Climate Change
How Climate Change Narrative Is Preventing Africa From Modernizing and Gaining Prosperity. Farmers like Mr. Machogu can’t get a combine harvester. Even if they could afford one from the meager salaries they make selling crops, Western nations’ climate policies prevent Africans from achieving what the West already has—modernization and prosperity. In November 2023, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use, the President of the Republic of Kenya, William Ruto, cut subsidies for fertilizer, fuel, and electricity for the 2023/2024 financial year. He did so at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a financial agency of the United Nations (U.N.).
Climate Change And The Law: The Lunacy Escalates. In an astonishing verdict, Europe’s highest human rights court ruled on 9th April that countries must better protect their citizens from “the consequences of climate change.” In the landmark ruling, setting a legal precedent across 46 member states of the Council of Europe, the court sided with a group of women called KlimaSeniorinnen or “Senior Women for Climate Protection.” Climate policies that cannot get implemented by democratic means are now pushed through by lawfare campaigns backed by the powerful climate-focused foundations.
Why the polar bears don’t need to worry. NOT A lot of people know, or rather a lot of people don’t want it to be common knowledge, that the maximum extent the Northern Hemisphere sea-ice cover occurs at approximately the same time as the Spring Equinox. This simple fact would undermine the foundations of the ‘warmist’ propaganda, which has focused for the last two months months on how warm the weather has been (especially in the middle-class, metropolitan bubble of SE England), and would scupper the hand-wringing by such luminaries as Saints Attenborough, Packham and Thunberg.
Covid
SARS-CoV-2 is precisely the virus WIV was hunting for in 2019. Lab leak critics often say that before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have considered a SARS2 progenitor interesting. “WIV was only interested in SARS-like viruses that were very close to SARS1,” they say. In actuality, the exact opposite is true — in late 2018, EcoHealth and WIV outlined their updated virus hunting criteria for 2019–2023, which show that they were now looking for SARS-like viruses that were 10–25% different from SARS1 in their spike but could still enter human cells. SARS2 fits those criteria like a glove: its spike is 24% different from that of SARS1, and yet it binds to the human ACE2 receptor even better than SARS1.
Fauci is set to testify at the Covid Select Subcommittee on 3 June 2024.
The non-science of WHO’s weekly Covid reports. The WHO's Weekly Epidemiological Updates (WEU) during the Covid event were touted as "comprehensive and authoritative analysis" on the global situation. What did they really show? The WEU experience should have taught the WHO to be more cautious about declaring a pandemic, because in doing so millions of lives were ruined and lost without cause. It should also have taught the WHO that rapid global data of a specific disease is impossible to collect, even in a high tech world. And it should have informed the WHO that transparent cost/benefit analyses should be done before sweeping measures are recommended on an unsuspecting world.
The Smoking Gun in Wuhan: The German-Chinese Lab and the HIV Inserts. Theories of a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 have largely focused on the presence in the genome of the famous furin cleavage site. Less attention has been paid to other anomalies and, in particular, the presence of the so-called HIV inserts first flagged by the Indian research team Pradhan et al. in late January 2020 and quickly dismissed as untenable conspiracy mongering. Thus, when an Anglosphere group of scientists around Kristian Andersen came to Anthony Fauci at almost exactly the same time with their concerns that the virus had been engineered, their focus was on the furin cleavage site and they took great pains to distance themselves from Pradhan et al. and the HIV inserts. But is that because they did not view them as anomalous or rather because they were worried that the implications of the anomaly were too shocking to be pursued? The content of their FOIA’d e-mails and Slack messages makes clear that it is the latter.
Covid Mandates & Lockdowns
Lockdown to blame for ‘concerning’ surge in number of potentially deadly falls. Figures for 2022 – the latest full calendar year available – show that the number of calls for ambulances because of falls was more than 16 per cent higher than in each of the previous two years, indicating worrying after-effects of the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, south-west London, said he had “become aware of many people who have fallen over unexpectedly, several with serious injuries” and that “many of these cases are almost certainly related to the detrimental effects of lockdown”. He added: “Immobility, lack of exercise, lack of sunshine and Vitamin D3 all make muscles weaker and the nervous system less able to compensate.”
Alcohol-related deaths soar to an all-time high in wake of Covid - fuelled by 'concerning' uptick in middle-aged women. Brands deliberately targeting women with clever marketing tactics are believed to have exacerbated the trend. Pandemic-era curbs also likely fuelled dangerous drinking habits for both genders, statisticians suggested. Alcohol-related deaths have been rising for decades. But they rose quickest from March 2020 onwards, after the first national lockdown came into force and got progressively worse. More than 10,000 alcohol-related deaths were recorded across Britain in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found. It was a jump of 32.8 per cent on levels pre-pandemic.
