Today's Must-Reads - 17 January 2024

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. This is a slimmed down version for all readers but is usually for paid subscribers only.

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Climate Change

• After 12 years of frustration, Mark Steyn’s brave battle for freedom of speech reaches court today. Long before the covid era of repression and free speech censorship, Mark Steyn had taken up arms on thought control and in defence of free speech. It was back in July 2012 that Steyn, amongst the first to defy the new climate change / global warming religion, in a blog post for National Review Online, described the climatologist Michael E Mann’s turn-of-the-century ‘climate change’ (global warming) hockey stick graph as fraudulent. Mann asked for an apology and a retraction but was told to get lost. He was not pleased. In October 2012, he issued a defamation lawsuit. It’s extraordinary that the case is still going.

Covid

• The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra. After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Japan’s Covid and Conformity Mania. Marking a dark beginning to the Japanese new year, a massive earthquake devastated Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture. Making matters worse, thousands at refuge centers, including many elderly people, have had to endure inane, unhealthy measures in response to some cases of Covid and influenza among them. These measures include propping open doors (in mid-winter) for ventilation and requesting that refugees wear masks even during sleep. Blogger Guy Gin remarks, “Wearing masks while sleeping is so stupid I’m surprised the Japanese government never officially recommended it.” Covid hysteria-related stupidity easily lends itself to parody, satire, and humorous commentary.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Since 2019, US native-born workers have lost 1.4 million jobs whilst foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs.

  

Health

• Chinese scientists 'create' a mutant coronavirus strain that attacks the brain and has a 100% kill rate in mice - as they admit there's a 'risk it spills over to humans'. The mice had been 'humanized', meaning they were engineered to express a protein found in people, with the goal being to assess how the virus might react in humans. The team were also surprised to find high levels of viral load in the mice's brains and eyes - suggesting the virus, despite being related to Covid, multiplies and spreads through the body in a unique way.

• Study discovers biggest cause of 'alarming surge' of excess deaths in UK. Heart failure is the biggest driver of an alarming surge in excess deaths, a study reveals, as MPs demand a "thorough investigation" into the trend. Research by scientists at Oxford University shows that while cancer and dementia deaths have fallen, deaths from heart and circulatory problems are spiralling. This includes deaths from heart disease, heart attacks, strokes and lung clots. The scientists say the rise cannot be accounted for by an ageing or growing population.

Politics

• Australian MPs pen letter urging UK government to stop Julian Assange's US extradition, citing health concerns. The parliamentary letter to U.K. Home Secretary James Cleverly is signed by the co-convenors of the Australian Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group. The letter cited the 2023 U.K. Supreme Court decision in AAA v Secretary of State for the Home Department, which found that courts in the U.K. cannot solely rely on third-party assurances by foreign governments and must make independent assessments of the risk of persecution to people before an order is made to remove them from the U.K.

• Jordan Peterson loses fight with psychology college over mandatory social media training. An Ontario court has dismissed Jordan Peterson's appeal of an earlier decision that sided with the College of Psychologists of Ontario. “Is there free speech in Canada? To what extent are the limits on free speech in Canada, to free speech which is not criminal or not tortious, not a violation of any law? To what extent are regulated professionals and regulated trades impacted in terms of what they can say in the public forum?” said Howard Levitt, Peterson’s lawyer. “These are important issues and Canada has been castigated broadly for the decision of the divisional court.”

• Poland You have 6hrs to Report for Duty. On January 13, Poland passed a completely radical new form of conscription card intended in the event of mobilization and during a war. The changes in this formula are significant, with the 6-hour notice and the drastic penalties for failing to report to the army in such situations clearly showing the backdrop intent for war. The governments of Europe are selling the nonsense that Putin wants to take Europe. The common Russian people no more want war than the average European. The common people lose everything, the elite profit, and the whole thing never solves anything. Hermann Göring was absolutely correct.

• Ursula von der Leyen: misinformation is world’s gravest problem. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen today declared that “misinformation and disinformation” are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change. “For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate,” she said in her speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. “It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies.” The solution, according to von der Leyen, is for businesses and governments to collaborate to quash disinformation.

• Dark Davos: Escort Services "Completely Booked" As WEF Begins. The 54th annual gathering of the World Economic Forum begins today in the small Alpine resort town of Davos. After world leaders, politicians, business leaders, academics, NGOs, and religious leaders debate global problems and attempt to find 'solutions' to issues plaguing the world, there is an after-hours scene that is very dark. What's on the menu this year? Well, The New York Post described: "Caviar, magic mushrooms, gold-leaf desserts, A-list selfies, $2,500-per-night hookers and secret dinners."

Science

• 'A big cosmological mystery': Newfound cosmic corkscrew defies our understanding of the universe. The structure is so large, it defies one of the simplest rules of cosmology. Named the Big Ring, the gigantic spiral of galaxies and galaxy clusters is 1.3 billion light-years wide and has a circumference of 4 billion light-years, making it one of the largest objects ever seen. Both the Big Ring and the Giant Arc are so large they could lead astronomers to throw out old models of the universe's birth and evolution.

  

Technology

• AI Tools ‘Hallucinate’ False Legal Content Up to 88 Percent of the Time: Study. Artificial Intelligence is proliferating in many industries, including law, but practitioners are being warned about relying too heavily on the new technology. Last year, Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, admitted that he accidentally gave fake legal citations to his attorney after Google’s Bard AI tool concocted them. In Wales and England, the judiciary issued guidance this past month regarding the use of AI in the legal system. It warned that “all judicial office holders must be alive to the potential risks” of the technology.

Ukraine

• Germany to unilaterally provide Ukraine with over 7 billion euro, draws criticism. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Jan 16. in a phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden said that Berlin will unilaterally provide Ukraine with over seven billion euro in security assistance and humanitarian support in 2024. Germany's direct approach has drawn criticism from some senior EU policymakers. The EU's Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton on Jan. 15 slammed Berlin for not backing multilateral EU mechanisms to deliver aid. "Today we see that Germany is trying to go solo, it hasn't fooled anyone, and in particular it is trying to stop supporting the European Peace Facility."

Vaccines

• Do Covid19 injections with modified RNA risk generating inappropriate parasite proteins and prions? Injection technology mRNA COVID19 substitutes to all the natural Uracile bases by modified pseudo Uracile bases. These modified bases are sometimes ignored by the ribosome which skips them, thus causing a shift in the codon reading frame. Here we analyze the Spike protein when it is read following the second or third reading frame of the codons. We then discover parasitic proteins that we analyze, some of which may have the property of Prion or amyloid.