No Bad News Today Links

* thisisfine.jpg: Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House. Russian Hackers Acted to Aid Trump in Election, U.S. Says. White House orders intelligence report of election cyberattacks.

* Chiafalo and Guerra are members of a group called “Hamilton Electors” that is seeking to convince Republican members of the Electoral College to reject Trump and agree on a consensus Republican alternative. They’re lobbying to persuade at least 37 Republican electors to join them, the minimum they need to block Trump from winning the Electoral College and send election to the House of Representatives. Democrats can stop Trump via the electoral college. But not how you think. The Electoral College Can and Must Stop Donald Trump. I’ll spare you the rants from my Twitter but it’s agonizing that this is legal, workable, doable, and no one is going to try.

* Interesting strategy to discredit Electoral College here; compulsory voting in NY and CA. And I missed this one: You could swing the presidential election by moving a single county between states.

* Donald Trump confirms he will violate Constitution his first day in office.

* Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump.

* What can I say, though, he’s winning me over: JUST IN: Lockheed Martin’s market value drops $4,000,000,000 after Pres.-elect Trump tweets on F-35 program.

* What Vichy France can teach us about the normalization of state violence.

* Reminded of this one every four years in November: On Cooling the Mark Out.

* The birthering of the Democrats.

* For Bauerlein, Trump is a figure out of Hegel, a “world-historical figure” who arises at the right time to bring about a necessary change in society.

* Japanese American Historical Plaza.

* Star Wars and Vietnam.

* The smoke break and solidarity.

* Robots and literary criticism.

* Prince’s Closest Friends Share Their Best Prince Stories.

* What Things Cost in an American Country Store in 1836.

* The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island.

* Headlines that, uh, don’t seem right to me: Why conservatives might be more likely to fall for fake news.

That Democrats are saying "we're the ones who care about FACTS" as they fall into a full-on psychotic break is like out of a Greek tragedy.

— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) December 12, 2016

* Charlie Stross vs. all media: Eleven Tweets.

* Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art.

* The Meta-Politics of Westworld.

* How John Milton Invented Sci-Fi in the 1600s.

* The World According to Stanislaw Lem.

* The Untold Story of Napoleon Hill, the Greatest Self-Help Scammer of All Time.

* This is some Black Mirror shit.

* Inside the NFL’s relentless, existential, Big Tobacco-style pursuit of your children.

* The troll has it both ways. He is magnificently indifferent to social norms, which he transgresses for the lulz, yet often at the same time a vengeful punisher: both the Joker and Batman.

* And okay, he’s won me back: Slavoj Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting.’