Today's Must-Reads - 17 April 2024

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

I spend a lot of time each day gathering together new information and fascinating 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. This is a slimmed down version for all readers but is usually for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• A Generation Lost to Climate Anxiety. In a far-reaching new essay in The New Atlantis, the environmental researcher Ted Nordhaus makes a case that while the basic science of CO2 and climate is solid [debateable!], it has been abused by the activist class in service of a wildly irresponsible and unscientific climate catastrophism. This reckless alarmism, saturated across the mainstream media and endlessly amplified by it, has had profound societal consequences. It has both distorted public understanding of the massive benefits the carbon economy makes possible and grossly exaggerated the risks of extreme events it allegedly makes more likely.

Covid

• ‘Sweden has been vindicated on Covid’ - Martin Kulldorff on why lockdowns were a disaster for public health. Almost as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, governments began locking down. These measures, we were told, might have been insanely authoritarian and historically unprecedented, but politicians were just ‘following the science’. We simply had to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. And yet, in Sweden, ‘the science’ looked very different. The nation refused to go into full lockdown, insisting this would be better for health in the long-run. It made itself a global pariah in the process. So, four years on from the first lockdowns across the West, has Sweden’s more liberal approach been proven wrong or vindicated?

• Wenstrup Announces Subpoena for Top Fauci Advisor After Whistleblower Allegations are Confirmed. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) announced a subpoena to compel Dr. David Morens — a top advisor to Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — to hand-over documents from his personal email account related to COVID-19. Dr. Morens has also agreed to testify in front of the Select Subcommittee at a public hearing later this year. Recent whistleblower allegations revealed new, additional evidence that Dr. Morens intentionally used his personal email to hide conversations about the origins of COVID-19 and subvert federal transparency laws. Last week, Dr. Morens’s self-proclaimed “best friend” — EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak — released four document tranches that confirmed the whistleblower’s allegations.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The market cap of the largest stock relative to the 75 percentile stock has risen past the level seen during the Great Depression.

  

• Banks saw their lowest YoY earnings gains for 40 years in 2023. Only 32% of banks reported YoY gains.

  

• Morgan Stanley gives up June rate cut bet as stronger inflation muddies outlook. "Recent inflation prints muddy the near-term path, so we push the first cut to July and take out one forecasted cut this year," analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a recent note, forecasting the Fed to cut three times, down from a prior estimate of four cuts. The bank's less dovish view followed recent data that has forced it to boost its growth forecast for the year, forecasting GDP growth to be 2.3% in Q4 this year and 2.1% in 2025, up 0.7% from a prior estimate.

Health

• Prescription Drugs Are the Leading Cause of Death. And psychiatric drugs are the third leading cause of death. Overtreatment with drugs kills many people, and the death rate is increasing. It is therefore strange that we have allowed this long-lasting drug pandemic to continue, and even more so because most of the drug deaths are easily preventable. Drug usage is now so common that newborns in 2019 could be expected to take prescription drugs for roughly half their lives in the US. Moreover, polypharmacy has been increasing.

• Aggressive Colorectal Cancer Tied to Oral Bacterium. The discovery was made in a study published March 20 in Nature. Researchers from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center performed a variety of tests on human stool samples and mice to document the transfer of this bacterium, Fusobacterium nucleatum, which occurred in about half of the colorectal cancers in tumors removed from 200 patients. “We don’t know what we’re doing to the microbiome,” said Dr. Makary, a bestselling author whose latest book is “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.” “It may be antibiotics and other things we do may enable more inflammatory bacteria, and inflammation has been suggested to be a contributing factor to cancer.

Middle East

• US makes failed bid for Iran to allow 'symbolic strike' by Israel. An Iranian military security official has revealed exclusively to The Cradle that the US contacted the Islamic Republic, asking the nation to allow Israel "a symbolic strike to save face” following Iran's retaliatory drone and missile barrage this weekend. He added that Tehran “outright rejected” the proposal, delivered by mediators, and reiterated warnings that any Israeli attack on Iranian soil would be met with a decisive and immediate response. The reply was delivered directly to the Swiss envoy in Tehran by officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and not the foreign ministry.

