This Week's Must Reads - 25-31 March 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

• The Hertz Meltdown Reveals Scale Of The EV Debacle. The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has revealed its ambition: to phase out gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles (EVs). Incredibly, this announcement comes as we are flooded with overwhelming evidence that EVs are a market loser. Indeed, the artificial boom and then meltdown of the EV market is a modern industrial calamity. It was created by government, social media, wild disease frenzy, far-flung thinking, and the irrational chasing of utopia, followed by a rude awakening by facts and reality.

• The EU’s net zero retreat is gathering steam. Across Europe, 72 gigawatts-worth of gas plants are being built, as nations realise you cannot power a national grid on solar and wind alone. Green lobbyists are making themselves an irrelevance by turning against all fossil fuels in all circumstances. Governments may have nodded along with their demands up until now, by setting net zero targets. But clearly, when ideology collides with reality, governments are not going to sacrifice the well-being of their citizens. The move to build new gas plants is yet one more sign of Europe’s retreat from unrealistic net zero targets.

• Shock Discovery: Huge Carbon Credit Project in Australia Turns Out to Be a Sham. Australia's carbon credit scheme was undermined by damning new research Wednesday, which found a world-leading reforestation project had been an underperforming "catastrophe". Vast swathes of land across Australia's desert Outback have been earmarked for native forest regeneration, which is meant to offset emissions as new trees suck up carbon. But researchers have found that across almost 80 percent of these plantations forest growth was either stagnant – or that woodlands were shrinking.

Covid

• Impacts of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein on the Innate Immune System: A Review. In this article, the dual character of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, both inflammatory and tolerogenic, is clearly demonstrated with a hyperinflammatory trend in the presence of LPS. Immune tolerance may explain the persistence of Spike in the body for months, and repeated exposure to the same antigen, whether through infections or anti-COVID-19 injections, may lead to deleterious cumulative effects, via amyloid formations and neuroinflammatory activities.

• Senior US journalist attacks leading scientists for ‘misleading’ him over Covid lab-leak theory. A former New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “clearly” misleading him over the Covid lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic. Donald McNeil Jr said he became sceptical of the hypothesis the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab after several top epidemiological virologists insisted it wasn’t possible. Mr McNeil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being “dropped” for a year.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Dr. Martin Kulldorff. “World Gone Mad:” Covid Lockdowns, Unethical Mandates and Government Censorship. In a compelling interview with The New American, Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, delves into the epidemiologically absurd and medically unethical Covid-19 policies and the totalitarian practice of government censorship targeting lawful speech. Additionally, Dr. Kulldorff, a former member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group, addresses issues related to the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines, citing serious flaws in their clinical trials and talking about the differences in excess mortality between people vaccinated with mRNA and viral-based Covid vaccines.

• WHO do you think you are? MPs fear 'unelected' UN officials could dictate Britain's lockdown policy in future pandemics under controversial new treaty. Under plans for a new global pandemic treaty, the UN agency is considering making dozens of amendments to its legally-binding rulebook. Critics worry member nations might be made to comply with advice in future health crises, such as enforcing lockdowns or vaccine passports. A group of Conservative MPs have now warned the UK risks 'signing away' its powers to 'unelected' WHO bosses, complaining about mooted changes in a letter to Alicia Kearns, chair of the foreign affairs select committee.

• AMA President Advocates for Stricter Censorship of Health “Misinformation,” Urges Platforms To Follow YouTube’s Strict Speech Policy. The American Medical Association (AMA) President Jesse Ehrenfeld is arguing in favor of more censorship, supposedly targeting those “spreading misinformation.” Ehrenfeld is happy with how Google/YouTube is doing that, via the controversial “medical misinformation” policy which he says “landed a solid punch” (against suspected medical information, not free speech, according to him). And, Ehrenfeld is urging other platforms to adopt similar rules.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The Insanity In Our World Is Driven By Money Printing. Recently, our minds have been inundated with headlines about illegal immigration, squatters and the degradation of private property rights, war across the world, small battles within the larger “culture war”, increasing prices, and the decisions made by central banks around the world. In the midst of all of this chaos it is important to take a step back and remind yourself of what lies at the core of most of these issues; the fact that we’ve completely broken money. When you break money, the most important tool humans use to facilitate economic activity, a ripple effect of negative consequences begins to emanate from the root of the world’s engine. Those ripples create the momentum that leads to chaos that we are witnessing today.

