This Week's Must Reads - 5-11 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

• The West’s humiliating electric car climbdown has begun. France’s President Macron had a plan to make millions of electric vehicles a year. Chancellor Scholz planned to put 15 million on Germany’s roads by 2030. President Biden trumped the lot with a $174bn (£138bn) plan to make the US the world leader. Even Boris Johnson – remember him – had a £1bn plan to beef up our charging network. Rewind only a couple of years, and almost every president or prime minister was making electric vehicles the cornerstone of an industrial strategy. And yet, this week we have learned that Renault is abandoning plans to separately list its electric vehicle (EV) and software business, while Volvo is winding down its Polestar electric sports car subsidiary.

• Jury Orders Mark Steyn to Pay Michael Mann $1 Million for Defaming Him in Blog Post. A Washington, D.C., jury on Thursday ordered conservative pundit Mark Steyn to pay $1 million in punitive damages to climate scientist Michael Mann, determining that he was defamed in a 2012 blog post on National Review’s website. The jury’s decision for Mann could have important implications for the free-speech rights of critics to comment on controversial matters without fear of legal reprisals. In a statement before the jury’s verdict Simberg said the case was about “the ability of myself and others to speak freely about the most important issues of our day, whether climate change or another issue,” according to the Associated Press. “If others are faced with over a decade of litigation for giving their opinions, we will all suffer.”

• Climate change row as British scientists claim ‘Day After Tomorrow’ modelling is wrong. Prediction by Dutch team that vital Atlantic system could reach a tipping point and trigger new ice age has been ‘forced’, say experts. The new study claims to have shown that Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is “on route to tipping”, a prospect that the authors say is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”. However British scientists warned that the outcome had been “forced” by using unlikely variables, such as assuming large influxes of freshwater into the Atlantic. “Models are not reality. The real system may be more, or less, prone to collapse than this model suggests.”

Covid

• Dangerous virus research continues to endanger lives. For more than a decade, the scientists conducting gain-of-function work and the bureaucrats who fund them with our tax dollars blindly believed that this dangerous research would someday benefit humanity. They knew that if it became known that the COVID-19 virus came from a lab, this research would be stopped. Only a well-coordinated effort from the highest levels of the NIH and the National Institue of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to act as if this was natural, to act as if this virus must have come from nature, and therefore to not take the simplest steps of mitigation, could preserve this research.

• World Health Organisation claims 'we're STILL in a pandemic' and says virus is 'rampant'. The WHO has now said that the pandemic is not yet over, instead entering its endemic phase, which means it will continue to spread indefinitely. Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of the WHO’s Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention said: “We don’t know everything about this virus. Even in year five, there’s still a lot of research that needs to be done.” Kerkhove also mentioned that mask-wearing, social distancing and improving ventilation were all “no-brainers” when it comes to confronting the virus.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Lockdown impact on children risks damaging productivity for decades, says OECD. The Paris-based organisation warned that the deterioration in basic reading and writing skills among 15-year olds since 2018 risked damaging the earnings potential of a generation of school leavers throughout their working lives. It said this could drag down economic growth for much of this century, warning in its latest economic outlook that this could have a “persisting negative impact on the level of productivity over the next 30 to 40 years”.

• Infant dies after allegedly suffocating on mask at New Taipei daycare. Authorities in New Taipei on Wednesday said they are investigating the death of an 11-month-old boy at a public daycare center, which the child's family allege happened when he suffocated on a mask a teacher forced him to wear. According to surveillance video footage viewed by the parents, the incident on Monday happened when the boy became irritated and took off his mask, after which the teacher put it back on for him. At that point, the child burst out crying, which "possibly saturated the mask with tears and mucus, causing it to stick to his nose and mouth and suffocate him."

• Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic. This paper shows that the UK spike in deaths, wrongly attributed to COVID-19 in April 2020, was not due to SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was largely absent, but was due to the widespread use of Midazolam injections which were statistically very highly correlated (coefficient over 90 percent) with excess deaths in all regions of England during 2020. Importantly, excess deaths remained elevated following mass vaccination in 2021, but were statistically uncorrelated to COVID injections, while remaining significantly correlated to Midazolam injections.

