NASA's Near Earth Object (NEO) Program published a diagram a few days ago, showing 556 mapped comet/asteroid fragment impacts on Earth over the last 20 years (see above). NASA says it's based on data gathered from 1994-2013 on small asteroids impacting Earth's atmosphere to create 'fireballs', adding that "the sizes of yellow dots (daytime impacts) and blue dots (nighttime impacts) are proportional to the optical radiated energy of impacts measured in billions of Joules (GJ) of energy, and show the location of impacts from objects about 1 meter (3 feet) to almost 20 meters (60 feet) in size."

Note the random distribution of impacts around the globe. But note also what the map and accompanying NASA report do not indicate: the year-on-year distribution of those impact events over that 20-year period. This omission enables them to give the following misleading subheading to their report:

It happens all the time: small asteroids impact Earth's atmosphere

By not providing a year-on-year breakdown of the impacts, and by including their rather banal headline, NASA leaves us to assume that these events were more or less evenly distributed over those 20 years - on average, 27 fireball events of note in 2013 (556 total events/20 years). But we have serious doubts about this.

We know from the American Meteor Society that there were nearly 3,500 observed events in 2013 alone - and just in the US. Check out the data for yourself: browse through the AMS Events database. Select for events in 2013 with both 'sound' and 'fragmentation' reported. Note how many of last year's 184 US fireball events, that were large enough to be both seen breaking up and heard exploding, were witnessed from multiple US states. Now go back to the NASA world fireball map from 1994-2013. Assuming its random global distribution is accurate, we can try a little exercise in extrapolation to get a figure for significant fireball events globally in 2013.

On this week's episode of 'Connecting the Dots' on SOTT Talk Radio, hosts Joe, Niall and Juliana discussed the G20 meeting in Australia, where the main item on the agenda was... Putin-bashing! If you're looking for true commentary on the G20 meeting because you couldn't find it anywhere on the lamestream media, this show is for you!

Also discussed: do Western leaders actually believe the lies they peddle? Or are they so invested in their 'dynamic narratives' that they will never ever, see the error of their ways?

Where did travelling, political freak-shows like the G-country meet-ups originate anyway? Believe it or not, the Bilderbergers and the 'green' environmental movement!

Noting how the West continues to target Russia's economy, and thus hurting Ukraine's economy in the process, your hosts considered what economic collapse in the US might look like. Will 'austerity' measures and backfiring sanctions cause the West to implode in on itself?

And stay tuned for this week's Extreme Weather Update: the 'Bering Bomb' polar vortex - did Russia send it to America as a gift?

Running Time: 02:13:00

Download: MP3

Media reports on Saturday claimed that Russian President Putin was planning to spurn the G20 leaders breakfast on Sunday and leave the farcical psychopathic love-in early. Within a few hours however, a Kremlin spokesman denied that Putin had any such plans. If the idea of an early exit did happen to cross the mind of the Russian president, it would be entirely understandable. From the moment Putin arrived in Australia, most of the G20 leaders have acted like the discourteous, arrogant, obnoxious quislings of empire they are.

Launched in 2004, the Rosetta spacecraft mission to rendezvous comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has just succeeded in landing its Philae module on the surface of the comet. After a last-minute glitch that temporarily had the lander failing to respond to signals from the European Space Agency's controllers, Philae came online. With the mission a success so far, researchers hope to find the building blocks of life, testing the theory that comets spread life-bearing molecules throughout the cosmos.

It should come as no surprise to readers of SOTT.net that, so far, ice is nowhere to be found on the comet. Despite its 'surprisingly' dry surface, however, it is producing a large amount of water. Like so many 'comets' before, this one is like all the others: a big hunk of rock. So, on the one hand, a great day for scientific advancement; on the other, yet another example of people who should know better being 'totally surprised' at facts that should have been totally obvious. Comets are not dirty snowballs!

Unfortunately for humanity, scientific and technological progress have absolutely no correlation with moral progress. We can't help but find it ironic that as humanity makes this 'great step' towards understanding the secrets of space and life in the cosmos, our world is on the brink of societal, economic and moral collapse. Just today, we can find the following stories and headlines in the news.

The high and mighty George Soros recently published an article about the Ukraine crisis in the New York Review of Books. It is so full of lies, manipulations, and false assumptions that reading it makes your head spin. However, given George Soros' prominent position in Western strategic circles, his article's publication presents a rare opportunity for those of us in the 'reality-based community' to see what the enemy is up to, and what it might do next. And so we've taken some time to 'truth-ify' Soros' anti-Russian screed by picking apart his steaming pile of propaganda.

Let's start with the title:

'Wake Up, Europe'

Soros better hope European politicians and people don't wake up to what's going on or it'll be game over for Washington and the Western global 'elite'.

Europe is facing a challenge from Russia to its very existence.

What??? How can Russia challenge the 'very existence' of a continent, a continent of which it is a part? What in God's name can he mean by this?

Neither the European leaders nor their citizens are fully aware of this challenge or know how best to deal with it. I attribute this mainly to the fact that the European Union in general and the eurozone in particular lost their way after the financial crisis of 2008.

Yeah, thanks in large part to greedy financial terrorists like George Soros.

The fiscal rules that currently prevail in Europe have aroused a lot of popular resentment. Anti-Europe parties captured nearly 30 percent of the seats in the latest elections for the European Parliament but they had no realistic alternative to the EU to point to until recently.

Okay, we guess by "Europe," then, he means the European Union, not the continent. Firstly, the EU, in its current form, is essentially a US-controlled organization. Its economic and fiscal policies are based on the 'Washington Consensus'; its foreign policy and military adventures are based on 'American exceptionalism'; its military-intelligence structures were created by - or taken over by - NATO, MI6 and the CIA. So if one is to criticize 'the EU', as it is, then one is criticizing Washington.

