Today's Must-Reads - 27 May 2023 - Beyond Growth - Inflation vs Recession - Highly Processed Foods - UK Blacklists Government Critics - Lab Grown Babies - AI Regulation - German Excess Mortality Study

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

I spend a lot of time each day gathering new information and interesting articles. I then pick the most interesting topic and write about it but that leaves a lot of 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 on other days will be for only paid subscribers.

---

Climate Change

• Watch the Beyond Growth conference at the EU. The purpose of this plenary session is to provide concrete recommendations in order to shift the European economy towards a new post-growth model aiming to flourish rather than to grow.

• The New Pause Lengthens by Two Months To 8 Years 11 Months. As usual, the start and end dates of the New Pause are not cherry-picked. The end date is the most recent month for which data are available; the start date is the farthest back one can reach and still find a zero trend. It is what it is.

  

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• The Next Time There Is A Virus We Will Absolutely Lock Down Again. DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: What I'm really concerned about is to make sure that we never do this again because as things currently stand our template is to lock down again. Next time there is a virus going around we will absolutely lock down again. People like Rochelle Walensky, Tony Fauci, they're giving themselves awards.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Europe’s Economic Engine Is Breaking Down. Germany is at risk of a long, slow decline — with consequences for the whole of the EU. The warning signals are getting hard to ignore. Despite Scholz telling Bloomberg in January that Germany would ride out Russia’s energy squeeze without a recession this year, data published Thursday show that the economy has in fact been contracting since October and has only expanded twice in the past five quarters.

• Tanking the economy just to keep Rishi Sunak's ill-advised promise on inflation is the economics of the madhouse. No sooner had the International Monetary Fund put its hands up and admitted — OK folks, we got it wrong, the UK is not heading for a recession this year — than Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says he doesn't mind a recession if it's needed to get inflation down.

• Whale exodus continues: $400 million Bitcoin pulled from exchanges, fuelling speculation. In a stunning display of digital asset movement, a jaw-dropping $400 million worth of Bitcoin was withdrawn from exchanges in a single day, as per the latest reports. This mass exodus, the second-largest withdrawal this year, has sparked a frenzy of speculation and raised questions about the implications for Bitcoin’s short and long-term future, as well as its broader impact on the crypto sector.

• A chart showing the value of the Turkish Lira against the dollar.

  

Health

• The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health. Eating packaged foods like cereal and frozen meals has been associated with anxiety, depression and cognitive decline. Scientists are still piecing together why. Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average American diet come from highly processed foods. Research from the past ten or so years has shown that the more ultraprocessed foods a person eats, the higher the chances that they feel depressed and anxious. A few studies have suggested a link between eating UPFs and increased risk of cognitive decline.

• Are We Medicating Millions of ADHD Children without Scientific Justification? ADHD is currently the most common childhood disorder in Western-oriented countries. Its ever-increasing rates are now skyrocketing. The documented prevalence of ADHD is not about 3 percent, as it used to be when the disorder was first introduced in 1980. In 2014, a survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that over 20 percent of 12-year-old boys were diagnosed with this “lifelong condition.”

Politics

• Nigeria to combine bank cards with national ID. Banking and identity are converging in Nigeria, where the government has told commercial banks to start issuing debit cards that can also serve as a national ID document. As reported by The Cable Nigeria, the move passed following a memo from the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) giving banks permission to provide the combined banking and national identity cards. Approval from the federal executive council, and a partnership with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), formalized the process.

• British Civil servants told to trawl social media of government critics. Experts ‘blacklisted’ from speaking events under Cabinet Office guidance. “Blacklisting” guidance from the government is instructing civil servants to scour up to five years of social media posts by guest speakers to check if they have “spoken against government policies”. Scientists, academics, trade experts and a former army colonel believe they have been barred from talking at official events because a list of vetting rules, seen by The Times, is being applied overzealously.

Science

• Lab-grown babies could become a reality within five years. In a breakthrough that could revolutionize human reproduction, Japanese scientists are making significant strides in the field of lab-grown human babies, potentially overcoming the challenges of infertility, same-sex parenthood, and age-related childbearing restrictions. The research could herald a new era in which human eggs and sperm are grown in a laboratory setting – developing in an artificial womb and resulting in a viable fetus.

Technology

• OpenAI chief seeks to calm fears on job losses. The boss of OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular ChatGPT bot, said on Friday that his firm’s technology would not destroy the job market as he sought to calm fears about the march of artificial intelligence (AI). Sam Altman, on a global tour to charm national leaders and powerbrokers, said in Paris that AI would not — as some have warned — wipe out whole sectors of the workforce through automation.

• OpenAI warns over split with Europe as regulation advances. Speaking to reporters during a visit to London this week, Altman said he had “many concerns” about the EU’s planned AI Act, which is due to be finalised next year. In particular, he pointed to the European parliament’s move this month to expand its proposed regulations to include the latest wave of general purpose AI technology, including large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Vaccines

• Australia - Deaths of suspected 30,000 mRNA vaxx victims will not be investigated by a senate inquiry. A motion put to the senate by Senator Ralph Babet on May 24 to establish an inquiry to investigate an excess, non-covid related death rate of 17 per cent, or some 30,000 suspected vaccination victims in the Australian population was defeated by one vote. Senator Malcolm Roberts has hit out at the rejection of the inquiry motion accusing the Labor and Greens parties of being “Big Pharma whores.”

• Study: Estimation of Excess Mortality in Germany During 2020-2022. In total, the number of excess deaths in the year 2021 is about 34,000 and in 2022 about 66,000 deaths, yielding a cumulated 100,000 excess deaths in both years. The high excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 was mainly due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 years and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onward. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 9.4% in the second quarter and 19.4% in the fourth quarter of the year 2021 compared to previous years.

• The three icebergs of vaccine injury - Heart, blood and neurological / autoimmune conditions. It is a general rule of thumb that the first indications of a drug safety problem will underestimate the size of the problem. This is due to poor measuring of the extent of illness. The opposite is true for infectious disease epidemics. The early indicators will always overestimate the risk of death per infection because of underestimating how many were infected in the first place.

• [2021] - A blast from the past when the European Medicines Agency said that the vaccine which was eventually pulled for causing blood clots, ‘likely reduces’ risk of blood clots. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has concluded its safety review of the AstraZeneca vaccine, saying it ‘likely reduces’ the risk of blood clots overall.