This Week's Must Reads - 29 January - 4 February 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

• Trillions Spent on ‘Climate Change’ Based on Faulty Temperature Data, Climate Experts Say. Meteorologist finds 96 percent of NOAA temperature stations located in ‘urban heat islands,’ including next to exhaust fans and on ‘blistering-hot rooftops.’ “The few stations that are left that are not biased because they are, for example, outside of town in a field and are an agricultural research station that’s been around for 100 years ... their data gets completely swamped by the much larger set of biased data. There’s no way you can adjust that out.”

• The sun’s poles are about to flip. It’s awesome — and slightly terrifying. The sun is growing feistier. Great news for aurora watchers. Bad news for communication satellites. Every 11 or so years, the sun undergoes an epic transformation: its magnetic poles reverse. Like on Earth, the sun has a magnetic North and a magnetic South. But unlike Earth, whose poles flip on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, the sun’s shuffle is a regular occurrence. The sun’s poles last reversed in 2013. So we’re just about due — likely starting some time this year.

• Net Zero threatens national security. As the EU shifts its spending priorities from the Net Zero agenda to investing in defence, a prominent expert on national security has called for the UK to go back to coal, oil and gas and to start fracking. ‘These are the only domestic energy sources that do not leave the country’s energy security at the mercy of enemy states’, Professor Gwythian Prins has warned. Professor Prins, formerly head of the Mackinder Programme at the London School of Economics, and an adviser to NATO and the Ministry of Defence, warns that our lack of secure energy supplies risks leaving us dangerously exposed.

• EU Wildfire Trends. The European Environment Agency has not yet published its wildfire data for 2023 yet, but they did issue the final data for 2022 in October. Hands up who can spot global boiling.

  

Covid

• Inside NIH virus lab in Montana - that has eerie ties to Wuhan - where US scientists inject pigs and monkeys with EBOLA and other dangerous bio-agents. Images and video footage obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show researchers sedating monkeys and pigs and giving them injections, as well as piglets housed in small and unsanitary cages. While there is no suggestion any of the footage shows illegal activity, it gives an eerie glimpse into what goes on at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Lab (RML), which has come under scrutiny in recent months.

• Negligence by experts in the early response to COVID-19. Putting aside, one thing is quite certain. Knowledge obtained through virology research is useless unless it is utilized in face of a pandemic. The virologists who have been heavily funded for the purpose of pandemic prediction and preparedness, like the USAID-funded PREDICT project, did not immediately share their knowledge that SARS-CoV-2 had a great risk of pandemic with its anomalous adaptation to human infections, possibly acquired through serial passage. They are accountable for their cover-up. Even if the risky virology research is worth taking risks to prepare for future pandemics, it should be carried out by a new generation of open-minded researchers. The virologists who have conspired to cover-up critical information must be removed from the academic community.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Did the battle against “misinformation” go too far? The pandemic brought a massive effort to limit the spread of bad health information. Did it do more harm than good? Whether the government crossed the line from legal persuasion to illegal coercion will be a question for the courts to decide. Whatever the outcome of that case, however, the public health and misinformation research communities will be left with foundational questions of their own. Chief among these is whether, in the midst of a pandemic emergency, efforts to control misinformation overstepped the evidence. And if so, did these overzealous efforts have any negative effects, such as muting useful scientific disagreement, eroding public trust, or stymieing free speech?

• Africa needs an inquiry into Covid-19 mistakes. An accounting must be made of the mistakes, so that such an inept response driven by wealthy nations and foisted onto Africa never takes place again. With a median age of lower than 20, Africa was always likely to have a low death rate from Covid. This is not an indication of success, but instead of the catastrophe that took place when assuming that Covid-19 would be an equal threat in Africa as it may have been elsewhere. The first mistake came with lockdowns which had been trialled in Freetown and Monrovia during the Ebola epidemic. Esteemed groups such as Doctors Without Borders had counselled against this move then, and subsequent academic research deemed that they had been ineffective – as impossible to maintain in environments where the informal economy is so important.

• COVID-19 school closures caused a significant drop in student learning outcomes. Country studies show large learning losses, which could cost this generation of students trillions of dollars in lifetime earnings. Global studies also document significant learning losses. International grade 4 reading scores declined an average of 33 percent of a standard deviation, equivalent to losing more than a year of schooling. Distance learning during the school closures does not seem to have helped very much.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• A Famed Analyst’s Final Forecast Is the Fall of the U.S. Economy. Over his 54 years as a financial analyst, Richard X. Bove perfected the art of grabbing attention. Last week, a few hours after completing a spot on Bloomberg television, the 83-year-old announced his retirement. He took that weekend off — and then jumped right back in. “The dollar is finished as the world’s reserve currency,” Mr. Bove said matter-of-factly, perched in an armchair outside his home office just north of Tampa, from which he predicted that China will overtake the U.S. economy. No other analysts will say the same because they are, as he put it, “monks praying to money,” unwilling to speak out on the mainstream financial system that employs them.

