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Biden's last speech from the Oval was his best. He warned of rising oligarchy and the threat from a "tech-industrial complex." And on #climate: "Powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis." youtu.be/J0FEi8Jh5KI
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— Jeff Young (@jefftheyoung.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 10:25 PM
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
New Republic — The Right-Wing Judge on a Mission to Destroy ESG Retirement Planning
The notorious Reed O’Connor is back with another one of his patented-troll decisions, this time threatening to upend the world of socially conscious investing.
There are more than 800 federal judges in the United States. None of them create as much work for their colleagues as Reed O’Connor, a federal judge who serves in the northern district of Texas. For nearly two decades, O’Connor has delivered one ideologically driven ruling after another. No matter how many times those decisions are overturned by the appellate courts and the Supreme Court itself, he persists.
In his latest haphazard ruling, O’Connor held last week that American Airlines violated its legal obligations to employees by allowing BlackRock, the company’s 401(k) manager, to consider “environmental, societal, and governance” factors when making investment decisions and casting proxy votes. If upheld on appeal, the ruling threatens to upend the entire retirement plan industry by opening 401(k) managers to litigation and penalties for using ESG factors as part of their investment strategies—something that nearly every manager has done in recent years.
...BlackRock currently manages more than $10 trillion in retirement funds. Like nearly all such managers, it adopted a series of ESG policies over the last decade. Those policies led it to use its proxy voting powers on behalf of shareholders to encourage companies to adopt more socially and environmentally conscious policies. In perhaps the most famous episode, it sided with a group of activist investors in a 2021 proxy vote to put three members on ExxonMobil’s board who would push for investments in renewable energy.
The plaintiffs claimed that this approach violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, also known as ERISA….
South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was sent to a detention center near Seoul on Wednesday night, after being questioned by anti-corruption officials who took him into custody over his imposition of martial law last month.
Yoon was detained in a major law enforcement operation at the presidential compound earlier in the day. Yoon defiantly insisted that the country’s anti-corruption agency, which led the raid with police, didn’t have the authority to investigate his actions, but said he complied to prevent violence.
Yoon, the country’s first sitting president to be apprehended, now faces the prospect of a lengthy prison term over potential rebellion charges.
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"It is easy to see why uncertainty has spread. Will Donald Trump deport millions of people? Nobody knows. But if he succeeds inflation could jump as employers lose workers. The story is similar for tariffs, which would also increase prices" #Trumpcession ? www.economist.com/finance-and-...
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— Howard Lee (@hlee.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 8:20 AM
Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) shared pointed concerns Tuesday about one of President-elect Donald Trump's top national security nominees — saying at a POLITICO Live event that former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard had not done enough to win his vote for confirmation as director of national intelligence.
Curtis separately said he remained undecided about Pete Hegseth's nomination as Defense secretary, saying he was closely monitoring his hearing Tuesday and the results of a FBI background check done for the Senate Armed Services Committee.
...Curtis also stressed that personal character is a "huge" part of his personal evaluation criteria but added, "We're all flawed, and the question is: At what point do you cross that line?"
Curtis, a freshman who is considered a relative moderate inside the Senate GOP, also said he continues to look into Hegseth's nomination as Defense secretary, making calls to people who know Hegseth and reading his book in an attempt to get to know the former Fox News personality more closely.
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The LA wildfires have been the top story nationwide for a week,the climate link is incontrovertible, and not one big group is showing the slightest interest in who runs Energy, Interior, or EPA. Can progressive groups act on climate or is it just gonna be siloed off and left to the Sierra Club?
— RL Miller (@rlmiller.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 8:55 PM
SOME WAIVERS LEFT BEHIND: California officials were hoping to have eight waivers in hand to enforce clean air rules before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Instead, two of the biggest rules failed to cross the finish line.
The California Air Resources Board told President Joe Biden’s EPA on Monday that it was withdrawing requests for permission to enforce stricter-than-federal rules aimed at phasing out diesel burning trucks and trains — a whole week before Trump’s inauguration.
The agency framed the move as a way to insulate the rules from a hostile incoming administration poised to dismantle them.
...“While we are disappointed that U.S. EPA was unable to act on all the requests in time, withdrawal is an important step given the uncertainty presented by the incoming administration,” CARB Chair Liane Randolph said in a statement today.
