-19 vaccine, a shot widely admitted not to protect against infection or spread and is associated with injury on a scale without pharmaceutical precedent. There is a darker way to understand this policy move too. It serves as a filtering mechanism. Many people around the world were fleeing shot mandates from their home countries. Adding this one to the list of required injections was a way to signal to the world: the US would not provide any sanctuary to shot refuseniks, so don’t bother even trying.
BBC 'misrepresented' Covid risk to boost lockdown support, says top scientist. Prof Mark Woolhouse, an eminent epidemiologist and government adviser, lambasted the corporation for having “repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm”. He said this created the “misleading impression” among BBC News viewers at the start of the pandemic that “we are all at risk” and “the virus does not discriminate”. In reality, he said it was known at the time that the risk of dying from Covid was 10,000 times higher in the over-75s than the under-15s.
Room Filtration Didn’t Work Either. Journalist David Zweig spotted an interesting paper released by the British Medical Journal. It concerns the effectiveness of HEPA filters in classrooms as a means of slowing or stopping the spread of Covid. The study looked at German kindergarten classrooms with and without the system and concluded there was no difference. It’s not a surprising conclusion, once you think about it, simply because Covid is spread, if it is contracted at all, the way such coronaviruses are spread, namely through person-to-person aerosols.

Economy/Energy/Finance

Is the market prepared for a wave of goods inflation arriving from the spring and onwards? Freightco versus US PCE goods inflation.
Thailand Discovers Nearly 15 Million Tonnes Of Lithium. The find means Thailand has the third largest lithium resources, behind Bolivia and Argentina, but it is not yet clear how much can be exploited commercially. The 14.8 million tonnes of lithium are distributed between two separate sites in the southern province of Phang Nga, government deputy spokeswoman Rudklao Intawong Suwankiri told The Nation television station.
More than 47,000 UK businesses on ‘brink of collapse’, warn insolvency experts. It marks the second consecutive quarter-on-quarter period when critical financial distress has risen by a 25%, the latest “Red Flag” report by insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor found. The construction and property sectors accounted for 30% of all businesses facing critical financial distress. The quarterly rate of increase in the number of companies facing critical financial distress grew by 32.6% in the construction industry, by 41.3% in health and education, a quarter in real estate and property services and 24% in support services.
Trillion Dollar Dilemma: Is the US Treasury Market in Trouble? The US Treasury market impacts everything from mortgage rates to the value of the dollar in your pocket. Recent increases in government borrowing have raised questions regarding its future. Is the most important financial market in trouble? In addition to plugging the hole torn by deficits, the US government needs to refinance existing debt coming due — which is a lot. An astonishing 85% of Treasury debt issued in 2023 is due within one year or less. This leads to constant refinancing needs. 4-week Treasury bills, for example, need to be refinanced twelve times per year.
Millions of people in UK would need to double their income to escape poverty, new report warns. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation report said 14.4 million people in the UK were in poverty in 2021-22, including 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.2 million children and 2.1 million pensioners. The charity also said six million people were in very deep poverty. This means they received less than 40% of the country's median (middle) income after housing costs.
ECB asks some lenders to monitor social media for early signs of bank runs. European regulators have sharpened scrutiny of banks' liquidity after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse in March last year, the people said, requesting anonymity because the discussions are private. In response to the ECB's requests which were specific to certain banks in the region, a major European lender has arranged for a team to signal significant volumes of negative posts to the bank's treasury, which will in turn assess any impact on deposits, one of the two executives said.
Toyota Chairman Predicts Battery Electric Cars Will Only Reach 30% Share. With a billion people in the world living without electricity, limiting their choices and ability to travel by making expensive cars isn’t the answer, the grandson of the company’s founder said during a business event this month, according to remarks published on the company’s media platform Tuesday. “Customers — not regulations or politics — should make that decision,” he said.
Big Brother Watch Responds to Government CBDC Plans. Commenting on the Treasury and Bank of England’s response to the public consultation on the introduction of a UK central bank digital currency, Susannah Copson, Legal and Policy Officer at Big Brother Watch said: “It’s puzzling that the Government is pushing ahead with plans to pilot a digital pound despite failing to explain to the public or parliament why one is needed. It’s a solution in search of a problem that could pose serious risks of privacy intrusion, security breaches and inequality in the UK.”
The US labour market is in freefall.
Fed Unexpectedly Kills Bank "Free Money" Bailout-Fund Arbitrage Scheme As It Ends BTFP Program. The arbitrage of The Fed's various balance sheet facilities first appeared after The Fed's November 1st meeting made it clear that peak-rates were in (and the Treasury announced a lower than expected refunding plan). As explained before, a completely perfect and riskless 'free money' arbitrage was available to those banks who could lodge collateral with The Fed at its BTFP facility receiving cash at par (at a cost of OIS+10bps) and then post that cash earning Fed Funds rate on it, pocketing the difference.
Russia struggles to sell Pacific oil, 14 tankers stuck. More than a dozen tankers loaded with 10 million barrels of Russia's Sokol grade crude oil have been stranded off the coast of South Korea for weeks, so far unsold due to U.S. sanctions and payment issues, according to two traders and shipping data. The volumes, equating to 1.3 million metric tons, represent more than a month's production of the Sakhalin-1 project, once a flagship venture of U.S. major Exxon Mobil, which exited Russia after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
White House halts enormous natural gas projects in victory for environmentalists. In a joint announcement Friday morning, the White House and Department of Energy (DOE) said the pause would occur while federal officials conduct a rigorous environmental review assessing the projects' carbon emissions, which could take more than a year to complete. Climate activists have loudly taken aim at LNG export projects in recent weeks, arguing they will lead to a large uptick in emissions and worsen global warming.

