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“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

-- Blaise Pascal

News and Opinion

Obama Must Declassify Evidence of Russian Hacking

Here are two of political history’s great constants: first, countries meddling in the internal affairs of others (both enemies and “friends”); and, second, bogus charges from a faction in one country that foreigners are meddling in its internal affairs to help another faction. ...

Taking Donald Trump’s position — that we should just ignore the question of Russian hacking and “move on” — would be a disaster.

Relying on a hazy war of leaks from the CIA, FBI, various politicians, and their staff is an equally terrible idea.

A congressional investigation would be somewhat better, but that would take years — like the investigations of the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction — and would be fatally compromised by the Democrats’ political timidity and GOP opposition.

The only path forward that makes sense is for Obama to order the release of as much evidence as possible underlying the reported “high confidence” of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia both intervened in the election and did so with the intention of aiding Trump’s candidacy.

Pfffffftttt!!! Reuters joins "the battle of the anonymous sources."

Top U.S. spy agency has not embraced CIA assessment on Russia hacking - sources

The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA's analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named.

The position of the ODNI, which oversees the 17 agency-strong U.S. intelligence community, could give Trump fresh ammunition to dispute the CIA assessment, which he rejected as "ridiculous" in weekend remarks, and press his assertion that no evidence implicates Russia in the cyber attacks. ...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose evidentiary standards require it to make cases that can stand up in court, declined to accept the CIA's analysis - a deductive assessment of the available intelligence - for the same reason, the three officials said.

Electoral College Members Seek Intel Briefing on Possible Russian Meddling in Election to Aid Trump

Where's the Proof? Calls Grow to Declassify Evidence of Alleged Russian Hack

Ten members of the Electoral College have signed an open letter asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to provide them with classified briefings on Russia's alleged hacking during the campaign.

"The Electors require to know from the intelligence community whether there are ongoing investigations into ties between Donald Trump, his campaign or associates, and Russian government interference in the election, the scope of those investigations, how far those investigations may have reached, and who was involved in those investigations," the letter reads.

Hypocrisy Behind the Russian-Election Frenzy

As Democrats, the Obama administration and some neocon Republicans slide deeper into conspiracy theories about how Russia somehow handed the presidency to Donald Trump, they are behaving as they accused Trump of planning to behave if he had lost, questioning the legitimacy of the electoral process and sowing doubts about American democracy.

The thinking then was that if Trump had lost, he would have cited suspicions of voter fraud – possibly claiming that illegal Mexican immigrants had snuck into the polls to tip the election to Hillary Clinton – and Trump was widely condemned for even discussing the possibility of challenging the election’s outcome.

His refusal to commit to accepting the results was front-page news for days with leading editorialists declaring that his failure to announce that he would abide by the outcome disqualified him from the presidency.

But now the defeated Democrats and some anti-Trump neoconservatives in the Republican Party are jumping up and down about how Russia supposedly tainted the election by revealing information about the Democrats and the Clinton campaign. ...

Aren’t the Democrats doing exactly what they accused Trump of planning to do if he had lost the Nov. 8 election, i.e., question the legitimacy of the results and thus undermine the faith of the American people in their democratic system?

For days, Trump’s unwillingness to accept, presumptively, the results of the election earned him front-page denunciations from many of the same mainstream newspapers and TV networks that are now trumpeting the unproven claims by the CIA that the Russians somehow influenced the election’s outcome by presenting some Democratic hidden facts to the American people.

Yet, this anti-Russian accusation not only undermines the American people’s faith in the election’s outcome but also represents a reckless last-ditch gamble to block Trump’s inauguration – or at least discredit him before he takes office – while using belligerent rhetoric that could push Russia and the United States closer to nuclear war.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea for the CIA to at least have hard evidence before the spy agency precipitated such a crisis?

Were the DNC Emails Hacked or Leaked?

Obama Will Preserve Senate Torture Report in His Presidential Library

The Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,700-page history of the CIA torture program will be kept among Barack Obama’s presidential papers — safe from the Republicans on the committee who have attempted to have it destroyed.

The executive summary of the report, which was released in December 2014, contained shocking description of brutal torture tactics like waterboarding, “rectal feeding,” and rectal exams conducted with “excessive force.” Following the election of Donald Trump, Senate Democrats have urged Obama to make the full report public, fearing that it could be destroyed.

