Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is The world at a crossroads...
• Trump’s pick for the EPA is worse than you probably thought.
• Clueless 24-year-old kindled the flames of Pizzagate:
Despite the fallout of Pizzagate (as it’s come to be known) that resulted in an armed man entering Comet Ping Pong in search of alleged child sex slaves, MacWilliams said she has no regrets.
“I really have no regrets and it’s honestly really grown our audience,” she said.
• Newly published study says Greenland was ice free during Ice Age warming periods. That means it could melt faster than expected, which could have a greater impact over the next 50-100 years than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted. The IPCC calculated a 3-4 foot sea-level rise because they thought that Greenland’s ice mostly remain intact during warming periods. Since it didn’t, that could mean a sea level rise of 24 feet.
• Activists shame Democrats for their nearly all-white top staffers:
Senate Democrats are facing growing pressure to break the white male stranglehold on senior staff positions in their ranks — a push that's uniting consultants and lobbyists inside the Beltway with Black Lives Matter and other minority leaders who are accusing the party of “soft bigotry."
The attacks are prompting uncomfortable discussions among Democrats even as they welcome their historic Senate freshman class, which includes the chamber’s first Latina and Indian-American members.
• So how did cats trick us into feeding them and taking care of them?
For a long time, it was probably just an accident. But there are reasons that cats made the transition, but we don’t have badgers or foxes as pets today. One reason is that cats have a set of physical features that, for completely accidental reasons, remind us of human babies. Cats have big round eyes located right in the middle of their faces, because they’re ambush predators and need good binocular vision. They have little noses, because they don’t hunt by smell. They have round faces because they have short, powerful jaws. This set of features, which is actually just an expression of the way the cat hunts, looks to us like our infants. That gave them a leg up on the competition, and made them an intriguing and charming presence, rather than a straight-up nuisance, like a raccoon.
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• The result of making “fake news” meaningless is to raise suspicions about all sources:
Is “fake news” a reference to government propaganda designed to look like independent journalism? Or is it any old made-up bullshit that people share as real on the internet? Is “fake news” the appropriate label for a hoax meant to make a larger point? Does a falsehood only become “fake news” when it shows up on a platform like Facebook as legitimate news? What about conspiracy theorists who genuinely believe the outrageous lies they’re sharing? Or satire intended to entertain? And is it still “fake news” if we’re talking about a real news organization that unintentionally gets it wrong? (Also, what constitutes a real news organization anymore?)
Finally, do any of these distinctions matter if the end result—widespread confusion and disagreement over what’s real and true—is the same?
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: More Trump cabinet picks & contenders. Conflicts of interest are here to stay. A #GunFAIL roundup, including concealed carriers as a protected class. The double standard & embedded bias against the left. More thoughts on Jan. 3rd & High Noon.
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