• Our foreign debt time bomb. An explosion threatens when interest rates rise. Australia’s net foreign debt has ballooned to $1.2 trillion as of September 30. This amounts to about 50 per cent of GDP. Gross debt is now $2.8 trillion, about 110 per cent of output. These are high ratios by international standards. The risk is that one day, global investors might baulk at adding to Australia’s foreign debt. Australia would face an economic crisis if foreigners stopped sending their savings because, by the count of the ABS, about $542 billion, or 19 per cent of gross debt has a maturity of less than 90 days. While this figure is bloated by derivatives, it highlights the vast amount of debt that needs to be renegotiated at acceptable rates every three months for Australia’s economy to function.

• IMF raises Russia growth outlook as war boosts economy. Gross domestic product is forecast to rise 2.6 per cent this year, more than double the pace the IMF predicted as recently as October, and slightly slower than the 3 per cent expansion estimated for 2023. The Russian upgrade, by 1.5 percentage points, is the largest for any economy featured in an update to the fund’s World Economic Outlook, released on Tuesday. The figures will raise fresh questions over the effectiveness of multiple rounds of western sanctions aimed at depressing the fiscal revenues harvested by the Kremlin to finance its war in Ukraine.

• China Awarded Major Contract By Iraq For Supergiant Oil And Gas Field. There are two key reasons why China, Russia, and the U.S. have long been scrambling to secure control over Iraq’s gas sector, and these are its massive potential size and its huge geopolitical importance. Last week’s awarding of the major build-own-operate-transfer contract to a subsidiary of Chinese flagship gas firm PetroChina to develop the Nahr bin Umar onshore gas field is a clear signal of how this competition is going. Even more so, as it follows the previous week’s takeover by PetroChina from the U.S. ExxonMobil of the lead operator role on Iraq’s supergiant West Qurna 1 oil field.

• A commercial real estate crash is unfolding, and regional banks are feeling the pain. Plummeting regional bank stocks are giving investors déjà vu, but the underlying problem this time around is the commercial property crisis. On Wednesday, the KBW Nasdaq Regional Bank index saw its worst day since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March, ending the day down by 6%. The decline was led by New York Bancorp, which tumbled nearly 40% on Wednesday after posting a fourth-quarter loss of $260 million due to of sour commercial real estate loans. US property losses also sent Tokyo-based Agora bank tumbling 20%, Bloomberg reported. And Deutsche Bank AG in Europe is quadrupling its provisions, or which is money set aside to anticipate future losses, to $123 million.

• A great chart to see what an anomaly the last few years have been when it comes to US M2 money supply.

  

• China’s Economic Pain Worsens as Real-Estate Sales Plummet. The world’s second-largest economy faces problems on multiple fronts as factory activity also slows. The country’s 100 largest developers recorded a deep slump in new-home sales in January, according to data from China Real Estate Information. They sold homes worth $32.83 billion, down 34% from the same period a year earlier. It was the worst month of sales since at least July 2020, when the data provider changed how it calculates them.

• Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Recent History. On the surface, it was an blockbuster jobs report, certainly one which nobody expected. Starting at the top, the BLS reported that in January the US unexpectedly added 353K "jobs" - the most since January 2023 (when the print was 482K compared to 131K) , double the consensus forecast of 185K and more than the highest Wall Street estimate (300K from Natixis). In fact, this was a 4-sigma beat to estimate, unheard of in the past year. In fact, there is a 9 million gap between the number of U.S. "Jobs" and the number of "employed" workers.

  

• Red Sea Shipping Impacts to Be Felt This Summer, Says Breakwave Advisors’ Kartsonas. John Kartsonas, managing partner of Breakwave Advisors, explained that the “Just in Time” strategy has proven risky, especially considering the geopolitical conditions over the past few years. He noted that many companies have adapted by maintaining larger inventories, which helps to mitigate short-term disruptions, such as the current one in the Red Sea. However, Kartsonas warned that if the Red Sea disruption continues for an extended period, there will be increased costs for delivered goods due to longer sailing distances and higher fuel consumption. This will particularly affect goods traded in the East-West corridor. “The impact will begin to be felt in the summer months,” says Kartsonas.