The public will still have to wait to see the report, however. In a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, White House Counsel Neil Eggleston wrote that “the President has informed the archivist that access to classified material, among other categories of information, should be restricted for the full twelve years allowed under the act.”

Locals Flee as Rebels Claim ‘Massacre’ in East Aleppo

Rebels claim that pro-government forces had executed over 180 people in the newly captured neighborhoods, but exactly who was executed, who did it, and where exactly they did it were not reported. Such accusations are common, with rebels often trying to play up the human rights situation to get international support.

Whether the claims are substantiated or not, they’re working, as the UN Secretary-General expressed “grave concern,” urging the UN Special Envoy for Syria to “urgently” follow up on the matter, while other UN officials warned Russia would he held accountable for “any atrocities” that might get committed in Aleppo.

Blaming Russia for the al-Qaeda-dominated rebels losing in Aleppo has been common among Western officials, though in reality Russia hasn’t carried out a single strike in the city since October, and made efforts to try to help with evacuation of civilians, evacuations which the rebels were blocking for weeks.

Battle for Aleppo enters 'final Phase'

Children trapped in building under attack in Aleppo, doctor tells UN

Children are reportedly trapped inside a building under attack in besieged Aleppo, the UN’s children agency has said, amid reports that forces loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad are carrying out extrajudicial killings in areas of the city recently reclaimed from the Syrian opposition.

“According to alarming reports from a doctor in the city, many children, possibly more than 100, unaccompanied or separated from their families, are trapped in a building, under heavy attack in east Aleppo,” Unicef said in a statement. “We urge all parties to the conflict to allow the safe and immediate evacuation of all children.” ...

Multiple sources told the UN that 82 civilians had been killed across four different neighbourhoods. “The reports we had are of people being shot in the street trying to flee and shot in their homes,” Rupert Colville, a UN spokesman, said. “There could be many more.”

Meanwhile, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow was fed up of calls from the US to halt the fighting. “We are tired of hearing this whining from our American colleagues in the current administration,” he told journalists. The US was urging Russia to halt military action while doing nothing to separate moderate rebels from “terrorists” in Aleppo, he added.

Aleppo Fight Enters Final Stages, Syrian Govt Controls 98%

Following reports late last week that the Syrian military controlled a whopping 92% of Aleppo, the losses among the rebel coalition in the city continued to mount rapidly, with the government now saying it controls fully 98% of the city, and every single district east of the Aleppo River. ...

Negotiations are still ongoing on a deal to evacuate what’s left of the rebels, which includes a number of al-Qaeda fighters and their allies. The talks are proceeding a lot more slowly than the battle, however, meaning that the rebels might be defeated outright before any deal convincing them to leave.

Indeed, the rebels still aren’t talking pullout themselves, with one of the rebel officials in Turkey issuing a statement predicting that the river would represent “a new front line” and that the rebels would continue to fight. While the logistics of getting into the last rebel stronghold aren’t totally clear at this point, with so much of the city damaged and barricaded, since the rebels lost effectively half of their territory in just a few hours, it seems unrealistic for their Turkey-based spokesmen to hope for a major turnaround.

Report: ISIS Defeat Unlikely, Group Will Remain Influential for Years

The US can back groups around the Middle East to physically defeat ISIS in individual cities, and given enough time might even militarily expel ISIS from all significant territory they hold. A new report from the US Institute of Peace, however, is warning that’s not going to defeat ISIS.

The report cites a panel of experts who are saying largely what locals in Iraq and Syria have been warning about throughout the ISIS war, that the group’s territory gains weren’t just happenstance, and that sectarian tension and economic woes that played a big part in setting the stage for ISIS’ rapid rise remain not just unsolved, but largely unchanged. ...

It is still noteworthy that the think-tank’s report doesn’t envision victory in any meaningful time-frame. The report also noted that President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign proposal to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS was not only unlikely to help, but was likely to make things worse, cautioning that the larger the military intervention, the bigger the jihadist reaction would be.

