Today's Must-Reads - 1 June 2023

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

Jun 01, 2023

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

More insurers desert net-zero alliance as U.N. climate group sounds alarm. Lloyd's of London became the sixth organisation to quit a net-zero alliance for insurers within 36 hours on Friday, as a U.N.-backed coalition of financial groups warned about the fallout of "political attacks" on insurers in the United States.

Covid

Australian garlic kills COVID-19, says Doherty Institute. Scientists at Doherty have been researching garlic properties over the past 18 months and have discovered a certain Australian grown garlic variety demonstrates antiviral properties with up to 99.9 per cent efficacy against the viruses which cause COVID-19 and the common flu.

Economy/Energy/Finance

A default wave is building, says Deutsche Bank. Here’s how bad it may get. the Deutsche Bank team say, “a default wave is imminent.” By the fourth quarter of 2024, they say the U.S. high-yield default rate will peak at 9%, and the U.S. loan default rate will reach 11.3%. The European speculative-default rate will rise too, though to a less steep 5.8%.
Company Insiders Made Billions Before SPAC Bust - Executives and early investors sold shares worth $22 billion. Some of the biggest winners were Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores’s investment firm Platinum Equity, British billionaire Richard Branson and convicted Nikola founder Trevor Milton. They were among many insiders who got shares on the cheap and sold them as they rose in value, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of insider-trading disclosures associated with more than 200 companies that did SPAC deals.
One Bitcoin May Be Worth $1 Billion by 2038, Fidelity Says. One Bitcoin may be equivalent to $1 billion by 2038, according to Jurrien Timmer, Director of Global Macro at Fidelity. Timmer backed up his assertion with a 4-hour BTC/USD chart that combined the stock-to-flow model with his demand model. In Timmer’s words: “Metcalfe’s Law holds that, as the number of its users grows linearly, a network’s value (or, by inference, the bitcoin price) grows geometrically.”

Health

North Korea elected to World Health Organization executive board. The North Korean Ministry of Public Health's Dr. Jong Min Pak has been seated on the WHO's executive board with a term set to last until 2026. The communist state's new position on the board allows them say in determining the organization's agenda and policy prescriptions. The decision sparked immediate criticism from the government of neighboring South Korea, which pointed to North Korea's history of ignoring policies put forward by the WHO and its parent organization, the United Nations.
Chinese scientists develop new gene-editing tool that differs in approach to CRISPR-Cas9. Unlike the well-known gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 – which acts as “molecular scissors” that can cut the two strands of DNA in the genome and relies on the cell’s self-healing mechanism to repair – the new tool, known as “base editors”, fixes specific sites in the genome without cutting the double helix.
Similar to what is happening around the world, Minnesota is seeing a surge in cancers. This graph shows the number of malignant cancers of lymph/blood with multiple primary sites.
Excess deaths in the UK continue to remain high. Looking at deaths in 15-44 year olds, the first 20 weeks of 2023 have broken all records.

Politics

Revealed: How British spies pull the PA’s strings. A cache of leaked documents obtained by The Electronic Intifada reveals the extent of British intelligence penetration of Palestinian Authority forces, including “daily direction” from a UK military officer.
The Trump-Cuomo Covid Bromance - The once mortal enemies unite to distort Florida’s success. The 2024 presidential race is already wild, and the strangest moment so far may be the mutual Covid admiration society of Donald Trump and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In 2020 they were mortal political enemies, but now they’re uniting to praise their performance in order to trash the far better Covid judgment and governance of Ron DeSantis in Florida.
White men trying to join the RAF were branded 'useless' by recruitment officers in leaked emails set to renew row over diversity quotas. The emails, which are set to renew a row over diversity quotas, were sent by a squadron leader in the air force's recruitment division in January 2021. They expose the pressure that officers appeared to be under to filter out white male recruits and fast-track women and ethnic minorities.
Misinformation Is a Word We Use to Shut You Up. The policing of “information” is the stuff of Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, and similar anti-liberal regimes. To repress criticism of their dicta and diktats, anti-liberals label criticism “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Those labels are instruments to crush dissent. This paper offers an understanding of knowledge as involving three chief facets: information, interpretation, and judgment. Usually, what people argue fervently over is not information, but interpretation and judgment.
Let Roger Waters play. Banning the former Pink Floyd frontman for his Nazi-uniform stunt will do nothing to challenge anti-Semitism. Waters is set to perform his first UK show tonight in Birmingham, with further concerts scheduled for Glasgow, London and Manchester. These are part of his controversial ‘This Is Not a Drill’ tour, which began its European leg a few months ago. The show contains a number of controversial elements, such as Waters dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform and brandishing a gun, while Anne Frank’s name is projected above the stage. In past tours, he has floated an inflatable pig with a Star of David on it above the stage.
Project Veritas is suing James O’Keefe. Being known as the founder of an organization does not entitle that person to run amok and put his own interests ahead of that organization. Defendant James O’Keefe failed in his duties to Plaintiff, Project Veritas, causing it serious and significant damage. O’Keefe must be held accountable, as must the organization O’Keefe created, O’Keefe Media Group (“OMG”) for suborning his violations.
China - Dahua Selling Protestor / Banner Alarms, Deletes Evidence. Political protests are quickly suppressed in the PRC, most famously with the recent Beijing Bridge Man banner. Dahua is offering a technological solution to this with AI analytics that automatically detect and report protest signs and protestors' faces to PRC police.

Science

The shape of your brain may strongly influence your thoughts and behaviour, study finds. Research suggests that the brain's size, curves and grooves may play important roles in its function, perhaps even more than the connections between neurons. Brain shape is easier to measure than brain wiring, so paying closer attention to the size or curves of the brain could open new avenues for research.
The Earth has been spinning faster lately. Scientists around the world have noted that the Earth has been spinning on its axis faster lately—the fastest ever recorded. Several scientists have spoken to the press about the unusual phenomenon, with some pointing out that this past year saw some of the shortest days ever recorded.

Technology

Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn’t Apply To AI Training. In a surprising move, Japan’s government recently reaffirmed that it will not enforce copyrights on data used in AI training. The policy allows AI to use any data “regardless of whether it is for non-profit or commercial purposes, whether it is an act other than reproduction, or whether it is content obtained from illegal sites or otherwise.”
Time magazine’s latest cover. Experts are scared. Last summer I surveyed more than 550 AI researchers, and nearly half of them thought that, if built, high-level machine intelligence would lead to impacts that had at least a 10% chance of being “extremely bad (e.g. human extinction).” On May 30, hundreds of AI scientists, along with the CEOs of top AI labs like OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, signed a statement urging caution on AI: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Tech developer 'clones his girlfriend with ChatGPT' AI - it can send him selfies. Tech developer Enias Cailliau is trying to 'clone' his girlfriend by making an AI replica of her - and he's released the software to the public so anyone else can do the same. The visuals still need a bit of improvement.

Vaccines

FDA approves Pfizer RSV vaccine for older adults. The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved a vaccine made by Pfizer
that protects adults ages 60 and older from respiratory syncytial virus, a common pathogen that kills and hospitalizes thousands of seniors every year.