• US Property Losses Trigger 20% Plunge in Japanese Bank Aozora. The bank announced that it expects to post a net loss of 28 billion yen ($191 million) for the fiscal year, compared with its previous forecast of a 24 billion yen profit. The bank said the loss is due the additional draw down of loans for US real estate and losses on sales of foreign bonds. It made an additional reserve of 32.4 billion yen against bad loans related to US office real estate the third quarter. Aozora’s woes echo the situation at another regional bank counterpart, with New York Community Bancorp slashing its dividend and stockpile reserves due to its exposure to the US commercial real estate market.

  

Health

• Scientists Have Discovered a Previously Unknown Protein Capable of Keeping Human Cells Healthy. Researchers at the University of São Paulo, in collaboration with Australian colleagues, have discovered a unique bacterial protein capable of keeping human cells healthy even when the cells have a heavy bacterial burden. This breakthrough holds the potential for developing new treatments for various diseases linked to mitochondrial dysfunction, including cancer and autoimmune disorders. Mitochondria, the cell’s powerhouses, are essential for providing the energy required for cellular biochemical reactions.

• Medicine Has Been Fully Militarized. By early-to-mid 2020, it became obvious to those paying attention that the Covid “response,” while promoted as a medical initiative, was in fact a military operation. Top-down diktats on how to manage Covid patients were handed down to physicians from high above, and these were enforced with a militaristic rigidity unseen in doctors’ professional lifetimes. The mandated protocols made no sense. They ignored fundamental tenets of both sound medical practice and medical ethics. They shamelessly lied about well-known, tried-and-true medicines that were known to be safe and appeared to work. The protocols killed people.

• Examining the ONS all-cause mortality data. Keeping data hidden from the public… for whose benefit? It is not necessary to have a degree in statistics to understand that something is very amiss with public data reporting, with lack of transparency being the most egregious issue. The taxpayer funds the very existence of the ONS. We should have access to the information that we are paying to be collected. This paternalistic idea that we must be ‘protected’ from things we can’t handle is clearly an inversion. It is very obvious that we are not the ones being protected from the obfuscation of facts that would be of great benefit to the public to be aware of, regardless of how dangerous it is to The Narrative™.

  

Middle East

• UNRWA'S Terrorgram - How a Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrated the October 7th Hamas massacre. Notwithstanding the repeated denials by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and its insistence that it has zero tolerance for hatred and antisemitism, UN Watch continues to find abhorrent antisemitism and support for jihadi terrorism by UNRWA staff on social media. This report details how UNRWA teachers in a 3,000-member UNRWA staff Telegram group cheered and celebrated Hamas’s October 7th massacre while at the same time asking when their UNRWA salaries will be paid. The UNRWA staff in the group shared photos and video footage of those events and prayed for the terrorists’ success and for Israel’s destruction, in clear violation of UN rules.

• Traders divert Russian oil products around Africa to avoid Red Sea. Since the full EU embargo on Russian oil products took effect in February 2023, traders have rerouted fuel oil, vacuum gasoil (VGO) and naphtha cargoes from Russian ports to Asia and the Middle East via the Red Sea and the Suez Canal as the shortest sea route. According to LSEG shipping data, fuel oil and VGO loaded on two tankers Nissos Christiana and Alkinoos at the Russian Baltic ports, had turned around in the Mediterranean Sea and were skirting the coast of Africa on their way to India and Singapore.

• Iraqi parliament calling to ditch US dollar for oil trade. The Finance Committee in the Iraqi parliament made a statement on 31 January calling for the sale of oil in currencies other than the US dollar, aiming to counter US sanctions on the Iraqi banking system. “The US Treasury still uses the pretext of money laundering to impose sanctions on Iraqi banks. This requires a national stance to put an end to these arbitrary decisions,” the statement said. “Imposing sanctions on Iraqi banks undermines and obstructs Central Bank efforts to stabilize the dollar exchange rate and reduce the selling gap between official and parallel rates,” it added. The Finance Committee affirmed its “rejection of these practices, due to their repercussions on the livelihoods of citizens," and reiterated its "call on the government and the Central Bank of Iraq to take quick measures against the dominance of the dollar, by diversifying cash reserves from foreign currencies.”

