Today's Tweet

That asteroid can't get here soon enough

For that “hard to buy for” person on your Xmas🎄 list:

Company sells edible butthole chocolates and offers a service for people to get custom molds of their buttholes. It even comes in packaging that says "Pure Belgian Chocolate."https://t.co/uRMkkal7dK

— ᎠᏌNᎬᎷYᎢᎻᎪNᏩ™️ (@Kris_Sacrebleu) December 11, 2018

hat tip = @athyvaya

Today's Pix

click

Guardians Of The Truth

That'll put a knot in his knickers

Editor-In-Chief, Time Magazine:

It has long been the first move in the authoritarian playbook: controlling the flow of information and debate that is freedom’s lifeblood. And in 2018, the playbook worked. Today, democracy around the world faces its biggest crisis in decades, its foundations undermined by invective from on high and toxins from below, by new technologies that power ancient impulses, by a poisonous cocktail of strongmen and weakening institutions. From Russia to Riyadh to Silicon Valley, manipulation and abuse of truth is the common thread in so many of this year’s major headlines, an insidious and growing threat to freedom.
- and - 

In its highest forms, influence—the measure that has for nine decades been the focus of TIME’s Person of the Year—derives from courage. Like all human gifts, courage comes to us at varying levels and at varying moments. This year we are recognizing four journalists and one news organization who have paid a terrible price to seize the challenge of this moment: Jamal Khashoggi, Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, and the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, Md.

They are representative of a broader fight by countless others around the world—as of Dec. 10, at least 52 journalists have been murdered in 2018—who risk all to tell the story of our time.

Welcoming Some Chickens Back To The Roost

It seems obvious that Maria Butina is a key player in one of the many subplots in this whole Russia-Trump-GOP shit fest.

I've become pretty well convinced that one of the big reasons for the deafening silence coming from the Republicans in congress is that the NRA has been a major carrier for channeling Russian money into American politics.

Betsy Woodruff, Daily Beast:

Maria Butina, a Russian national who cultivated relationships with powerful American conservative activists, agreed Monday to plead guilty to conspiring to violate laws prohibiting covert foreign agents. As part of her agreement, which was reviewed by The Daily Beast, she has promised to cooperate with American law enforcement. 

As a result of the deal, Butina will become the first Russian national since the 2016 election to plead guilty to a crime connected to efforts to influence American politics. After running a gun rights organization in Russia, she moved to the United States, where she spent years building relationships with conservatives in hopes of influencing a future Republican presidential administration. During the campaign season, she questioned then-candidate Donald Trump about sanctions; built relationships in the upper echelons of the American gun rights community; arranged for NRA leaders to travel to Moscow; and bragged that she was a channel between Team Trump and the Kremlin, as The Daily Beast first revealed. 

She also struck up a romance with Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican gadfly close to NRA leaders. He sang Disney songs with her on camera, called her his “Siberian princess” in emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, and—since her July arrest—has visited her regularly in jail.

In March 2015, according to the plea deal, Butina worked with an unnamed U.S. person—known to be Erickson—to draft a proposal for a diplomatic endeavor. Given the fraught relationships between the governments of Russia and the United States, she “cast herself as a possible unofficial transmitter of communications” between the two countries.

This thing is very deep and very wide.

And every day is a new illustration of the immediate need to get a handle on the problems caused by allowing too much money into our political system. Particularly the unregulated dark money that always fucks up a good thing. Always.

Every chapter in the consolidated American Theme Book has a cautionary tale about the shitty things rich people do when they get to thinking they can do whatever the fuck they want because they're rich and they own everything.

I'm gob-smacked thinking the "conservatives" can't quite get their little pea brains to remember the message of every fucking one of those John Wayne movies they say they love so much.

Suddenly, all these idiots are siding with bosses paying Liberty Valance and Santa Ana and Ned Pepper.

Anyway -

45* kept saying he was really rich, and didn't need anybody's help financing his campaign, but we knew all along that 1) he's not as rich as he claims, and 2) his disclosure forms were always a little fuzzy, never really divulging where the money came from during his run in the primaries.

