Today's Must-Reads - 20 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. This is a slimmed down version for all readers but is usually for paid subscribers only.

Support this newsletter by becoming a paid subscriber and join the thousands of readers who stay informed about what is really going on in the world and why.

---

Climate Change

• "Worst-Case Scenario" Volcano Erupts In Iceland Near Power Plant. A volcano in the southwestern region of Iceland erupted on Monday, sending geysers of hot lava as high as 330 feet. The eruption was located near the Svartsengi geothermal power plant near the town of Grindavík, which was evacuated last month over an increase in seismic activity, the NY Times reports. "We are looking at a worst-case scenario," said Icelanding volcanologist, Thorvaldur Thordarson, adding "The eruption appears big, and only about two kilometers from major infrastructure."

• Another heat pump myth has just crumbled. It's time we stopped pretending that going green will save us money. As with electric cars, it should be obvious by now that heat pumps are not going to sell themselves. If it wants to reach its targets, the Government is going to have to bully us with fines and cajole us with taxpayer-funded grants. Not that that will stop government ministers and the wider green lobby perpetuating the fib that going green is saving us money.

Covid

• The shameless cover-up of the lab-leak theory. The political and scientific establishment seems determined to suppress the truth about Covid’s origins. Pandemics are not acts of God. Somebody somewhere did something that caused the virus to enter the human species. The evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong. That an outbreak caused by a bat sarbecovirus should happen in the one city in the world that had been collecting hundreds of bat sarbecoviruses and experimenting on them is striking enough. That it happened one year after that lab proposed inserting the one feature that distinguishes SARS‑CoV‑2 from all other viruses of the same kind makes it a heck of a coincidence. That the virus was highly infectious from the start, highly attuned to human receptors and evolving comparatively slowly, implying it had been already trained on human cells, was a shock. That the lab in question refuses to this day to release the database of the viruses it had been working on is as insulting as it is suspicious.

• Is this the smoking gun for the Covid lab leak? Blueprint for creating a 'SARS-CoV' virus with an altered spike protein in Wuhan was published in 2018, bombshell new records show. A newly-uncovered trove of documents detailing plans to create a Covid-like virus in China months before the pandemic make the 'lab leak almost certain', experts say. The records - obtained now by FOIA requests - lay out a plan to 'engineer spike proteins' to infect human cells that would then be 'inserted into SARS-Covid backbones' at the infamous Wuhan virology lab from December 2018.

• EcoHealth Alliance Response to False Statements About an Unfunded Grant Proposal. In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance drafted and submitted a proposal to DARPA for funding along with partners at UNC, USGS National Wildlife Health Center, Duke-NUS, PARC and the WIV. The proposal was rejected for funding and the work was never done. However, documents representing incomplete or early drafts of the proposal have been acquired via the Freedom of Information Act and published along with allegations regarding their intent. These allegations are false, based on misunderstanding of edits and comments on the document, and based on misleading out-of-context quotations, and a lack of understanding of the process by which federal grants are awarded.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Warren Buffett Revealed To Be Quietly Making Bank From Bitcoin And Crypto Amid Price Swings. Warren Buffett, the famed billionaire investor, has been one of the loudest bitcoin and crypto critics amid a U.S. "war" on bitcoin. Now, as a crisis is threatening to engulf the U.S. dollar, a new analysis of Warren Buffett's Berkshire HathawayBRK.B +0.6% stock portfolio has revealed the Oracle of Omaha's best-performing investment this year is bitcoin and crypto-friendly Nubank.

Health

• Map shows deadly fungus spreading across the US with experts worried. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) has shared a map that showcases the worrying spread of the deadly Candida auris fungus across the United States, reports The Mirror. The fungus is a type of yeast that can cause people to become severely ill, can spread easily among people in healthcare settings, and is impervious to some antifungal treatments.

• Wheat Intolerance Might Be Due to Glyphosate – New Canadian Study. A scientific review identifies glyphosate as a possible cause of the global rise in wheat intolerance. This condition is increasingly reported by people who don’t have a diagnosis of celiac disease (a condition where your immune system attacks your own tissues when you eat the protein gluten), GMWatch reported. While no GM glyphosate-tolerant wheat is commercially planted in North America, glyphosate-based herbicides are often sprayed on non-GM wheat pre-harvest to desiccate it (“dry it down”).

Politics

• Colorado Supreme Court removes Trump from state's ballot. It's the first time a court has found that the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause applies to Trump in relation to his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. The Trump campaign said it would file an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Colorado case is one of roughly three dozen across the country seeking to remove Trump, who is currently facing four criminal indictments, from the ballot through the largely untested insurrection clause. The state's high court questioned whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment covers the presidency and whether the insurrection rose to that level.

• Over 170 of Jeffrey Epstein's high-profile associates will be NAMED in court documents set to be unsealed in the first days of 2024. A judge has ruled to unseal documents that would name 177 Does who are Epstein's friends, recruiters and victims within the coming weeks. The material is related to a defamation case brought by Prince Andrew's accuser Virginia Roberts in New York against Epstein's madam Ghislaine Maxwell. The hundreds of files will shed new light on the late financier's sex trafficking operation and his network of influence.

  

• How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism. From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy. Ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protests have swept U.S. colleges, leading to charges of Jew-hatred and a disastrous congressional hearing where three college presidents failed to offer a clear moral condemnation of rising antisemitism. But the ideology fueling these demonstrations isn’t limited to the college campus. It now begins in public high schools and even elementary schools as early as pre-K, according to more than 30 public school teachers, administrators, and parents across four states who spoke to The Free Press.

Science

• Researchers use Moore's Law to calculate that life began before Earth existed. Geneticists Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida and Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore have proposed, in a paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, that if the evolution of life follows Moore's Law, then it predates the existence of planet Earth. The two researchers acknowledge their ideas are more of a "thought exercise" than a theory proposal, but at the same time suggest their calculations ought to be taken seriously.

  

• The Moon’s Far Side Is Inexplicably More Conductive, Korean Lunar Orbiter Reveals. There’s something odd about the far side of the Moon, scientists have concluded based on data from the Korean Pathfinder Lunor Orbiter. The results are yet to be published, but suggest a discrepancy between the conductivity of the near and far sides, which so far lacks a plausible explanation. The Moon does not have a global magnetic field the way the Earth does, although it once did. However, like Mars, it has some intriguing local fields.

Ukraine

• Ukraine’s military is seeking up to 500,000 more soldiers. Zelensky told reporters at his annual year-end press conference that the military wants to add up to 500,000 more soldiers, but that he wants more details from the top leaders before deciding on whether to approve their ask, The Associated Press (AP) reported. He noted that adding up to half a million more troops is a “very sensitive matter.”

Vaccines

• Texas makes a stand against Big Pharma’s Covid vaccines. On the last day of November Texas launched extraordinary legal proceedings that could have wide-ranging political ramifications across the developed world. Following a lengthy state investigation, Republican Attorney-General Ken Paxton sued pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for “false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practices” related to its Covid-19 vaccines. Paxton didn’t mince words. “We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies,” he said in his November 30 statement.

• Gene-based COVID-19 vaccines: Australian perspectives in a corporate and global context. Key phase III clinical trials for these products are yet to be fully completed, despite administration to billions of people. Mass vaccination of workforces has been mandated, and vaccine mandates correlate with excess mortality. Neither risk nor cost can justify these products for the vast majority of people. We should pause, reflect, and reaffirm essential freedoms, welcome the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, embrace natural immunity, and lift all mandated medical therapy.