This Week's Must Reads - 6-12 May 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

• Germany accused of ‘policy madness’ after hiking airline passenger tax. A group of the world’s largest airlines have warned that a 19pc jump in Germany’s aviation levies will damage the country’s economy and erode the industry’s ability to hit net zero. The change, which came into force on Wednesday, will mean that each passenger flying to and from German airports must now pay between €15.53 (£13.28) and €70.83 in tax on their fares. It comes as German policymakers propose the introduction of a Europe-wide jet fuel tax, which the industry says would make it more expensive to do business in Germany.

Covid

• US shared ‘gobsmacking’ Covid lab leak file with UK. In January 2021, Five Eyes intelligence-sharing nations were convened to discuss the possibility of a lab leak as the US warned that China had covered up research on coronaviruses and military activity at a laboratory in Wuhan. In a previously unreported phone call that month, Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, presented evidence that supported the lab leak theory to Dominic Raab, then the Foreign Secretary, and representatives from Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Speaking to The Telegraph, two Trump administration officials accused Mr Raab and the UK Government of ignoring the lab leak theory because of resistance from government scientists who supported the explanation that the virus had jumped between animals and humans.

• State Department documents released yesterday suggest that Covid-19 originated from a lab-related accident in Wuhan and that the CCP covered it up.

  

  

• Why Ralph Baric’s Testimony Strengthens the Case for a COVID-19 Lab Origin. Ralph Baric confirmed that DEFUSE proposed inserting novel furin cleavage sites into live viruses, inspired by feline coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage sites is identical to the one found in several lethal feline coronavirus strains. Ralph Baric strongly believes WIV had unpublished viruses and viral reverse genetics systems. Most plausible Covid origin is the result of research on identifying new SARS-like viruses and developing broad vaccines against them.

• Newly disclosed emails suggest Peter Daszak acted intentionally to obstruct and delay the Select Subcommittee’s Covid investigation.

  

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Britain refuses to sign global vaccine treaty that would force it to give away fifth of jabs. The UK is firmly against such vaccine-related commitments and will not sign any form of the pandemic agreement that undermines Britain’s sovereignty. Representatives of the WHO’s 194 member states are halfway through talks to try to agree to the WHO Pandemic Agreement, an initiative first announced in May 2021. It is understood the UK will only agree to a legally binding global accord if there is a commitment that British-made jabs are used for what the UK deems to be its own national interest.

• Urgent pandemic messaging of WHO, World Bank, and G20 is inconsistent with their evidence base. When international agencies make claims of an “existential threat” to humanity and advocate for urgent action from countries, it should be a safe assumption that they are consistent with their own data. However, a review of the data and evidentiary citations underlying the claims of the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, and the Group of Twenty (G20) reveals a troubling picture in which the stated urgency and burden of infectious disease outbreaks, namely those of pandemic threat, is grossly misrepresented. These discrepancies in key documents and subsequent recitations in pandemic preparedness proposals have significant policy and financial implications.

• Mounting Desperation: It’s CYA time for Covid officials and MSM “journalists”. What should we make of the recent flood of prior Covid officials and “journalists” suddenly grasping the nuances of vaccines and using the best available treatments for treating vaccine injuries? Well, that Common Knowledge is on the way, for one. As if a light switch were flicked, there’s an obvious change in the Covid narrative. Why? Because the winds have shifted. They now know that their anti-scientific, antilogical and anti-humane stances are politically and professionally untenable. Because they are all, to every man and woman, narcissists, they will change their positions to map into whatever works personally for them best.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The electric car crash will rival the dotcom bubble - The problem for ministers is that most consumers just won’t buy EVs. In terms of global misallocation of capital, there has been nothing like it since the dotcom bubble. As far as the UK is concerned, the obvious thing for the government to do is to live up to Claire Coutinho’s words and abandon the attempt to force consumers to buy products they don’t entirely trust, which can only end terribly for the businesses involved. However, it is not so simple. The problem is the commitment to make the UK “net zero” by 2050, a declarative piece of legislation insouciantly passed without proper debate in the dying days of Theresa May’s tenure of office, as her “legacy”.