Uber employees 'spied on ex-partners, politicians and Beyoncé'

Uber employees regularly abused the company’s “God view” to spy on the movements of “high-profile politicians, celebrities and even personal acquaintances of Uber employees, including ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, and ex-spouses”, according to testimony from the company’s former forensic investigator Samuel Ward Spangenberg. Even Beyoncé’s account was monitored, the investigator said.

Spangenberg, who is suing the minicab company alleging age discrimination and whistleblower retaliation, made the claims in a court declaration in October. He says he told Uber executives including the company’s head of information security, John Flynn, and its HR chief Andrew Wegley, of his concerns around the lack of security, and was fired 11 months later.

As well as a lack of oversight regarding customer data, Spangenberg alleges numerous other ethical breaches at Uber. The company stored driver and employee information in an insecure manner, he says, while it operated a vulnerability management policy which allowed data to be stored that way if the company deemed there to be a “legitimate business purpose” for doing so. ...

Spangenberg told CIR that Uber had increased security provisions during his time there, as well as renaming the tool “Heaven View”. Uber confirmed that some employees – “fewer than 10” – had been fired for abusing the tool, and said that it needs to provide relatively widespread access for a number of reasons, including refunding customers and investigating accidents. To prevent spying on celebrities, Uber implemented a flag for searches for customers considered “MVP”, but Spangenberg pointed out that that did nothing to protect non-MVPs.

Transition Adviser Peter Thiel Could Directly Profit From Mass Deportations

Palantir Technologies, the data mining company co-founded by billionaire and Trump transition advisor Peter Thiel, will likely assist the Trump Administration in its efforts to track and collect intelligence on immigrants, according to a review of public records by The Intercept. Since 2011, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars to help construct and operate a complex intelligence system called FALCON, which allows ICE to store, search, and analyze troves of data that include family relationships, employment information, immigration history, criminal records, and home and work addresses.

In a separate multi-million-dollar contract signed in 2014, Thiel’s $20 billion company is building a complex case management system for ICE’s HSI, which processes tens of thousands of civil and criminal cases each year.

Working closely with a President-elect who has pledged to dramatically expand ICE, Thiel’s varied connections to the immigration agency place him in a position to potentially benefit financially from a deportation campaign that carries highly personal stakes for millions of Americans.

Since Thiel joined Trump’s transition team last month, Palantir’s wide-ranging contracts with federal agencies — that include the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency — have raised eyebrows of ethics watchdogs. In recent years, the federal government has reportedly paid Palantir some $340 million in contracts. Concerns over Thiel’s potential conflicts deepened last week when it was reported that he would not confirm whether or not he had signed standard paperwork barring him from participating in Trump transition matters that might conflict with his private interests.

Trump's leading candidate for secretary of state has some senators worried

Rex Tillerson, the apparent front-runner to become President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of state, can expect a very tough job interview.

Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, is one of the few Americans who can call Russian President Vladimir Putin a personal friend. Tillerson has represented Exxon’s interests in Russia since the 1990s and has spent years lobbying the U.S. government to ease sanctions against the country. ...

Tillerson’s close ties to Russia are making some prominent Republican hawks nervous. “It’s a matter of concern to me that he has such a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin,” Sen. John McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “That would color his approach to Vladimir Putin and the Russian threat.” In 2013, Putin personally awarded Tillerson the Order of Friendship, one of Russia’s highest honors given to foreign civilians.

Sen. Marco Rubio also slammed Tillerson in a semi-veiled tweet Sunday. “Being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for from a Secretary of State,” the Republican said. ...

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham also expressed discomfort with Tillerson and his connections to Russia. “I don’t know the man much at all, but let’s put it this way: If you received an award from the Kremlin, [an] Order of Friendship, then we’re gonna have some talkin’,” Graham told the Washington Post. “We’ll have some questions. I don’t want to pre-judge the guy, but that’s a bit unnerving.”

Heh, the Guardian's headline writer appears to be in the tank.

Rex Tillerson: an appointment that confirms Putin's US election win

Rex Tillerson’s nomination as the next secretary of state confirms Vladimir Putin as one of the strategic victors of the US presidential election. ...

The Wall Street Journal reported: “Friends and associates said few US citizens are closer to Mr Putin than Mr Tillerson.”

