This Week's Must Reads - 24-30 July 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

• Antarctic sea ice levels dive in 'five-sigma event', as experts flag worsening consequences for planet. Earlier this year, scientists observed an all-time low in the amount of sea ice around the icy continent, following all-time lows in 2016, 2017 and 2022. Usually, the ice has been able to recover in winter, when Antarctica is reliably dark and cold. But this year is different. For the first time, the sea ice extent has been unable to substantially recover this winter, leaving scientists baffled.

• The Betrayal of the Environment by Environmentalists. These dogmatic eco-warriors have become an actual threat to a cleaner, greener world, and they are sucking all the air out of the room, the money out of the system, and both discrediting the valid aims of what is an important bottoms-up movement and championing top-down actions and mandates that will set it back a century if they don’t knock it off.

• New Study: Modern Central Asia Climate Halfway Between Medieval Warmth And Little Ice Age. The mean annual temperature was 2-3°C warmer than present during the Holocene Thermal Maximum in arid central Asia. Over the last few millennia, Silk Road human civilizations (e.g., Sui, Tang, Ming, Yuan Dynasties) flourished during warm periods and declined during cool periods (Ding et al., 2023). In other words, there is nothing unprecedented or outside the range of natural variability occurring today in this region.

Covid

• Did the New York Times just admit Covid deaths were overcounted? A recent New York Times article contains a rather surprising piece of information. Discussing the significant decline in official Covid deaths in the US, writer David Leonhardt claims that the actual number is almost certainly even lower. “The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had the virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,” Leonhardt writes, noting that even the CDC’s own data shows that almost one-third of recent official Covid deaths have fallen into this category.

• Mysterious Chinese COVID Lab Uncovered in City of Reedley CA. Code enforcement check uncovers illegal lab making COVID-19 and pregnancy test kits, bacterial and viral agents and 900 white mice. Why would a COVID lab run by a shady Chinese company be operating in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley?

• Covid cover-up: Wuhan lab leak suspicions, Anthony Fauci and how the science was silenced. America’s top infectious diseases adviser, Anthony Fauci, delib­erately decided to downplay ­suspicions from scientists that Covid-19 came from a laboratory to protect his reputation and deflect from the risky coronavirus research his agency had funded, according to his boss, one of the most senior US health officials during the pandemic.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• White House Pressured Facebook to Remove COVID-19 Vaccine Meme, Documents Show. “We are re facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content,” a Facebook employee told CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in April 2021 in one of the messages. “While authoritative information dominated the list, the White House was concerned that the #3 post was a vaccine discouraging humorous meme, and they called on us to delete the meme,” the worker wrote.

• Mask mandates and COVID-19: A Re-analysis of the Boston school mask study. Districts that dropped mask mandates first experienced the largest decreases in cases (22% drop vs 12% in the masked districts). Conclusions: We fail to find any consistent notable negative relationship between school mask mandates and infection rates in the Greater Boston Area or state of Massachusetts during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Robert Shiller says decade-long rally in home prices could end when the Fed wraps its hiking cycle. "I think the fear of interest rate increases has influenced people's thinking," he said. "It's not just homeowners. It's new buyers who wanted to get in before the interest rates went up even more. They wanted to lock in. So that's been a positive influence on the market, but it's coming to an end."

• BP extracted Iraqi oil worth £15BN after British Invasion. Despite UK ministers denying the war was about oil, the flagship British company reaped a bonanza upon its return to Iraq after the 2003 invasion, Declassified has found. The new information comes on the 20-year anniversary of the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, which was judged to be illegal by the UN. However, neither US president George W Bush nor British prime minister Tony Blair, the leaders who prosecuted the war, have been subjects of a criminal investigation.

• India's rice export ban triggers panic buying at US supermarkets - sparking costs of 20-pound bag to soar from $16 to almost $50. The south Asian country, which accounts for 40 percent of world rice exports, ordered a halt to its largest rice export category, non-basmati rice, on Thursday to calm domestic prices, sparking fears of global shortages. Videos and reports shared on social media over the weekend show Indian-Americans standing in long lines or panic-buying rice in Texas, Michigan, New Jersey Alabama, Ohio, Illinois and California.

• BOJ to discuss yield curve control tweak to allow rates over 0.5%. Central bank likely to keep current cap while taking flexible approach. Under its yield curve control, the central bank buys large quantities of Japanese government bonds if 10-year yields look likely to go beyond its allowable range of 0.5% below or above zero, resulting in market distortions. The proposed change would keep the rate ceiling, but allow for moderate rises beyond that level.

