This Week's Must Reads - 8-14 January 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 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 more comprehensive daily summaries will be for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• [Quick, tax it!] Scientists excited to find ocean of one of Jupiter’s moons contains carbon. The observations, by the James Webb space telescope, indicate that carbon dioxide ice on the moon’s surface originated from the salty ocean that lies beneath a 10-mile thick crust of ice. Although the findings do not answer the question of whether alien life is lurking in the cold, gloomy depths, they add weight to the view that Europa’s ocean could be the most promising place in the solar system to go looking for it.

• 'The ultimate virtue signaller!' Sadiq Khan racked up 80,000 air miles last year - while telling Britons not to fly. Asked about the use of private jets in May 2023, Khan warned: "We are in a climate emergency and people are more aware of the need to consider the flights they take and opt for low-carbon alternatives if they can. "Every sector of the economy must cut its emissions if climate catastrophe is to be averted”. He added: "Frequent air travellers should consider firstly whether a particular journey is needed at all and, if so, to take the lowest carbon options wherever possible." Since he was elected in 2016, Khan and his team have racked up more than 440,000 air miles.

• Greenhouse Gas Theories and Observed Radiative Properties of the Earth’s Atmosphere. The greenhouse effect predicted by the Arrhenius greenhouse theory is inconsistent with the existence of this radiative equilibrium. Hence, the CO2 greenhouse effect as used in the current global warming hypothesis is impossible. The greenhouse effect itself and the CO2 greenhouse effect based global warming hypothesis is a politically motivated dangerous artifact without any theoretical or empirical footing. Planet Earth obeys the most fundamental laws of radiation physics.

Covid

• Scientists at the center of the ‘lab leak’ controversy met with NIH, Fauci. Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Shi Zhengli passed a security screening to visit National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases staffers in June 2017, where she gave a presentation about novel coronaviruses, emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know show. Shi is known internationally as the “Bat Lady” for her work with bats and their coronaviruses. Though ostensibly a civilian lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted research projects “for defensive and biosecurity needs of the military” since at least 2017, according to U.S. intelligence.

• Controversial research group linked to Wuhan discovers never-before-seen virus in bats in Thailand with 'almost' as much potential as Covid to infect humans. Dr Peter Daszak, head of the New York based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, detailed his finding in bats at an event held by the World Health Organization (WHO) on future pandemic research preparedness. 'We found a lot of SARS-related coronaviruses, but one in particular we found was quite common in bats where people were commonly exposed,' he told the WHO event. He said that after lab analysis, scientists found the virus was a close relative of both SARS-CoV2, the scientific name for Covid, and another pathogen called RATG13, itself a 96 per cent genetic match for Covid.

• Will Anthony Fauci finally face his reckoning? This week Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the US Covid response, sat through a two-day closed-door US congressional hearing aimed at uncovering vital facts about his role in gain-of-function research in Wuhan, scientific censorship and the societal harms of Covid policies. A public hearing is scheduled for later this year. Chairman of the US Select Subcommittee on Covid, Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), released a summary statement yesterday: “Dr. Fauci’s transcribed interview revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority… dissenting opinions were often not considered or suppressed completely.”

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Lockdown broke the social contract between schools, parents and teachers. The only way to end the truancy epidemic is to concede that shutting children out of the classroom was a terrible mistake. During the pandemic, powerful messaging – some might say propaganda – from the Government, teaching unions and health bodies, shattered the social contract between schools, parents and teachers.

• New research finds the natural seasonality of coronaviruses had more influence on the COVID-19 pandemic than government interventions. A new international study on the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in six northern European countries has unexpectedly discovered that the pre-existing seasonal nature of coronaviruses may have played more of a role during the pandemic than any of the government public health intervention policies – including vaccinations, lockdowns, masks and travel restrictions. The scientific study was published in the peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Clinical Medicine.

• COVID ‘6-feet’ social distancing ‘sort of just appeared,’ likely lacked scientific basis, Fauci admits. Fauci, 83, revealed to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the “six feet apart” recommendation championed by him and other US public health officials was “likely not based on scientific data,” according to Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who is also a physician. A top White House adviser to two presidential administrations, Fauci’s transcribed interview before the House COVID panel “revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority,”.