• Global government debt is $82 trillion, up $20 trillion since Covid.

  

• The Meltdown of Commercial Real Estate. In case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks. Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses. The note, by Senior Editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate. To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.

• New home prices in the US have dropped almost 20% from their 2022 peak.

  

• Pawn Shop Inventories Are Exploding As The Failing U.S. Economy Hammers Those At The Bottom Of The Economic Food Chain. How much longer will the Biden administration and the mainstream media continue to deny that we are in the midst of a very painful economic downturn? Debt levels have never been higher, delinquency rates are spiking, the commercial real estate market is crashing, the banking industry is mired in turmoil and large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation. Anyone that attempts to claim that the U.S. economy is in good shape is just being delusional.

• SWIFT planning launch of new central bank digital currency platform in 12-24 months. Global bank messaging network SWIFT is planning a new platform in the next one to two years to connect the wave of central bank digital currencies now in development to the existing finance system, it has told Reuters. The move, which would be one of the most significant yet for the nascent CBDC ecosystem given SWIFT's key role in global banking, is likely to be fine-tuned to when the first major ones are launched. Around 90% of the world's central banks are now exploring digital versions of their currencies.

• The Baltimore Bridge Collapse Is Even More Devastating Than It Seems - It's an 'Economic Nuke Strike'. By now, most people have seen the shocking images of the devastating collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, that happened on Tuesday morning. However, as many users on the social media platform X have noted, the ramifications of this disaster will be devastating for Baltimore’s infrastructure. Not to mention that the entire harbor was the second busiest in the mid-Atlantic — and now, thanks to this accident, it has been rendered completely inaccessible.

• Expect a Financial Crisis in Europe With France at the Epicenter. The EU never enforced its Growth and Stability Pact or Maastricht Treaty rules. The crisis is coming to a head with France and Italy in the spotlight. The first casualty will be Green policy. In a single word, the EU is dysfunctional. That’s the problem, not technology. The Maastricht treaty itself is a big part of the reason the EU is dysfunctional. The Euro itself, with one common interest rate, is fundamentally flawed.

• How Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend and early recruit helped put the FTX founder behind bars for 25 years. In sentencing FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to a 25-year prison sentence on Thursday, Judge Lewis Kaplan cited testimony from Caroline Ellison, an ex-girlfriend of the defendant and early recruit into his crypto enterprise. “I keep coming back to Ms. Ellison’s testimony that he knew it was wrong,” Kaplan said at the sentencing hearing in downtown Manhattan. “He knew it was criminal.” Ellison was the star witness for the Department of Justice in its prosecution of Bankman-Fried. She agreed to a plea deal in December 2022, a month after FTX spiraled into bankruptcy.

Health

• Major US Study Confirms a New #1 Cause of Disease Worldwide. Conditions affecting the nervous system – such as strokes, migraines and dementia – have surged past heart disease to become the leading cause of ill health worldwide, a major new analysis said on Friday. More than 3.4 billion people – 43 percent of the global population – experienced a neurological condition in 2021, far more than had previously been thought, the analysis found. More than 11 million people died from the 37 neurological conditions in 2021, according to the study in The Lancet Neurology journal.

• Life Expectancy on the Decline in the US. The average America will not live to see 80-years of age. The average life expectancy stands around 76.4 years, according to the CDC, with women living an average of 79.3 years and men expiring sooner at 73.5. Those figures have been steadily declining each year. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf recently spoke out about the “disturbing” trend and believes it deserves “urgent attention.” The Society of Actuaries is also raising the alarm, noting that young Americans are dying rapidly. “Mortality was 26 percent higher among insured 35-to-44-year-olds, and 19 percent higher for 25-to-34-year-olds continuing a death spike that peaked in the third quarter of 2021 at a staggering 101 percent and 79 percent above normal, respectively,” the Hill stated in a recent article.

