(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest for December 11 (Winter is Coming edition) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-12-11 It's not just the EPA. From Elon Musk and RFK Jr. to Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, Trump's picks to lead key agencies are poised to set a very different climate agenda. President-elect Donald Trump has put forth a slate of Cabinet nominees that reflects a clear commitment to fossil fuels and upending the country’s efforts to address climate change. The eclectic group includes TV personalities, industry insiders, and climate skeptics. If confirmed, they are expected to promote fossil fuels, environmental deregulation, and hostility toward climate science. They will also likely stymie the expansion of renewable energy and the adoption of climate-friendly technologies. Of course, the clean energy transition has built up some momentum that even the Trump administration cannot stop. State and local governments are preparing to take up the mantle as well. But Trump clearly intends to use the full weight of federal authority to reverse the climate initiatives of the Biden administration and slow or stall further efforts to mitigate the crisis. Such efforts would add billions of tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Grist has unpacked the background of the Trump Cabinet nominees who will have an especially significant impact on federal climate policy, the public, and, ultimately, the planet. 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 Outgoing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) voted for the first time in weeks on Wednesday to oppose the nomination of Lauren McFerran to continue serving on the National Labor Relations Board. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), another outgoing senator and former Democrat, also voted against the nomination. The NLRB is a vital agency that oversees U.S. labor laws and rules on labor disputes, collective bargaining, and unfair labor practices. Its five members serve five-year terms. Currently, the board has three Democrats, one Republican, and one vacancy. McFerran, a Democrat, is the chair of the board, but her term expires next week. When President-elect Donald Trump assumes office in January, he will be able to appoint two Republicans, which will give the GOP control of the board. McFerran’s nomination was downed 49-50 as every Republican present voted against it. They spent more than a decade tacking left on the issue to win Latino votes. It may have cost them the White House—twice. The election of Donald Trump this year shattered a long-standing piece of conventional wisdom in American politics: that Latinos will vote overwhelmingly for whichever party has the more liberal approach to immigration, making them a reliable Democratic constituency. This view was once so pervasive that the Republican Party’s 2012 post-election autopsy concluded that the party needed to move left on immigration to win over more nonwhite voters. If that analysis were true, then the nomination of the most virulently anti-immigration presidential candidate in modern history for three straight elections should have devastated the GOP’s Latino support. Instead, the opposite happened. Latinos, who make up about a quarter of the electorate, still lean Democratic, but they appear to have shifted toward Republicans by up to 20 points since 2012. According to exit polls, Trump—who has accused South American migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and called for the “largest deportation effort in American history”—won a greater share of the Latino vote than any Republican presidential candidate ever. At the precinct level, some of his largest gains compared with 2020 were in heavily Latino counties that had supported Democrats for decades. And polling suggests that Trump’s restrictionist views on immigration may have actually helped him win some Latino voters, who, like the electorate overall, gave the Biden administration low marks for its handling of the issue. For more than a decade, Democrats have struck an implicit electoral bargain: Even if liberal immigration stances alienated some working-class white voters, those policies were essential to holding together the party’s multiracial coalition. That bargain now appears to have been based on a false understanding of the motivations of Latino voters. How did that misreading become so entrenched in the first place? ...The jihadi rebels who rode into Damascus over the weekend have made peaceful overtures to the Kurds. But the rebels violently drove Kurdish fighters out of the eastern city of Deir al-Zour days after government forces abandoned it. To the north, a separate opposition faction backed by Turkey that has been battling the Kurds for years seized the town of Manbij. And Turkey carried out airstrikes on a Kurdish convoy it said was carrying heavy weapons looted from government arsenals. The Kurds are among the largest stateless ethnic groups in the world, with some 30 million concentrated in a territory straddling Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. They are a minority in each country and have often suffered persecution, which has fueled armed Kurdish uprisings. During his previous term, in 2019, Trump abandoned the Kurds ahead of a Turkish incursion, casting ...it as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to end U.S. involvement in the region’s “endless