• Why Iraq Just Awarded A Strategically Vital Gas Field To A Ukrainian Firm. So strategically vital to Russia, Iran, and China is the Akkas gas field in Iraq that enormous pressure was brought to bear on politicians in Baghdad to ensure that all contracts related to the field went to Russian firms in the first instance, with back up from Chinese companies when required. However, in one of the most extraordinary surprises in recent gas or oil field contracts’ history, Iraq has awarded the Akkas development to a virtually unknown company from Russia’s current archenemy - Ukraine. So, what is going on?

• The Oil and Energy Macro. U.S. oil reserves reached a new record in 2022. Crude oil and condensate proved reserves exceed 48 billion barrels (Figure 1). Reserves declined from 1969 to 2006 then increased with additions from the deepwater Gulf of Mexico and Tight Oil. Tight oil accounted for 27 billion barrels (56% of total) in 2022. Countries in the Persian Gulf have almost half of the world’s oil, and 42% of the worlds remaining proved reserves are in just four countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates. Iraq is now a vassal state of Iran—an enemy of the U.S.—and, together, they have more than 20% of the oil that’s left. Add Russia and our principal enemies control a quarter of the world’s oil. Those are terrible odds. U.S. foreign policy after World War II was founded on oil security from the Middle East. The last four energy-blind U.S. presidents managed to undo that. One of those two will be the next president of the United States.

• US rents have outpaced wages in most major metros.

  

• A world without growth. Cancer is the only thing in nature that grows indefinitely at the same pace as the human economy. It is no surprise then, that there have been a host of consequences from our political leaders’ endless pursuit of growth. Global warming is the best known, least deadly, and most over-hyped of the fallout crises – resource shortages, soil depletion, deforestation, desertification, species extinctions, agricultural run-off, toxic water courses, are just a few of the less publicised environmental crises that threaten to wipe out billions of humans long before the temperature really starts to heat up. To add to the crisis, we live in a grossly unequal economy in which growth mainly serves a tiny godzillionaire class along with their professional-managerial class lackeys, even as the majority have been pushed ever further into poverty – a process that operates both within countries and across the world as a whole.

• US revokes licences for supply of chips to China’s Huawei. The Biden administration has revoked export licences that allow Intel and Qualcomm to supply Huawei with semiconductors as Washington increases the pressure on the Chinese telecoms equipment company. Washington already has tough restrictions on the sale of US technology to Huawei, but Republican lawmakers have urged President Joe Biden to take even tougher action against the Chinese group, which national security officials say helps Beijing engage in cyber espionage around the world. Huawei has denied the claims.

• Issuance of US Treasury Bonds is set to hit a record $1.9 Trillion this year, far higher than during the GFC.

  

• BP Needs 70% Less Coders Thanks to AI. “We’ve done an awful lot to digitize many parts of our business and we’re now applying Gen AI to it,” said CEO Murray Auchincloss, via a Seeking Alpha transcript. “The places that we’re seeing tremendous results on are coding. We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding, the human only needs to look at the final 30% to validate it, that’s a big savings for the company moving forward.” Interestingly, Auchincloss acknowledges that human programmers are still needed to verify and validate code generated by AI, as using AI has been known to result in less secure code.

• Strong Economy? Think Again. It should be evident by now that the “strong” economy of the last several years was nothing of the kind. To the contrary, the Keynesian GDP accounts were actually inflated by deferred spending runoffs that flowed from the utterly abnormal buildup of household cash during Washington’s pandemic lockdowns and stimmy extravaganza. When the Fed inflates the monetary system, the resulting ill effects work through the financial markets and real economy unevenly. Prices, including those for labor and assets, do not move in lockstep, because foreign competition holds down some prices and wages while falling real interest rates and higher valuation multiples inherently cause asset prices to rise disproportionately.

• Swedish surprise - The Riksbank kicked off its easing cycle with its first rate cut since 2016. The central bank lowered its policy rate by a quarter-point to 3.75% and said it could be reduced twice more in the second half of the year. While some had expected the cut, Bloomberg Economics had anticipated it would stand pat to avoid adding to krona weakness. Indeed, the currency weakened further after the decision. “The fact the Riksbank has cut rates today tells us that domestic economic concerns are starting to dominate the debate,” ING said.

