“Some portion of this steep rise in cases is related to the fact that more people are being tested for the flu than in previous years. Over the month of November, about twice as many flu tests were done at clinical labs nationwide as during the same period last year (about 540,000 versus 265,000). More testing means more cases will get picked up.
However, there are corroborating warning signs that this is truly a bad season. Flu hospitalizations have been off the charts and are rising quickly. In a press conference Monday, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said there have already been 78,000 flu hospitalizations this season, or nearly 17 out of every 100,000 Americans. That’s “the highest we’ve seen at this time of year in a decade,” she said. In keeping with past trends, the highest hospitalization rates are among adults 65 and older.
What’s making these high hospitalization rates particularly concerning is their overlap with surges in other viruses causing many people to get sick enough to require admission. One of those is RSV, which has been packing pediatric hospitals for more than six weeks. And while Walensky noted there were signals RSV transmission was slowing in parts of the country, Covid-19 hospitalizations recently began to tick upward.”
“In late 2016, billionaire Elon Musk was sitting in traffic on West Los Angeles’s notoriously clogged 405 freeway while shuttling between one of his Bel Air mansions and SpaceX’s headquarters in nearby Hawthorne. Fed up with “soul-destroying traffic,” he initially suggested adding another layer to the 405 before tweeting out an even more far-fetched idea: a 3D network of tunnels.
The idea is even more complicated than it sounds: Teslas would drive from the street onto elevator platforms called car “skates,” be lowered to tunnels below ground, and be propelled autonomously at 120 to 150 miles per hour to their destinations, while their passengers relaxed. Thus was launched the Boring Company.
Musk’s new company bought a machine and started boring a tunnel under Hawthorne. An opening party for the test tunnel in late 2018 received mixed reviews. The path was bumpy; the cars did not drive themselves, and they never went faster than 40 miles an hour.
In the years since, the company built a 1.7-mile-long tunnel under the Las Vegas convention center, in which passengers are ferried back and forth in human-driven Teslas. Proposed projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore were scrapped. But that hasn’t stopped cities large and small, in California, Kentucky, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere, from expressing interest in building tunnels for cars. But as Curbed’s Alissa Walker explains on Today, Explained, the company is continually ghosting these cities once they bump into permitting issues or other infrastructural complexities.”
“There is a possibility there were other elements to the deal. There might be something entirely secret that we don’t know and won’t know, something that it would be both in Russia’s and the US’s interests to keep behind closed doors. After all, that’s how the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, through quiet diplomacy, a complete picture of which wasn’t clear until later.”
“An “unprovoked” machete attack on three New York City police officers near Times Square on New Year’s Eve is being investigated as a possible terrorist incident. The suspect is allegedly a 19-year-old man from Maine, whose online posts indicate recent Islamic radicalization, sources told ABC News.
Investigators are looking into whether the suspect came to the annual ball drop specifically to wage an attack on law enforcement, the sources said.”
“The plot originated out of a movement called the Reichsbürger — literally, “Reich citizens.” They believe that every German state since World War I has been illegitimate, a corporation rather than an authentic government, and thus feel entitled to ignore its laws. It’s not the first time the group has been implicated in a violent incident. In 2016, one alleged member killed a Bavarian policeman; in 2020, Reichsbürger adherents participated in an attempt to storm the German capitol during a protest against Covid restrictions. But a sizable armed cell plotting a coup takes the dalliance with violence to a whole new level (even though Heinrich isn’t much of a prince).”
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“What [the Reichsbürger] are saying is the last valid German state was under the Kaiser, basically an aristocratic form of government. Every German state that came into existence after that is invalid for different reasons, but they’re all invalid. They’re all illegitimate. Basically, what they are trying to recreate, what they are trying to go back to, is essentially a monarchical system — the monarchy [that] ended in Germany with the defeat in World War I.
As a consequence, they do sometimes attract these failed aristocrats who are still aggrieved about the end of the monarchy over 100 years ago. I think it makes sense, from their ideological point of view, to say, “The new head of state has to be some kind of prince, has to be some sort of person with an aristocratic line.””
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“The German security agencies only really got interested in this phenomenon of the Reichsbürger, or sovereign citizens, in 2016 — [when] a policeman was killed in Bavaria because they wanted to search the property of a supporter of the movement. Suddenly, people started asking questions: Why was that policeman killed? Why did the guy have a weapon? What was that search about?
As a result of that, for the first time we discovered that there was such a thing as the sovereign citizen movement [in Germany]. Security agencies started digging, and at the beginning of 2016, they said, “They have a few hundred supporters.” Only two or three years later, they actually came to the conclusion that they were probably up to 20,000 supporters across the country.
That’s not because, in those three years, the number increased so much. It’s because no one had looked for them and categorized them as a separate category before. It became obvious that there was a whole movement that had existed beyond that, that hadn’t been looked at before.
Then [the pandemic] came. The lockdowns and the rules around masks and vaccinations were, of course, a complete boon for the movement.”
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“the second most used language in QAnon chat rooms on Telegram is German. The second most translated language of QAnon videos and documents is German. I myself follow a lot of German QAnon Telegram channels; a lot of people seem to be very fascinated by it.
I don’t know of any personal, physical connections between leaders of the movements, but there certainly seems to be a lot of inspiration. Once they understand and accept that a lot of this comes out of an American context, they are trying to find ways to translate it into a German context.