The 64-year-old Texas oilman spent much of his career working on Russian deals, including a 2011 agreement giving Exxon Mobil access to the huge resources under the Russian Arctic in return for giving the giant state-owned Russian oil company, OAO Rosneft, the opportunity to invest in Exxon Mobil’s operations overseas.

Tillerson is also friends with the head of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, a former interpreter who worked as chief of staff for Putin when he was deputy mayor in St Petersburg in the mid-1990s. Sechin, sometimes described as the second-most-powerful man in Russia, is now under US sanctions. He has said that one of his ambitions is to “ride the roads in the United States on motorcycles with Tillerson”. ...

“Trump’s choice of Rex Tillerson suggests he wants to make good on his promise to cut deals with Russia instead of containing it,” said Thomas Wright, who has written extensively on Trump’s foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. ...

Running the state department would not be like running Exxon Mobil, however. For a start, Tillerson would have to audition in front of a sceptical Senate. Even before Trump announced his decision on Tuesday, leading Democrats were painting Tillerson as a Moscow stooge.

US investigating jail where black man died after being held for months over $5

The US justice department has opened an investigation into the jail in Virginia where, the Guardian revealed, a young black man with mental health problems had died after spending months detained for stealing snacks worth $5.

Federal officials are investigating whether the civil rights of inmates are being violated at Hampton Roads regional jail in Portsmouth, where 24-year-old Jamycheal Mitchell was found dead in his cell last year. ...

Mitchell died of heart problems and a wasting disorder in August last year, after a judge’s order that he should be committed to a mental health hospital was mislaid by a state official and forgotten about. Relatives said he suffered from schizophrenia and other psychotic problems.

The jail has the highest death rate of any in Virginia.

Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn confirmed to Trump economic post

President-elect Donald Trump has formally tapped Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn for a top White House economic post.

Cohn will serve as director of the National Economic Council, heading a department with a key role in policymaking. The post does not require Senate confirmation.

In a statement, Trump says Cohn will “put his talents as a highly successful businessman to work for the American people”. ...

Cohn is a former Goldman commodities trader from Ohio who joined the firm in 1990. He served in a variety of leadership roles in bond trading, becoming co-head of Goldman’s broader securities and, eventually, co-president in 2006. He makes frequent appearances at industry conferences and on television, speaking on the state of the financial markets.

[See also: Trump puts Goldman Sachs in spotlight, for better or worse - js]

Heh, what a surprise, Trump loves the philosophy of the self-dealing asshole created by Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists

Donald Trump has decided to risk a confirmation fight, officially nominating ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state this morning. Tillerson and Trump had no previous relationship, but the Texas oilman and the New York developer hit it off when they met face to face. One of the things that they have in common is their shared affection for the works of Ayn Rand, the libertarian heroine who celebrated laissez-faire capitalism

The president-elect said this spring that he’s a fan of Rand and identifies with Howard Roark, the main character in “The Fountainhead.” Roark, played by Gary Cooper in the film adaptation, is an architect who dynamites a housing project he designed because the builders did not precisely follow his blueprints. “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything,” Trump told Kirsten Powers for a piece in USA Today.

Tillerson prefers “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand’s novel about John Galt secretly organizing a strike of the creative class to hasten the collapse of the bureaucratic society. The CEO listed it as his favorite book in a 2008 feature for Scouting Magazine, according to biographer Steve Coll. ...

Andy Puzder, tapped by Trump last week to be secretary of labor, is an avid and outspoken fan of Rand’s books. One profiler last week asked what he does in his free time, and a friend replied that he reads Ayn Rand. ... Mike Pompeo, who will have the now-very-difficult job of directing the Central Intelligence Agency for Trump, has often said that Rand’s works inspired him. ...

Ayn Rand was perhaps the leading literary voice in 20th century America for the notion that, in society, there are makers and takers, and that the takers are parasitic moochers who get in the way of the morally-superior innovators. Her books portray the federal government as an evil force, trying to stop hard-working men from accumulating the wealth that she believes they deserve. ... The fact that all of these men, so late in life, are such fans of works that celebrate individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing. They will now run our government.

Neoliberalism turned our world into a business. And there are two big winners

Tomorrow, Silicon Valley leaders will sit down for a summit with Donald Trump. Larry Page, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Sheryl Sandberg are all expected to attend. The agenda is unknown, but the mood is likely to be tense. After all, tech executives overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton and loudly railed against the dangers posed by a Trump presidency. And Trump regularly lashed out at Silicon Valley on the campaign trail, bashing the industry for building hardware overseas and importing foreign engineers.