Politics

• BBC staff told not to hire candidates who are ‘dismissive’ of diversity. A recruitment policy document says applicants should be asked to “explain what diversity and inclusion means to you and, should you be successful, what opportunities do you see for you to promote, celebrate or encourage diversity and inclusion in your role?” The guidelines, used in a major non-editorial department of the BBC, tell recruiters: “Don’t hire [candidates who are] unsuited to the organisation” if they are “dismissive or derisory of diversity and inclusion and surrounding topics”. Critics believe guidelines act as mechanism to maintain ‘groupthink’ and promote controversial ideas.

• 20% of under 35 faculty members think it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. 40% of them think it is ok to physically block other students attending a speech. And 60% think it is ok to shout down a speaker during their talk to prevent them from speaking on campus.

  

• Rishi Sunak is quietly betraying Brexit. His new Northern Ireland deal will tie the whole of the UK to EU law. Furious at this carving up of the UK, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has spent the past two years refusing to enter government at Stormont. To try to restore power-sharing, Sunak has proposed screening all new UK laws to ensure they don’t create new trade barriers in the Irish Sea. This week, the DUP leadership finally accepted Sunak’s offer. But while the new regime might ease trade across the Irish Sea, it will also tie mainland Britain to EU law by the back door. It will discourage precisely the kind of regulatory divergence that could make Brexit Britain a more attractive place for business than the EU. In other words, this supposed Brexiteer and Conservative patriot is now creating a situation where UK law will be subjected to a de facto EU veto.

• South Africa says five countries confirm they are joining BRICS. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have confirmed they are joining the BRICS bloc after being invited last year, South Africa's Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said on Wednesday. The five countries were extended invitations along with Argentina at a summit in August in Johannesburg to join the bloc comprising Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa. Members say the move would help reshuffle a world order they view as outdated. Argentina has since declined the invitation to join.

• Flailing Germany is the future of Europe. For much of the Merkel era, Germany stood as an island of economic and political stability amid Europe’s perennially stormy waters. Those days, however, seem like a distant memory. Europe is still in crisis — but now Germany is the epicentre. It is, once again, the sick man of Europe. Anti-government demonstrations are rare in Germany. So when hundreds of angry farmers and their tractors descended on Berlin in mid-December, to protest a planned cut to diesel subsidies and tax breaks for agricultural vehicles as part of a new new austerity measures, it was clear that something was afoot.

• Britain’s forecasted rise in population over the next 25 years - virtually all net migration.

  

• UK’s “Online Safety Act” officially grants MSM permission to publish lies. Welcome to the UK where it’s now official government policy that you CAN’T publish “misinformation”, but The Guardian, the BBC, Disney and Netflix CAN. Yes, it’s true – the recently signed “Online Safety Act” brands the publication of “false information” a criminal offense punishable by up to a year in prison…unless you’re an MSM outlet, when it’s totally fine.

Science

• 1.6-billion-year-old fossils push back origin of multicellular life by tens of millions of years. Groundbreaking fossils unearthed in China suggest that multicellular organisms arose earlier than scientists previously thought. The fossils, of what may be an ancient type of photosynthetic alga, are the oldest known multicellular eukaryotes, a group of organisms that contains a clearly defined nucleus full of packaged DNA. The fossils date back more than 1.6 billion years, which is around 70 million years earlier than scientists previously thought multicellularity arose, according to a new study published Jan. 24 in the journal Science Advances.

• What inner speech is, and why philosophy is waking up to it. It is quite rare for philosophers to start investigating a new area, and a lot of the questions they explore have been around since ancient times. However, there is something they have only begun to look at closely in the last 15 years or so, which sits at the intersection of psychology and philosophy: inner speech. Also known as the internal monolog, inner speech is the voice we hear in our minds when thinking or reading. Surprisingly, empirical research has found that not everyone has this inner voice, though the majority of us do.

• Scientists Discovered Strange ‘Entities’ Called ‘Obelisks’ In Our Bodies. Their Purpose Is a Mystery. Scientists have discovered strange entities hiding in our guts and mouths that may represent an entirely new class of life—if they are even alive. Dubbed “obelisks,” these tiny rings of RNA can fold into a structure that looks more like a rod, hence the name. They’re also surprisingly commonplace in our microbiomes—the community of viruses, bacteria, fungi, and their genes that live in our bodies. Yet, they’ve gone undetected until now and represent the latest discovery in an ever-growing list of mysterious “genetic agents” hiding in plain sight. Indeed, the researchers who discovered them report that their function, if they have one, is a mystery.

Technology

• Google Update Reveals AI Will Read All Your Private Messages. Google has just unveiled a game-changing AI upgrade for Android. But it has a darker side. Google’s AI will read and analyze your private messages, going back forever. Bard will also analyze the private content of messages “to understand the context of your conversations, your tone, and your interests.” It will analyze the sentiment of your messages, “to tailor its responses to your mood and vibe.” And it will “analyze your message history with different contacts to understand your relationship dynamics… to personalize responses based on who you're talking to.”