• College Vaccine Mandates: Here to Stay? It is January 2024, and Covid vaccine mandates persist at 70 of the top 800 colleges in the US, and who knows if they will ever let them go. If you are a healthcare major, nearly every clinical partner site still mandates that healthcare students take the most updated Covid vaccine (often no exemptions accepted) even if those sites are affiliated with colleges and universities that do not currently mandate Covid vaccines. It is truly remarkable with all that we have learned about these novel medical treatments that colleges can still coerce students into taking them.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Retailers could suffer ‘perfect storm’ of Red Sea and Panama Canal disruption, says logistics expert. The Houthi attacks on cargo ships in the Red Sea and the drought afflicting the Panama Canal have created a “perfect storm” of disruption in global shipping, according to Mike Giambrone, an account executive at logistics provider OEC Group New York.

• With government debt topping $34 trillion, America is on a financial road to ruin. The government risks going bankrupt suddenly as interest rates have returned to higher (more normal) levels, foreigners become reluctant to add to their large US government bond holdings and rating agencies warn, absent a change in policy direction, they’ll be forced to downgrade the country’s credit rating. Worse, the Congressional Budget Office is warning that, based on present policies, the deficit will remain at its present level for as far as the eye can see.

• US personal interest payments are shooting through the roof.

  

• The Great Taking Exposes the Financial End Game. VOM has now contracted to a lower level than at any point during the Great Depression and world wars. Once the ability to produce growth by printing money has been exhausted, creating more money will not help. It is pushing on a string. The phenomenon is irreversible. And so, perhaps the announcement of the ‘Great Reset’ has been motivated not by ‘Global Warming’ or by profound insights into a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ but rather by certain knowledge of the collapse of this fundamental monetary phenomenon, the implications of which extend far beyond economics.

• India plans to double its coal production. India faces a challenge in building more power capacity to meet growing demand, as the country plans to double coal production and add 88 gigawatts of thermal power plants by 2032. This move may seem counterintuitive for India, which is highly vulnerable to climate impacts. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keen to avoid power shortages as the country heads into elections.

• German Industry Shrinks for Sixth Month as Recession Looms. Production declined 0.7% from October, led by capital goods, and intermediate goods, the statistics office said Tuesday. That’s the sixth consecutive drop and defies economists in a Bloomberg survey, who’d predicted a 0.3% increase. Germany probably ended 2023 with its first recession since the pandemic, as analysts reckon data will reveal a second straight contraction in output in the fourth quarter.

• The cost of electricity in Germany is now so expensive, due to ridiculous climate policies and the blowing up of Nord Stream, that the average amount of electricity consumption per person is the same as it was in 1978.

  

• Government defends access to UK pension surpluses. Trustees of UK pension schemes would be prevented from taking “overly risky” decisions after government plans to ease employers’ access to billions of pounds in pension fund surpluses, ministers said. The government is consulting on proposals to enable employers to use surplus funds built up in defined benefit plans. These schemes currently serve around 10mn members. The aggregate surplus of the UK’s 5,100 pension schemes was about £428bn at the end of December, according to analysis by the UK’s Pension Protection Fund.

• Pension Fund Crisis? Calstrs Seeks $30 Billion In Leverage Amid CRE Turmoil. One of the biggest public pension plans in the US plans to borrow tens of billions of dollars to maintain liquidity instead of triggering a fire-sale of its assets. The need to increase leverage comes after a report from the Financial Times last April explained that CalSTRS was planning to write down the value of its $52 billion commercial real estate portfolio after high interest rates crushed the values of office towers.

• Hertz is selling 20,000 EVs and replacing them with gas cars. Hertz is selling off a third of its electric vehicle fleet, which is predominantly made up of Teslas, and will buy gas cars with some of the money it makes from the sales. The company cited lower demand for EVs and higher-than-expected repair costs as reasons for the decision. The sell-off began last month and will continue through 2024. As some electric vehicle-focused blogs have noted, they’re being sold at steep discounts. The company said in a Thursday morning filing that it is recognizing “approximately $245 million of incremental net depreciation expense related to the sale,” which is a dry way of saying it’s taking a bath on the decision.

