This Week's Must Reads - 7-13 August 2023

A summary of this week's most interesting news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering new information and interesting articles. I then pick the most interesting topic and write about it but that leaves a lot of information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the best articles and information from this week. This weekly summary is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but daily summaries will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• The UK’s Net Zero zealotry is harming the world’s poor. So much of our foreign aid is being used to keep the developing world down. Britain’s Net Zero fixation is a disaster for developing countries. We need to stop acting like a global hall monitor for carbon emissions and start being a voice for progress and development. Right now, Britain’s green zealotry is encouraging poorer nations to immiserate themselves further.

• In 2023, Europe has experienced less burned area than in at least a decade.

• Climatism and the Reification of Global Temperature. What was once a number crudely calculated through averaging together a few dozen reasonably well-spaced meteorological time series, has become reified as an objective entity that simultaneously measures Earth System behaviour, reveals the future, regulates geopolitical negotiations and disciplines the human imagination. Apart perhaps from GDP rarely can so constructed an abstract entity have gained such power over the human world.

• The real crisis is global gaslighting. Forget global boiling – it’s global panic-mongering we should be angry about. They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about.

Covid

• Uncanny inserts in the N-terminal domain. Early in the pandemic IIT scientists Pradhan et. al. attracted controversy when they identified 4 sites in the spike of SARS-CoV-2 as having inserts from HIV. CovOrigin proposes alternative explanations that are equally “uncanny”.

• Dr. Fauci referred to prosecutor for CRIMINAL charges by Republican Rand Paul for 'lying' under oath about whether COVID came from a lab. Paul sent a letter to D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves Tuesday, demanding an investigation into Fauci for allegedly committing perjury during a congressional hearing in 2021 when he said that COVID did not come from a Chinese lab. ' In a subsequent hearing, I warned Dr. Fauci of the criminal implications of lying to Congress and offered him an opportunity to recant his previous statements,' writes Paul in the letter.

• Covid alarmism returns with the Eris variant. According to the Guardian, the UK is “nearly flying blind” into a Covid wave this autumn. A summer spike is expected, by the estimation of the BBC. The New York Times tells us that “Covid didn’t take a summer vacation” and that it is “time for a refresher” on self-protection. Cases are up 55% in New York City, warns the New York Post, while the LA Times this week advocates a return to the wearing of masks.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Will They Ever Come Clean About the Damage They Caused? Nearly all of those said to have died “from Covid” were old, sick and/or obese and would have died soon whether infected or not. Those who didn’t fit this profile likely died iatrogenically from destructive hospital protocols, such as ventilation and kidney-damaging Remdesivir.

• How lockdown may have provided ‘cover’ for deadly child abuse in England. “We are now starting to see the impact that lockdown has had on children’s social care and vulnerable children. What these cases show is that our deepest fears did come to fruition for some children and harm was taking place behind closed doors.”

• UN Initiative Tasked with Targeting COVID-19 ‘Disinformation’ Quietly Vanishes. Team Halo was a social media influencer campaign formed as part of the United Nations Verified initiative and the Vaccine Confidence Project, and its members had targeted health care workers for what they called the spreading of "disinformation" about COVID-19.

• US suicides hit an all-time high last year. About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Americans owe a record $1 trillion in credit card debt. Credit card debt hit $1 trillion for the first time on record, according to new data, a troubling development as interest rates and delinquencies also rise. That’s the highest level on record and $193.4 billion more than the start of the year and $264 billion above the $736 billion in April 2021, the lowest level since the onset of the pandemic.

• M2 is negative, something that hasn’t been seen in at least 40 years.

• US oil reserves have been quickly depleting and are now at their lowest level since 1985.

• Nothing Is Over: Inflation Is About To Come Back With A Vengeance. Perhaps one of the most bizarre recent developments in economic news has been the attempt by establishment media (and the White House) to declare US inflation “defeated” despite all the facts to the contrary.

• German industrial production is still massively below trend.

• Business demand for bank loans, in both the US and Europe, is cratering back to 2008 levels.

• Moody's downgrades US banks, warns of possible cuts to others. "Many banks' second-quarter results showed growing profitability pressures that will reduce their ability to generate internal capital," Moody's said in a note. "This comes as a mild U.S. recession is on the horizon for early 2024 and asset quality looks set to decline, with particular risks in some banks’ commercial real estate (CRE)portfolios."

• Oil and food prices are rising, and so are wages. Inflation isn’t beaten yet. “It would be foolish for any central bank to declare victory,” Randall Kroszner, a former governor of the US Federal Reserve System and now an economics professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told CNN. “We’ve seen inflation come down, but we really need to see that this is something that’s going to be sustainably down.”

• America Is Deindustrializing Europe. For decades, the European Union was regarded as an emerging counterweight to US geopolitical hegemony that would accord its member states greater autonomy from the superpower across the Atlantic. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has revealed the emptiness of this promise. Today, Europe’s “vassalization” (in the words of an analyst for the European Council on Foreign Relations) is arguably more pronounced than at any time since the middle of the 20th century.

