🔓 Today's Must-Reads - 25 July 2024

Exposing the narrative with the latest news, studies, reports and articles!

Welcome to your daily dose of curated news and insights from across the globe!

There’s a lot of news to get through every day. To save you time and to save you constantly scrolling past inane headlines to find anything of interest, I’ve done the work for you. So grab a cup of tea or coffee, sit down and read the news that really matters.

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• Obama doesn’t believe Kamala Harris can beat Trump, which is why he hasn’t endorsed her. Following Joe Biden’s shock resignation from the race on Sunday, and his immediate endorsement of the vice president, most of the Democratic elite have been quick to rally behind Harris — but Obama is a notable exception. “Obama’s very upset because he knows she can’t win,” the Biden family source told The Post. “Obama knows she’s just incompetent — the border czar who never visited the border, saying that all migrants should have health insurance. She cannot navigate the landmines that are ahead of her.”

• Quantum Mischief Rewrites the Laws of Cause and Effect. Spurred on by quantum experiments that scramble the ordering of causes and their effects, some physicists are figuring out how to abandon causality altogether. Over the last decade, quantum physicists have been exploring the implications of a strange realization: In principle, both versions of the story can happen at once. That is, events can occur in an indefinite causal order, where both “A causes B” and “B causes A” are simultaneously true.

• Ullstein-Verlag drops 'Hillbilly Elegy' from its program. J.D. Vance's autobiographical book "Hillbilly Elegy," which was a literary hit in Germany and the US, will no longer be published by Ullstein-Verlag. According to "Spiegel," the book was previously removed from the publisher's website. The publisher cited Vance's political transformation since the initial publication as the decisive reason for not renewing the contract. In their statement to "Spiegel," they said, "At the time of its release, the book provided a valuable contribution to understanding the division of US society." However, they noted that this had significantly changed. "He now officially acts on Trump's side and promotes an aggressively demagogic, exclusionary politics," the publisher stated.

• The flaws in the Lucy Letby case - The convictions should be referred back to the Court of Appeal. In the case of the nurse Lucy Letby, a theory that she was a murderer was alighted upon by one of the ward’s consultant paediatricians very early on — after only a very few of the unexplained deaths or collapses that ended up on her indictment — and the theory was based almost entirely on her having been on shift at the relevant times. There can be little doubt that there was not, at that stage, enough evidence for murder to be anything other than a remote possibility. So either it was a very lucky guess, or this theory was later taken up by others in a way that led to inaccurate expert medical opinion, the misleading presentation of evidence, and a terrible miscarriage of justice.

• OpenAI could lose $5B this year and run out of cash in 12 months. OpenAI is running a costly business that could lose as much as $5 billion in 2024, putting the ChatGPT maker at risk of running out of cash within 12 months, according to an analysis by The Information. According to the report, which cites previously undisclosed financial data and people familiar with the business, OpenAI is on track to spend some $7 billion on artificial intelligence training alone, and another $1.5 billion on staffing. That far exceeds the reported expenses of rivals, such as Amazon-backed Anthropic, which expects a 2024 burn rate of $2.7 billion.

• How AI Is A Sign Of Collapse. Artificial Intelligence, self-checkout, electric cars, reusable rockets. Modern 'innovation' doesn't actually create anything new (nouns), it just adds more complication to existing technology (adjectives). Modern civilization is just getting more and more complicated, which only makes it more fragile. Indeed, we are witnessing precisely what Joseph Tainter described in his book, The Collapse Of Complex Societies.

• Your brain on shrooms — how psilocybin resets neural networks. Taking psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, temporarily resets entire networks of neurons in the brain that are responsible for controlling a person’s sense of time and self, finds a study that repeatedly imaged the brains of seven volunteers before, during and after they took a massive dose of the drug. Researchers “saw such massive changes induced by psilocybin” that some study participants’ brain-network patterns resembled those of a different person entirely.

• Nord Stream: New response from the German government – ​​status of investigation into attack remains secret. The blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea is the largest act of sabotage in post-war European history. Nevertheless, the German government continues to refuse to publish interim results of the investigations into the matter. This is evident from the German government's response to a major inquiry by the AfD, which has now been published on the Bundestag's website .

• The Berlin Wall Falls Again, This Time on the State Prosecution of Heinrich Buecher. One of Germany’s most notorious prosecutions of free speech has collapsed, as the Berlin prosecutor’s office has dropped a case designed to stop Germans discussing the war against Russia in the Ukraine. Heinrich Buecher, owner of the COOP Anti-war Café on Rochstrasse, has been prosecuted in a Berlin district court and then in the higher regional court for statements he had made in a city park on June 22, 2022. On the anniversary of the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, Buecher had declared: “Never again may we as Germans get involved in a war against Russia in any form. We need to unite and join to oppose this madness together.”

• Elon Musk has revealed the pain of losing a child to the trans cult. It’s not often one feels sorry for a billionaire. Yet it was hard not to sympathise with Elon Musk as he told Jordan Peterson about the time he was ‘tricked’ into allowing his son to become a ‘girl’. His voice crackling with emotion, he said he was hoodwinked into ‘signing documents’ for one of his older sons, Xavier, to go on puberty blockers. What he didn’t realise at the time, he says, is that puberty blockers are ‘actually just sterilisation drugs’. The end result? ‘I lost my son’, he says, the grief for his boy who was turned into a ‘girl’ clearly etched on his face.