• Why industrial policy isn’t working. Excessive corporate welfare is sucking the dynamism out of the UK economy. In practice, industrial policy is the established reality in 21st-century Britain and is embraced across the political spectrum. Indeed, it has been the habitual practice of most Western governments since the financial crisis in 2007-8, which exposed the fragility of Western economies and the poor state of their productive activities. The interventionist response to the Covid pandemic and later the energy crisis have only further normalised state activism.

• Money is leaving China for the first time in over 20 years.

  

Health

• [2016] The ‘Swiss Agent’: Long-forgotten research unearths new mystery about Lyme disease. The tick hunter was hopeful he had found the cause of the disabling illness, recently named Lyme disease, that was spreading anxiety through leafy communities east of New York City. At a government lab in Montana, Willy Burgdorfer typed a letter to a colleague, reporting that blood from Lyme patients showed “very strong reactions” on a test for an obscure, tick-borne bacterium. He called it the “Swiss Agent.”

• The number of people who started to receive disability benefits each month in the UK (excluding Scotland) reached record levels in 2023. An upward trend which started in 2021.

  

• Scientists find about a quarter million invisible nanoplastic particles in a liter of bottled water. The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers. Much of the plastic seems to be coming from the bottle itself and the reverse osmosis membrane filter used to keep out other contaminants, said study lead author Naixin Qian, a Columbia physical chemist. “We and others have shown that these nanoplastics can be internalized into cells and we know that nanoplastics carry all kinds of chemical additives that could cause cell stress, DNA damage and change metabolism or cell function.”

• Cancer Is Striking More Young People, and Doctors Are Alarmed and Baffled. Diagnosis rates in the U.S. rose in 2019 to 107.8 cases per 100,000 people under 50, up 12.8% from 95.6 in 2000, federal data show. A study in BMJ Oncology last year reported a sharp global rise in cancers in people under 50, with the highest rates in North America, Australia and Western Europe. Doctors are racing to figure out what is making them sick, and how to identify young people who are at high risk. They suspect that changes in the way we live—less physical activity, more ultra-processed foods, new toxins—have raised the risk for younger generations.

Middle East

• Israel And Hezbollah Are Headed Toward A New War. Storm clouds are gathering on Israel's northern border. There, intensifying attacks by Hezbollah, Lebanon's powerful Shiite militia, and targeted Israeli killings of high-value militants, are heightening tensions and raising the specter of a new conflict between Israel and the group that ranks as Iran's chief terrorist proxy. Israel isn't itching for such an escalation, despite what some pundits have contended. Israel's current offensive in Gaza is complex, resource-intensive, and still far from over, and there are real world constraints on the country's ability to fight a two-front war.

• The order: prevent terrorists from returning to Gaza "at all costs", even if they have hostages with them. Investigating the chaos in the early hours of October 7: confused orders, pilots who had no one to direct them to attack terrorists, and an order to shoot at all vehicles returning to Gaza - despite the fear that they may contain hostages. The full investigation, which outlines minute by minute the morning of the attack, will be published tomorrow in the "7 Days" supplement of "Yediot Ahronoth.

Politics

• Senior Biden leaders, Pentagon officials unaware for days that defense secretary was hospitalized. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized since Monday, U.S. officials said Saturday, as questions swirled about his condition and the secrecy surrounding it. The Pentagon did not inform the White House National Security Council or top adviser Jake Sullivan of Austin’s hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, until Thursday, according to two administration officials.

• A Little-Noticed Part of Pelosi Daughter’s Video Raises Serious Questions of J6 Collusion. On January 6th, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had her daughter, Alexandra, a documentary filmmaker, accompany her around the United States Capitol with a camera while the day’s events transpired. But it was a little-noticed aspect of the video that is now raising serious questions about the former Speaker’s coordination and knowledge aforehand about the January 6 riots. In the video, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is seen talking to Secret Service agents about President Donald Trump.