The Three Rs of Fear Messaging in a Global Pandemic: Recommendations, Ramifications and Remediation. Using evidence from published documents, the paper shows that UK Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours' (SPI-B) supported the use of fear messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is inconsistent with the extant psychological literature and contrary to the disaster planning literature. The recommendations regarding fear messaging may have had harmful ramifications and impacts, especially for young people. It recommends that a wider multidisciplinary expertise is employed to deal effectively, ethically and holistically with future crises. Plans for future pandemics must include meaningful engagement with the public, particularly children and young people.
Is WFH Bad for Your Health? The following chart uses data from a Statista Consumer Insights survey to see how reported health differs among people who mostly work from home versus from an office or factory. It found that six in ten U.S. adults who primarily work from home had experienced some kind of pain - be it back pain, joint pain or a headache - in the 12 months prior to participating in the survey. These symptoms occurred marginally more frequently for those working from home than those working from an office environment (59 percent versus 54 percent).
Pupils in England ‘facing worst exam results in decades’ after Covid closures. Children in England could face the worst exam results in decades and a lifetime of lower earnings, according to research that blames failures to tackle the academic and social legacies of school closures during Covid. The study funded by the Nuffield Foundation predicts that national GCSE results in key subjects will steadily worsen until 2030, when it expects fewer than 40% of pupils to get good grades in maths and English.
Economy/Energy/Finance
Lavrov Says Russia, China Almost Dedollarized Their Trade. Russia and China have almost completely stopped using the dollar in their mutual trade, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Moscow on Monday, according to Tass. More than 90% of settlements are carried out in the two countries’ national currencies, Lavrov said. Trade and economic cooperation between Russia and China is actively developing despite persistent attempts by Western countries to prevent this, he added. Economic ties between the two countries have boomed since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the West imposed sanctions. Trade between Russia and China increased by 26% to $240 billion in 2023.
America’s sixth largest credit card provider, Discovery Financial, has seen delinquency rates shoot up in recent months.
New York Stock Exchange tests views on round-the-clock trading. The survey by the NYSE, part of Intercontinental Exchange, was put out by its data analytics team rather than its management, but it highlights the growing interest in trading the likes of Nvidia or Apple overnight between 8pm and 4am Eastern time. The issue has become a hot topic in recent years, prompted in part by the 24/7 operation of cryptocurrency trading and the rise in retail investor activity first spurred by coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.
Worldwide semiconductor shipments have dropped to their lowest levels since the GFC.
Nearly 40% of Homeowners Couldn’t Afford Their Home If They Were to Buy It Today. Nearly two of every five (38%) homeowners don’t believe they could afford to buy their own home if they were purchasing it today, according to a new report from Redfin, the technology-powered real estate brokerage. Nearly three in five (59%) homeowners who answered this question have lived in their home for at least 10 years, and another 21% have lived in their home for at least five years. That means the majority of respondents have seen housing prices in their neighborhood skyrocket since they purchased their home: The median U.S. home-sale price has doubled in the last 10 years, and has shot up nearly 50% in the last five years alone.
UPS reports first quarter earnings declines. First quarter earnings results issued this morning by Atlanta-based global freight transportation and logistics services provider UPS were down. Quarterly consolidated revenue, at $21.7 billion, fell 5.3% annually, and adjusted earnings per share, at $1.43, saw a 35.0% annual decline. Consolidated quarterly operating profit came in at $1.6 billion, which was off 36.5% annually.
New car loan rates have quickly surpassed levels last seen during the GFC.
Many large U.S. cities are in deep financial trouble. Here’s why. The financial challenges within cities appear to be mounting despite high municipal credit ratings and robust demand for urban commodities like housing. For example, New York City had a total public debt of $177.6 billion at the end of fiscal year 2022, according to researchers at Truth in Accounting. That translates into a per capita taxpayer burden of $61,200, according to the group’s analysis. This comes from pension debt obligations that are underreported and will eventually be pushed on to future taxpayers. “If I don’t pay that invoice, I don’t have to include it in my balanced budget,” said Sheila Weinberg, the group’s founder and CEO.
The Japanese Yen is trading like crypto currency. It’s rise versus the dollar yesterday was a rare 3 standard deviation event.
From Naked Emporor on Substack