Health

• 'Disease X': UK scientists begin developing vaccines against new pandemic. The work is being carried out at the government's high-security Porton Down laboratory complex in Wiltshire by a team of more than 200 scientists. One early success is the world's first vaccine against Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, a disease that's spread by ticks and has a fatality rate of 30%.

• The hidden harms of CPR. The brutal procedure can save lives, but only in particular cases. Why has it become a default treatment? Although CPR has become synonymous with medical heroism, nearly eighty-five per cent of those who receive it in a hospital die, their last moments marked by pain and chaos.

• Using certain acid reflux drugs linked to higher dementia risk. Using certain acid reflux medications for an extended period of time may raise a patient’s risk of dementia by up to 33 percent, a new study warns.

• More young Americans are dying – and it's not COVID. Why aren't we searching for answers? Life insurance actuaries are reporting that many more people are dying – still – than in the years before the pandemic. And while deaths during COVID-19 had largely occurred among the old and infirm, this new wave is hitting prime-of-life people hard.

Politics

• Inside Tony Blair Inc. - The former PM's new empire is growing. Blair spends as much as 70% of his time abroad: raising funds, attending conferences, giving speeches and networking with world leaders, plutocrats, corporate executives and “thought leaders”. Formally, he is “executive chairman” of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, known to all as the TBI. The institute was born in 2017 and now employs more than 800 people worldwide, some with salaries as high as $504,000 (though Blair does not take one).

• More than 3,000 US troops reach Red Sea amid Iran tensions. “These units add significant operational flexibility and capability as we work alongside international partners to deter destabilizing activity and deescalate regional tensions caused by Iran’s harassment and seizures of merchant vessels earlier this year,” the U.S. Fifth Fleet spokesman Cmdr. Tim Hawkins said.

• Secret Pakistan Cable documents US pressure to remove Imran Khan. “All will be forgiven,” said a U.S. diplomat, if the no-confidence vote against Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan succeeds.

• Our academics are attacking the whole concept of knowledge. The decolonisers in Britain’s universities are not just trying to defend their views. They are seeking to upend the free market in ideas by imposing them, says Doug Stokes. The first problem about decolonisation is the word itself. Colonisation is the process of establishing control over a foreign territory and its indigenous inhabitants, by settlement, conquest or political manipulation. But decolonisation? It has come to mean much more than the reversal of that process.

Science

• Spartans help make a surprising discovery about the sun. MSU physicists were part of an international collaboration that has discovered the highest-energy light coming from the sun. “The sun is more surprising than we knew,” said Mehr Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University. “We thought we had this star figured out, but that’s not the case.”

• Smoking-gun evidence for modified gravity at low acceleration from Gaia observations of wide binary stars. A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics.

• Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature. Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature. They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics. Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons.

• Nasa asteroid strike unleashes boulder storm ‘as deadly as Hiroshima’. Spacecraft successfully used to knock planetoid off its course – but inadvertently dislodges 37 rocks flying through space at 13,000mph. Last September, the agency crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in the first planetary defence experiment aimed at finding ways to protect humanity from an extinction-level event.

Technology

• Massive solar flare strikes Earth knocking out radio across US – and it won’t be the last. The Sun has been very active lately, sending out scorching flares and frying communication systems back on Earth. The latest one was recorded on Monday when an X-class solar flare disrupted radio and navigation signals across North America.

Ukraine

• Ukraine has exposed the EU’s nationalism - The war has punctured its cosmopolitan myth. The European Union occupies a much more complex space within the binaries that dominate our political thinking. As an examination of its history shows, it stands for liberalism rather than democracy, while replicating some of the features of nationalism on a larger, continental scale. Crucially, rather than limiting these tendencies, the war in Ukraine may actually be strengthening them.

• Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden? Could Ukrainian officials have kompromat on Joe, given all the allegations of his corruption in Ukraine? It's a much more reasonable question about Joe Biden than it ever was when posed as a certainty about Trump.

Vaccines

• Relapsing myocarditis following initial recovery of post COVID-19 vaccination in two adolescent males. This study describes two cases experiencing recurrent myocarditis following mRNA COVID-19 vaccine despite a prior episode with full clinical recovery. Between September 2021-September 2022 they observed two male adolescents with recurrent myocarditis related to mRNA-based-COVID19 vaccine.

• mRNA-loaded lipid nanoparticles reprogram cells and edit genes. A single dose of the particles delivered treatment in mice and reversed sickle cell production in human cells. The new advance involves a single injection and uses antibodies to target the payload to its intended destination. And it makes its cellular or genetic modifications directly in the body without the need for cell extraction.

• Groundbreaking Ruling: Manufacturer of Remdesivir Not Shielded by PREP Act for Man’s Injuries. A Michigan judge ruled that a drug manufacturer and hospital are not protected by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act in the case of a man who experienced two strokes and a leg amputation after receiving the COVID-19 medication remdesivir that was contaminated with glass particles.