Health

The Globalists’ New Weapon. The big push from the WHO and the WEF is that “Disease X” will be zoonotic. That money to surveil every speck of land in the world is the path forward to stopping “Disease X.” What a coincidence that the brand new CIA/intelligence agency designated to run the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center to surveil pathogens intends to do just that. And that this happens to be intended to run in parallel with the CIA mission to surveil the world for other (nefarious?) purposes.
Heart disease warning as early deaths at highest rate in more than a decade. The premature death rate for cardiovascular disease has risen year-on-year since 2020, with the latest figures showing it reached 80 per 100,000 people in England in 2022 - the highest rate since 2011 when it was 83. It is the first time there has been a clear reversal in the trend for almost 60 years. Between 2012 and 2019 progress slowed and, from 2020, premature death rates began to rise, the data reveals.
A New National Purpose: Leading the Biotech Revolution - a joint report by Tony Blair and William Hague. The revolution in biotechnology brings major opportunities to the world, with the chance to extend healthy lifespan and to relieve great suffering. But it also brings the dangers of any new technology that can be used for harm as well as benefit. We call for the UK to lead the way in global biosecurity needed for this new age, with a new taskforce helping us prevent the next pandemic. There should be strong safeguards to prevent misuse of DNA synthesis and to control research on the creation of powerful pathogens. Responsible governance of biotechnology will be indispensable to realising its immense benefits.
PFAS “forever chemicals” found in conventionally and organically farmed kale samples nationwide. This is a ticking time bomb for both human health and environmental impacts. Thousands of PFAS chemicals have become ubiquitous in the environment, where they persist for an incredibly long time; they are highly mobile, capable of traveling tremendous distances from where they were released; they seep into the ground where they accumulate in the plants that we eat or make their way into our drinking water; we add them unwittingly to our foods when we cook using certain saucepans; we cover or wrap foods with PFAS-containing materials, and; they get into the air and are in the dust that we breathe in.

Middle East

Shipping fallout from Red Sea crisis spreads to product tankers. With no end in sight for the Red Sea crisis, detours around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope are soaking up even more vessel capacity and pushing up spot rates across multiple shipping segments. Freight fallout began with container ships. It is now significantly impacting product tankers — the vessels that transport gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, naphtha and other petroleum products. According to Eirik Haavaldsen of Pareto Securities, “As it stands today, no product tankers look set to use the Suez Canal during the first half of February — and this will imply near-zero middle-distillate arrivals from the Middle East Gulf and India to Europe during that time.
Herbicidal Warfare in Gaza. Over three decades, in tandem with the Madrid and Oslo negotiation processes, the occupied Gaza Strip has been slowly isolated from the rest of Palestine and the outside world, and subjected to repeated Israeli military incursions. Since 2014, the clearing and bulldozing of agricultural and residential lands by the Israel military close to the eastern border of Gaza has been complemented by the unannounced aerial spraying of crop-killing herbicides. The NGO Al-Mezan has further warned that, in addition to crop damage, the long-term consumption by livestock of plants affected by the sprayed chemicals has negative effects that may harm the health of humans who then consume meat from those livestock.
UN agency fires staff members allegedly involved in October 7 attacks. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Israeli authorities provided the agency “with information” alleging several of its employees participated in Hamas’ murderous rampage into southern Israel, when the militant group killed at least 1,200 people and abducted more than 250 others. An investigation is being launched into the alleged involvement of the employees and those involved will be held accountable “including through criminal prosecution,” added Lazzarini.