And we can leave aside the fact that the Press Poodles gave him many millions in unearned media, cuz that only gets him so far.

And I'm not taking about the RNC raising and spending a jillion dollars after he got the nomination.

The efforts on his behalf came from people and places of very dubious repute, and so the money that went into those efforts is (and has to be) invisible.

But anyway again, I also like thinking about the turnaround where Ms Butina is concerned. Most people want to be released on bail while they maneuver their defense. Maria Butina knows she'll need protection from her "friends" for the rest of her life - so the greatest threat Mueller can make against her is to let her out of jail. And that's kinda fun.

Also fun is the thought of the NRA going into austerity mode, possibly because all that Russian money dried up - kinda sudden-like.

Amend the Constitution to overturn Citizens United

Old Ice

Chris Mooney, WaPo:

Over the past three decades of global warming, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by a stunning 95 percent, according the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual Arctic Report Card.

The finding suggests that the sea at the top of the world has already morphed into a new and very different state, with major implications not only for creatures such as walruses and polar bears, but in the long term, perhaps, for the pace of global warming itself.

The oldest ice can be thought of as a kind of glue that holds the Arctic together and, through its relative permanence, helps keep the Arctic cold even in long summers.

“The younger the ice, the thinner the ice, the easier it is to go away,” said Don Perovich, a scientist at Dartmouth who coordinated the sea ice section of the yearly report.

- and -

The new findings about the decreasing age of ice in the Arctic point to a less noticed aspect of the dramatic changes occurring there. When it comes to the icy cap atop the Arctic ocean, we tend to talk most often about its surface area — how much total ocean is covered by ice, rather than by open water. That’s easily visible — it can be glimpsed directly by satellite — and the area is, indeed, in clear decline.

But the loss of old and thick ice, and the simultaneous decline in the total ice volume, is even larger — and arguably a much bigger deal. Young and thin ice can regrow relatively quickly once the dark and cold winter sets in. But it may not add much stability or permanence to the Arctic sea ice system if it just melts out again the next summer.

Remember - it's the volume, not the area:

- and - keeping in mind the tendency of "conservatives" to cherry-pick the data, watch out for the assertion, "everything's just peachy because the ice is making a comeback" - along the same lines of their famous bullshit about how "AGW has paused, and the planet is actually cooling now".

In fairness, the ice volume has rebounded somewhat since 2012. And PIOMAS is only a model, cautioned the University of Washington’s Axel Schweiger, who runs the analysis. (The model draws upon direct measurements of ice thickness taken from submarines, satellites, and other sources.) Still, Schweiger agreed that when you think about the total volume of the ice, rather than its mere surface extent, you realize that far more has been lost.

“We’ve lost about half of the extent, we’ve lost half of the thickness, and if you multiply these two things, we’ve lost 75 percent of the September sea ice,” he said

Scientists get it wrong sometimes. I'll still take their word for things over the deniers because science is self-correcting - deniers will always just deny because that's what they believe, as opposed to people who can be convinced due to evidentiary knowledge.

A MeToo Update

Harvey Weinstein gets no credit for helping us become a little more aware of the micro-shit we put on each other.

The credit goes to ballsy women.

hat tip FB bud H Weichselbaumer

Christmas Ad

The phrase "truth in advertising" has some interesting twists.

The best ads (ie: the most effective) always play on our emotions; sometimes in a cynically manipulative way. 

But that doesn't mean there's never a good message.

One of my faves.

It's good to remember that it's always up to us. No matter what the politicians or other bosses tell us, we make the final decision on what we do - on our own, for ourselves.

It's not much of a war if nobody shows up to fight.

New On TV

Colbert just kills it sometimes

Saturday Tunes

Homemade Music

Podcast

45* has delivered on exactly none of his big promises:

• Repeal Obamacare
• Build the wall and have Mexico pay for it
• Defund Planned Parenthood

And do we wanna talk about how the GOP's TaxScam2017® carried a provision that included a stealth tax on churches and charities in order to prop up private corporations?

It's the weekend - time for the best little podcast on the prairie.

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The Professional Left

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Springfield, IL 62791-9133

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