• The CDC has no records supporting its own statement that “High vaccination population reduces the spread of the virus and helps prevent new variants from emerging”.

  

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Beijing Powerless As Chinese Stocks Crater After Trump Confirms He Will Impose 60% Tariffs. Putting the latest collapse in context, China's market capitalization has sunk by just over $1 trillion in the space of 13 trading days, dragging the total value of the nation’s equities under $8 trillion on Friday, from just above $9 trillion on Jan. 16, as the authorities’ hand-wringing about equity declines simply concentrated investors’ minds on the apparent lack of any solutions for the downturn. Speaking in an interview on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Trump was asked about a Washington Post report that he was considering a flat 60% tariff on Chinese goods imports; Trump's response: “no, I would say maybe it’s going to be more than that.”

• UK state pension age will soon need to rise to 71, say experts. The retirement age will have to rise to 71 for middle-aged workers across the UK, according to research into the impact of growing life expectancy and falling birthrates on the state pension. The UK pension age of 66 is set to rise to 67 between May 2026 and March 2028. From 2044, it is expected to rise to 68. But the research suggests that this is not enough, and that anyone born after April 1970 may have to work until they are 71 before claiming their pension. This age limit may need to be set even higher, say experts, thanks to the high rate of workers exiting the workforce before they reach state pension age, predominantly due to preventable ill health.

• A record $8.9 trillion of US government debt is set to mature in the next year.

  

• US Commercial Real Estate Contagion Is Now Moving to Europe. The latest victim was Germany’s Deutsche Pfandbriefbank AG, which saw its bonds slump on concern about its exposure to the sector. It responded by issuing an unscheduled statement Wednesday that it had increased provisions because of the “persistent weakness of the real estate markets.” It described the current turmoil as the “greatest real estate crisis since the financial crisis.” Lenders are taking increasing provisions on debt extended to property owners and developers as loans begin to sour after rising interest rates eroded the value of buildings around the world.

• Radioactive water leaked at Fukushima, no outside impact detected. The utility estimates up to 5.5 metric tons of radioactive water containing 22 billion becquerels of radioactive substances leaked after valves on water treatment equipment were left open during maintenance work. No meaningful changes have been detected at monitoring posts around the plant or in water monitor readings in gutters inside it, the company said. The plant was crippled by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

• Shipping giant Maersk’s profit sinks, warns of Red Sea risk. Shares in shipping giant Maersk have plummeted after it warned of an uncertain 2024 earnings outlook linked to an oversupply of container vessels and Yemeni rebel attacks in the Red Sea. The downbeat forecast came after its 2023 earnings were hit by overcapacity in the shipping sector, which caused a drop in freight rates. The group reported a more than sevenfold drop in its net profit last year to $3.8 billion, compared to $29.2 billion in 2022. The “oversupply challenges” in the maritime shipping industry are expected to “materialize fully” over the course of 2024, Maersk says.

• Sweden Closes Investigation of Pipeline Blasts, but Stays Silent on Cause. The natural-gas connection was sabotaged in September 2022, seven months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prompting rampant speculation about who was to blame. In Sweden, in whose economic zone the attack partly occurred, the issue remained so delicate that the nation wrapped its investigation in secrecy. It even refused to team up with its closest neighbors, Denmark and Germany, a sign of how nervous the issue was making officials in Stockholm at a moment when it is still maneuvering for acceptance into the NATO military alliance.

• Why Did The Rockefellers Pressure Biden To Pause LNG Exports? What began as an apparent attempt by the Biden administration to punish Texas over the border dispute turns out to be part of a successful campaign by wealthy donors - including the Rockefeller family - to pressure the government into shifting away from Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). As the Wall Street Journal reports, "The Rockefellers, along with other wealthy donors including the philanthropy of Michael Bloomberg, have provided millions of dollars in recent years to front-line environmental groups that are campaigning against fossil-fuel projects, including LNG terminals that have been proposed on the Gulf Coast," according to anonymous people familiar with the effort, which they claim is four years in the making.