• Blinken: Escalation with Iran is not in U.S. or Israel's interests. The U.S. assessment is that Iran would respond to any significant, overt Israeli strike on Iranian soil with a new round of missile and drone attacks, a senior U.S. official told Axios. "We think it will be very hard to replicate the huge success we had on Saturday with defeating the attack if Iran launches hundreds of missiles and drones again — and the Israelis know it," another U.S. official said.

Politics

• Inside the disinformation industry - A government-sponsored agency is censoring journalism. The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. Alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the GDI receives money from the UK government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department. In the US, a number of media organisations have started to take action against GDI’s partisan activism, prompted by a GDI report in 2022 that listed the 10 most dangerous sites in America.

  

• The sinister censorship of NatCon Brussels - The technocratic elites are the true menace to liberty. European public life is in real trouble, if today’s goings on in the Belgian capital are anything to go by. This morning, Emir Kir, the mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in Brussels, sent in the cops to shut down the National Conservatism Brussels conference, a gathering of conservative and right-wing intellectuals, politicians and writers. As Nigel Farage took to the stage, police amassed outside with an order for the event to close, on the grounds it was ‘creating a public disturbance’.

• Whistleblower says Boeing should stop production of 787 Dreamliner due to safety issue. A Boeing engineer-turned-whistleblower who contends that the aerospace giant’s 787 Dreamliner is unsafe to fly due to assembly flaws doubled down on his claims Tuesday, saying that the plane could fall apart and “drop to the ground” midflight unless the alleged safety problems are addressed. Boeing quality engineer Sam Salehpour spoke to “NBC Nightly News” in his first on-camera interview since raising his allegations publicly last week. He said the company has yet to properly address tiny nonconforming gaps found in multiple planes after two sections of their fuselages were joined together during assembly. Salehpour said such “safety issues” could lead to catastrophic outcomes.

Science

• First Fractal Molecule in Nature Assembles Into a Sierpinski Triangle And We Don't Know Why. From the spiral arms of galaxies to microscopic snow crystals, nature seems to fall into fractal-like patterns that repeat in increasingly smaller increments. No matter how small you go, parts of the pattern still resemble the whole. One exception appears to be molecules, which have not been known to exhibit self-similarity at changing scales. That is, until now. Researchers from Germany, Sweden, and the UK have discovered an enzyme produced by a single-celled organism that can arrange itself into a fractal – not just any fractal, but a repeating pattern of triangles known as a Sierpiński triangle.

Technology

• Meta Releases MEGALODON, Efficient LLM Pre-Training and Inference on Infinite Context Length. MEGALODON’s linear computational and memory complexity during training and inference is achieved by chunking input sequences into fixed blocks as in MEGA-chunk. This results in efficient long-context pretraining and better data efficiency. MEGALODON is evaluated across various scales of language modeling and downstream domain-specific tasks, showcasing its ability to model sequences of unlimited length.

Vaccines

• The vast scale of vaccine damage America tried (and failed) to hide. WHY would America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) want to hide covid vaccine safety data received from its ‘v-safe’ app? The self-reporting smartphone tool was launched in December 2020 because there was no long-term safety data for the vaccines, produced at ‘warp speed’, and because of the ‘rapid and extensive rollout of the vaccine’, a court heard. The app has over 10 million users who share post-vaccine symptoms via text message. Current analysis was done by the non-profit organisation Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and shows that 3.3million had their health impacted: 1.2million were unable to continue with normal activities, 1.3million missed work or school, and 800,000 required medical care.

• Alberta updates mRNA booster guidance to every three months, starting with six-month-old babies. That works out to about 320 doses for the average lifespan. These booster shots “are anticipated to provide a good immune response against currently circulating strains,” says AHS. AHS specifically recommends the extra booster to seniors, adults living among seniors, health care workers and people with underlying medical conditions or autoimmune issues — but it doesn’t end there. Alberta health officials also name First Nations people, “members of racialized and other equity-denied communities,” and pregnant women as special groups that should get the vaccine.