wars.” The move prompted heavy criticism, including from prominent Republicans who accused him of betraying an ally. Trump backtracked weeks later, approving a wider mission to secure oil fields in the east. The troops remained where they were and the alliance endured. The liver converts dietary fructose into nutrients that feed tumor growth, linking high-fructose consumption to cancer progression. This finding highlights both dietary caution and potential new cancer treatments. Fructose consumption has risen significantly over the past five decades, primarily due to the extensive use of high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener in beverages and ultra-processed foods. Recent research from Washington University in St. Louis reveals that dietary fructose promotes tumor growth in animal models of melanoma, breast cancer, and cervical cancer. However, the study, published on Dec. 4 in the journal Nature, indicates that fructose does not directly fuel tumors. Instead, WashU scientists discovered that the liver converts fructose into usable nutrients for cancer cells, a compelling finding that could open up new avenues for care and treatment of many different types of cancer. ...“Our initial expectation was that tumor cells metabolize fructose just like glucose, directly utilizing its atoms to build new cellular components such as DNA. We were surprised that fructose was barely metabolized in the tumor types we tested,” said the study’s first author, Ronald Fowle-Grider, a postdoctoral fellow in Patti’s lab. “We quickly learned that the tumor cells alone don’t tell the whole story. Equally important is the liver, which transforms fructose into nutrients that the tumors can use.” After spending more than $10 billion on its robotaxi unit, General Motors is abandoning its Cruise driverless ride-hailing service. The Detroit automaker on Tuesday said it will no longer fund its Cruise division’s robotaxi development and will instead fold the unit into its broader tech team. GM shares rose 2.3% in extended trading. “Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business — but when you look at the fact you’re deploying a fleet, there’s a whole operations piece of doing that,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call Tuesday. Barra said GM would instead focus on the development of autonomous systems for use in personal vehicles. ...Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, who left the company in November 2023, posted on X after the announcement, “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.” Silicon Valley's "authoritarian turn" is hard to miss: tech bosses have come out for autocrats like Trump, Orban, Milei, Bolsonaro, et al, and want to turn San Francisco into a militia-patrolled apartheid state operated for the benefit of tech bros ...In other words, "a reactionary tech boss is a liberal tech boss who hired a bunch of pals only to have them turn around and start a union." And also: "Tech founders say things were simpler when they were running startups, but what they miss is that the reason no one asked their startup to seriously engage with the social harms it caused is the because the startup was largely irrelevant to society, while the large company it turned into is destroying millions of peoples' lives today." The oft-repeated reactionary excuse that "I didn't leave the progressive movement, they left me," can be both technically true and also profoundly wrong: if progressives in your circle never bothered you about your commercial affairs, perhaps that's because those affairs didn't matter when you were grinding out code in your hacker house, but they matter a lot now that you have millions of users and thousands of employees. ...Dictators aren't necessarily any more prone to these lapses in judgment than anyone else. Benevolent dictators actually exist, people who only retain power because they genuinely want to use that power for good. Those people aren't more likely to fly off the handle or talk themselves into bad places than you or me – but to be a dictator (benevolent or otherwise) is to exist without the consequences that prevent you from giving in to those impulses. Worse: if you are the dictator – again, benevolent or otherwise – of a big, structurally important company or nonprofit that millions of people rely on, the consequences of these lapses are extremely consequential. This is how BDFL arrangements turn sour: by removing themselves from formal constraint, the people whose screwups matter the most end up with the fewest guardrails to prevent themselves from screwing up. An atheist writer and critical race theory critic who made his name submitting fake articles for publication in progressive academic journals and later attacking “liberal” evangelicals has a new target: conservative Christian nationalists. James Lindsay, who describes himself as a “professional troublemaker,” rewrote parts of “The Communist Manifesto,” adding some critiques of “the liberal establishment,” and then sent it off to the American Reformer, an online magazine that seeks to “promote a vigorous Christian approach to the cultural challenges of our day.” ...