• Smart meters should be forced on every home, says British Gas boss. Chris O’Shea, who in 2020 was appointed group chief executive of Centrica, the owner of British Gas, has called for a “street by street” installation programme for the devices, claiming that it could be completed within five years. Speaking to the MPs on the House of Commons energy select committee, O’Shea, who was paid £8.2m last year, said: “We think that in order to have the proper smart grid that’s required to keep costs low in the future, everybody should have a smart meter.

• US set to impose 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports. The Biden administration plans to raise tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles imports from 25 per cent to 100 per cent, as it intensifies efforts ahead of the US election to protect American industry. The sharp rise in the levies comes amid mounting concern that China could flood the US market with cheap EVs, threatening the American car industry. The decision to increase tariffs on EVs comes as the administration becomes particularly concerned that China is moving far ahead in the green industrial sector, including in the production of solar panels.

• At the limits of monetary possibility. The very structure of the financial system makes a future shock inescapable. Over the past twenty years, and depending on the definitions used, each dollar of growth in the global economy has been accompanied by between $3 and $8 of newly-created financial liabilities. Simply stated, the financial system has been allowed to grow far more rapidly than the underlying economy itself, and this creates a wholly unsustainable set of trends which will lead to a drastic reset of the relationship between the economy and the financial system. This has happened because we’ve been trying to counter, whilst at the same time denying, structural deterioration in the global economy.

Health

• Pharmaceutical giants knowingly sold HIV-infected treatment to NHS. Internal documents from American pharmaceutical companies show they knew a “wonder drug” made from human plasma could transmit HIV to patients, but they sold it regardless. Some 1,250 people in the UK contracted HIV in the 70s and 80s from Factor VIII, a treatment for the bleeding disorder haemophilia. Up to 5,000 more also contracted hepatitis C. Survivors who have been seeking justice for 40 years expect the final report on May 20 to be critical of Factor VIII manufacturers, successive governments, and doctors. The report will also explain how as many as 26,800 people contracted hepatitis C from blood transfusions.

• Cancer Cells Spread When They Stop Recycling Waste. Cells perpetually produce mountains of waste, such as damaged proteins or haywire organelles, but they have evolved a sustainable recycling plan to prevent trash piles. Autophagy is an essential waste disposal process that salvages used parts for resources that the cell can reuse. Scientists are exploring how autophagy affects the growth of tumor cells, but few studies have focused on its role in metastasis. Publishing in Cell Reports, researchers identified a long-overlooked autophagy regulator that stops breast cancers from crossing tissue boundaries.

• FDA says it's preparing for a bird flu pandemic in people that could kill one in four Americans. Dr Robert Califf told a Senate Committee that officials were drawing up plans to roll out tests, antiviral drugs and vaccines in the event the virus jumps to humans. But he emphasized the risk of it spreading to people was still low, with only one person infected so far - a farm worker in Texas in March. 'This virus, like all viruses, is mutating,' he told the policymakers. 'We need to continue to prepare for the possibility that it might jump to humans.'

Middle East

• Gaza war surgeon feels ‘criminalised’ after being denied entry to France. Prof Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon was due to speak about the war to the French parliament’s upper house on Saturday. However, after arriving at Charles de Gaulle airport north of Paris on a morning flight from London, he was informed by French authorities that Germany had enforced a Schengen-wide ban on his entry to Europe. His lawyer, Tayab Ali, said the German government issued the Schengen-wide ban without any consultation with Abu-Sitta, and without disclosing the information the ban is based on.

• Why are pro-Palestine protesters heckling Holocaust survivors? What on Earth could compel a person to travel to Auschwitz to yell at Holocaust survivors? As incredible as it sounds, this is precisely what a group of ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters did yesterday. In Poland, half a dozen activists gathered around the former site of the Nazis’ largest extermination camp in order to disrupt a remembrance march for victims of the Holocaust. Seemingly, this was to make some sort of point about the war in Gaza.

• Strategized Civil Unrest Staged Across the World. Protestors throughout the West are protesting on behalf of Palestine in a deliberate effort to destabilize national politics. Greta Thunberg, a girl with no knowledge of war or science, took part in a Swedish pro-Palestinian protest that attracted a group of up to 12,000. These events are clearly staged when they use a famous social justice warrior to promote the event. George Soros openly meddles in politics and creates grassroots movements to spur unrest.

