This Week's Must Reads - 4-10 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

• 'Very Bizarre': Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data. The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth. But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

• Electric cars release more toxic emissions than petrol-powered vehicles and are worse for the environment. The study, which was published in 2022 but has begun circulating again after being cited in a WSJ op-ed, found that brakes and tyres release 1,850 times more particulate matter compared to modern exhaust pipes which have filters that reduce emissions. It found that EVs are 30 percent heavier on average than petrol-powered vehicles, which causes the brakes and tyre treads to wear out faster than standard cars and releases tiny, often toxic particles into the atmosphere.

Covid

• Chinese scientist booted out of Canadian lab after mailing Ebola virus to Wuhan linked to 'bat woman' virologist and British doctor Peter Daszak at center of Covid leak theory. Dr Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Dr Keding Cheng were fired from a lab in Winnipeg in 2021 after they were found to have sent virus samples to China. The full extent of their treachery was revealed in a 600-page report released by Canadian intelligence services last week in response to cries of a cover up. Now, further details have emerged that put Dr Qiu at the center of 'dangerous' research at a Wuhan lab that has been accused of leaking the Covid-19 virus

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The Covid-19 lesson from Sweden: Don't lock down. Results suggest that the Swedish policy of advice and trust in the population to reduce social interactions voluntarily was relatively successful. Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs. In future pandemics, policymakers should rely on empirical evidence rather than panicking and adopting extreme measures. Even if policymakers appeared to act rapidly and decisively, the rushed implementation of strict lockdowns in 2020/21 probably did more harm than good.

• Seven in ten scientists say ministers failed to consider the long-term damage of lockdowns during the Covid pandemic. Some 68 per cent of those interviewed believe that more attention should have been paid to the fallout caused by restrictions during the pandemic. More than a third (37 per cent) also described modelling during the crisis as 'average', 'poor' or 'very poor'. One in three disagreed with the notion that lockdowns were always proportionate and justified, while a whopping 70 per cent slammed ministers and officials for not communicating with the public transparently throughout the pandemic.

• Are Covid Lockdowns Behind the Rise in Extreme Poverty in the Global South? In the context of a huge increase in global poverty since 2020 which has driven political convulsions most especially in low-income countries, a closer look at pandemic policies is vital to safeguard against future missteps. Could pandemic poverty have been avoided, and if so, how? Some may say that without Covid lockdowns, the virus would have been so devastating in poor countries as to render all of this academic. Yet in fact, the epidemiological benefits of shutdowns in informal housing are negligible because of the overcrowded nature of such settlements. Indeed, there is strong evidence from Mumbai’s slums that lockdowns accelerated the spread of Covid there.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The QE theory of everything - How the $30 trillion quantitative easing experiment reshaped our world – from Brexit to the dominance of Big Tech. Quantitative Easing has quietly become the defining idea of our time. For the past 15 years, every major development in our economy and the cultural superstructure that rests upon it – the explosive growth of social media and Big Tech, the property boom, the gig economy, Elon Musk, cryptocurrencies, fake news, overpriced coffee, Brexit, woke capitalism, Donald Trump and yes, perhaps even Prince Harry and Meghan Markle – can be related to the huge sums of new money that have disrupted every major economy.

• Russia to cut oil output by 471,000 bpd in second quarter. Russia will cut oil production by almost half a million barrels per day in the second quarter of 2024, the government said Sunday, as part of a move to boost prices. The plan, agreed with Russia’s energy allies in the OPEC+ group, comes on top of previous cuts to both oil output and exports as some of the world’s largest energy producers drive to push up market rates amid economic uncertainty. Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said Sunday that Moscow will reduce its output by 350,000 barrels a day (bpd) in April, by 400,000 bpd in May and then 471,000 bpd in June.

• Rocky Road to Dedollarization: Sergei Glazyev Interview. Very few people in Russia and across the Global South are as qualified as Sergei Glazyev, an academic with a prominent role within the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), to speak about the drive, the challenges and the pitfalls in the road towards de-dollarization. Glazyev explained how his main idea was “elaborated a long time ago. The basic idea is that a new currency should be first of all introduced on the basis of international law, signed by the countries which are interested in the production of this new currency. Not via some kind of conference, like Bretton Woods, with no legitimacy.