• Nord Stream Probe Hampered by Resistance From Poland. Polish officials have resisted cooperating with an international probe into the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines and failed to disclose potentially crucial evidence, according to European investigators working on the case. Those Polish officials have been slow to provide information and withheld key evidence about the alleged saboteurs’ movements on Polish soil, investigators said. They are now hoping the new government in Warsaw, which took office in December, will help shed light on the attack.

• JPMorgan strategist predicts that Biden will pull out of the presidential race over poor health.

  

• 2024 is the year of the New Right. Of the torrent of elections scheduled throughout the world this year, the most transformative promises to span an entire continent. In all of the 27 nations which constitute the European Union, and which will ask their citizens to vote for EU parliamentarians in early June, at least one New or far-Right party is now active. In several (Finland, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden), they form part of a coalition government of the Right. In three (Hungary, Italy, Slovakia), they lead the government.

• The Washington Post Is in Full-Scale Collapse. According to the report, not only is the Post losing $100 million a year, but it lost over half of its online engagement by the end of 2023. The signs were already there by mid-year, and the worst has come to pass. Having a billionaire sugar daddy has helped mask some of the issues plaguing the Post, but the tide can only be held back so long. To lose over 50 percent of its online viewership is catastrophic for an outlet with such high overhead costs. Subscriber numbers have also nosedived throughout the Biden administration.

• Parents who refuse children gender change face seven years in jail in Scotland. SNP outlines proposal to ban 'conversion therapy' after its self-ID law was blocked by UK Government. Proposals published on Tuesday state that actions designed to “change or suppress” another individual’s gender identity, causing them physical or psychological harm, would become illegal under the radical law. SNP ministers acknowledged that so-called conversion practices often took place in a “family setting”, raising the prospect that parents could be criminalised if they refuse to go along with their child’s declaration that they are transgender.

• Scandalous Indoctrination: Inside a Kings College Counter-Terrorism Course for UK Civil Servants. A former civil servant, Anna Stanley reports on a counter-terrorism course she attended which she found a deeply, existentially depressing experience. She argues that ‘prestigious’ educational institutions are delivering politically biased, anti-government training, amounting to indoctrination and that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.

• Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

Science

• Have we just discovered aliens? The revelation that we might be seriously close to an answer is, therefore, momentous and surprising; even more surprising is that the revelation occurred on Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve 2023 ‘Musical Hootenanny’. What does it all mean? It is possible the three space-heads are referring to different discoveries, but the fact that they are all British, and all using similar language, suggests they are referring to the same thing: namely a scientific paper, probably British in origin, perhaps still being peer-reviewed, which will provide firm evidence of alien life on an exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system), using biosignatures, which generally means gases and chemicals in the atmosphere which are highly likely to emanate from organic creatures.

• Can we explain the post-2015 absence of the Chandler wobble? This paper discusses recent observations in Earth's polar motion, specifically focusing on the Chandler Wobble (CW), a small deviation in the Earth's rotation axis. Usually, the CW has a regular pattern, but recent data show that it's missing its expected 6-year rhythm, a change that began around 2015.

• Huge ancient city that was built 2,500 years ago and lasted for 1,000 years with a population of 100,000 has been found in Ecuador in the Amazon. A series of mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain. Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roads, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years.

  

Technology

• Artificial Intelligence Is Allowing Them To Construct A Global Surveillance Prison From Which No Escape Is Possible. Every inch of our planet is being watched, and incredibly sophisticated “artificial intelligence solutions” make it possible for those that are watching our planet to find whatever they want in just minutes. You can try to run, and you can try to hide, but if they really want to find you it won’t be very difficult. All around us, a global surveillance prison is being constructed. Even if you completely stay off the Internet and you totally avoid all forms of modern technology, cameras and satellites will still be endlessly watching you. And once your face has been identified, artificial intelligence can be used to locate you wherever you pop up on the entire planet.

