Tuesday Night Open Thread: Questions That Need Answers

Posted by Oppo on 16 February 2021, 9:00 pm

Unexpected Life: Strange Creatures Accidentally Discovered Far Beneath Antarctica’s Ice Shelves
SciTechDaily | 2/14/2021
Far underneath the ice shelves of the Antarctic, there’s more life than expected, finds a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
During an exploratory survey, researchers drilled through 900 meters of ice in the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf, situated on the south eastern Weddell Sea. At a distance of 260km away from the open ocean, under complete darkness and with temperatures of -2.2°C, very few animals have ever been observed in these conditions.
But this study is the first to discover the existence of stationary animals — similar to sponges and potentially several previously unknown species — attached to a boulder on the seafloor.
“This discovery is one of those fortunate accidents that pushes ideas in a different direction and shows us that Antarctic marine life is incredibly special and amazingly adapted to a frozen world,” says biogeographer and lead author, Dr. Huw Griffiths of British Antarctic Survey.
“Our discovery raises so many more questions than it answers, such as how did they get there? What are they eating? How long have they been there? How common are these boulders covered in life? Are these the same species as we see outside the ice shelf or are they new species? And what would happen to these communities if the ice shelf collapsed?”

Previously settled science marches on!

“And You’ve Got No Words of a Biden on That”

Posted by Oppo on 16 February 2021, 8:00 pm

So, let me get this straight:

Biden calls a lid on talking to governors about something life-threatening:

Jen Psaki: Joe Biden Has Not Spoken Personally to Governors Affected by Winter Storms
Breitbart | 02/16/2021 | Charlie Spiering
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that although President Joe Biden was “monitoring” states drastically affected by winter storms, he had not yet personally reached out to their governors. “The president has been kept abreast as I noted of the events and been provided regular updates on the storm and the progress,” Psaki said during the White House press briefing Tuesday afternoon.

. . . But . . .

When he does talk to one governor, he doesn’t discuss something life-threatening:

Biden, Gov. Cuomo Didn’t Discuss COVID Nursing Home Scandal, Psaki Says
NY Post | 02/16/2021 | Steven Nelson
It was the elephant in the Oval Office, but somehow, President Biden and Gov. Andrew Cuomo didn’t discuss his COVID-19 nursing home scandal when they met last week. The controversy “was not a focus of their conversation or a topic,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters during her daily briefing Tuesday.

Politics as Usual

Posted by Oppo on 16 February 2021, 7:00 pm

Kind of a counterpoint to the previous post about Comey.

Mayor, Police Chief and Clerks All Arrested in Small Iowa Town
New York Post | Feb. 14, 2021 | Jesse O’Neill
The mayor, police chief, city clerk and a former city clerk of a small Midwest town were all arrested for allegedly abusing their power — with crimes including stealing money, falsifying records and strong-arming civilians, officials said.
In one instance, a resident in Armstrong, Iowa — population 840 — was attacked by one of the defendants with a stun gun to shake them down for money, authorities said.

Additional arrests are said to be pending.

What an Anti-American Tool

Posted by Oppo on 16 February 2021, 6:00 pm

And perjurer.

Violate the Fourth Amendment, and we’ll have to double up on the Second.

Smoking Gun: Comey Told Clapper FBI Unable To ‘Sufficiently Corroborate’ Steele — Then Signed FISA
Just the News | February 14, 2021 | John Solomon
The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s outgoing intelligence community chief with a very different assessment of the British spy’s intelligence on Russia collusion, a newly released memo shows.
“We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting,” Comey wrote in a Jan. 12, 2017 email to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that was declassified and made public through an open records lawsuit by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

CIA officials had already informed Comey’s FBI that the target of the FISA warrant, Carter Page, wasn’t a Russian spy but rather an asset helping U.S. intelligence. The bureau had received warnings about Steele and the reliability of his source network, including that it might have been compromised by Russian disinformation. Agents had also just recommended on Jan. 4, 2017 shutting down the probe’s inquiry into incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lack of evidence.
The FBI had been warned the previous summer that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have planted the false Russia collusion story as a way to “vilify” Trump and distract from her email scandal, and agents were about to interview Steele’s primary sub-source, who would discount much of the information in the dossier attributed to him as bar talk and unconfirmed rumor not worthy of official intelligence.
And the larger intelligence community had decided it did not want to vouch for the Steele dossier in its official Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

Comey tried to push back, suggesting Steele was deemed reliable (he actually had been terminated by the FBI for leaking by that time) and that his network included sources that might be in a position to know things (although the key source had already disavowed the information attributed to him in the dossier).