• NYCB Downgraded to Junk by Fitch, as Moody’s Goes Even Deeper. The bank’s discovery of weaknesses “prompted a reconsideration of NYCB’s controls around adequacy of provisioning, particularly with respect to its concentrated exposure to commercial real estate,” Fitch said. The stock plunged 26% Friday, even as the company said it doesn’t expect that control weaknesses will result in changes to its allowance for credit losses.

• UK authorities will soon have fewer restrictions when seizing crypto. The United Kingdom government recently released statutory instrument documentation stating that U.K. law enforcement authorities will be able to freeze crypto assets used in crime without requiring a conviction from the end of April. Published on Feb. 29, the document outlines the amendments made to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, which expands the power of the National Crime Agency to confiscate and seize crypto assets the agency suspects are linked to suspicious illicit activities, without needing to go through extensive legal procedures.

• Bankruptcies in the UK are shooting up.

  

• Britons need 72-year mortgages to make bills affordable, analysis reveals. Borrowers would need to spread their home loans over more than 70 years to be able to afford the same mortgages on offer just two years ago, banks have said. High house prices and higher interest rates have pushed up the length of affordable loans dramatically, and last year led to the lowest level of mortgages sold to home-movers since 1974. While rates had begun to ease earlier this year, swap rates – a leading indicator for mortgage rates – have more recently begun to climb again. This week, high street lenders HSBC, Clydesdale, NatWest, and Barclays all signalled rate increases ahead of the spring Budget.

• ‘It’s all fallen flat’: households earning more than £60,000 on how they are struggling financially. An annual gross income of £74,000 puts Scott, 28, a software engineer from Leicestershire, in the top 10% of earners nationally. But, he says, it doesn’t feel that way for him and his family. “Ten years ago we’d have been laughing with my salary. Now, it feels like our heads are barely above water. There’s an attitude that at this level of income you’ve plenty of money, but it’s not true at all,” he says. Scott was just one of scores of middle-class earners who shared with the Guardian how they are struggling to cope financially and can no longer afford comfortable living standards despite having household incomes of between £60,000 and £120,000.

• Similar to the US, Britain’s immigration numbers have shot up since Covid.

  

• US Layoffs rise to the highest for any February since 2009. The total of 84,638 planned cuts showed an increase of 3% from January and 9% from the same month a year ago, with technology and finance companies at the forefront. From a historical perspective, this was the worst February since 2009, which saw 186,350 announcements as the worst of the financial crisis was seemingly coming to an end. Financial markets bottomed the following month, paving the way for the longest economic expansion on record, lasting until the Covid pandemic in March 2020.

• In just February, 500k native born Americans lost their jobs whilst 1.2 million immigrants gained a job. All net job gains since Covid have been by foreign born workers.

  

Health

• Are People Getting Sick More Since the Covid Pandemic? There are two main schools of thought when it comes to this phenomenon. The first is the “immunity debt” theory, which posits that Covid-era practices like social distancing caused our immune systems to “forget” how to fight certain viruses. But “there is no scientific data to support this theory,” says Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The second theory is “immunity theft,” which suggests Covid infections could have led to immune system dysregulation and dysfunction. “This is an area of growing scientific inquiry,” says Wallace. [I can give them a third theory if they want!]

• Anxiety drug pregabalin killed my son — and hundreds more are dying from it. Originally a treatment for epilepsy, pregabalin now has the fastest-rising death toll of any drug in the UK. How did we sleepwalk into a US-style opioid crisis? In 2012, pregabalin was indicated in nine fatalities. A decade later, in 2022, the number had risen to 779, with almost 3,400 deaths in the past five years. Concerns about the use of addictive prescription drugs have come to the fore since the opioid crisis in the US. Between 1999 and 2021, almost 645,000 Americans died from an overdose involving an opioid.

• Doctors admit link between transgender hormone therapy and cancer in leaked emails. Leaked emails show other medical professionals admitting that trans patients do not always understand the consequences of gender reassignment. The cache of files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which sets guidelines that have influenced NHS treatment, show that doctors are carrying out life-changing surgery and prescribing puberty blockers even though they are aware the adults and children may not fully understand the long-term ramifications. One doctor talked about a transgender person who died of cancer as a result of his hormone treatment.