“Of all the waivers that were pushed out in the last couple of weeks, these were the ones that were the most controversial in terms of legal authority,” said former CARB Chair Mary Nichols. “Therefore, rather than test them in a hostile administration and likely hostile court, strategically, I think EPA was being helpful to California in this regard.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom, at least for now, isn’t making a big deal out of the loss, even though he made the waivers a top priority in recent months, including on a trip to Washington shortly after the election where he lobbied EPA officials to approve the full suite. A planned return trip was nixed last week as wildfires burned in Los Angeles.
The Supreme Court dealt a major setback to the oil industry Monday, refusing to block lawsuits from California and other blue states that seek billions of dollars in damages for the effects of climate change.
Without a comment or dissent, the justices turned down closely watched appeals from Sunoco, Shell and other energy producers.
In Sunoco vs. Honolulu, the oil industry urged the justices to intervene in these state cases and rule that because climate change is a global phenomenon, it is a matter for federal law only, not one suited to state-by-state claims.
“The stakes could not be higher,” they told the court.
But none of the justices said they wanted to hear their claim, at least not now.
The decision clears the way for more than two dozen suits filed by states and municipalities to move forward and try to prove their claim that the major oil producers knew of the potential damage of burning fossil fuels but chose to conceal it.
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Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a leader in the progressive prosecutor movement, is facing a tough re-election fight in 2025. It’s one of the many local elections defining criminal justice policy that we are tracking: boltsmag.org/2025-cr...
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— Bolts (@bolts.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 8:53 AM
As the narrative of the Southern California wildfires has shifted to identifying the causes behind what could prove to be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, a common refrain has emerged on social media that seeks to dismiss the role scientists say climate change played.
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“To say CA has always had wildfires is a classic form of climate denial. For years we've heard, ‘The climate has always changed...' that’s just totally disingenuous. The question is whether climate change is making those things worse. The answer is yes." www.yahoo.com/news/yes-wil...
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— Peter Gleick (@petergleick.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 6:36 PM
“California has forest fires every year,” a commenter wrote in response to a Yahoo News story on distinguishing the singular cause of a fire from its underlying aspects.
“To say California has always had wildfires, that they’ve always had extreme events, is a classic form of climate denial,” Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and the co-founder of the Pacific Institute, told Yahoo News. “For years, those of us in the climate community have heard, ‘The climate has always changed. We’ve always had floods, droughts and heat waves.’ And that’s just totally disingenuous. Of course we’ve had those things. The question is whether climate change is making those things worse, and the answer is yes.”
...University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann, who regularly spars with skeptics, said in an email that climate change “is the primary reason for the increasingly widespread, damaging and deadly North American wildfires.”
The scientific consensus is not that rising global temperatures are creating problems that never existed before, it’s that it is making many existing problems, such as wildfires in states like California, quantifiably worse.
Parts of the country most susceptible to natural disasters are slowly waking up to an underinsurance crisis stoked by climate change.
On top of the human tragedy they’re still inflicting, the Los Angeles wildfires are exposing a gap between what people thought their homes were worth and what they’ll actually get from insurance companies when those houses have been reduced to ash. Potentially thousands of homeowners are learning it won’t be nearly enough.
But this isn’t just a Los Angeles problem. From California to Texas, Florida and beyond, parts of the US most susceptible to natural disasters are slowly waking up to an underinsurance nightmare. It’s still ballooning in scope as home values keep rising, people keep crowding onto the front lines of climate change and a heating planet keeps intensifying those disasters.
Four years ago, the total difference between harsh reality and what a site like, say, Zillow suggested homes were worth might have been $1.2 trillion, according to one estimate. Now that estimate has grown to $1.7 trillion. Without better foresight and action from policymakers, mortgage lenders, realtors and homeowners, it will keep growing, potentially to $2.7 trillion.
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Important paper by Dutch scholars brings data to show that the alleged epidemic of disinformation is not widespread or made by tech but is a specific tactic of far-right extremists exploiting the vulnerability of an open society. h/t @amonck.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....
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— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 8:42 AM
TikTok users are migrating to Red Note (Xiaohongshu) and learning all about China's EV game. And now they want some.