Politics

The un-American disenfranchisement of RFK Jr. voters. People who, if they hope to vote for Kennedy in November, are being disenfranchised by a system rigged in favor of the two main political parties. And yet there is next to no political, media or public outcry against this injustice. All the opposite in some cases. To be sure, the Biden White House and its supporters in the media have gone after Kennedy hammer and tongs since he first announced his run for president — then as a Democrat — in April 2023. Kennedy has been more than happy to remind all that the DNC and the Biden backers did the exact same thing to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders back in 2020. It may be “hardball” politics, but it’s wrong.
How Australia became obsessed with land acknowledgments. If you attend almost any public meeting or event in Australia these days, you’ll be greeted – some would say confronted – by a mandatory statement before it starts. Even the nation’s parliament now starts the day with this statement, ahead of the centuries-old ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Known as the Acknowledgment of Country, it is a now all-pervasive ritual of Australian life. Generally, it uses these words: “We meet here today on the lands of the traditional owners, the (Aboriginal tribe) people, and acknowledge their elders past and present”. Indeed, a whole industry has sprung up around Aborigines being hired by event organisers to stage Welcomes to Country.
Putin's Decree Triggers Ominous Alaska Calls. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new decree relating to Moscow's historic real estate holdings abroad, a move interpreted by ultranationalist bloggers as a foundation for future revanchism against Russia's neighbors—and even the U.S. The decree, signed by the president late last week, allocates funds for the search, registration, and legal protection of Russian property abroad, including property in the former territories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This would include Alaska, swathes of eastern and central Europe, large chunks of central Asia, and parts of Scandinavia.
Elon Musk says he will pay for challenges to Irish hate speech bill. In the past, he has criticised plans by the Irish Government to combat hate speech and last year posted that the proposed legislation is "a massive attack on freedom of expression." Today, Mr Musk said that his default approach is to challenge any legislation that infringes upon people's abilities to say what they want to say. "We will also fund the legal fees of Irish citizens who want to challenge the bill, so we'll make sure that if there is an attempt to suppress the voice of the Irish people that we do our absolute best to defend the people of Ireland and their ability to speak their mind," he added.
Britain isn’t a free country. We all lose out when our freedoms are eroded. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are by far the most essential bedrocks of liberty, and both have declined in recent decades for reasons related to issues of identity. Indeed, one might even say that those cornerstone freedoms are incompatible with the worldview which has now become all-powerful, and which sends the police around to the homes of citizens when they express a deviant opinion. It’s not a free country, after all.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is still ramping up.
The American Crack-Up. The nation remains blinded by a veil of madness. Imagine a time-traveller from any decade in recent memory arriving in America in January 2024: they would encounter a country that would appear to have gone nuts. Millions of migrants stream illegally into the US at the highest rates in history, while the government in Washington prohibits border states from enforcing Federal law. Meanwhile, major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are routinely paralysed by angry demonstrators whose causes change from month to month (this month’s cause is “intifada”).
News industry off to brutal 2024 start as mass layoffs devastate publishers, raising questions about the future of journalism. The rapid contraction, coming even as the presidential election cycle heats up and public attention and revenues historically mount, has been on full display this month, with the first few weeks of 2024 ushering in a spate of painful layoffs at news organizations from coast-to-coast. The Los Angeles Times slashed its newsroom by more than 20% earlier this week; TIME cut dozens of staffers; and Business Insider said it would trim its workforce by 8%.
US to station nuclear weapons in UK to counter threat from Russia. Warheads to be housed at RAF Lakenheath for first time in 15 years, Pentagon documents reveal, as Moscow warns of 'escalation'. Procurement contracts for a new facility at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk confirm that the US intends to place nuclear warheads three times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb at the air base. Boris Johnson on Friday night backed Sir Patrick’s call for a citizen army, as he pledged to sign up if the UK went to war with Russia. The US navy secretary, Carlos Del Toro, then urged Britain to “reassess” the size of its armed forces.
What are they trying to tell us? Internal Pentagon report warns America is unequipped to defend itself from an alien invasion. A newly declassified document found the Department of Defense (DoD) lacks comprehensive or coordinated effort to track and analyze UFOs - which have been rebranded Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) in recent years. The Office of Inspector General (OIG) made the eerie conclusion that this blindspot in the DoD's defensive capabilities 'poses a threat to military forces and national security.'
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Science

