Today's Must-Reads - 24 February 2023
A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles
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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. Today, this is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but will be for paid subscribers only a lot of the time in the future.
Please consider taking out a paid subscription because it enables me to spend longer reporting on the news that isn’t, but should be reported.
Climate Change
Do you care more about young Russians and Ukrainians needlessly dying, the potential for nuclear escalation or how the war is impacting climate change? If you chose the latter then Time has an article for you. Whilst bombs have released some greenhouse gasses, the squeeze on gas exports has pushed the region’s emissions down - result! Just don’t think about all the people dying because they can’t afford to heat their houses.
A climate emergency has been declared. Two university professors tell us how universal basic income will help the planet. Money can’t be saved and people don’t have to work, what could go wrong?
Covid Lockdowns & Mandates
More shocking news from George Mason University. They conducted a study which showed that DC’s indoor vaccine mandates didn’t work. “Covid cases were not affected by the mandate, Covid deaths were not affected by it, and people were not more likely to get vaccinated at all in the first place”.
Alan Dershowitz continues the backtracking. ‘What I meant was people should lose their human rights if a perfect vaccine was invented’. Well that’s ok then! Glad you made your position clear.
Economy/Energy/Finance
The FT highlights the price that is being paid for the push to electric vehicle use. European autoworkers losing their jobs. Electric vehicles take far fewer people to make and design so bye bye jobs. Ford have announced that they are cutting 40% of its entire European engineering team, the first sign of a coming wave to hit the sector.
Moderna’s Q4 2022 earnings call contains some interesting snippets. “Cost of sales includes a charge of $297 million for inventory write-downs related to excess and obsolete COVID-19 products…unutilised manufacturing capacity…loss on firm purchase commitments and related cancellation fees of $281 million…driven by surplus production capacity and overall lower demand”.
The US Virgin Islands is demanding more documents from JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon over the bank’s alleged decision to retain the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associates as customers despite numerous red flags. “Dimon was personally involved both in decisions to retain Epstein’s accounts…and to Epstein’s referrals of prominent and high-wealth potential clients”.
The US exported just over 20 billion cubic meters of gas to the EU in 2021. Then there was a big explosion….of US gas exports in 2022.
Head of the BIS, Agustin Carstens says that crypto assets and trade will only exist under certain conditions. The only trusted digital currency will be Government CBDCs.
Environment
Karl Denninger takes a closer look at the train derailment in Ohio. From an early look at the report it seems the accident was entirely avoidable and directly caused by stupidity. Unsuitable individuals being put into positions of power is sadly a common occurrence nowadays resulting in incidents such as this one.
Good News
After a three year old boy got stuck down a pipe a thirteen year old volunteered to squeeze down to get him. You can see in the first few seconds of the video how small and tight the pipe was. An uplifting story featuring a brave and heroic young boy.
Health
Brownstone looks at the bird flu fear porn that is ramping up. An even deadlier pandemic could soon be here warns the NY Times. It appears someone wants the public to panic.
News of the death of a Cambodian child and father, after testing positive for H5N1, will only exacerbate things. However, so far there has been no evidence of person to person transmission.
But guess who is modelling the worst case scenarios? Professor Lockdown is modelling how an outbreak would sweep the UK. Remember his 2005 bird flu predictions where 200 million would die? It turned out only 282 did.
Politics
Why are we getting so much advice from China? In this clip the IMF looks at CBDCs and how transactional data can be used to underwrite credit for social scoring.
Ukraine
Canada has announced more than $32 million in support for Ukraine. This includes $7.5 for demining and $12 million to counter chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. Sounds like a job for Hunter Biden.
China is reportedly negotiating with Russia to supply kamikaze drones. This comes after China is looking to negotiate a peace plan between Russian and Ukraine but abstained in the UN vote to demand Russia ‘immediately’ withdraw.
The war truly is theatre for NATO. It said “Ukraine is hosting one of the epics of this century” and compared the war to Hollywood blockbusters.
World
North Korea is testing its strategic cruise missiles again. Four were fired towards the Sea of Japan demonstrating the conflict readiness of Pyongyang’s “nuclear combat force“.
Explosions and anti-anticraft fire have been recorded in Karaj, Iran. The city is the main manufacturing centre for the production of centrifuges used at the country’s two nuclear facilities.
Top Chinese diplomat Wang Wenbin discuses the destructive influence of the US. According to him, it “tried to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, violently interfered in elections in at least 30 countries and tried to kill more than 50 foreign leaders.”
What a grand collection of up to date world news!
Enough to keep my head spinning for at least the whole of the weekend.
Thank you, Mr Emperor.
Thank you. Another fine collection for the weekend. Plus a reminder, from a 13 year old, what real humanity looks like.