Today's Must-Reads - 24 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

• Conspiracy Theorists Were Right About Climate Lockdowns. Yesterday, the unfortunate Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, issued a TRAVEL BAN for an entire county. You read that correctly. No, not a travel advisory, but a full on travel ban! Meaning, New Yorkers in Erie County are forbidden from going anywhere. What’s another name for that? Well, if you live in a rural or very suburban area (which most of New York State is), where driving on a road is the way you get from point A to point B, then I would say a synonym would be “lockdown.”

• EU must invest about €1.5tn a year to meet net zero targets, says Brussels. The figures are part of a draft document from the European Commission, seen by the Financial Times, that sets out Brussels’ plan for slashing emissions and reaching “economy-wide climate neutrality” by 2050. To reach the goal, the document says the EU will require an almost completely decarbonised electricity sector by about 2040, a shift of the bloc’s workforce into green industries and an overall reduction in fossil fuel consumption of 85 per cent compared with 1990 levels.

Covid

• University keeps prominent Covid-19 scientist’s emails under wraps. The emails of a prominent Scottish scientist who dismissed fears that Covid came from a Chinese laboratory are being kept secret over concerns for his safety. The University of Edinburgh has refused to release the correspondence of Andrew Rambaut, a globally renowned virologist, about the source of the pandemic. The Scottish academic, writing informally to his colleagues in February 2020, said: “Given the shit-show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Ron DeSantis was the last hope of a Covid reckoning. There are two distinct and contradictory visions of the future now that DeSantis is gone from the presidential race. According to the pessimistic one, the lesson of DeSantis losing the Republican primary race is that Americans will never have an honest inquiry over the Covid policy fiasco. The more optimistic reading is that there may be one, but only if we can muster the grace to have it focus on providing lessons for future policy and not on political point-scoring. But if it is the former, then lockdowns are a permanent fixture in the public health toolbox, and the population should plan accordingly for them to inevitably return.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Trillion Dollar Dilemma: Is the US Treasury Market in Trouble? The US Treasury market impacts everything from mortgage rates to the value of the dollar in your pocket. Recent increases in government borrowing have raised questions regarding its future. Is the most important financial market in trouble? In addition to plugging the hole torn by deficits, the US government needs to refinance existing debt coming due — which is a lot. An astonishing 85% of Treasury debt issued in 2023 is due within one year or less. This leads to constant refinancing needs. 4-week Treasury bills, for example, need to be refinanced twelve times per year.

• Millions of people in UK would need to double their income to escape poverty, new report warns. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation report said 14.4 million people in the UK were in poverty in 2021-22, including 8.1 million working-age adults, 4.2 million children and 2.1 million pensioners. The charity also said six million people were in very deep poverty. This means they received less than 40% of the country's median (middle) income after housing costs.

Health

• Global pandemic agreement at risk of falling apart, WHO warns. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, said the momentum had been slowed down by entrenched positions and “a torrent of fake news, lies, and conspiracy theories”. He warned that if nobody was prepared to seize the initiative or give ground, the whole project risked going nowhere. Tedros said claims that the accord would cede sovereignty to the WHO or give it the power to impose lockdowns and vaccine mandates were “completely false”.

• Where Is This Pandemic Threat? For years now, we have heard that there is a growing threat of pandemics. It’s like a civic doctrine that everybody knows. The next pandemic is on its way, they say, and government and large pharmaceutical companies are going to save us. A team of researchers has dared ask the unthinkable question: how do we even know this? What they have come up with is fascinating. In the detailed statistical review of 100 years of pandemic threats, they show that pandemic risk is dramatically decreasing, not increasing. That has been true for a very long time. Data that shows the contrary is due to better pathogenic surveillance but overall deaths from pandemics show that they are getting more mild by the year.

Politics

• Elon Musk says he will pay for challenges to Irish hate speech bill. In the past, he has criticised plans by the Irish Government to combat hate speech and last year posted that the proposed legislation is "a massive attack on freedom of expression." Today, Mr Musk said that his default approach is to challenge any legislation that infringes upon people's abilities to say what they want to say. "We will also fund the legal fees of Irish citizens who want to challenge the bill, so we'll make sure that if there is an attempt to suppress the voice of the Irish people that we do our absolute best to defend the people of Ireland and their ability to speak their mind," he added.

• Jeffrey Epstein’s brother doesn’t believe he died by suicide and wants new investigation. Mark Epstein doesn’t accept the justice department report that found jail officials guilty of negligence, misconduct and outright job performance failures, but also found no evidence that his death was anything but suicide. “I would like a full investigation of his death. If you look at all the evidence, including the autopsy, the photographs of his body, the bullshit DOJ report that is filled with inaccuracies, you would never come up with the conclusion that this was a suicide – but based on what?” he said.

• The shameless campaign to silence Jordan Peterson. Writer and psychologist Jordan Peterson has lost his battle with Canada’s woke moralists. After a two-year legal fight, the Ontario Court of Appeal has ruled that the Ontario College of Psychologists has the right to send him for mandatory ‘social-media training’ – or to a ‘re-education camp’ as Peterson puts it. If he refuses, Peterson will lose his licence to practise clinical psychology. Peterson is effectively being punished for committing thoughtcrimes. His troubles started in 2022, when several individuals complained to the Ontario College of Psychologists about his tweets, particularly his criticisms of climate-change alarmism and gender ideology.

Science

• Universal process that wires the brain is consistent across species. A new modeling study helps confirm that key connections in the brain are formed in the same way across different animal species, likely including humans. Mouse, insect or worm — in all these creatures, the same principle guides the formation of super strong connections between neurons in the brain, a new study confirms. The research helps validate the idea that, regardless of species, there's a universal mechanism that underlies how brain networks form.

Technology

• Scientists invent dirt-fuelled power source that ‘lasts forever’. Soil-based microbial fuel cell based on a 113-year-old technology first developed by a British botanist. A team from Northwestern University in the US say the book-sized unit could be used to power sensors used in farming, as well as remote devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). The technology works by generating electricity from naturally-occurring bacteria within the soil, offering a sustainable and renewable alternative to toxic and flammable batteries.

Vaccines

• COVID Vaccines Could Trigger Vasculitis, Damaging Multiple Organs. Various diseases associated with COVID-19 vaccines have been reported. A recent case study indicated that COVID-19 vaccination may trigger the development of anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA)-associated vasculitis, potentially damaging multiple organs. Among 29 patients, five underwent plasmapheresis treatment (the separation and replacement of plasma from blood), and five relied on dialysis therapy.