• Half Of All Skills Will Be Outdated Within Two Years, Study Suggests. Executives believe nearly half of the skills that exist in today’s workforce won’t be relevant just two years from now, thanks to artificial intelligence. And a lot of that includes their own skills. This startling proclamation came out of a recent survey of 800 executives and 800 employees released by edX, an online education platform. Executives in the survey estimate that within the next five years, their organizations will eliminate over half (56%) of entry-level knowledge worker roles because of AI.

Ukraine

• “It Will Be A Shock”: Ukraine Lost 500,000 Soldiers In War So Far, Nearly 30,000 Per Month: Lutsenko Claims. Ukraine lost 500,000 soldiers, killed or seriously wounded, since the beginning of the Russian special military operation/invasion, former Prosecutor General and ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko said on the YouTube channel. “I think that they should name the number of dead Ukrainians. I know that they don’t want this, and it will be taken seriously. Yes, it will be a shock,” he said.

• Sweden states all citizens must be prepared for war. There's a threat of war, and all citizens "must act to strengthen the country's defense," according to the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, Micael Bydén, and the Minister for Civil Defence, Carl-Oscar Bohlin. According to Minister Bohlin, the situation is very serious. He has expressed concern that the modernization of civil defense is not happening quickly enough. The minister emphasizes that "Sweden may face war, and all Swedes must act to strengthen the country's defense."

• Pentagon failed to track Ukraine arms worth more than $1bn, says watchdog. The report from the defence department’s inspector-general did not offer an assessment on whether the weapons had been diverted but found that the US did not appropriately monitor at least $1bn of $1.7bn in weapons sent to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour nearly two years ago. The exports covered by the report include shoulder-fired missiles such as Javelins and Stingers, switchblade or “kamikaze” drones and night vision goggles.

• American citizen Gonzalo Lira dies from neglect in Ukrainian prison. Gonzalo Lira, a prominent commentator on the Russia-Ukraine war imprisoned in Ukraine for speech critical of the country’s government, has died after weeks of medical neglect by Ukrainian authorities. A note written by Lira and provided by his father to The Grayzone indicates his death came after a nearly three-month battle with pneumonia, a condition which was apparently ignored by his Ukrainian jailers until just weeks before his death.

Vaccines

• Lipid Nanoparticles: The Real Danger of mRNA Vaccines? Christie Grace is a specialist in RNA and lipid nanoparticles and was a project manager at the top plasmid company in the world manufacturing recombinant proteins such as monoclonal antibodies, CRISPR, SpCas9, gene editing, and IVT mRNA production. For two years Christie has been raising the alarm over harms that can be caused by lipid nanoparticles and has concerns over cold chain management, vaccine production quality assurance/control and the medical community’s unwillingness to look at the scientific data.

• ICAN Obtains Data Used to Identify “Hot Lots” of Moderna and Pfizer Covid Vaccines. This data makes it possible to determine the number of doses distributed per lot number. According to OpenVAERS’ analyses of this data obtained by ICAN, there are several “hot lots.” Their graph below, for example, shows that one lot from both Pfizer and Moderna was responsible for extremely large numbers of myocarditis reports.

  

• Prenatal Exposure to COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 Induces Autism-Like Behaviors in Male Neonatal Rats: Insights into WNT and BDNF Signaling Perturbations. Our findings reveal that the mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine significantly alters WNT gene expression and BDNF levels in both male and female rats, suggesting a profound impact on key neurodevelopmental pathways. Notably, male rats exhibited pronounced autism-like behaviors, characterized by a marked reduction in social interaction and repetitive patterns of behavior. Furthermore, there was a substantial decrease in neuronal counts in critical brain regions, indicating potential neurodegeneration or altered neurodevelopment. Male rats also demonstrated impaired motor performance, evidenced by reduced coordination and agility.

• Federal Judge Orders CDC to Release All V-Safe Free-Text Entries in a Huge Win for Vaccine Safety Transparency. One year ago, on the heels of ICAN obtaining the check-the-box portion of the V-safe data, another lawsuit was brought to demand that CDC release the critical “free text” entries collected by V-safe—CDC’s safety monitoring system for the COVID-19 vaccines. A federal judge has now ordered the release of all 7.8 million entries over the next 12 months!