• From nanny state to Big Brother. Using facial-recognition software to stop underage boozing is the thin end of an authoritarian wedge. Robots might not be about to take over the world anytime soon, but it would be nice if politicians stopped giving them so many jobs to do. Last week, it was reported that the UK government wants to install facial-recognition cameras at supermarket checkouts to stop under-18s from buying alcohol. The problem with this proposal is that it is expressly giving AI a role in upholding the law. And once we allow algorithms to enforce legal requirements, things can only get worse from there. The next step could well be digital IDs – that catch-all solution that politicians of all parties just can’t seem to quit.

• New invention could get rid of millions of batteries, scientists say. At the moment, sensors are used across the world in a variety of critical contexts: those that monitor buildings for dangerous sounds, for instance, or others that help people who are deaf. But they require constant power, and tend to rely on batteries that have to be regularly changed and generate vast amounts of rubbish. One EU study has suggested that by 2025, 78 million batteries will be binned each day. Now researchers say they have built a mechanical sensor that requires no power at all, and could help prevent some of that battery waste.

Ukraine

• Ukraine says corrupt officials stole $40 million meant to buy arms for the war with Russia. The SBU said late Saturday that five people have been charged, with one person detained while trying to cross the Ukrainian border. If found guilty, they face up to 12 years in prison. The investigation comes as Kyiv attempts to clamp down on corruption in a bid to speed up its membership in the European Union and NATO. Officials from both blocs have demanded widespread anti-graft reforms before Kyiv can join them.

• UN Court Rejects Much of Ukraine's Case Alleging Russia Discriminated in Crimea, Supported Rebels. The United Nations' top court on Wednesday rejected large parts of a case filed by Ukraine alleging that Russia bankrolled separatist rebels in the country's east a decade ago and has discriminated against Crimea's multiethnic community since its annexation of the peninsula. The International Court of Justice ruled Moscow violated articles of two treaties — one on terrorism financing and another on eradicating racial discrimination — but it rejected far more of Kyiv's claims under the treaties. It rejected Ukraine's request for Moscow to pay reparations for attacks in eastern Ukraine blamed on pro-Russia Ukrainian rebels, including the July 17, 2014, downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 that killed all 298 passengers and crew.

• Ukraine Downed Russian Il-76 Full of Ukrainian PoWs Using US-Made Patriot Missile System. Six Russian crewmembers, three Russian servicemen and 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile attack targeting an Ilyushin Il-76 strategic airlifter over Belgorod region last Wednesday. The plane was on route to a planned prisoner exchange, which was subsequently cancelled. The US sent several Patriot missile batteries to Ukraine last spring in a bid to shore up defenses against Russian precision strikes targeting military and energy infrastructure.

Vaccines

• Does acute exposure to thimerosal, an organic mercury compound, affect the mitochondrial function of an infant model? Thimerosal (TM) is a toxic, organometallic mercury compound (which releases ethyl-mercury-containing compounds in aqueous solutions) used as a preservative in vaccines. Mitochondria are organelle which are highly vulnerable to many chemical compounds, including mercury (Hg) and its derivatives. Acute TM treatment exposure in a Wistar rat model mimicking TM exposure in an infant following childhood vaccination significantly damaged brain bioenergetic pathways. This study supports the ability of TM exposure to preferentially damage the nervous system.

• Determinants of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis. Following the roll-out of the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2, Moderna mRNA-1273, and Janssen Ad26.COV2.S coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) injections in the United States, millions of individuals have reported adverse events (AEs) using the vaccine adverse events reports system (VAERS). COVID-19 vaccination is strongly associated with a serious adverse safety signal of myocarditis, particularly in children and young adults resulting in hospitalization and death. Further investigation into the underlying mechanisms of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis is imperative to create effective mitigation strategies and ensure the safety of COVID-19 vaccination programs across populations.

• Cryptic vaccine-associated adverse events: The critical need for a new vaccine safety surveillance paradigm to improve public trust in vaccines. Some vaccine reactions are not immediately obvious, or are even clinically “silent” or cryptic, making them challenging to identify and link directly to a vaccine. It is critical to be vigilant about rare, silent, or subtle reactions. Public health agencies and healthcare providers can play a much more favorable and vital role in establishing vaccine trust by enlarging the current vaccine safety paradigm, and in publishing and communicating, in full, these risks and benefits transparently to the public.