• Industry Payments to US Physicians by Specialty and Product Type. Despite evidence that financial conflicts of interest may influence physician prescribing and may damage patients’ trust in medical professionals, such relationships remain pervasive. The Physician Payments Sunshine Act led to the creation of the Open Payments database in August 2013, a repository of industry payments to health care professionals. This paper examined the distribution of payments within and across specialties and the medical products associated with the largest total payments. From 2013 to 2022, US physicians received $12.1 billion from industry. More than half of physicians received at least 1 payment…93.8% of these payments were associated with 1 or more marketed medical products.

• Healthy life expectancy declines for babies born in England. Babies born in England between 2020 and 2022 could experience fewer number of years in good health, figures suggest. Between 2017-2019, men could expect to be healthy for 63.3 years and women 63.7, with latest figures showing a drop to 62.4 years and 62.7 respectively. Data from the Office for National Statistics shows the healthy life expectancy of a boy born in 2020-22 is 9.3 months lower than it was in 2011-13 when the current estimates began. Girls have seen an even bigger fall since 2011-13, of 14 months.

• Latest ONS figures show life expectancy is falling throughout the UK.

  

Politics

• John Ioannidis - Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal. Just like an army of ants caught in an ant mill, individuals, groups and even whole societies are sometimes caught up in a Death Spiral, a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behavior characterized by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one (set of) solution(s), denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness. The review furthermore draws on theories such as Social Safety Theory, Conservation of Resources Theory, and management theories that describe the decline and fall of groups, companies and societies, as well as offer ways to reverse this trend.

• The Fight to Save Julian Assange. If kicking the can down the road was an Olympic sport, the judges in the Assange case would be gold medalists. The High Court this week had one job: to decide whether Julian Assange should be granted a full appeal hearing or whether he should be immediately extradited to the US to face trial. Given two clear options they decided to do neither. Instead, with Assange approaching five years in Belmarsh high security prison, they decided to wait for even longer before making a final decision. This latest delay is because the Court has asked the US government to supply ‘assurances’ that if Assange is put on trial in the US, he will be treated as if he were a US citizen, not a foreigner; that he will be guaranteed First Amendment freedom of speech protections; and that he will not face the death penalty.

• Trudeau government ‘gaslighting’ critics of Online Harms Act, legal expert warns. In recent an opinion piece critical of Bill C-63, which is the Online Harms Act that was introduced in the House of Commons on February 26, law professor Dr. Michael Geist said that the text of the bill is “unmistakable” in how it will affect Canadians’ online freedoms. Geist noted that the new bill will allow a new digital safety commission to conduct “secret commission hearings” against those found to have violated the new law.

• Boeing’s faulty airliners and the mystery death of a whistleblower. BOEING whistleblower John Barnett has died in an apparent suicide, despite telling his family that if he died suddenly, it would not be because of suicide. Mr Barnett claimed that faulty parts were deliberately fitted to planes by production workers, and that a test on emergency oxygen systems showed a failure rate of 25 per cent. During an emergency, one in four breathing masks did not work, he said. He also accused the firm of using substandard parts from scrap bins and identified a fire risk after he found metal shavings had fallen near electrical wiring in some planes. ‘When you mix metal slivers with electrical components, it’s a recipe for disaster,’ he said.

• Feds Ordered Google To Unmask Certain YouTube Users. Critics Say It’s ‘Terrifying.’ Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects. In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of buying bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting.

• Why family-friendly policies don’t boost birth rates. Between 1980 and 2019, the world’s most developed countries roughly tripled their real-terms per capita spending on child benefits, subsidised childcare, parental leave and other family-friendly policies. They also saw their birth rates decline from 1.85 to 1.53 per woman. Birth rates in liberal, developed countries look exceptionally unlikely to return to replacement level any time soon. If they miraculously do so, it will most likely be due to broad social and cultural shifts, not policy. There’s nothing wrong with governments pursuing family-friendly packages for other reasons but if they’re fretting about ageing and shrinking populations, then they need to find other solutions.