Politics

• MIT becomes first elite university to ban diversity statements. In what’s likely to be a watershed moment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended the use of diversity statements for faculty hiring, making it the first elite private university to backtrack on the practice that has been roundly criticised as a political litmus test. The decision marks an inflection point in the battle over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. Since at least the late 2010s, diversity statements have been ubiquitous in faculty hiring, sometimes carrying serious weight in the selection process. As one dean at Emory University put it while describing her approach to hiring, “Diversity statement, then dossier.”

• The dream of a President Michelle Obama. There have been rumors for months that the former first lady might run; that at the Democratic Party Convention in August, Joe Biden will make a grand gesture of announcing his resignation and proposing Michelle Obama in his place. Last year, even the government said that the Democrats had tested Michelle Obama's chances in polls.

• The Machinery of Fascism Revisited. The lesson of the war, that the US should stand for freedom above all else while wholly rejecting fascism as a system, was largely buried. And generations have been taught to regard fascism as nothing but a quirky and failed system of the past, leaving the word as an insult to fling at in any way deemed reactionary or old-fashioned, which makes no sense. In today’s polarized political environment, the left continues to worry about unbridled capitalism while the right is forever on the lookout for the enemy of full-blown socialism. Each side has reduced fascistic corporatism to a historical problem on the level of witch burning, fully conquered but useful as a historical reference to form a contemporary insult against the other side.

• FBI File On Jeff Bezos' Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, Has Been Destroyed. What's not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon's supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise's "FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed."

• The EU is turning into a Remainer nightmare. With the EU elections less than a month away, one can only imagine the cognitive dissonance that the pro-EU, anti-Brexit crowd must be experiencing. In a curious twist of fate, the EU is turning into everything Remainers feared Brexit would bring to the UK. For years they’ve been painting Brussels as a beacon of progressivism, peace and democracy, as opposed to the far-Right, racist and economically suicidal project of Brexit. Yet, ironically, it is the European Parliament, not the British one, that is about to swing firmly to the Right, as several European governments already have.

• MPs issued with guide to conspiracy theories. The guide aims to inform MPs about the risks of conspiratorial thinking, but ends up drawing some rather tenuous links between various conspiracies. The report goes on to highlight how theories regarding the Great Reset, World Economic Forum and the Ukraine war (Volodymyr Zelensky’s family is Jewish) are all also closely tied to antisemitism. This includes the belief that prominent Jewish financiers, most notably the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, control world events.

  

• The liberal international order is slowly coming apart. At first glance, the world economy looks reassuringly resilient. Look deeper, though, and you see fragility. For years the order that has governed the global economy since the second world war has been eroded. Today it is close to collapse. A worrying number of triggers could set off a descent into anarchy, where might is right and war is once again the resort of great powers. Even if it never comes to conflict, the effect on the economy of a breakdown in norms could be fast and brutal.

• Britain is forgetting what it means to be a free country - By downgrading freedom as a value, we’re choosing a false promise of ‘stability’ over dynamism and growth. The whole handling of the pandemic shows how feeble this conception now is. I have to laugh when I hear people argue that being a member of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a barrier to domestic tyranny: did they not notice that, when raison d’état demanded it in 2020, the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, just when they might have been useful, turned out to be no more than worthless bits of paper?

Science

• Orangutan 1st wild animal seen treating injury with medicinal plant. Akar kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria) is a medicinal plant with anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and other properties used by people in Sumatra and elsewhere to treat wounds. But one day in June 2022, scientists in Gunung Leuser National Park in Indonesia spotted a wild male Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii), who they call Rakus, treating himself with the plant in a similar way. Rakus chewed the plant — which orangutans don't normally eat — and put the juice it produced on a wound on his face, they report in the journal Scientific Reports. He then covered the wound with the chewed-up plant. Within five days, the wound closed, and it healed within a month.

• Consciousness came before life - The fundamental cause of evolution. Most scientists believe that consciousness came after life, as a product of evolution. But observations of extraterrestrial organic material, along with Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s quantum theory of consciousness, provide reason to believe that consciousness came before life. In fact, argue Hameroff and his collaborators, consciousness may have been what made evolution and life possible in the first place.