But tech has little to fear from Trump. If his cabinet appointments are any indication, he seems keen to govern as a free-market fundamentalist, cutting taxes and regulations to the bone. ... But there’s another, deeper reason that tech and Trump will prove highly compatible. It’s not merely that tech CEOs will thrive under Trump. It’s that Trump embodies a particularly extreme version of the worldview that Silicon Valley epitomizes.

This worldview can be summarized in a single word: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can mean many things, including an economic program, a political project, and a phase of capitalism dating from the 1970s. At its root, however, neoliberalism is the idea that everything should be run as a business – that market metaphors, metrics, and practices should permeate all fields of human life.

Trump built his campaign around the premise that his chief qualification for the presidency was his success as a businessman. He promised to make America great again by bringing business discipline and dynamism to government. It’s true that he often denounced the depredations of corporate America, lobbing populist salvos at free trade, outsourcing, and Wall Street for hurting working people. But his principal solution to these sins of business was always more business: he would cut deals with CEOs and foreign leaders, drawing on his talents as a negotiator to get American workers better terms.

Since his victory, Trump has begun turning his campaign rhetoric into reality. He is making government look more like a business than ever before. He has created the wealthiest cabinet in history. He has selected a fast food executive for secretary of labor, a billionaire Goldman Sachs alum for secretary of treasury, and the CEO of ExxonMobil for secretary of state. He is also preparing to personally profit from the presidency, refusing to cut ties with his corporate empire. Trump will run government not merely like a business, but as a business.

Liberals are quick to condemn these moves as further evidence that Trump is far outside the mainstream. They portray him as fundamentally foreign, a “banana republic” strongman whose rise to power was the result of a Russian plot. But the truth is that Trump is deeply, maximally American. He didn’t import his politics from abroad, but simply followed the governing logic of American society through to its radical conclusion. The reason that 62 million Americans were prepared to entrust the presidency to a billionaire best known for playing a businessman on television is because they’ve been absorbing the tenets of market absolutism their whole lives. Trump may have campaigned as an outsider, but his appeal was radically mainstream.

Jill Stein's election recount ends as Wisconsin finds 131 more Trump votes

The recount effort by Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein came to an end on Monday, after weeks of legal wrangling yielded only one electoral review in Wisconsin that ended up favoring Donald Trump. ...

Wisconsin election officials said on Monday that they had completed their 10-day recount after finding that Trump’s margin of victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton had increased by 131 votes, bringing Trump’s total lead to 22,748.

Greg Palast: By Rejecting Recount, Is Michigan Covering Up 75,000 Ballots Never Counted?

Pipeline rupture spews oil into creek 150 miles from Standing Rock

Electronic monitoring equipment failed to detect a pipeline rupture that spewed more than 176,000 gallons of crude oil into a North Dakota creek, according to the pipeline’s operator, about 150 miles from the site of the Standing Rock protests.

The potential for a pipeline leak that might taint drinking water is at the core of the months-long standoff at the Dakota Access pipeline, where thousands of people have been protesting against its construction. That pipeline would cross the Missouri river.

It’s not yet clear why the monitoring equipment didn’t detect the leak, Wendy Owen, a spokeswoman for Casper, Wyoming-based True Cos, which operates the Belle Fourche pipeline, said.

A landowner discovered the spill near Belfield on 5 December, according to Bill Suess, an environmental scientist with the North Dakota health department.

Suess said the spill migrated about six miles from the spill site along Ash Coulee creek, and it fouled an unknown amount of private and US Forest Service land along the waterway. The creek feeds into the Little Missouri river, but Seuss said it appears no oil got that far and that no drinking water sources were threatened.

Leaked BP report reveals serious near-miss accidents

An internal report into how the oil giant BP monitors its refinery and chemical sites has revealed at least two near-miss accidents that could have caused deaths.

The report, leaked to Greenpeace, concludes that “urgent attention” is required to improve how BP manages crucial engineering data across the world and that the company lags behind its competitors including Shell, Chevron, Petronas and ConocoPhillips. ...

