Three things that don't surprise me
Three stories showed up today, and none of them should come as a surprise:
1) Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event; on this day in 1908, something (either a small asteroid or a small comet) exploded in the air over Siberia. Although it never impacted the ground, and the object itself was only a few meters across, the blast (measuring somewhere between 5 and 30 megatons) flattened 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles. The explosion of this small object was 1,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Even though nearly 1,000 potentially hazardous asteroids are known to be in Earth-threatening orbits, we're not doing much to monitor or counteract the threat.
2) The Pentagon considers itself above the law and refuses to comply with EPA orders to clean up its thousands of polluted sites, including 129 Superfund sites. The Department of Defense just doesn't feel like cleaning up its contamination of our soil and drinking water, so that's that.
3) Our nation's only significant response to both climate change and the looming petroleum crisis involves the burning of corn. This policy turns out to be "economical nonsense, ecologically useless and ethically indefensible."
Surprise, surprise.