• Terminal lucidity: why do loved ones with dementia sometimes ‘come back’ before death? Dementia is often described as “the long goodbye”. Although the person is still alive, dementia slowly and irreversibly chips away at their memories and the qualities that make someone “them”. Since as early as the 19th century, stories from loved ones, caregivers and health-care workers have described some people with dementia suddenly becoming lucid. They have described the person engaging in meaningful conversation, sharing memories that were assumed to have been lost, making jokes, and even requesting meals. It is estimated 43% of people who experience this brief lucidity die within 24 hours, and 84% within a week. Why does this happen?

Technology

• 'It would be within its natural right to harm us to protect itself': How humans could be mistreating AI right now without even knowing it. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and is improving at an unprecedented pace. Now we are edging closer to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) — where AI is smarter than humans across multiple disciplines and can reason generally — which scientists and experts predict could happen as soon as the next few years. But there are risks in embracing any new technology, especially one that we do not fully yet understand. While AI could become a powerful personal assistant, for example, it could also represent a threat to our livelihoods and even our lives.

• An AI-controlled fighter jet took the Air Force leader for a historic ride. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028. Arms control experts and humanitarian groups are deeply concerned that AI one day might be able to autonomously drop bombs that kill people without further human consultation, and they are seeking greater restrictions on its use.

• DeepMind is experimenting with a nearly indestructible robot hand. A new robot hand provides extremely fast and flexible finger movements, while also being tough enough to survive intense damage. That durability helps the hand, which is already being used in Google DeepMind’s robotics experiments, during the trial-and-error learning required to train artificial intelligence. This latest robotic hand can withstand repeated punishment such as pistons punching the fingers from multiple angles or a person smashing the device with a hammer.

Ukraine

• France sends combat troops to Ukraine battlefront. France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère). The initial group of French troops numbers around 100. This is just the first tranche of around 1,500 French Foreign Legion soldiers scheduled to arrive in Ukraine.

• Moscow threatens to strike British military facilities following Cameron’s remarks. The Kremlin also summoned the British Ambassador to Moscow “to express a strong protest” in connection with recent comments by U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron. Cameron told Reuters last week that Ukraine has the "right" to use British-supplied weapons to strike Russia inside its own territory. “Russian side views Cameron's words as evidence of a serious escalation and confirmation of London's growing involvement in military operations on the side of Kyiv,” according to the Russian foreign affairs ministry.

• Scholz announces Germany's readiness to deploy 35,000 troops to support allies. According to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Germany has managed to consistently respond to the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and against this backdrop, the Bundeswehr confirms its commitment to defending Northeastern and Central Europe. "Almost 35,000 German soldiers are ready to provide operational support to our allies in case of an emergency," Scholz said.

• Dominic Cummings: Zelenskyy’s no Churchill and Ukraine’s corrupt. Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings launched a sweary attack on Western support for Ukraine Thursday. He declared that the West “should have never got into the whole stupid situation” and claimed sanctions against Russia have had a greater impact on European politics than in Moscow. “This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he said. “This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence. We are getting f**ked now right?”

Vaccines

• Illusions in Vaccine Effectiveness. In 2021, we were flooded with visuals showing us how effective the mRNA vaccines were against death from Covid. We saw, for example, that the Covid mortality graph of those who completed the 2-dose protocol was substantially lower than that of the unvaccinated. To strengthen the point, we were shown a consistent pattern across age groups or after age adjustment. Much of this was an illusion. Back then, they did not display comparable graphs for non-Covid deaths. If they did, we would have seen that the vaccinated also fared better on non-Covid mortality.

• The Withdrawal of the AstraZeneca Vaccine Raises Fresh Questions About the Failure of the MHRA to Keep the Public Safe. How can a vaccine that was once actively promoted by the Government and celebrated with knighthoods, standing ovations and even Barbie dolls rapidly lose its credibility? Although the company claims it’s due to commercial reasons, early indications of potentially harmful side-effects were overlooked, resulting in significant costs to patients and its ultimate downfall. The MHRA’s approach to patient safety requires a radical overhaul. MPs are right when they say the MHRA’s failure to flag Covid vaccine side-effects must be investigated.