Today's Must-Reads - 11 May 2024

The latest news, studies, reports and articles you need to know!

Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights! While I can't cover everything, I've hand-picked the most important stories you should have on your radar.

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Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• 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

• 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.

Middle East

• 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. Politco reported that Jewish Voice for Peasc and IfNotNow were both affiliated with the Tides Foundation, supported by Democrat election meddler George Soros and the Open Society Foundations AND the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

• Safetyism doesn’t belong on campus - Conservatives have adopted social-justice tactics. Scorn should also be reserved for those supine university bosses who — having spent years positively incentivising an entire generation to think of themselves as pleasingly disruptive social radicals, acting on behalf of a variety of oppressed victim classes — have now swung to the other extreme without missing a beat, and are cracking down excessively on behaviour they used to tolerate or even encourage. Equally depressing has been the way that many conservative commentators, normally professional scourges of wokeness, have become apparent fans of safetyism for Jewish students (please note — not safety, but safetyism).

• UN assembly approves resolution granting Palestine new rights. The UN General Assembly voted by a wide margin on Friday to grant Palestine new “rights and privileges” and called on the Security Council to favourably reconsider its request to become the 194th member of the United Nations. The 193-member world body approved the Arab and Palestinian-sponsored resolution by a vote of 143-9 with 25 abstentions. US Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood made clear on Thursday that the Biden administration opposed the assembly resolution. The US was among the nine countries voting against it, along with Israel.

Politics

• How to make marriage less taxing - We should let young couples keep more of their own money. The UK has one of the least generous marriage allowances in Europe. In this country, an individual can only transfer up to 10 per cent, or £1,260 of their personal allowance to their husband, wife or civil partner. Even then that only applies if the higher earner only pays the basic rate. At most, this will take off £252 from the tax paid by a couple. Compare this to enlightened France, where each nuclear family in a single household submits just one tax return. When calculating tax liabilities, this joint income is then divided by the number of “shares” in the household, with the married couple composing two shares, the first two children composing half a share each and a full share for each subsequent child. In short, married people pay less tax.

• 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.

  

Science

• Astronomers are on the Hunt for Dyson Spheres. One group of scientists thinks that we may already have detected technosignatures from a technological civilization’s Dyson Spheres, but the detection is hidden in our vast troves of astronomical data. A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical engineering project that only highly advanced civilizations could build. In this sense, ‘advance’ means the kind of almost unimaginable technological prowess that would allow a civilization to build a structure around an entire star. These Dyson Spheres would allow a civilization to harness all of a star’s energy.

Technology

• There's No Undoing Tech's Great Rewiring of Childhood. The book currently topping the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is The Anxious Generation, a jeremiad against social media and its impact on young people. Its thesis is that apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have unleashed an epidemic of mental illness among children, preteens, and teenagers. Immediate and extreme measures are required to reverse this deadly trend. The author, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has been promoting it everywhere. But a review in Nature hit a more critical note. “The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brain and causing an epidemic of mental illness,” wrote Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological science at UC Irvine, “is not supported by science.”

• Apple has declared war on our humanity. The advert for the new Apple iPad Pro features a hydraulic press crushing all the traditional tools, materials and artefacts of human creativity into a single reflective slither. Released earlier this week, it’s supposed to reflect how the the new model is Apple’s thinnest product ever, but the end result instead appears like a shard of infinitely dense compressed evil, like a fragment of the devil’s looking glass, as was shattered and scattered in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. How many of us had that on our iBingo* Card for 2024?

Ukraine

• 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?” He argued that war would only strengthen the relationship between Russia and China, saying Western nations “pushed [Russia] into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power.”

• US to announce new $400 million military aid package for Ukraine. The package, which will involve transferring weapons already in U.S. stocks, includes new Patriot missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Bradley fighting vehicles, mine-protected vehicles, Javelin anti-armor systems and other munitions. The latest tranche comes after months of wrangling over authorizing $60 billion in more military assistance for Ukraine in Congress.

Vaccines

• UK's little-known deal with AstraZeneca means YOU will pay compensation to anyone injured by pharma firm's lockdown-ending jab. In just a few short years, the vaccine has become a pariah, dragged through the courts by the families of those it has allegedly killed and maimed through a rare side effect missed in the original clinical trials. If successful, it will be the British taxpayer that foots the bill, which lawyers have estimated could amount to upwards of £250million under a deal struck between the pharma giant and ministers in the darkest days of the Covid lockdown. The deal was to shield jab makers from the risk of being sued for any extremely rare adverse side effects missed in clinical trials to ensure the vaccines could be rolled out in the UK as soon as possible.

• AstraZeneca just pulled their Covid jab….why? The general buzz has been this is a score for the so-called “anti-vaxxers”. Social media is awash with “I told you so” in various forms. But none of this is really new information. AZ has been known to cause blood clots for years, not just in “anti-vaxxer” circles but “officially” too. It’s certainly peculiar that despite an ongoing court case, an admission their product hurt people and the pulling of said product, AZ’s stock price actually went up. That could conceivably be some kind of pay-off for being the vaccine lizard tail, it’s at least a sign that AstraZeneca’s “fall” is more controlled than it appears right now.