Mon: They Think That Ignorance Will Protect Their Kids.

Wagner Shows Its True Colors

Russia's Wagner mercenary group has released a video appearing to show the brutal killing of one of its soldiers who defected to the Ukrainians.

The video, on the Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone, shows the soldier giving his name and details of his recruitment, before a man hits him with a sledgehammer in a cellar.

Wagner released a similar sledgehammer "execution" video three months ago.

Wagner has thousands of troops involved in heavy fighting in Ukraine.

The group, which calls itself a private military company, began operations in 2014 in Crimea.

It has since operated in Syria, other parts of Ukraine, and across Africa, and has been accused of brutality and war crimes.

The QOP Can't Stop Digging a Deeper Hole

Since Tuesday’s State of the Union, President Joe Biden has had Republicans on the ropes over Social Security and Medicare, and he’s not backing down. After his resounding State of the Union victory, Biden took his win on the road to Florida and Wisconsin. Those happen to be the home states of the senators with the most radical proposals for killing off the programs.

Oddly, those senators—Rick Scott (FL) and Ron Johnson (WI)—decided to just keep digging. They lent a shovel to Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) over the weekend, who went on CNN Sunday to tell Jake Tapper that he looks at Social Security like defense spending, something that should be “managed” every year by Congress.

“I kind of look at Social Security the way I do the Department of Defense and our defense spending,” Rounds told Jake Tapper. “We’re never not going to fund defense, but at the same time, every single year, look at how we can make it better and I think it’s about time we start talking about Social Security and making it better.” That’s Ron Johnson’s idea—throw the programs into the same pot as the rest of government spending and fight out funding for them on an annual basis. That’s the same Ron Johnson who calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

Rounds wasn’t finished, though, going even further to put in a plug for the other bad idea they just can’t let go of: privatizing it. “Republicans want to see Social Security be successful and be improved. And the best way to do that is to take a look at other successful pension programs that the vast majority of us … would include in their portfolios.” That’s a big tell right there, because the “vast majority” of Americans (especially those who are not white and wealthy) do not have portfolios they are managing.

They just can stop.

Look at Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), House Majority Leader, who really whiffed it last week after the speech. “The president, for a few weeks now, has been falsely saying that there are people that want to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. And it’s been inaccurate for a long time—and you saw last night when he tried to pin it on us,” Scalise, told NBC News Wednesday.

“We want to strengthen Social Security by ending a lot of those government checks to people staying at home rather than going to work,” Scalise said. It might be the first time a Republican has endorsed work requirements for a retirement program. Behind the garbled message, you could see Scalise’s greasy little wheels turning: He’s got Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all lumped together in his head, with some nefarious designs on that last one.

And More Digging

House Republicans launched their big investigations this week. Guess how that went

House Republicans begin with a massive credibility deficit. A recent Navigator Research poll found that only 16% of Americans think the GOP’s obsessive investigations are important. And the Pew Research Center found that 65% of U.S. adults believe Republicans will be overly focused on investigating the Biden administration.

Independent voters convened for a Washington Post focus group viewed the Republican majority’s agenda as mostly about revenge against Democrats and showed little interest in its preoccupation with Hunter Biden, the president’s son. When asked about the absurd new House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, most Americans surveyed by ABC News and the Washington Post did not find it legitimate.

Two Degrees of Idiocy and Ignorance



They Think That Ignorance Will Protect Their Kids.  That's an Ignorant Belief.

Research ships that arrived in West Antarctica during mid-December when conditions are most favorable have reported an unprecedented marine heatwave threatening the stability of the giant ice platforms.

Marine heatwaves worldwide have substantially increased over the past decades, but not so much in Antarctica. The deep ocean heat corrodes the ice shelf from underneath the ice creating tunnels and fissures that weaken the ability to provide resistance to land ice.

At the two most essential chunks of ice in the world, Pine Island and Thwaites, the pinning points that fasten the ice to the bedrock are disintegrating, sparking fears of runaway melt and rising sea levels.

Warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW), which upwells poleward onto the continental shelf, is the primary mechanism that transports heat toward Antarctica’s marine-terminating glaciers. In recent years, warm CDW transport onto the continental shelf has been linked to accelerated basal melting of ice shelves

Despite “that extraordinary change, what we’ve seen this year is dramatic,” said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program.

“Even as somebody who’s been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw,” he said. “We don’t know how long this is going to last. We don’t fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave.”

If such conditions recur in the coming years, it could start a rapid destabilization of Antarctica’s critical underpinnings of the global climate system, including ice shelves, glaciers, coastal ecosystems and even ocean currents. Such radical changes have already been sweeping the Arctic, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s.

If the same marine conditions return again and again, it likely will lead to a collapse of the W Antarctic marine extensions within ten years.

178 Hours of Hell

After one week of lying in the rubble of a building decimated in Turkey's earthquake, a girl was miraculously rescued and carried to safety on Monday, new video shows.

Footage of the rescue shows the moment the child, identified as Miray by Turkey's transport minister, was pulled from a pile of debris in Adiyaman after an agonizing 178 hours.

A team of rescue crew members wearing hard hats can be seen clamoring upon finding the child and carrying her away from the rubble, some shouting "God is great!"

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