...Now, a few normal, non-car enthusiast Americans are getting a taste of what they drive in China, and they want more.
...“They sell it in pink, it’s like $15,000. Which is affordable, so affordable. And it has so many features,” she says. By the end of the two-minute-long video, she’s pretty disillusioned at the fact that she can’t buy a Dolphin in the United States, due to U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made EVs.
“We basically have products made, that we don’t have access to, that we don’t even realize we don’t have access to, that are actually super affordable and super nice, but we can’t have them," she said.
...To be fair, this was somewhat of a trend even before Americans decided to semi-ironically invade Rednote/Xiaohongshu. On TikTok, it wasn’t uncommon for “edits” of Chinese cars to go viral. For those who aren’t in the know, an “edit” is glamourized and stylish footage of Chinese EVs clipped together, usually to a popular song, aimed at going viral. These videos would often be swarmed with comments of people who are excited about the cars themselves, but once again, are let down when they learn they can’t be sold in the U.S. without severe tariffs. Or, possibly at all, according to the new rules set for Chinese-operated connected cars.
As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.
The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.
The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky were to end up in the hands of billionaires.
The campaign comes a week after Meta announced that it was dropping fact-checking and loosening its content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, which make it hard for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky saw a recent surge in users who migrated over from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and other political causes, including the right-wing AfD party in Germany.
...If this news surfaced prior to the pandemic, the comics industry would have been thrust into a state of chaos. Then, Diamond had a monopoly on comics distributions and virtually every single publisher pushed its books through the Maryland-based distro. In fact, there was a time at the onset of the pandemic in which Diamond temporarily shuttered distribution, pausing the release of all new comics for a few months. It was a move that quickly led to the creation of competing distributors out of a moment of necessity. Now, Diamond is joined by Lunar and Penguin Random House in its comic distribution efforts — Lunar serving as the exclusive distributor of DC and Image titles, while Penguin finds itself distributing titles from Marvel, Dark Horse, and BOOM! amongst others.
Still, should Diamond not resurface from Chapter 11 bankruptcy — InCharge Debt Solutions reports just 10% of all Chapter 11 successfully make it through reorganization — the industry will forever be changed. On one hand, it would force two other distributors to adapt in order to maintain market shares, otherwise they'd run the risk of more competitors entering the fray. After all, many would attribute Diamond's decades-long complacency to its impending downfall.
On the other hand, it would devastate the release of small press books. In fact, it'd flat-out kill the distribution of those titles given Diamond has a relatively open submissions policy, allowing small press publishers and creators to submit their titles directly to the Diamond purchasing team. While indie stalwarts like Image, Dark Horse, Oni, and BOOM! will always have their own distribution, smaller presses like Band of Bards, Blood Moon Comics, Blackbox, Antarctic Press, and more — the places where many comic creators first break into the industry — may soon find themselves without a direct way into comic shops.
The comic development pipeline that's been in place for the past three decades, give or take, may soon be rendered obsolete. Whatever way you look at it, serious change is on the horizon and it may make or break comics.
There are many remarkable things about octopuses—they’re famously intelligent, they have three hearts, their eyeballs work like prisms, they can change color at will, and they can “see” light with their skin. One of the most striking things about these creatures, however, is the fact that each of their eight arms almost seems to have a mind of its own, allowing an octopus to multitask in a manner that humans can only dream about.
At the heart of each arm is a structure known as the axial nervous cord (ANC), and a new study published January 15 in Nature Communications examines how the structure of this cord is fundamental to allowing the arms to act as they do. Cassady Olson, first author on the paper, explains to Popular Science that understanding the ANC is crucial to understanding how an octopus’s arms work: “You can think of the ANC as equivalent to a spinal cord running down the center of every single arm.”
.... Technically, they are a type of structure called a “muscular hydrostat,” composed only of muscle, connective tissue, and nervous tissue. (Another example of such a structure, Olson notes, is the human tongue.) This provides them far more freedom of movement than a tail, and allows octopuses to demonstrate remarkable dexterity. And, of course, each arm is studded with suckers, all of which an octopus can control independently—to the extent of changing individual suckers’ shape as required—and all of which can also smell and taste as well as feel.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
