Today's Must-Reads - 13 December 2023

A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering together new information and interesting articles. I then pick one or two of the most interesting topics and write about them. However, that leaves a lot of missed out information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the latest articles and information that I’ve found.

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Climate Change

• 7,500 wind turbines in Spain to be dismantled within five years. Approximately 36% of energy-generating wind turbines in Spain will need to be decommissioned within the next five years as they become obsolete, predicts the Wind Energy Association (AEE). This translates to around 7,500 wind turbines and 20,000 blades turning into scrap that will have to be dismantled, transported, and processed, posing a significant logistical challenge. The challenging aspect of disposal is the fiberglass blades of the turbines, which only a few landfills accept.

• Eruption Near Grindavík Remains Likely. A volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula remains a likely outcome, according to a notice from the Icelandic Met Office today. Crustal uplift continues in the Svartsengi area and is now at a higher level than in early November when a magma intrusion formed under the town of Grindavík. The town’s population of over 3,000 people was evacuated November 10 and remains displaced, after seismic activity and a magma dike opened crevasses and damaged roads, homes, and infrastructure.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Andy Cook: how lockdowns broke Britain. As the Covid inquiry continues, the prevailing narrative seems to be that Britain locked down too late. Meanwhile, the Centre for Social Justice has just released a paper, “Two Nations: The State of Poverty in Britain”, which lays bare the ills for which lockdown can be held accountable. The gap between those who can get by and those struggling had long been widening in Britain, but according to the CSJ the successive lockdowns implemented during the pandemic were the “dynamite that blew it open”.

• Third of millennials support closure of nightclubs as Covid cases surge. A survey by More in Common showed 33 per cent of those aged between 25 and 40 said they support the government reintroducing the closure of nightclubs as Covid cases surge. Up to 31 per cent of Generation Z (age 18-24) supported the same measure, compared with 27 per cent of Generation X (age 41-55) and baby boomers (age 56-74), and just 23 per cent of the silent generation (age 75+).

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Argentina’s Milei Devalues Peso by 54% in First Batch of Shock Measures. Argentina devalued the peso by 54% and announced a swath of spending cuts as the first steps of President Javier Milei’s shock-therapy program, moves welcomed by the International Monetary Fund. The newly inaugurated administration weakened the official exchange rate to 800 pesos per dollar, Economy Minister Luis Caputo said in a televised address after the close of local markets on Tuesday. It was 366.5 per dollar before the address.

• The American Dream Now Costs $3.4 Million. The classic "American Dream" including two kids, a house, and car costs more than most make in a lifetime. The cost of raising two children to the age of 18 is now estimated at over half a million dollars ($576,896). The average lifetime cost of a home including a mortgage with a 10% down payment and a 30-year fixed rate of 7.2% is now about $796,998.

• American Wealth Declined in Q3. According to a recent Federal Reserve report, US household wealth experienced a significant decline in the third quarter, largely attributed to deep stock losses. The central bank’s report revealed that household net worth fell by approximately $1.3 trillion, or 0.9%, from July to September, amounting to $151 trillion. The decline was primarily driven by a $1.7 trillion drop in the value of equity holdings.

Health

• This is bigger than COVID: Why are so many Americans dying early? People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent. Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, “excess,” deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.

• We Must Save Ourselves from the Public Health Professionals. Humans are prone to think themselves important if they seem to have power over the lives of others. The result, inevitably, is an international public health workforce that has a very high opinion of itself. We need legislators, and the public, to reclaim public health ethics and to return to credible concepts of health and well-being – as the WHO once did – “physical, mental and social.” This is what was intended when previous generations fought to overthrow dictators, striving for equality and for the rights of individuals over those who would control them. History tells us that public health professions tend to follow self-interest, taking the side of those who would be dictators. If our democracies, freedom, and health are to survive, we must accept reality and address this as a basic issue of individual freedom and good governance for which we are all responsible. There is too much at stake to leave this to self-interested corporatists and the notorious enforcers they control.

Middle East

• IDF has begun pumping seawater into Hamas tunnels in Gaza. The IDF has started pumping seawater into Hamas’s underground tunnel system in Gaza, a move aimed at destroying the Palestinian terror group’s subterranean network of passages and hideaways and driving its operatives above ground, a report said Tuesday. Wall Street Journal says tactic still at early stage and being evaluated; IDF chief has said it’s ‘a good idea,’ but environmentalists and some US officials have voiced concern.

Politics

• Rumble Hit With “Unprecedented” Cyber Attack After Posting J6 Security Cam Footage. Last week it was revealed that the GOP-controlled Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight had created a new Rumble channel to post hours of security footage from Capitol Police taken on January 6, 2021. Shortly after, Rumble was hit by a massive and seemingly organized attack that left people unable to upload or watch content. “I can confirm that this attack has been unprecedented and has been happening since this weekend,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski posted on X. “I also suspect it is political, coming from activists and/or organizations who want to censor our creators, and related to J6 videos being posted on Rumble,” he added.

• Britain is being tricked into an EU army through flawed Brexit deal says new report. A report by the European Parliament into the Brexit deal struck between Britain and Brussels has highlighted that the UK could be tricked into becoming part of an EU army. The report into the UK's Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with the EU lays out a roadmap on how cooperation already agreed over military movement in the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) agreement could see the UK pulled in further. PESCO is seen as the basis for an EU Army which has long been championed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

• Canadian Human Rights Commission Labels Christmas Celebration “Discrimination Grounded In Colonialism”. The cancerous spread of woke ideology into every facet of society and government is more obvious in some places compared to others, but every so often the movement crosses a line and sparks considerable opposition. Part of the ongoing invasion of the woke movement involves regular attempts to undermine Christian holidays as “problematic” and archaic. National celebrations like Christmas are therefore a representation of “discrimination” because they are being given preference over minority holidays.

• The derangement of James O’Brien. How They Broke Britain is a liberal-elite conspiracy theory, stretched over 350 pages of pompous, smug prose. British radio presenter James O’Brien is not easy to warm to. This is mainly due to his personality. A combination of moderate intelligence, a sense of public-schooled entitlement and a gargantuan ego has generated the event horizon of smugness – a man so full of himself it’s a wonder light can escape his presence. Sadly, thanks to his prominent media and social-media profile, we the public now struggle to escape O’Brien, too.

Technology

• Inside the dystopian ‘HateLab’ that’s surveilling social media. The elite war on ‘hate speech’ is a recipe for limitless censorship. Tackling so-called hate speech has become an obsession of the Western elites. A whole host of criminal laws, regulatory bodies and NGOs have sprung up in recent years, all of which are working to suppress the expression of views that some deem offensive. One such initiative is Cardiff University’s ‘HateLab’. Established in 2017 as a joint venture between criminologist Matthew Williams and computer scientist Pete Burnap, the HateLab is committed to ‘identifying’ and ‘monitoring’ any and all hateful speech online. It claims that, through the use of statistical modelling and machine learning, it can track trends in online ‘hate’ in real time.

Vaccines

• 70 Percent of Deaths from Pfizer Vaccine in Japan Reported Within 10 Days of Jab: Study. Number of deaths within the first 10 days of vaccination was 'significantly higher' than those between 11 and 180 days among people aged 64 and under. After “unexplained deaths,” the biggest cause of death in this group was ischemic heart disease (27 deaths), cardiac arrhythmias (24), subarachnoid hemorrhage (20), and myocarditis/pericarditis (17). Autopsies were conducted in nine out of the 51 unexplained deaths.

• The rise in civilian labor force with a disability seems to have shot up since vaccination started but not Covid.