This Week's Must Reads - 25 September - 1 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

• Modeling transformational policy pathways on low growth and negative growth scenarios to assess impacts on socioeconomic development and carbon emissions. This article shows that negative growth…interventions do not solve the global climate crisis. On the other hand, a global negative growth scenario will significantly reduce future cumulative carbon emissions (45%) but also dramatically undermines the pursuit of global development goals, like the elimination of poverty…[and] leads to an increase of 15 percentage points in global extreme poverty by 2100.

• The Cheap Wind Fantasy. Advocates of Net Zero policies repeatedly reassure the public that they are advancing cheap, green energy with the promise of vast numbers of lucrative green jobs and world leadership for the U.K. in selected green technologies. Unfortunately for the hard pressed British electorate “cheap, green energy” is nothing more than an empty political slogan arrived at by a dishonest sleight of hand.

• Comparison of Recently Proposed Causes of Climate Change. This paper compares the ideas contained in the main papers published on climate change since World War II to arrive at a suggested consensus of our present knowledge regarding climatic changes and their causes. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is only suggested as a cause in one theory, which, despite its wide acceptance by Politicians, the media, and the Public, ignores the findings in other studies, including the ideas found in the Milankovitch Cycles.

Covid

• Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection and Postacute Risk of Non–Coronavirus Disease 2019 Infectious Disease Hospitalizations: A Nationwide Cohort Study of Danish Adults Aged ≥50 Years. The study does not support an increased susceptibility to non-COVID-19 infectious disease hospitalization following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

• ‘Long Covid’ is a failure of science. It offers opportunities to a medical-industrial complex to gain access to public funding for research, while the real victims get lost.

• Top Japanese Virologist Warns of Manufactured Omicron Strain. Professor Miyazawa has published over 250 academic papers and studies in the areas of virology, disease, veterinary medicine, and microbial ecology. Yet his most recent paper has the world talking and deeply moved him into action to alert others to what he has found.

• SARS-CoV-2 infects coronary arteries, increases plaque inflammation. NIH-funded research sheds light on link between COVID-19 infection and increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. The researchers thought that if SARS-CoV-2 could directly infect arterial cells, the macrophages that normally are turned loose might increase inflammation in the existing plaque. [What happens when heart cells start producing spike protein after vaccination?]

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Jenny Harries interview: We’ll behave more like Sweden when the next pandemic hits. The UK Health Security Agency head on Britain’s Covid response and preparing for other deadly diseases that could threaten the country.

• Lockdown harm to children was preventable, Government told. Report by leading campaigners argues worst impacts could have been avoided if ministers had considered rights of the young.

• A Pandemic of Lockdown Denialism. These days, if you listen to the rhetoric, you would think that absolutely no one forced anyone to do anything, not even take the jab. There were no mask mandates. No one was ever locked down. There were some mistakes, sure, but those came only from doing the best we could with the knowledge we had. Other than make well-considered recommendations, they didn’t force anyone to do anything.

• Government report: no good evidence that lockdown worked. The UK Health Security Agency concluded that evidence around NPIs is weak. On Wednesday, the UK Health Security Agency quietly released a review which found that the evidence base for the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on Covid transmission was weak.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• China Developers Drop Most in 9 Months on Evergrande Woes. Chinese property stocks tumbled the most in nine months as concern over a possible China Evergrande Group liquidation added to fresh signs of stress across the industry.

• Germany-Backed SEFE Set to Take First Russian LNG Since Crisis. A former trading unit of Gazprom PJSC is poised to obtain liquefied natural gas from Russia for the first time since Germany nationalized the company during last year’s energy crisis.

• Dimon Warns 7% Fed Rate Still Possible, Times of India Says. Markets may be predicting the end of the Federal Reserve’s tightening cycle, but Jamie Dimon is still telling clients to prepare for a worst-case scenario of benchmark interest rates hitting 7% along with stagflation.

• US excess savings for the bottom 80% of US households have been depleted.