• Mexico Dethrones China as America’s Largest Exporter. Based on data from the US Commerce Department, China is no longer America’s top supplier of goods. Imported goods from Mexico rose by around 5% from 2022 to 2023, totaling over $475 billion. Mexico has not surpassed China in exports to the US since 2002, marking a drastic shift in overall trade as tensions continue to rise between the US and China. Chinese imports tanked by 20% over a one-year period to $427 billion.

Health

• Common Preservative May Harm Your Gut. Nisin is a popular antimicrobial preservative used in everything from beer to cheeses and dipping sauce. It is made naturally by bacteria to eliminate competition from other microbes by killing them. Compounds like this are often called "lantibiotics" because they are made of special bacteria-derived molecules called lantipeptides. However, while these are very effective at eliminating food-borne diseases, they may also be damaging the "good" microbes in our gut.

• The UK Saw an Unusual Spike in Middle-Aged Deaths. An unusual spike in deaths among middle-aged Britons could hit profits at insurers Aviva Plc and Legal & General Group Plc, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence report. The mortality rate for 40- to 44-year-olds worsened the most in the first half of 2023, analysis of Office for National Statistics data showed. The number of age-standardized deaths per 100,000 rose 6% in the same period, following two years of declines. This marks a potential turning point for the age-standardized mortality measure, which has been steadily improving since the 1990s. BI analysts wrote they expected the new trend to be sustained for the full year, though the underlying reasons for the change were unclear.

• Mutant wolves roaming Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have developed cancer-resilient abilities. The wild animals have managed to adapt and survive the high levels of radiation that have plagued the area after a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant exploded in 1986, becoming the world’s worst nuclear accident. The wolves are exposed to 11.28 millirem of radiation daily for their lifespans — more than six times the legal safety limit for humans. The Chernobyl wolves’ immune systems appeared different than normal wolves’ — similar to those of cancer patients going through radiation treatment, the researchers found.

• The dying of Down Under. A lot of Australians are dying. Many politely say: We need to know why. …but really now, how long must polite company continue this faux naivety? The Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), is the only body in Australia that undertook the task to investigate why Australian Excess Deaths continue to equate to about two jumbo jet crashes each week, and every week, since early 2021. That is two jumbo jets of dead Australians a week. By the end of 2021, somewhere between 85-95 per cent of Australians had fallen victim to the many tactics employed by their federal and state governments, to receive the ‘safe and effective’ gene-based injections. Now, a lot of Australians are dying. People are asking, why?

Politics

• China named as hypothetical enemy for 1st time in Japan-U.S. exercise. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the U.S. military named China as a hypothetical enemy for the first time in their joint command post exercise, government sources said Sunday, amid rising concerns over a potential invasion of Taiwan by Beijing in the future. The computer simulation exercise, which began on Feb. 1 and is slated to be held through Thursday, envisions an emergency in Taiwan. A provisional name was previously used when referring to an enemy.

• Sadiq Khan investing £150m in ‘secret’ technology that could deliver pay-per-mile road charging. The scheme, called Project Detroit, was set up by Transport for London (TfL) to create a “more sophisticated… new core technology platform for road-user charging”. A series of Freedom of Information (FoI) requests show 157 staff are now working solely on the scheme, with some engineers being paid more than £100,000 a year.

• Exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei: 'Censorship in West exactly the same as Mao's China'. The 66-year-old dissident told Sky News' Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that "society becomes so timid, to really avoid any kind of questioning or argument". He also argued the Jewish community had a significant influence in the media, finance and culture in the US, and that America's $3bn (£2.45bn) annual military aid to Israel meant the two countries had a "shared destiny".

• People are trusting the mainstream press less and less.

  

• Everyone loses in America’s misinformation war. There are insidious alliances between Big Tech and government. The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024. Moderna relaunched efforts to influence vaccine discourse, again working with Public Good Projects. Moderna also employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm Talkwalker to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites, including social media and gaming platforms like Steam. Moderna labelled almost any critic of the company or vaccine policies as “high risk” for spreading misinformation, including reputable academics like Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and local elected officials who simply voiced objections to vaccine mandates.