“They published Karl Marx’s definitive Communist work, dressed up to resemble their own pompous, self-pitying drivel, when it was submitted from a completely unknown author with no internet footprint whatsoever bearing the name ‘Marcus Carlson,’” Lindsay wrote in revealing his hoax, an announcement that coincided with the magazine’s “Giving Tuesday” campaign. I can't ease you into this one, so: Haliey Welch, colloquially known as the "Hawk Tuah girl," launched a bespoke cryptocurrency token called HAWK last Wednesday, the same day she told Fortune it was "not just a cash grab" and her manager cut off a question in the same interview about its legality (because, he said, "We don’t want to break securities laws"), and hours before the vast majority of HAWK tokens were sold off in what appears to be a textbook example of a pump-and-dump scheme. This reads, on first glance, as a story about some fundamentally ephemeral viral bullshit; it isn't not about viral bullshit, though I'd argue it's worth taking seriously as an extreme yet representative example of the new paradigm of online fame, social media, and a certain irradiated, newly relevant segment of culture. ...As unlikely as big-time TikTok success is for most people, the barriers to entry are nonexistent, unlike access to the upper tier of American life. Young people today live in a country with collapsing public services, a society actively receding away from them. If they are lucky enough to get into a position to rack up six figures of student debt, they face bleak job prospects and prohibitively expensive housing costs, not to mention the death of the biosphere and its associated shakeups. That aforementioned "pure path"? It doesn't meaningfully exist anymore, so why not play the viral lottery? Why not start gambling? Why not generate AI images of Jesus smoking weed with Santa Claus and harvest the last drops of juice from Facebook's corpse? Why not get involved in cryptocurrency speculation? What is keeping you from getting off your ass and drop-shipping baby products? Sure, the game is rigged, but so is everything, so why not have some fun along the way? Why not at least be on the winning side of something? ...Which brings us back, finally, to Haliey Welch. If the sui generis emergence of her media career is a case study in how to most efficiently capitalize on a single, widespread, ecstatic moment of attention—I should stress that this is not a critique of Welch as a comedian or public figure; not anyone could hop on the mic and be so comfortable so quickly, and while her stuff is aggressively not for me and I find the broader Zynternet which Max Read brilliantly aligned her with earlier this summer to be rancid, she seems at least mildly talented and eminently ready for her moment—it is simultaneously the purest expression of this bag-chasing id. The crypto pump-and-dump makes total sense, as it is the most direct and ruthless mechanic through which one could monetize attention and obtain The Bag. In the Fortune interview, Welch said she used to conceive of crypto as "just a scam" and an "easy way for you to lose money," but that she changed her mind after going to a pair of conferences, which is another way of saying after her role in the online ecosystem switched from potential prey to potential predator. Most fans of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire believe that author George R. R. Martin will never finish the book series. It's been so long since the last book was released (in 2011) that it's no longer just an inside joke in the ASOIAF community, but a universally accepted idea among fans of the book series, television show and people who know nothing about the story. Ironically, Martin himself seems less concerned than fans, but he's also a hard book to read (no pun intended). The acclaimed author is more bothered by the treatment of adaptations in the entertainment industry. Back in September, Martin wrote a lengthy, dauntingly brutal post on his blog declaring his problems with how House of the Dragon Season 2 fudged up some of his original ideas from his book Fire & Blood. Martin quickly took the post down, likely due to him heavily spoiling crucial plot points of Season 3. Still, he made his voice heard and boy, did it sting. Credit where due, Martin is a man of his word and will stick by it. Unfortunately for fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, those words probably won't be found in a new book, but rather more adaptations that he will probably be unimpressed by. ...Nearly every single year, Martin releases at least one update sharing his hopes for a near publishing date of the book. But as time goes on and the expectations start to get bigger, Martin's updates have gotten less inspiring. He claimed that his television projects "ate up most of the first half" of 2024, and he also worked on the film In the Lost Lands, based on his short story of the same name. Thus, his September 2024 update, where he said he completed "some new pages" wasn't thrilling. But it wasn't anything worse than when he admitted to The Hollywood Reporter in December 2024 that he may never finish the book series: "Unfortunately, I am 13 years late. Every time I say that, I'm [like], 'How could I be 13 years late?' I don’t know, it happens a day at a time... But that's still a priority. A lot of people are already writing obituaries for me. [They're saying] 'Oh, he'll never be finished.' Maybe they're right. I don't know. I'm alive right now! I seem pretty vital!" 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. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/11/2291359/-Overnight-News-Digest-for-December-11-Winter-is-Coming-edition?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/