• Plastic Found Inside More Than 50% of Plaques From Clogged Arteries. Researchers have been busy studying the effects of microplastics in mini-replicas of organs, and in mice, to get a sense of how they might impact the human body. However, the concentrations of microplastics used in those studies might not reflect people's real-world exposure, and few studies have been done in humans. Now, a small study in Italy has found shards of microplastics in fatty deposits surgically removed from patients who had an operation to open up their clogged arteries – and reported their health outcomes nearly 3 years later.

Middle East

• Half of British publishers ‘won’t take books by Jewish authors’. Literary agent claims issue has been present for some time and has worsened during Palestine conflict. “A very well-known literary agent of great repute and associated with books that one would immediately recognise said that he is having difficulty with his Jewish authors or writings on Jewish subjects because he just finds that much of literary London is now a no-go zone for Jews,” said Mr Games. “He said there is no point putting proposals up to commissioning editors as they just are not interested.”

Politics

• Billionaires are building bunkers and buying islands. But are they prepping for the apocalypse – or pioneering a new feudalism? People are asking not only “Why is Mark Zuckerberg building a private apocalypse bunker in Hawaii?”, but also “What do the [billionaires] know?” and “What is going to happen in 2024 that they are not telling us?”. For billionaires, putting money into such projects doesn’t mean they’re crazy, or paranoid, or in possession of some special secret knowledge about the future. It simply means they’ve amassed such colossal surpluses of wealth, they may as well use it for something.

• The dangers of banning ‘Islamophobia’ - Literally anything related to Islam would be ringfenced from criticism. The definition of Islamophobia, put forward by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims in 2018, has now been adopted by one in seven local authorities in England. It is likely to be taken up by more, particularly if the Labour Party wins the next General Election. The APPG definition is as follows: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’ The problem with such a broad definition is that it can be invoked to shut down legitimate criticism of Islam as a religion, not just unacceptable prejudice towards Muslim people. Indeed, the authors of the APPG report dismissed the ‘the supposed right to criticise Islam’ as ‘nothing more than another subtle form of anti-Muslim racism’.

• Galloway’s Rochdale Victory is an Establishment Trap. The UK’s Parliamentary constituency of Rochdale held a bye-election on Friday, and George Galloway won. While Galloway may well be popular in his new constituency, that doesn’t change the fact the system could have denied him his seat if it wanted to. Galloway wins, and the doors are opened wide for a new “moral panic”. Suddenly Rishi Sunak is making an “emergency address” to the nation warning about “Islamic extremists” and “the far-right” (because, you know, everyone we don’t like is “far-right” now, even when they’re quite “far left”). Suddenly articles appear all over the media talking about how “dangerous” Galloway is. Tory talking heads are calling the election “an appaling spectacle for our democracy”.

• Top Secret Document Exposes UK Role in Ghana Coup. The UK Foreign Office conducted a covert propaganda campaign to help remove Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, declassified files show. Britain’s Foreign Office engaged in “covert attacks” against the government of Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah, a recently declassified file reveals. The objective was to create “an atmosphere” in which Nkrumah “could be overthrown and replaced by a more Western-oriented government”, the file shows. This policy was supported by officials in both Conservative and Labour governments alike.

• Who fact checks the BBC’s fact-checkers? BBC Verify, unveiled last year by the corporation’s chief executive of news, Deborah Turness, was to be dedicated to ‘radical transparency’ and employ 60 journalists trying to finding the real truth about what is happening in the world. This rather prompts the question of what the BBC’s 2,000 other journalists spend their time doing. Making up lies? Evading reality? Knitting? And here is the problem with Verify: the whole concept is philosophically flawed. You do not need to be Jacques Derrida to believe that in this complex world of ours it might not be possible for 60 hacks to arrive at incontestable truths on every issue that comes before them. This reality-fact-checking-verify business has its roots in the Brexit debate, when the BBC – forced by law to be impartial in the run-up to our referendum – decided it needed a conduit to enable it to be considerably less so.