Universal process that wires the brain is consistent across species. A new modeling study helps confirm that key connections in the brain are formed in the same way across different animal species, likely including humans. Mouse, insect or worm — in all these creatures, the same principle guides the formation of super strong connections between neurons in the brain, a new study confirms. The research helps validate the idea that, regardless of species, there's a universal mechanism that underlies how brain networks form.
The consciousness wars: can scientists ever agree on how the mind works? There are dozens of theories of how the brain produces conscious experience, and a new type of study is testing some of them head-to-head. philosophers and neuroscientists have proposed multiple theories to explain the physical basis of the subjective experience — referred to as the “hard problem of consciousness” — and of the “easy problems” such as attention and wakefulness. In an unpublished effort to count them, Jonathan Mason, a mathematician based in Oxford, UK, identified more than 30 theories.
Nasa ‘quietly funding’ theological conferences amid ‘demonic’ UFO fears. UFO expert Nick Pope said: "I don't believe in demons myself but a lot of people do and certainly the Bible talks about these things in terms of unclean spirits.” “We know that the Catholic Church, for example, has issued several statements on this. One of them said that there's no doctrinal objection to the existence of aliens because as they put it, man may place no creative limits upon God.” “Nasa has quietly put in a bit of funding to theological conferences that have talked about this.”

Technology

Google Scientists Discovered 380,000 New Materials Using Artificial Intelligence. The Materials Project, an open-access database for new materials, is revolutionizing how researchers discover and develop materials for future technologies, with Google DeepMind contributing 400,000 new compounds. This synergy of AI, supercomputing, and experimental data speeds up the creation of materials for applications like renewable energy, efficient electronics, and environmental solutions.
Scientists invent dirt-fuelled power source that ‘lasts forever’. Soil-based microbial fuel cell based on a 113-year-old technology first developed by a British botanist. A team from Northwestern University in the US say the book-sized unit could be used to power sensors used in farming, as well as remote devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). The technology works by generating electricity from naturally-occurring bacteria within the soil, offering a sustainable and renewable alternative to toxic and flammable batteries.
AI's next fight is over whose values it should hold. There's no such thing as an AI system without values — and that means this newest technology platform must navigate partisan rifts, culture-war chasms and international tensions from the very beginning. Every step in training, tuning and deploying AI models forces its creators to make choices about whose values the system will respect, whose point of view it will present and what limits it will observe.

Vaccines

AstraZeneca is facing tens of millions of pounds in compensation claims from 35 alleged victims of the Covid jab in High Court legal battle. The pharmaceutical giant, which developed its jab in partnership with the University of Oxford, is set to face a High Court battle over claims the vaccine is 'defective'. It has been linked to a newly identified condition called Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombocytopenia and Thrombosis (VITT) which causes blood clots.
Autopsy findings in cases of fatal COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis. This systematic review aims to investigate potential causal links between COVID-19 vaccines and death from myocarditis using post-mortem analysis. All 28 deaths were most likely causally linked to COVID-19 vaccination by independent review of the clinical information presented in each paper.
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign. Hypothetically, if the six-month Pfizer trial had continued, assuming the relative risk of 1.31 remained constant and deaths accrued at the same rates as during the trial, then the lower limit of the 95% confidence interval would exceed one at 34 months. Stated another way, the relative risk would exhibit statistical significance (p<0.05) at this time, with a 31% increased mortality risk in the mRNA vaccine vs placebo groups. Thus, assuming the mortality rates continued unchanged in both groups as observed in the initial six months, the all-cause mortality difference would have become statistically significant (p<0.05) around 2.8 years (34 months). At 2.5 years, the p-value was at 0.065, decreasing to 0.053 by 2.75 years.