• Arresting the fertility crisis. The UK’s TFR has been declining since before the 1970s, but the news that the average British woman is now having just 1.49 children is a cause for significant concern. In order to maintain the labour force and an economy that can support pensions and healthcare, we need one baby to be born for each 50-year-old in the population (so that the baby enters the workforce at around the time the 50 year old will retire). So far we have plugged the gaps created by low birth rates with massive levels of immigration. On average, women have the aspiration to have 2.3 children. Indeed the average family size has not changed much since the 1970s — most mothers today have two or three children, as they did 50 years ago. What has changed — and the factor that is driving the decline in TFR — is the number of women who never have children at all.

• Sir Jeffrey Donaldson steps down as DUP's leader after being charged with historical sexual offences. In a statement, the DUP said: "The party chairman has received a letter from Sir Jeffrey Donaldson MP confirming that he has been charged with allegations of an historical nature and indicating that he is stepping down as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party with immediate effect. It comes after the Police Service of Northern Ireland said a man had been charged with non-recent sex offences.

Science

• Chimpanzees stayed in an 'invisible cage' after zoo enclosure was enlarged—South African study. The chimpanzees' perception of space had been altered by their experience of the previous, smaller, barren housing and that this limited their space use in the naturalistic enclosure through what appears to be a self-imposed "invisible cage." Curiously, the chimpanzees also appeared to exhibit a strong tendency to form tightly spaced groups which matched the exact dimensions of the previous housing. These groups formed regardless of when or where in the enclosure the chimpanzees were, the environmental conditions at the time or which individual chimpanzees were involved.

• Biologists Says the Sun May be Conscious - "Consciousness Does Not Need to Be Confined to Brains." Neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, proposed what he called the "integrated information theory of consciousness," which suggests that consciousness is, essentially, almost everywhere. By and by, a sort of panpsychist renaissance began to take place, and in 2014 — nearly 100 years after the Vienna Circle killed the feel-good theory — the respected neuroscientist Christof Koch argued in Scientific American that if lumps of matter can form into human bodies and become conscious, there's no reason that groups of elementary particles couldn't either.

• Why NASA Will Fire Three Rockets At The Solar Eclipse. NASA has announced it will fire three scientific sounding rockets into the moon’s shadow on Monday, April 8 during a partial solar eclipse across North America. In what will be a total solar eclipse for a 115 miles-wide path through parts of Mexico, 15 U.S. states and Canada and a partial solar eclipse for the entire Americas, the event will see a sudden drop in sunlight. The space agency’s project, Atmospheric Perturbations Around The Eclipse Path, will investigate how that drop in sunlight and temperature affects Earth’s upper atmosphere. APEP is named after the serpent deity from ancient Egyptian mythology, nemesis of the sun deity Ra, according to NASA.

• CERN to test world's most powerful particle accelerator during April's solar eclipse to search for 'invisible' matter that secretly powers our universe. The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is set smash protons together on April 8 to search for invisible particles secretly powering our universe. Theories have suggested there are 17 different particle groups and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, confirmed the existence of one using its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. Now, the team has restarted the LHC after a two-year hibernation with hopes of unraveling more mysterious - specifically dark matter.

Technology

• More than 1,600 planes are hit by mysterious GPS jamming across Europe - with Russia feared to be responsible. Planes flying over and around the Baltic Sea in northern Europe have been suffering technical problems caused by jamming since Sunday, with 1614 planes, mostly civilian, reporting problems since then. While most of them appear to be taking place in Polish airspace, OSINT blogs have reported that planes flying in German, Danish, Swedish, Latvian and Lithuanian airspace have suffered interference problems. The planes appear to be suffering from GPS jamming, which can confuse pilots as this can make them believe they are in a different location than they actually are.

• Microsoft, OpenAI plan $100 billion data-centre project, Stargate AI supercomputer. Microsoft would likely finance the project, which is expected to be 100 times more costly than some of the biggest existing data centers, citing people involved in private conversations about the proposal. The proposed U.S.-based supercomputer would be the biggest in a series the companies are looking to build over the next six years, the report added.