Secondly, the sharp rise in popularity for anti-EU parties across Europe is a reaction to said ideological subservience to the US, not an expression of 'anti-Europeanism' per se. It's natural and logical that Europe as a region would come together and tend towards ever closer integration. What is foreign and unnatural is that that integration would lead to such undemocratic monstrosities as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a US 'CorpGov' project to cement their 'Atlantic Empire'.

We say 'undemocratic' because it in no way reflects the will of the people, who have not once been consulted about whether or not they'd like to live under such a regime. In fact, the EU simply stopped consulting the people when referenda held in France and the Netherlands in 2005 on the proposed EU Constitution returned strong rejections. The EU that Europeans can't stand is the EU that people like Soros were instrumental in shaping.

This is the man whose 'Quantum' hedge fund made $5.5 billion last year, the highest ever, while the vast majority of people in Europe (and the US) have to tighten their belts because speculators like George bloody Soros keep gambling with other people's money.

As warmongering, corporate profits, and police-state measures increase, so too does global suffering. While more and more people are expressing that suffering in the form of mass anti-government demonstrations in nearly every country, Mother Nature is expressing this suffering in the form of environmental upheaval. Deluges, meteor fireballs, 'thunder-snow', unseasonal tornadoes, 'super-storms'... October 2014 had it all.

A record-breaking hurricane/typhoon season on both sides of the Pacific brought near-constant flooding to Mexico and Japan. Dozens of spectacular meteor fireballs - from the US to India and Europe to Latin America were caught on camera last month. With most of the Arctic 'Taiga' already covered in snow, increased precipitation levels are translating into record-early snow cover in North America.

The now-familiar scene of vehicles being washed down city streets by raging torrents of water occurred this month in Montpelier, Genoa, and Athens. While there were fewer strong earthquakes than we've become used to in recent years, volcanic activity remains high, with Costa Rica's Turrialba Volcano erupting for the first time in 150 years, and Sakurajima Volcano in Japan sending an ash plume 4.5km high.

Check out the Signs of the Times in October 2014:

This week on SOTT Talk Radio we discussed the biggest story never told in modern Europe: NATO's secret warfare against European civilians. Proxy wars, false-flag terrorism, assassinations, economic warfare, color revolutions, interfering in elections... it's no secret that the U.S. establishment has done all that (and more) through its application of a psychopathic 'strategy of tension' around the world since the Second World War.

What is not generally known is that such 'secret warfare' was also taking place in Europe. For the briefest of moments, CIA and MI6 coordination of a 40-year-long, Europe-wide terror campaign - going by the code-name 'Operation GLADIO' in Italy - came to light in several European media in 1990, but the scandal was quickly buried by the rather fortuitous invasion by Saddam Hussein of Kuwait and the subsequent build-up to NATO's first 'expeditionary mission' to Iraq.

We spoke with Dr. Daniele Ganser, author of the seminal book NATO's Secret Armies in Europe, now translated into ten languages. Ganser is a historian lecturing in contemporary history, energy issues and geo-strategy at the Universities of St. Gallen and Basel in Switzerland. Check it out...

Running Time: 02:11:00

Download: MP3

The legitimacy of the ruling class - whatever political form it may take - is based on the illusion that it can protect the people; whether from war, famine, economic hardship, or any other kind of disaster that disrupts the everyday routine of their lives and livelihood. The following excerpt illustrates this point:

I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember why they need us!

(Excerpt from Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection)

The above quote is from the Chancellor's speech in the movie V for Vendetta, but it could just as well have been from Obama, Harper or Cameron for that matter.

Empires all go through a rising period, a flowering period and a collapse. No empires have escaped this fate and the current empire with its allies is no different, despite Obama's claim of this one being exceptional. All empires in the end have become thoroughly ponerized to the point that every person in a position of power will be suffering from some kind of psychological defect. As Lobaczewski writes:

In a pathocracy, all leadership positions, (down to village headman and community cooperative managers, not to mention the directors of police units, and special services police personnel, and activists in the pathocratic party) must be filled by individuals with corresponding psychological deviations, which are inherited as a rule.

Our current empire of chaos is no exception. It is today ruled by a pathological elite that is thoroughly corrupt, that promotes sick morals and values, that uses torture and violence to squash dissent, that engages in war without end, that demonizes large sections of the world's populace due to color or religion, all the while claiming to protect democracy, freedom of speech and humanitarian ideals. These words spoken by the pathological elite are as vile and devoid of substance as a dead pig once the blowflies have done their job.

Today, Canada began bombing Iraq and Syria, justified in large part by a 'terror attack', the narrative for which is falling apart. I've written previously about the suspicious background to the attacks in Ottawa and another city near Montreal a few weeks ago, but new details have emerged that pose serious questions about the official narrative surrounding the Ottawa war memorial and parliament shooting by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.

Welcome to the official radio show of Sott.net, your source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events. Each week, Sott.net editors Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley analyze global impact events that shape our world and future, and connect the dots to reveal the bigger picture obscured by mainstream programming.

From the crisis in Ukraine to the ISIS in Iraq, from increasingly extreme weather to surviving in a world ruled by psychopaths, your hosts, their colleagues (and occasional guests) explore the deeper truths driving world events by exposing the manipulations behind what passes for 'news'.

Live every Sunday from 2-4pm EST / 11am-1pm PST / 8-10pm CET, SOTT Talk Radio is the one and only radio show for Seekers of Truth.

Running Time: 02:11:00

Download: MP3