• The conservative paradox. The Tories face electoral oblivion, having failed to grasp that voters look to government for a shield against insecurity. Is a recovery now even possible? Thatcherism has become an aberration in a deglobalising world. As an economic system it meant non-interventionism in industry and free trade, orthodoxies that make little sense when deindustrialisation has undermined the West’s capacity to defend itself and trade has been weaponised in geopolitical struggles. Yet the intellectual energy is still on the right. Both the progressive left and the establishment right are clinging to an unsustainable status quo: the ossified husk of Thatcher’s free market joined with cheap labour supplied by mass immigration, lightly varnished with expensive green paint.

• No US President has ever been as unpopular as Biden at this point in their term.

  

• [2022] Tucker Carlson: The Elite Pedigree of a Brilliant Cosplaying “Populist”. Part of Carlson’s appeal is that he presents himself as a maverick outsider, someone who thinks outside the box and is not afraid to launch tirades against the powerful and criticize the government and its foreign policy. Certainly, he does surprise many people, covering subjects other cable news hosts do not touch. However, on closer inspection, this populist everyman persona is all a facade; Carlson himself has deep connections to the government and the national security state and works hard to obscure the real centers of power, channeling popular rage towards safer targets.

• UK steps up war on whistleblower journalism with new National Security Act. Under a repressive new act, British nationals could face prison for undermining London’s national security line. Intended to destroy WikiLeaks and others exposing war crimes, the law is a direct threat to critical national security journalism. Under this law, authorities in London have granted themselves the power to surveil, harass, and ultimately imprison any British citizens they wish on suspicionless grounds. Dissidents of every stripe must now worry that everything they do or say could land them in jail for lengthy terms, simply for failing to toe London’s rigid national security line.

• EU budget doubles - eye-watering trillions now being spent by the EU Commission. If the UK rejoined the EU, British taxpayers would be facing massive payments. Towards the end of last week the EU Commission issued one of its major statements, outlining the extent of its spending following the latest EU Council Summit on 01 Feb 2024. The sums involved – and the debts being incurred on the world’s money markets – are eye-watering.

  

• Mail-In Ballot Fraud Study Finds Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Won in 2020. A new study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election concludes that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail. They also found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, which was often done without legislative approval, President Trump would most likely have won.

• How “Wokeness” Took Over. One of the most prescient commentators on the decline of capitalist and democratic societies was Joseph Schumpeter. In his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), he predicted that capitalism would fail and be overtaken by socialism. His reason has nothing to do with a Marxian revolution. He thought that was nonsense. Instead, capitalism would be a victim of its own success. We would become so wealthy as a society we would take prosperity for granted and forget where the wealth came from. At that point, we would move to socialism (without revolution) on the view that we could afford it.

Science

• Western science beginning to catch up to what Indigenous history has always known. A very, very old mammoth tusk found near a road-widening project, for State Route 54 near National City in the early 1990s, set off considerable controversy among scientists. When a group of archeology, paleontology, and geology specialists (including those from the San Diego Natural History Museum) authored an article in the journal Nature in 2017 arguing proof of human existence in the Americas as far back as 130,000 years ago, it was a shock to convention — Western convention, anyway.

• Lucid Dreaming Breakthrough Achieved as Researchers Report Successful Control of a Virtual Object While Sleeping. Researchers with REMspace, a California startup, report that five participants in the recent study were successfully able to control a virtual Cybertruck while lucid dreaming, and even avoid obstacles that appeared on a screen. The research study’s participants displayed the ability to control an object on the screen for periods from just a few seconds, to up to several minutes.

• As A Scientist, I Didn’t Believe In Psychic Powers. Then I Experienced Something That Changed My Life. “Somehow, it appeared Janet was able to temporarily disrupt the functioning of her RPL, presumably allowing her to shift her consciousness in a way that some would claim allowed other forms of consciousness to speak through her. Despite what I thought I knew about reality, and as crazy as it sounded, I was left with the conclusion that Janet was somehow channeling several people, beings, or entities.”

• Hominins may have left Africa 700,000 years earlier than we thought. Our hominin ancestors originated in Africa and the consensus is that they didn't leave there until about 1.8 million years ago, but stone tools found in Jordan challenge the idea. Scientists say they have found stone tools there that were made and used 2.5 million years ago.

