Today's Must-Reads - 24 May 2023 - France Bans Flights - Bhakdi Not Guilty - US Default By Friday - Far Right Twitter - AI Nursing Robots - Mass Vaccination Caused Variants

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

Your new mission, if you choose to accept it, is to share these ‘Must-Reads’ as far and as often as humanly possibly.

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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.

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Climate Change

• Private jets as big polluters as pets, executive says. Patrick Hansen, chief executive of Luxembourg-based Luxaviation, told the FT’s Business of Luxury summit in Monaco that one of his company’s customers produces about 2.1 tonnes of CO₂ per year, or about the same amount as three cats — before a spokesperson rectified offstage that he meant three dogs.

• France considers £130bn ‘green tax’ on the super-rich to meet net zero. France has pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050. However, to reach these goals it would have to introduce “more cuts in the next 10 years than it has struggled to do over the past 30 years,” said the report, which called the coming period “the decade of all dangers”.

• At the same time, France’s short-haul flight ban comes into force. France has banned domestic flights for journeys possible in less than two-and-a-half hours by train, under a government decree published Tuesday, May 23. The change will mostly rule out air trips between Paris and regional hubs such as Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux, with connecting flights unaffected, though critics have noted that the cutoff point is shy of the roughly three hours it takes to travel from Paris to the Mediterranean port city Marseille by high-speed rail.

• Mish Talk says Germany is Turning Against the EU's Green New Deal, Common Sense to the Forefront. A backlash is coming. It started in France and Germany. The sooner a green backlash starts in the US the better, he says.

  

Covid

• I thought this had all finished? China is facing a new wave of Covid-19 infections that could see as many as 65 million cases per week by the end of June. This alarming prediction was made by respiratory disease specialist Zhong Nanshan at a biotech conference in Guangzhou. Zhong’s estimate provides a rare glimpse into the potential impact of the latest omicron variant, XBB, which has been fueling a resurgence in cases across China since late April.

• Spoilet alert - they want more funding. Prepare for a disease even deadlier than Covid, WHO chief warns. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the World Health Assembly that, despite the darkest days of the pandemic being consigned to history, a doomsday Covid variant with the power to send the world back to square one could still spawn.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, who’s videos I enjoyed watching at the beginning of the pandemic, was in court this week on the charges of inciting hate and denigrating the Holocaust. Fortunately, the judge found him not guilty yesterday.

• A paper published in The Lancet assesses COVID-19 pandemic policies and behaviours and their economic and educational trade-offs across US states from Jan 1, 2020, to July 31, 2022. Whilst it claims vaccines saved lives, it also shows that the majority of Covid restrictions actually increased death rates.

  

• This paper in Taylor & Francis Online concludes that the longer students were out of school, the less they learned. It is estimated that for every week that schools were closed, learning levels declined by almost 1% of a standard deviation. This means that a 20 week closure, for example, would reduce learning outcomes by 0.20 standard deviation, almost one year of schooling.

• The LA Times is still attacking the likes of Jay Bhattacharya and Jeffrey Tucker in 2023. These ‘experts’ sold the U.S. on a disastrous COVID plan, and never paid a professional price. Jonathan Howard reserves his deepest scorn for the promoters of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a manifesto for herd immunity published in October 2020 and signed initially by epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford; Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard; and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, warns souring commercial real estate loans could threaten some banks. “There’s always an off-sides,” Dimon said in a question-and-answer session during his bank’s investor conference. “The off-sides in this case will probably be real estate. It’ll be certain locations, certain office properties, certain construction loans. It could be very isolated; it won’t be every bank.”

• The US Treasury only has $60 billion left in the bank. At its current spending rate, the US could default by Friday. Get ready for a week of fear-mongering to increase the debt ceiling.

  

• As funds run short, Treasury asks agencies if payments can be made later. Senior Biden aides are rummaging through the nation’s books, looking for new ways to conserve cash while Washington battles over the debt ceiling.

• M2 money supply has dropped -4.63% in a year. This is the fastest pace of money supply destruction since the early years of the Great Depression.

  

Health

• Heart of The Matter: Sudden Cardiac Arrest among Teens on Rise; Here's What Experts Say You Can Do. Experts believe that such incidents have increased following the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. It has been established by several studies across the globe that even a mild Covid-19 infection has harmful effects on cardiovascular health.

History

• Giant petroglyph carving found hidden under moss in Sweden. Archaeologists from the Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslän’s Rock Carvings have discovered a giant petroglyph carving in the Swedish province of Bohuslän.

Politics

• The Atlantic says Twitter is a far-right social network - it can no longer be denied. Under Elon Musk, Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.

• Karl Denninger gives his Bottom Line on Epstein. “One or more of our agencies suborned and used the sexual abuse of underage girls, along with the sexual coercion of women who had reached the age of consent, for reasons we do not have knowledge of but which can be reasonably believed to be underhanded, illegal or likely both. Such acts are criminal felonies even if the government performs them; there is no immunity for a US Government agency or instrumentality to fund activity leading to the rape of children”.

Technology

• OpenAI-backed robot startup beats Elon Musk’s Tesla, deploys AI-enabled robots in real world. According to the CEO of 1X, a company backed by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, a robot capable of performing nursing and bartending tasks while using its human-like arms is currently operational in the United States and select parts of Europe.

• Microsoft launches new AI tool to moderate text and images. Called Azure AI Content Safety, the new offering, available through the Azure AI product platform, offers a range of AI models trained to detect “inappropriate” content across images and text. The models — which can understand text in English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian and Chinese — assign a severity score to flagged content, indicating to moderators what content requires action.

Vaccines

• Cell publishes a comparative analysis of within-host diversity among vaccinated COVID-19 patients infected with different SARS-CoV-2 variants. As Aaron Kheriaty elegantly puts its, cutting through the highly technical language, this study's findings suggest that immune-escape covid variants originate in vaccinated individuals, i.e., mass vaccination is responsible for prolonging the pandemic with new variants.

• Japanese Study Reveals COVID-19 Acute Adverse Event Rate of 0.19%. Researchers from Japan’s Tohoku University Hospital and the Miyagi Prefectural Government (Department of Health and Welfare) north of Tokyo on Japan’s eastern Pacific coast recently published public health data associated with the COVID-19 mass vaccination program. This study investigates the number of and profile of acute adverse events after the third and fourth COVID-19 vaccine doses.