• MH370: UFO encounter mystery videos - New expert analysis could bring a paradigm shift in how we view the UFO phenomenon. After pondering all the evidence, combined with our aviation expert’s analysis, we are left with an eerily similar question that seems to permeate all UAP/UFO discussions: How much is the government hiding from us? The secrecy, mystery, and confusion accompanying the videos have the same feel as events such as Roswell, figures like Bob Lazar, and locations akin to Skinwalker Ranch. Are each of these entities connected to a world beyond our own? Or are they all related to our government’s ever-developing weapon systems?

Ukraine

• Why Europe Sacrificed Ukraine. EU elites’ commitment to Ukraine, no matter the costs, is too deliberate and systematic to be dismissed as madness or sheer incompetence. Lurking beneath the clamor for European unity is a political struggle to establish supranational EU sovereignty—a project that trumps all other considerations, including Europe’s own strategic autonomy. Ukraine has become central to the agenda of transforming the European Union from a regional and institutional association of multiple nations into a sovereign administrative superstate—a “United States of Europe.” The European establishment has an ontological attachment to Ukraine: In the minds of many European technocrats, “Europe” always included Eastern Europe but excluded Russia.

• [2019] How Ukraine became the unlikely home for Isis leaders escaping the caliphate. Ukrainian authorities announced last week they had arrested a top Isis commander in Kiev in a joint operation with the CIA. He appears to be one of many to have made Ukraine their home. Ukrainian authorities have long fostered holes in their legal and law enforcement systems. The usual beneficiary is organised crime, which sustains itself on the flow of fake IDs and contraband, says Philip Ingram, a former British intelligence officer. But the lax regime has also created an obvious vulnerability to international terrorism.

• Russia says US, Britain & Ukraine were behind the Terrorist Attack. Russia has come out and bluntly stated that “The United States, Britain and Ukraine are behind the terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall, the chief of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Bortnikov has told the media.” As I have said, NOBODY who thinks even objectively ever thought for one half-a-second that this had anything to do with ISIS or any Islamic Terrorist attack. First of all, it would be the first time such an act took place, and the terrorists tried to run. They typically die in such events, for they believe all their sins will be forgiven, and they get the 72 virgins. Unfortunately, this was not very sophisticated to really try to cover up the source being Ukraine.

Vaccines

• The Era of Informed Consent is Over. In a significant blow to patient autonomy, informed consent has been quietly revoked just 77 years after it was codified in the Nuremberg Code. On the 21st of December 2023, as we were frantically preparing for the festive season, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a final ruling to amend a provision of the 21st Century Cures Act. This allowed …an exception from the requirement to obtain informed consent when a clinical investigation poses no more than a minimal risk to the human subject… This ruling went into effect on January 22nd, 2024, which means it’s already standard practice across America. 

• Investigating Nonspecific Effects of the Live-Attenuated Japanese Encephalitis Vaccine on Lower Respiratory Tract Infections in Children Aged 25-35 Months. Compared with inactivated Japanese encephalitis vaccine (JE-I), receiving the live-attenuated Japanese encephalitis vaccine (JE-L) as the most recent vaccine was associated with lower risk of inpatient and outpatient hospital visits for LRTIs among children aged 25 months to 35 months. The nature of NSEs induced by JE-L should be considered for policymakers and physicians when recommending JE vaccines to those at high risk of infection from the Japanese encephalitis virus.

• Persistence of S1 Spike Protein in CD16+ Monocytes up to 245 Days in SARS-CoV-2 Negative Post COVID-19 Vaccination Individuals with Post-Acute Sequalae of COVID-19 (PASC)-Like Symptoms. There have been concerning reports about people experiencing new onset persistent complications (greater than 30 days) following approved SARS-CoV-2 vaccines (BNT162b2 (Pfizer), mRNA-1273 (Moderna), Janssen (Johnson and Johnson), and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca)). The authors sought to determine the immunologic abnormalities in these patients and to investigate whether the potential etiology was similar to Post-Acute Sequalae of COVID (PASC), or long COVID.