• Europe Is Wargaming a Food Crisis. The combined forces of El Niño and La Niña have crippled Latin American soy output. Ukrainian and Russian grain farmers have gone to war. Indonesia has banned shipments of palm oil to Europe, while China is hungry for crops. The Mediterranean region is getting more like a desert. The year is 2024. “Food shortage in Europe? The only question is when, but they don’t listen,” says an unidentified voice in a video broadcast. The audience sits quietly — listening. The dramatic collision of events, of course, hasn’t yet come to pass. But over two days in central Brussels last month, some 60 European Union and government officials, food security experts, industry representatives and a few journalists gathered to confront the possibility of something barely on the radar a few years ago: a full-blown food crisis.

• New York governor to send National Guard to subway in controversial knife and gun crime crackdown. Kathy Hochul announced plans to deploy 750 members of the National Guard to the network to assist the New York Police Department (NYPD) with bag checks for weapons at entrances to busy train stations. Ms Hochul said she would also send 250 state troopers and police officers from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency, to help with the bag searches.

• Canada considers house arrest for people at risk of committing hate crimes. Justin Trudeau’s government has proposed a law giving judges the power to put someone under house arrest if they fear they could commit a hate crime. Critics have warned the “draconian” bill is an overreach of power and could stifle free speech and difficult discussions. But Canada’s justice minister defended the measure, claiming it would be an “important” tool to help protect potential victims. One of the suggested measures would give judges the ability to put people under house arrest who they worry could commit a hate crime in the future. The person could also be made to wear an electronic tag if the attorney-general requested it.

• Welcome to stagnation nation - Our Government has no money — and no strategy. Fifteen years after the great financial crisis blew Britain’s economic settlement apart, we’re still scrabbling around for a replacement. The staggering scale of our problems was revealed in Jeremy Hunt’s thoroughly depressing budget statement. Despite heavy doses of magical thinking to make his sums add up, the grim reality of the budget, buried in the small print, is that we are getting poorer and more vulnerable. Even the smallest fluctuations in the international economic climate could have ruinous consequences. To grasp the scale of our national fragility, you have only to cast your eye across the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report. The basic reality, there in black and white, is as confounding as it is worrying: we are now set to continue to get poorer even as the economy gets bigger, while rising taxes will not fund more spending on public services.

Science

• Brain Stimulation Unlocks Our Telepathy and Clairvoyance Powers. Researchers proposed a groundbreaking model in the study of psi phenomena, suggesting the human brain functions as a psi-inhibitory filter. They used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to temporarily inhibit the left medial middle frontal region in healthy individuals, observing significant psi effects as a result. The study reveals that individuals with neurological or rTMS-induced frontal lesions show enhanced mind-matter interaction abilities. This research offers a new perspective on how the brain might suppress innate psi abilities, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of these elusive phenomena.

• Earliest known stone tools in Europe are 1.4 million years old. And they weren't made by modern humans. Stone tools in Ukraine dated to 1.4 million years ago may be the earliest solid evidence of humans in Europe, a new study reveals. The makers of these tools likely weren't Homo sapiens but a close, now-extinct relation. While the tools are too old to be the work of either modern humans or our closest extinct relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans, they could be the work of Homo erectus, an extinct human species that first appeared in Africa about 2 million years ago and later spread to Asia and Europe, the researchers said.

• Scientists look for signs of alien technology in mysterious perfectly synchronised solar system. The solar system, about 100 light years away from ours, has six planets orbiting an orange dwarf star called HD 110067. Each of the planets, researchers say, orbits in harmony with its adjacent ones in extremely rare perfect synchrony, suggesting they likely remain undisturbed since their formation a billion years ago. Astronomers are looking for radio signals from these planets, smaller than the size of Neptune, that may likely point to evidence for past or present alien technology, or technosignatures.

Technology

• AI singularity may come in 2027 with artificial 'super intelligence' sooner than we think, says top scientist. Ben Goertzel, a computer scientist and CEO of SingularityNET, made the claim during the closing remarks at the Beneficial AGI Summit 2024 on March 1 in Panama City, Panama. He is known as the "father of AGI" after helping to popularize the term artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the early 2000s. Goertzel noted AI research is entering a period of exponential growth, and the evidence suggests that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — where AI becomes just as capable as humans across several areas independent of the original training data — is within reach. This hypothetical point in AI development is known as the "singularity."