• U.S. Federal Reserve confirms July 27 meeting on Basel III endgame capital proposals for banks. The move by the Fed late Monday comes after reports last week of the gathering by Federal banking regulators to bring the country's rules in line with the international Basel III accords put into place in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Health

• New Zealand Therapeutic products regulatory regime. The passing of the Therapeutic Products Bill marks the most significant change to the regulation of medicines, medical devices and natural health products in nearly 40 years.

• Mystery spike in baby deaths sparks national investigation. Post-neonatal deaths breached the upper warning limit in April, Public Health Scotland figures show. Figures from Public Health Scotland (PHS) show post-neonatal deaths reached 2.8 per 1,000 live births in April – just above the upper control limit. PHS said it detected “no unusual patterns” in the cause of the deaths which it said were not due to any issues in maternity and neo-natal care in the NHS. The latest figures from PHS also show the rate of stillbirths is at a record five-year high with 6.1 out of 1,000 live births recorded in April.

• Japanese Population Falls in All 47 Prefectures for First Time. The population of Japanese nationals shrank by more than 800,000 to 122.4 million over the year to Jan. 1, in the latest reminder of a demographic crisis Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has said threatens the country’s ability to function. The data, based on local government residents’ records, was released Wednesday by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

• ‘Catastrophic’ forecast shows 9m people in England with major illnesses by 2040. An extra 2.5 million people will be living with major illnesses, up 37% to 9.1 million compared with 2019, according to the report by the Health Foundation.

• Medical royal colleges receive millions from drug and medical devices companies.

  

Politics

• Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán Accuses the EU of Conducting Population Replacement. The balance of power in the world has shifted, and we are now suffering the serious consequences of this, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Romania on Saturday. In his speech he claimed that the European Union has rejected its Christian heritage, and it is carrying out a population replacement.

• EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen receives the World Peace and Liberty Award on behalf of the European Commission.

• Why China Won’t Talk With America’s Military. Beijing Sees Silence as Leverage. This past spring, the United States requested a meeting between Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The two were both going to attend the Shangri-La Dialogue—an annual security conference hosted in Singapore in June—where the United States’ and China’s defense chiefs traditionally speak with each other. But China turned down the United States’ request.

• Retail health company has Chase accounts suddenly terminated, owner critical of COVID vaccines, FDA. Employees of a Florida-based retail health company said JP Morgan Chase Bank suddenly terminated their personal and company bank accounts without an explanation. One of the employees believes the account shutdowns were politically motivated and due to their employer’s controversial stance on COVID-19.

• Talking back to Big Brother. Trust is a two-way process and self-reliance is needed to counter government overreach. If society is an aeroplane in free-fall the first step is to put on your own oxygen mask. Your brain must be alert. Everybody wants to be an individual and know their own mind. To do this, you must be able to recognise the myriad ways that you are manipulated, from Big Tech to politicians, from news to advertisers, even the humble waiter who asks, still or sparkling. It is time to take back control of our minds. Once you learn to see the nudges, pokes and shoves or modern life, you cannot unsee them.

• The growing list of Chinese elites who disappear but later resurface subdued. Foreign minister Qin Gang’s mysterious absence and replacement follows a pattern of falls from grace for rising stars. Qin Gang, China’s erstwhile foreign minister, has officially been replaced by Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, in a surprise reshuffle that provided a sliver of clarity regarding Qin’s mysterious month-long absence. But many questions remain unanswered.

• UK Labour leader, Keir Starmer, joined secretive CIA-linked group while serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Starmer served on the Trilateral Commission alongside two former heads of the CIA without telling Jeremy Corbyn—who would have blocked it, Declassified can reveal. The Trilateral Commission describes itself as a “global membership organisation” which seeks “to discuss and propose solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems”.

• Tony Blair is preparing to rule Britain again – and Starmer might just let him. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has 750 staff meddling in 40 countries. Its offering is fairly simple: Blairism for the planet. It prides itself on power and influence, saying 100 of its staff are currently “embedded” in governments around the world – and not in the back office, either. A promotional video trumpets the position of the new Blairites “at the centre … whether that’s the president’s office or prime minister’s office.”

• 6 banks, including Bank of America, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, submitted more than 170 suspicious activity reports on Biden. The reports allege involvement in several illegal activities, including money laundering, human trafficking, and tax fraud. The banks have expressed concerns over wire transfers the Biden family has received from foreign state-owned entities, particularly from the Chinese government.