• Mysterious 'Stonehenge' structure discovered in US lake. An enigmatic stone structure has been found beneath the waters of Lake Michigan in the US. Not only that, but this underwater creation is around 5,000 years older than its British counterpart. The stones, which are all made of granite – found locally in the area – are estimated to be around 10,000 years old, thereby making the formation one of the oldest ever discovered in North America. And yet, whilst the Lake Michigan stones are relatively similar in size and shape to the monoliths of Stonehenge, their origins are a lot murkier.

  

Technology

• Humans prefer AI-generated copy, survey finds. The survey of 700 U.S. consumers found that AI-generated content was preferred by humans more than human-generated content. “These results show that AI-written content can be effective and resonate with your customers. If you prompt your AI tools well enough, you can create engaging and high-quality marketing copy. However, our experiment does not suggest that AI is enough for content writing.”

• Biden’s AI plan to censor you revealed: Researchers say Americans can’t ‘tell fact from fiction’. Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 could soon be possible on an industrial scale — thanks to AI tools being built with funding from his father’s administration, a report from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee claimed Tuesday. The report reveals how the Biden administration is spending millions on artificial intelligence research designed to make anti “misinformation” tools which could then be passed to social media giants.

• Companies Turn to AI Because Real Intelligence is Hard to Find. UPS announced it will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reduce office workers. It Joins Google, Amazon, and others in the shift. If only we could do the same for government. There is a desperate need for artificial intelligence in government because a search for real intelligence turns up empty.

Ukraine

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismisses Ukraine’s ‘iron general’. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has dismissed Valeriy Zaluzhny as his top military commander, saying it was time for “renewal” of the country’s armed forces. Zaluzhny’s removal follows months of tensions between the president and his top general over strategy and tactics.

• Boris Johnson calls Tucker Carlson a traitor for Putin interview. “Around the world, people are watching that ludicrous interview with Vladimir Putin conducted by Tucker Carlson, and we must not fall for this tissue of lies above all for the notion that Putin is somehow fated to succeed in Ukraine. On the contrary, he is doomed to failure,” Johnson said in a video posted by the Daily Mail. The former prime minister said he “betrayed” viewers around the world.

• [2023] Official: Johnson Forced Kyiv To Refuse Russian Peace Deal. Russia was ready to end the war and withdraw its troops in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality just a few months after the invasion began and was refused partly because of ex-British PM Boris Johnson, who pressured Kyiv into continuing the fight, David Arahamiya, the leader of Ukraine’s ruling party confirmed in a recent interview, published on Friday, November 24th.

Vaccines

• First ever cancer vaccine administered in Britain as part of global trial. Scientists are using the mRNA technology behind Covid jabs to create new vaccines that could treat and even cure cancer. The vaccine works by highlighting specific protein markers on the cells of a cancerous tumour to the immune system so that a patient’s own defences kick in and attack the cancer, which would otherwise go undetected.

• Strategies to reduce the risks of mRNA drug and vaccine toxicity. mRNA formulated with lipid nanoparticles is a transformative technology that has enabled the rapid development and administration of billions of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine doses worldwide. However, avoiding unacceptable toxicity with mRNA drugs and vaccines presents challenges. Lipid nanoparticle structural components, production methods, route of administration and proteins produced from complexed mRNAs all present toxicity concerns. [They decide to look at this issue in 2024! Bit late now]

• Transplacental Transmission of the COVID-19 Vaccine mRNA: Evidence from

  Placental, Maternal and Cord Blood Analyses Post-Vaccination. The findings suggest that the vaccine mRNA is not localized to the injection site and can spread systemically to the placenta and umbilical cord blood. The detection of the spike protein in the placental tissue indicates the bioactivity of the vaccine mRNA reaching the placenta. Notably, the vaccine mRNA was largely fragmented in the cord blood and, to a lesser extent, in the placenta. To our knowledge, these two cases demonstrate, for the first time, the ability of the COVID-19 vaccine mRNA to penetrate the fetal-placental barrier and reach the intrauterine environment.