• Researchers Develop New Technique to Wipe Dangerous Knowledge From AI Systems. A study published Tuesday provides a newly-developed way to measure whether an AI model contains potentially hazardous knowledge, along with a technique for removing the knowledge from an AI system while leaving the rest of the model relatively intact. Dan Hendrycks, executive director at the Center for AI Safety, says that the “unlearning” technique represents a significant advance on previous safety measures, and that he hopes it will be “ubiquitous practice for unlearning methods to be present in models of the future.” [Doesn’t fit the narrative = dangerous knowledge]

• Russia and China announce plan to build shared nuclear reactor on the moon by 2035, 'without humans'. The proposed nuclear reactor, which could be transported and assembled without human assistance, would provide energy to a lunar base that Russia and China have agreed to build together. However, NASA astronauts are unlikely to be allowed to visit this base due to historically frosty relations with CNSA and a more recent split with Roscosmos, which will leave the International Space Station by 2025 in response to sanctions from the U.S. over Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukraine

• Germany spills British military secrets to Russia. Germany accidentally leaked British military secrets to Russia by using off-the-shelf video phone technology to discuss missiles in Ukraine. The head of the Luftwaffe told air force officers and a general who dialled in from his hotel room how British and French officials were delivering Storm Shadows to Ukrainian soldiers. He also said British troops were “on the ground”, a highly sensitive detail that has already caused division and infighting among Nato allies. Recordings of the call were broadcast by a Russian state television executive. The Kremlin maintains that Nato troops on the ground represent a serious provocation.

• Is Putin opening a second front in Europe? The chaos in Transnistria is ripe for exploitation. Could another war be beginning in Europe? The past few weeks in Transnistria are worrying, not least because they are so familiar. The separatist government there is agitating against Moldova, accusing it of destroying the economy, and violating Transnistrian human rights and freedoms. If this is not a new war, it certainly suggests a widening of the existing one. Transnistria, the narrow strip of land running between Moldova’s eastern border with Ukraine, illegally broke away from Moldova in 1990 and is unrecognised as independent by almost all the world, including the UN. But not Russia, of course, which maintains two motorised rifle battalions there.

• Rostislav Ishchenko: Defeating the West is not a problem, the problem is what to do with it then. “The wave of problems for our enemy is growing, but Russia should not seek benefit from this. We need to think about how not to end up with a nuclear state blown up from within.

  Remember what worried the United States most in the early 90s? The collapse of the USSR and the spread of nuclear weapons across the former Soviet republics. And until they gathered it in one place, in Russia, their situation was very alarming. And if now the United States explodes from the inside, and nuclear weapons end up in several different states, we will also be very concerned about that.”

Vaccines

• CDC Tells People 65 and Older to Take More COVID-19 Booster Shots. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that adults aged 65 and above get an additional dose of the updated 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccine following a heated debate by an advisory panel on the issue. “The recommendation acknowledges the increased risk of severe disease from COVID-19 in older adults, along with the currently available data on vaccine effectiveness,” the agency said in a Feb. 28 press release. “Adults 65 years and older are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, with more than half of COVID-19 hospitalizations during October 2023 to December 2023 occurring in this age group.”

• German patient vaccinated against Covid 217 times. A 62-year-old man from Germany has, against medical advice, been vaccinated 217 times against Covid, doctors report. The bizarre case is documented in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. The shots were bought and given privately within the space of 29 months. The man appears to have suffered no ill effects, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg say. Evidence for 130 of the jabs was collected by the public prosecutor of the city of Magdeburg, who opened an investigation with the allegation of fraud, but no criminal charges were brought.

• Where did the white clots come from? Numerous funeral directors have now reported struggling to embalm bodies because of finding white “calamari-like” clots blocking the veins. What do we know about these clots? John Campbell has interviewed a series of funeral directors who describe a decreasing incidence of such clots but claim they remain in about 20% of those who die in 2023. Are they just conventional post mortem clots? White blood clots did occur pre-covid panic – in the arterial system. The colour of these arterial clots is white because there are few red blood cells in them – it’s a sign they were made in a high flow environment. However, the funeral directors have removed these “calamari clots” from the venous system which is not a high flow environment.