Hello denizens of C99. Thanks for stopping by. I have gathered a few interesting articles and a little Funk Friday for your enjoyment.

The GOP on the Eve of Destruction

For reasons hard to fathom, the Republicans seem to have made up their minds: they will divide, degrade and secede from the Union.

Turn on your TV or computer, pick up a paper or magazine and you can see and hear them baying at the moon.They will do so with bullying, lies and manipulation, a willingness to say anything, no matter how daft or wrong. They will do so by spending unheard of sums to buy elections with the happy assistance of big business and wealthy patrons for whom the joys of gross income inequality are a comfortable fact of life. By gerrymandering and denying the vote to as many of the poor, the elderly, struggling low-paid workers, and people of color as they can. And by appealing to the basest impulses of human nature: anger, fear and bigotry.

20 Americans Have More Wealth Than Half the Entire US Population

A new report released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies looks into the fortunes of the Forbes 400 and compares their wealth to the much more meager assets of the rest of America.

Among their most significant findings:

America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group including Warren Buffett, Charles and David Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg and Sheldon Adelson — now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households.

The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population — plus more than a third of the Latino population combined.

The median American family has a net worth of $81,000. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 36 million of these typical American families.

Furthermore, the report authors note that they “believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration.” They say the “growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.”

America Has a Hidden Climate Denial Network and New Research Maps It Out

Here’s a story we all now know well: A small number of groups backed by the fossil fuel industry have for decades shed doubt on the science of climate change, even as the actual scientific community consensus on the issue — that greenhouse gas pollution posed a significant threat to our climate — remained strong and continued to grow stronger.

This week, Justin Farrell, a professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, released a comprehensive report in Nature Climate Change detailing just who these people opposing climate action are, where their funding comes from, and how the groups they work through are interrelated. Eric Roston reports for Bloomberg:

A loose network of 4,556 individuals with overlapping ties to 164 organizations do the most to dispute climate change in the U.S., according to a paper published today in Nature Climate Change. ExxonMobil and the family foundations controlled by Charles and David Koch emerge as the most significant sources of funding for these skeptics. As a two-week United Nations climate summit begins today in Paris, it’s striking to notice that a similarly vast infrastructure of denial isn’t found in any other nation.

The role of ExxonMobil and the Kochs in influencing climate denial hadn’t been empirically studied before now, according to Justin Farrell, an assistant professor of sociology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the author of the new paper. He said the flow of money from group to group and person to person is often opaque to researchers.

ExxonMobil has maintained for years that it does not fund denial of climate change. A spokesman pointed out that the company’s $100 million founding commitment to Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project was made in 2002, right in the middle of the period covered by the Nature Climate Change study. Representatives for any of the Koch family foundations could not be reached for comment.

BREAKING: Texas Sues To Keep Out Six Syrian Refugees

Texas has filed a lawsuit to stop the resettlement of six Syrian refugees in that state tomorrow.

The Hill is reporting that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission filed a request for emergency relief in Federal District Court late yesterday, asking the court to ban the Obama administration and the International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization, from resettling the Syrians in Texas as planned.

In its filing, Texas points to the 1980 Refugee Act, which requires the federal government to “consult regularly” with state and local governments about resettlement plans before relocating refugees in a state. The complaint charges instead of working with Texas, the Obama administration and the International Rescue Committee “have left Texas uninformed about refugees that could well pose a security risk to Texans and without any say in the process of resettling these refugees."

Texas also points out to the court that about 10% of all refugees end up in that state, and pleads that it has more than done its part, and that taking in more Middle Eastern refugees is just too dangerous.

Bombshell: Russian Military Reveals Details of ISIS-Daesh Funding, Turkey’s Role in Supporting the Terrorists, Complete Transcript, Videos, Documents

International terrorism is the world’s biggest threat today. It is not an imaginary threat. It is very real, and many countries, particularly Russia, have firsthand experience of suffering from it.

The notorious Islamic State is the absolute leader of international terrorism.

But there are ways to combat the raging monster of international terrorism, and defeat it. Russian Aerospace Forces have evidently demonstrated that over the past two months.

We are convinced that, in order to defeat ISIS, it is instrumental to deal a crushing blow to its sources of funding, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed out on many occasions. Terrorism without money is a beast without its fangs.

Illegal oil revenues are one of the main sources of income for the terrorists in Syria. According to some reports, they make about $2 billion a year on illegal oil trade.

Turkey is the main destination for the oil stolen from its legitimate owners, which are Syria and Iraq. Turkey resells this oil. The appalling part about it is that the country’s top political leadership is involved in the illegal business — President Erdogan and his family.

We have warned on many occasions how dangerous it is to court terrorists. It is the same as pouring gasoline on fire. Fire may spread onto other countries, and that is exactly what we are seeing in the Middle East.

Today, we will present to you only part of the available facts that prove there is a single team at work in the region, composed of extremists and the Turkish elites conspiring to steal oil from their neighbors. Oil is transported to Turkey in industrial quantities along the “rolling pipelines” made up of thousands of tanker trucks.

Bombshell: The Turkish Assault on Russia’s SU-24 was Guided by the US Air Force

Russia Insider reports that the ambush on the Russian U-24 bomber was guided by the US Airforce. In an interview with the Russian news agency Regnum, a Russian military expert said that “A US Air Force Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS plane took off on 24 November from the Preveza airbase in Greece. A second E-3A of the Saudi Arabian air force took off from the Riyadh airbase. Both planes were executing a common task—determining the precise location of Russian aircraft. It is they that picked the “victim.”

That's Enough

Have a great weekend!