  

• Biden Economic Advisors Are Economically Illiterate. Biden administration spin doctor Jared Berstein is at it again, demonstrating his complete ignorance of both economic theory and fact — an alarming trait for the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

• More bad news for U.S. home buyers: Mortgage rates hit a 23-year high. Unlike 2000, home prices offer no relief to buyers as they keep rising, Freddie Mac says. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 7.31% as of September 28, according to data released by Freddie Mac FMCC, -0.97% on Thursday.

• How a CBDC Created Chaos and Poverty in Nigeria. It is no coincidence that Nigeria, with a population of over two hundred million, became the first serious global testing ground for central bank digital currencies (CBDC) implementation.

Health

• “Euthanasia houses” to be set up across Canada under plans proposed by euthanasia group. A euthanasia group that set up Canada’s first “euthanasia house” is aiming to open similar “houses” where people can go to end their life through euthanasia throughout Canada.

• Insurance industry coalition forms non-profit to study baffling excess mortality. Members of the group, called The Insurance Collaboration to Save Lives, say they were increasingly concerned about excess mortality and morbidity trends that even three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

• The US has such a love affair with laxatives that there is now a national shortage. This is not normal. Stomach problems are so ubiquitous that they are trending on TikTok. They provide an insight into a lot of our current problems: from anxiety and stress to a poor diet.

• Scientists on panel defending ultra-processed foods linked to food firms. Three out of five at briefing playing down concerns over UPFs have ties to makers of such foods. Recent studies have linked UPFs such as ice-cream, fizzy drinks and ready meals to poor health, including an increased risk of cancer, weight gain and heart disease. Global consumption of the products is soaring and UPFs now make up more than half the average diet in the UK and US.

Politics

• ‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’: Yanis Varoufakis on extremism, Starmer, and the tyranny of big tech. In his new book, Technofeudalism, the maverick Greek economist says we are witnessing an epochal shift.

• Rumble Could Be Banned In UK Under New Online Safety Laws. Experts have said that Rumble, which hosts Russell Brand, could be blocked in the UK because of the Online Safety Bill which has passed the houses of parliament and is now awaiting royal assent.

• Canada's House speaker resigns over inviting a man who fought for a Nazi unit to Parliament. The speaker of Canada’s House of Commons is resigning for inviting a man who fought for a Nazi military unit during World War II to attend a speech by the Ukrainian president.

• ‘Bombshell’: Bank Records Show Chinese Payments Were Sent to Joe Biden’s Address. President Joe Biden’s home was used as the beneficiary address for the receipt of illicit payments from Chinese businessmen, a blockbuster new report finds.

• Elon Musk fires X ‘election integrity’ team for undermining election integrity. Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that he has cut the Electoral Integrity team at X (formerly Twitter) in half, including the newly brought on board head of the group, Aaron Rodericks.

• Technocracy: ‘Sustainable’ Is The New Code Word For Genocide. The Nazis didn’t call it murder or genocide. They called it, “The Final Solution.” Everyone in the Nazi Club knew what the “Final Solution,” actually meant. Like the word, “Sustainability,” today actually means getting the world population down to a level the Fascists think is sustainable.

• Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color.

  It Actually Did. The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color. The overall job growth included 20,524 White workers. The other 302,570 jobs — or 94% of the headcount increase — went to people of color.

• Press freedom does not exist while Julian Assange is in jail. We must defend the right to offend. Assange’s wife write that the most important aspect of the right to offend is the one that confronts those in power with the truths that they most eagerly wish to conceal.

• The New Abnormal: Authoritarian Control Freaks Want to Micromanage Our Lives. This overbearing despotism, which pre-dates the COVID-19 hysteria, is the very definition of a Nanny State, where government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

• Judgment call: the case for leaving the ECHR. One point should be made at the outset and never overlooked: we do not need the European Convention on Human Rights in order to protect human rights.

• Why the West’s elites invented a permacrisis. Our desperate rulers are clinging on to a dying world. The normalisation of the concept of permacrisis could be understood as a response to the loss of legitimacy and authority by Western ruling elites.

