This Week's TOP 10 Must Reads - 17-23 June 2024
A summary of this week's most interesting news, studies, reports and articles
Naked Emperor: Exposing the Narrative
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The big idea: can you inherit memories from your ancestors? The science of epigenetics suggests we can pass on trauma – but trust and compassion too. Scientists working in the emerging field of epigenetics have discovered the mechanism that allows lived experience and acquired knowledge to be passed on within one generation, by altering the shape of a particular gene. This means that an individual’s life experience doesn’t die with them but endures in genetic form. The impact of the starvation your Dutch grandmother suffered during the second world war, for example, or the trauma inflicted on your grandfather when he fled his home as a refugee, might go on to shape your parents’ brains, their behaviours and eventually yours. Might this new understanding increase our capacity for self-awareness and empathy? If we can grasp the potential impact of our ancestors’ experiences on our own behaviour, might we be more understanding of others, who are also carrying the inherited weight of experience?
The Ever Widening War. There is no peace movement. Western leaders have even turned peace advocates into traitors, putting them on lists of “Russian agents/dupes.” Those who warn of the pending catastrophe are pulled off airliners and have their passports confiscated. Writers who oppose the West’s participation in the Ukrainian Conflict get visits from the FBI. The French Army Chief of Staff says the Ukraine Conflict necessitates controlling public opinion with propaganda and by dictating what information is made available to the public. In other words, to prevent opposition to war people must be kept in the dark.
The Impending Collapse of the American Empire. The world as we know it is run by an exclusive class of American racketeers who operate with virtually unlimited weapons and money. Matt Kennard in his book The Racket – where he reports from Haiti, Bolivia, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Mexico, Colombia, and many other countries – rips back the veil. He exposes the hidden machinery of empire. He details its brutality, mendacity, cruelty and its dangerous self-delusions. In the late stage of empire, the image sold to a gullible public begins to entrance the mandarins of empire. They make decisions based not on reality, but on their distorted visions of reality, one coloured by their own propaganda.
Ultra-processed foods: here’s how they may affect the way the immune system functions. Studies on mice have shown exposure to low concentrations of emulsifiers can weaken the gut’s mucus barrier. This can make it easier for microbes (including harmful ones) to cross in and out of the gut. Changes in the mucus barrier’s integrity also correlated with higher levels of inflammatory markers. These are signs the body’s immune system is activated. The lack of fibre typical of diets high in ultra-processed foods may also affect the gut barrier’s integrity. The gut’s microbes need to digest fibre in order to produce short-chain fatty acids.
Ellen Brown: Why Does the Government Borrow When It Can Print? The theory was that if you borrowed rather than printed money, you were NOT increasing the existing money supply, and therefore, in theory, it would not be inflationary. That would be true if the debt were paid back, but today the government does not repay the debt but just keeps rolling it over, paying off old bonds as they come due with new bonds – currently at higher interest rates.
Fasting Boosts Immune System's Attack on Cancer, Mouse Study Finds. In a new study in mice, fasting was shown to effectively reprogram the metabolism of specific white cells tasked with killing tumors. "Tumors are very hungry," says immunologist Joseph Sun, from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. "They take up essential nutrients, creating a hostile environment often rich in lipids that are detrimental to most immune cells. "What we show here is that fasting reprograms these natural killer cells to better survive in this suppressive environment."
This Is The First Animal Ever Found That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive. Some truths about the Universe and our experience in it seem immutable. The sky is up. Gravity sucks. Nothing can travel faster than light. Multicellular life needs oxygen to live. Except we might need to rethink that last one. In 2020, scientists discovered a jellyfish-like parasite that doesn't have a mitochondrial genome – the first multicellular organism ever found with such an absence. That means it doesn't breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency.
EU pushes new law to allow bulk scanning of your chat messages. European elections are over, and the European soccer championship is in full swing – why not greenlight bulk searches of people’s private communications, even encrypted ones? The proposed EU legislation has activists all over the continent up in arms.
Extreme heat no one wants to mention: Greenland warmed 10 degrees in a few decades (many times). We may be living through some of the best weather in the last 100,000 years. Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on a new paper showing the incredible extreme climate shifts of Greenland. During the depths of the last ice age Greenland temperatures would swing abruptly by 10 to 15 degrees Celsius (or 30F) in the space of 30 years. And we’re panicking at the moment about warming at 0.13°C per decade.
Against Collectivism - How the Individual Became a Public Nuisance. Since Covid, so-called natural rights—rights intrinsic and inalienable to human nature, such as the right to dignity, life and liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, recognition as a legal person, the prohibition of torture and slavery etc.—have been increasingly flattened by the executive power of the state, at the expense of the legislative and the judiciary. The political Left who has been the architect of this dramatic shift. In the history of radical Left thought, “collectivism” and “the collective” were always revered as desirable goals for a future “socialist” society (much to what would have been Marx’s dismay). The individual became a public nuisance because of a dangerous interpretation of the idea of “society” on the Left, a Left now in charge of all dominant ideologies of power.
Reply to 6 & 7: I've only seen the claim in a keto book, but there are claims that cancer cells prefer to "eat" glucose and are unusually sensitive to insulin levels. Thus they prefer a host that is overweight and with too much blood sugar/insulin -- which defines a large fraction of the population. A strict keto diet that minimizes carbs will tend to starve cancer cells. It may not be a cure, but it's something I'd try if I had a cancer diagnosis.
Imagine how surprised I was to learn, a few years ago, about the flourishing farmsteads in Greenland and then how they eventually collapsed because of the increasing cold. I had always wondered why it'd been named "Greenland..."