The internal report, produced in August 2015, said “inadequate management and use of engineering information has been a root cause or contributing factor in 15% of the last 500 incidents”.

“It is clear that BP have again failed to act on [earlier] recommendations and address the issues raised,” said Prof Robert Bea, a safety expert at the University of Berkeley who produced reports for BP after explosions at its Grangemouth facility between 1987 and 2001. He told Greenpeace: “These failures could have very serious effects on the safety of the refinery operations.”

An 'Undeniable Success': Divestment From Fossil Fuels Passes $5 Trillion

Marking the divestment movement's "undeniable success," a new report shows the value of funds controlled by individuals and institutions who have vowed to dump their fossil fuels assets now surpasses $5 trillion.

350.org co-founder Bill McKibben said the "news is mammoth."

The report (pdf) by Arabella Advisors for the Divest-Invest Network shows that the value of global funds making the commitment—now at about $5.2 trillion—has doubled in size since September 2015, and comes from 688 institutions and over 58,000 individuals spanning 76 countries.

It comes exactly one year after the adoption of the landmark Paris climate accord, and that agreement, the report says, "bolstered the economic arguments underpinning divestment, validating it as a key tool for achieving the agreements goals."

Pointing to the election of climate science-denier Donald Trump, the report adds: "Any setback to official U.S. climate policy elevates the importance of divestment as an organizing and financial tool to speed the clean energy transition. Absent effective federal policy to curb emissions, advocates and investors can use their assets and their voice to continue pushing the energy sector beyond fossil fuels."

China to set date to close ivory factories

China is set to announce when it will close its legal ivory carving factories, 18 months after pledging to act.

At the time, conservationists described the announcement as the “single greatest measure” in the fight to save elephants from poaching. Wildlife advocates have since urged Beijing to get on with the job. ...

In a bilateral announcement with the US in July, China pledged to set a timeline for the phase out of its market by the end of this year. WildAid’s executive director Peter Knights told the Guardian that he believed the government would honour that pledge.

Heh, looks like Giant Meteor might still win the election, after all.

Earth woefully unprepared for surprise comet or asteroid, Nasa scientist warns

Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth.

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth noted that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth’s sky or strike its surface. “But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”

Comets follow distant paths from Earth but sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood. Nuth said that the Earth had “a close encounter” in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and then again in 2014, when a comet passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”. That second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet: not nearly enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been on a course for Earth.

“If you look at the schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them, it takes five years to launch a spacecraft. We had 22 months of total warning.”

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Federalist 68, the Electoral College, and Faithless Electors

US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims

The Corporate Media’s Assault on Free Speech: an Interview with Jeffrey St. Clair

Obama’s Outgoing Attitude on War and Terrorism: Do as He Says, Not as He Did

Message From the Future: Your Acceptance of Evil Has Condemned Us All

Ties to Putin Are Nothing Compared to Rex Tillerson's Vast Climate Crimes

Potential Secretary of State Nominee Rex Tillerson Has an SEC Problem

Trump Transition Team Picks Up Yet Another Promoter of Cheap Foreign Labor

Who Will Protect the Whistleblower Under Trump’s Corporate Regime?

A Guide to Donald Trump's Huge Debts—and the Conflicts They Present

Chris Hedges: Demagogue-in-Chief

Will you be financially better off than your parents? Don't count on it

Guantanamo Board Approves Release of Another Yemeni 'Forever Prisoner'

Moving U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem 'Very Big Priority' for Trump, Senior Adviser Says

22 Organizations Urge Tech Firms to Reject Muslim Registry

Bob Dylan Nobel prize speech: this is 'truly beyond words'

A Little Night Music

I Need Your Love So Bad - Irma Thomas

Irma Thomas - The Same Love That Made Me Laugh

Irma Thomas + BB King - You Can Have My Husband

Irma Thomas - Wish Someone Would Care

Irma Thomas - Yours Until Tomorrow

Irma Thomas - Times Have Changed

Irma Thomas - I Done Got Over

Irma Thomas - Breakaway

Irma Thomas - Fancy

Hugh Laurie & Irma Thomas - John Henry

B.B. King and Irma Thomas - We're Gonna Make It

Irma Thomas - Hip Shakin' Mama

Irma Thomas - Hittin' On Nothing