Science

• Science paints a new picture of the ancient past, when we mixed and mated with other kinds of humans. In recent years, researchers have gained the power to pull DNA from ancient hominins, including our early ancestors and other relatives who walked on two legs. Along with more fossils and artifacts, the DNA findings are pointing us to a challenging idea: We're not so special. For most of human history we shared the planet with other kinds of early humans, and those now-extinct groups were a lot like us.

• Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe? Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism. The concept proposes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, like mass or electrical charge.

• In A First, Scientists Recover Ribonucleic Acid From Extinct Animal. Daniela Kalthoff, in charge of the mammal collection at the Museum of Natural History, said the idea of possibly resurrecting the Tasmanian tiger was an "exciting idea".

• What Is Spacetime Really Made Of? Spacetime may emerge from a more fundamental reality. Figuring out how could unlock the most urgent goal in physics—a quantum theory of gravity.

• Scientists find antimatter is subject to gravity. Tests at Cern refute suggestion that antigravity might apply to antimatter, showing instead it also falls downwards.

• People Experience ‘New Dimensions of Reality' When Dying, Groundbreaking Study Reports. Scientists recorded the brain waves of people in cardiac arrest to understand what happens to consciousness when we die.

• 2.5 million years older than Lucy: Are 6-million-year-old footprints found on Crete from an ancient human ancestor? In 2002, researchers who had discovered hominid footprints on the Greek island of Crete discovered they were made an incredible 5.7 million years ago.

Ukraine

• U.S. Army Hospital in Germany Is Treating Americans Hurt Fighting in Ukraine. The Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center has quietly started admitting Ukrainian Army soldiers who were wounded in combat, most of them American volunteers.

• Chancellor Scholz agreed to the blowing up of Nord Stream by the US 3 weeks before the outbreak of war, which has now permanently destroyed Germany. On February 8, 2022, 3 weeks before the start of the Russian SMO, Scholz stood next to Biden when he announced that he would blow up Nordstream.

• What U.S. taxpayers are getting for their money in Ukraine. American taxpayers are financing more than just weapons. The U.S. government is buying seeds and fertilizer for Ukrainian farmers… and covering the salaries of Ukraine's first responders – all 57,000 of them.

• Canada’s honoring of Nazi vet exposes Ottawa’s longstanding Ukraine policy. By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans.

• After nine months of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, barely any territory has been recaptured. Instead tens of thousands of lives have been lost.

  

Vaccines

• Swedish Scientist Anette Stahel: CDC Used Flawed Israeli Analysis to Incorrectly Promote COVID-19 Vax Safe vs. Infection Risk. The young Swedish scientist picks apart the Israeli study, adjusting and correcting for flawed assumptions, then recalculating for what she argues reflects a far more accurate depiction of real-world risks and benefits associated with the COVID-19 vaccines.

• Scientists ‘shocked’ and ‘alarmed’ at what’s in the mRNA shots. Early in 2023, genomics scientist Kevin McKernan made an accidental discovery. While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls.

• Meat From Animals Vaccinated With mRNA Vaccines May Soon Make Its Way Into the US Food Supply. A growing list of food sources, including shrimp, pigs, and beef, are being targeted by mRNA gene therapy technology, and the risks are entirely unknown.

• Duration of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine persistence and factors associated with cardiac involvement in recently vaccinated patients. Vaccine was detected in the myocardium in a subset of patients vaccinated within 30 days of death.

• mRNA ‘vaccines’ must be banned once and for all. Oncologists have contacted Angus Dalgleish from all over the world including from Australia and the US. The consensus is that it is no longer confined to melanoma but that increased incidence of lymphomas, leukaemias and kidney cancers is being seen after booster injections.

• Inability to work following COVID-19 vaccination–a relevant aspect for future booster vaccinations. Among 1704 HCWs enrolled, 595 (34.9%) HCWs were on sick leave following at least one COVID-19 vaccination, leading to a total number of 1550 sick days.