Science

• [2016] The Case Against Reality. A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses. Donald Hoffman says the world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

• Nearly 100 Whales Strand Themselves At The Same Time On Australian Beach. A wildlife scientist said it seemed that "something else is going on that we just don’t know." Volunteers worked frantically on a second day Wednesday to save dozens of pilot whales that have stranded themselves on a beach in Western Australia, but more than 50 have already died. The incident is reminiscent of one in September, in which some 200 pilot whales died after a pod stranded itself on the remote west coast of Tasmania, off Australia’s southeastern coast. The following month, nearly 500 pilot whales died after stranding themselves on two remote beaches in New Zealand.

• Huge amounts of plastic from artificial grass end up in the sea. Fibres from artificial grass make up 15 per cent of plastic pieces found in samples of seawater near Barcelona. Liam de Haan at the University of Barcelona says the issue is likely to be global. “I think it’s pretty implausible that this is only happening in Spain,” he says. Since we don’t know how much artificial grass breaks down into microplastics and nanoplastics, and how much this contributes to plastic pollution in water bodies, the problem could be even bigger, he adds.

• 46,000-year-old worms wriggle back to life after scientists defrost them. The tiny creatures, discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2018, existed when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet. The tiny worms, which are less than a millimetre in length, were thawed out and coaxed back to life in a petri dish filled with a nutritious soup designed to encourage their growth. After a few weeks in the dish, they began moving and eating. The worms died within a few months, however scientists said the species has reproduced and is now undergoing lab experiments.

• [2022] Only 30-50% Of People Have An Inner Monologue, And Suddenly It All Makes Sense. For many of us, as you read this, you are hearing it in your head. This is what most would refer to as an inner monologue, but in case you didn’t know, a lot of people don’t have one. Roughly 50-70% of people do not have one, according to psychology professor Russell Hurlburt.

Technology

• ‘Havana syndrome’ not linked to any foreign power, says US intelligence. So-called “Havana syndrome” is the hundreds of cases of brain injuries and other symptoms reported by American personnel around the world. The findings released Wednesday by US intelligence officials cast doubt on the longstanding suspicions by many people who reported cases that Russia or another country may have been running a global campaign to harass or attack Americans using some form of directed energy.

• Australian National Digital ID: How the government plans to keep track of every citizen with a universal ID linking everything from Medicare to your driver's licence - here's when it will be launched. A universal ID was first planned by the Coalition and has now been taken up by the Albanese government.

Ukraine

• UK Media Now Admitting NATO’s Proxy War in Ukraine is a Disaster. After 18 months, it looks like the propaganda dam that’s been holding up the official NATO narrative on Ukraine – has finally begun to crack in the UK mainstream media.

• The real history of the war in Ukraine: A chronology of events and case for diplomacy. Expanding NATO to Ukraine, which Biden has long promoted, is a U.S. gambit that has failed. The neocons, including Biden, thought from the late 1990s onward that the US could expand NATO to Ukraine (and Georgia) despite Russia’s vociferous and long-standing opposition. They didn’t believe that Putin would actually go to war over NATO expansion.

• US Was Behind Both Crimean Bridge Attacks: Seymour Hersh. Legendary national security journalist Seymour Hersh has published a report this week alleging US intelligence helped the Ukrainians blow up the Kerch Bridge (or also, Crimean Bridge), which happened earlier this month and corresponded to President Putin refusing to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative deal. What's more is that Hersh's sources described that the US assisted in the initial, larger Kerch Bridge explosion which had initially temporarily disabled it in October 2022.

Vaccines

• The Canaries in the Human DNA Mine. Decades of sophisticated and detailed legislation created to safeguard humanity from exposure to genetically modified organisms was ignored or legislated away in an instant when SARS-CoV-2 arrived. This article retraces the steps in what appears to be a sophisticated deception played out in legal language, technical scientific jargon, and by medical regulatory bodies acting as if they were serving public health.

• [2022] Outcomes at least 90 days since onset of myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents and young adults in the USA: a follow-up surveillance study. Over 50% of children and young adults still had heart abnormalities after 90 days since the onset of myocarditis after mRNA Covid vaccination.

• Sex-specific differences in myocardial injury incidence after COVID-19 mRNA-1273 Booster Vaccination. mRNA-1273 vaccine-associated myocardial injury was more common than previously thought, being mild and transient, and more frequent in women versus men.

• COVID-19 Vaccines and Boosters Were Never Made With mRNA. The truth behind RNA-based vaccine technology (Part 1). We have been told that COVID-19 injections are made with mRNA. However, a vaccine using “natural” mRNA would not last long enough to initiate an immune response before being destroyed by our immune system. To make mRNA useful for routine medicine, scientists had to artificially modify mRNA to increase both its efficiency and lifetime. The result: modRNA.