In August 2020, there was an attempt to storm the Reichstag, the German parliament. It was in the context of a demonstration — 100,000 people in the streets of Berlin. Some of these Reichsbürger were actually trying to enter the building, just like the Capitol [on January 6]. They basically afterward said that they’d been convinced that Donald Trump was in town, that he’d secretly flown to Berlin in order to liberate Germany. This was one of those rumors that was spread on QAnon follower Telegrams.”
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” We have a very fixed idea of what a far-right extremist looks like, because of our history. A far-right extremist is a neo-Nazi; anything that doesn’t fit into that box of neo-Nazi or fascist, we have problems with, and we don’t recognize. Up until they [the Reichsbürger] killed that policeman in Bavaria, most intelligence agencies basically had them under the category of nutcases, crazies. But they had their own far-right, albeit separate, ideology — a very strange ideology.”
“Sinema’s decision reflects a tradition of Arizona politics, where registered independents rival the state’s registered Republicans as the state’s largest voting group. The state is split nearly evenly into thirds among the two major parties and independents.
Based on initial exit polls, the makeup of this year’s electorate reflected some of this dynamic: Independents made up the largest group of voters in the Senate race, and they backed Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly by more than 15 points. Republicans, the next largest group, backed candidate Blake Masters by a smaller margin than they backed the 2020 election-denying gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Sinema has said that her decision to change parties is meant to reflect this dynamic: “I promised I would never bend to party pressure,” she wrote in her op-ed. “Arizonans — including many registered as Democrats or Republicans — are eager for leaders who focus on common-sense solutions rather than party doctrine. … It’s no wonder a growing number of Americans are registering as independents. In Arizona, that number often outpaces those registered with either national party.”
Arizona’s partisan breakdown isn’t expected to change dramatically before 2024, and Sinema’s decision makes the state’s upcoming Senate race wide-open. Sinema isn’t announcing a reelection effort yet, only saying that she does not plan to run for president. But if she does run, her move could work to her advantage.
She faced an uphill challenge by running as Democrat — she wasn’t leading in any hypothetical polling conducted in 2021 or 2022 when matched up against leading alternative Democratic candidates, like Rep. Gallego, Rep. Greg Stanton, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, or Tucson Mayor Regina Romero. Her favorability ratings remained low during the last year in both public and private Democratic polling from the Kelly campaign, according to a Democratic operative who was familiar with those results. Now, by unaffiliating herself with the state party, she could avoid what likely would have been a bruising primary contest that she would have lost.”
“ESG is not a regulation or a set of rules, and it does not require any real action from a corporation. It’s mostly used as a catch-all term for any investment that considers social and environmental responsibility. In fact, what counts as ESG is so ill-defined and malleable it has been criticized as a way to “greenwash” corporate actions.
One of the defining ideas of ESG is that a company is better off accounting and reporting environmental and social risks to investors and clients, rather than being willfully blind to the world around it. This can include a broad swath of issues, such as a company’s reliance on oil, gas, and coal, or exposure to sea-level rise in coastal operations, human rights violations of the countries it operates in, and lack of board diversity and CEO transparency. A big part of the ESG movement, at least right now, is largely about disclosure of these potential bottom-line risks in the future, not necessarily doing anything differently in the present.
But Republican officials in West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and now Florida have withdrawn billions of dollars from BlackRock’s management. Proponents are planning to introduce a slew of bills in at least 15 states next year to divest pensions and boycott companies for considering sustainability as an aim. At the federal level, House GOP lawmakers are preparing antitrust investigations.
To get to the bottom of what is driving this, I spoke to one of the state officials leading the attack on ESG, Riley Moore, state treasurer of West Virginia. The way he sees it, “banks are coercing capital away” from coal, gas, and oil industries. He explains he doesn’t want the coal- and gas-reliant state to contract its financial services with a company that is “trying to diminish those dollars. They want less coal mining, they want less fracking.”
This is getting much bigger than BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, companies that used to be solidly at the right of corporate America. There are real stakes for pensioners, red-state taxpayers, and the wider economy if the GOP succeeds in scaring off financial institutions from pursuing climate targets.”
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“On the left, ESG has for years come under criticism as a form of greenwashing, and ESG disclosure isn’t the same thing as corporate behavior. As Harvard Business Review noted, the funding in ESG is “dedicated to assuring returns for shareholders, not delivering positive planetary impact.” Many environmentalists think ESG is a distraction from the main issue they’d like to see traction on: companies disclosing the impact their products and investments have on the world around them, and accounting for that in decisions.
ESG doesn’t go this far. In no way will disclosure be enough to save the planet from climate change. There are no binding requirements, either. But what Republican critics of ESG really fear is that the financial world will realign with climate science and no longer see new coal plants and offshore drilling as viable projects to finance.”
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“Many of the Republican attacks on ESG stem from a misrepresentation of what it actually means. It’s not always motivated by an altruistic climate or social agenda. ESG also helps banks and public companies meet their one goal by screening investments for various risks. “They’ve got a fiduciary duty to generate returns. So they’re not going to impose some agenda, whether it’s climate or social agenda, that’s going to get in the way of returns,” said University of Oxford business expert Robert Eccles.
As baseless as the attacks have been, the pressure could still work. Vanguard on Wednesday announced it is withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers coalition, in which companies voluntarily committed to reaching net-zero emissions in their portfolios by 2050.”