New Mexico legislature votes to circumvent the Electoral College

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written before about the drive to end the Electoral College. And I’m going to write about it again, because I think it’s very important and people need to become aware of what’s going on before it succeeds. Believe me, those pushing for this are very serious and very organized (as well as well-funded, I’m going to assume):

What [Democrats] want is for the extremely blue states of California and New York to decide the election, because that’s the way it would probably be if the Electoral College were to be eliminated. Before the 2016 election, you didn’t hear all that many calls from Democrats for the end of the EC, in part because the EC arrangement was seen to favor Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Remember all the cries that Trump had no Electoral College “path” to victory? I certainly do.

But since Trump somehow managed to blaze such a path, much to their intense astonishment (and somewhat to mine, I must say), they want the Electoral College gone. And because there is little chance of a constitutional amendment to that purpose passing (probably not enough states would support it), they’ve found a way around that little impediment [the following quote is from the Times editorial]:

“There is an elegant solution: The Constitution establishes the existence of electors, but leaves it up to states to tell them how to vote. Eleven states and the District of Columbia, representing 165 electoral votes, have already passed legislation to have their electors vote for the winner of the national popular vote. The agreement, known as the National Popular Vote interstate compact, would take effect once states representing a majority of electoral votes, currently 270, signed on. This would ensure that the national popular-vote winner would become president.”

Notice how far this movement has gotten without all that much fanfare, considering the enormous changes it would wreak on our entire political system. For example, this just happened, and it doesn’t seem to be that heavily covered:

New Mexico is the 14th state to move away from the traditional use of the electoral college in presidential elections. Yesterday, Governor Michelle Luján Grisham signed House Bill 55 for her state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. By so doing, the Governor agrees with New Mexico Democrat Party lawmakers to give all the state’s electoral college votes to the winner of the national popular vote. There were no New Mexico Republican lawmakers on board with the decision. The will of New Mexico voters would not be honored if they were to select a different candidate than the winner of the aggregated popular vote in the other NPVIC states. So far the NPVIC laws won’t go into effect. The states approving it must equal 270 electoral votes. With New Mexico’s alignment, there are now 189. Critics of the move away from the traditional use of the electoral college model claim there are constitutional problems with the compact and that if implemented, the end result would be that the most populous states such as California and New York could end up electing the U.S. president. NPVIC supporters deny the criticisms.

If this sort of thing were to pass only in blue states, it probably wouldn’t end up mattering much in terms of electoral results. But New Mexico is sometimes considered to be a swing state—although it’s been trending blue for quite a while.

And Ohio? That could be a big big deal. Ohio is a pivotal swing state that often has a big role in determining the outcome of an election. It’s hard to gauge how much support this has in Ohio, but it may not need all that much support if activists are energized by it and not enough other people realize what’s going on and what it means:

The proposed amendment was submitted to the attorney general’s office by Don McTigue, a Columbus election lawyer, who provided 1,000 signatures from Ohio voters. The signatures were collected by a Washington, D.C. canvasing outfit, but it’s not completely clear who all is behind the effort. Cleveland.com reported that McTigue “referred comment to Reed Hundt, a former Federal Communications Commission chair who is now chair and CEO of Making Every Vote Count, a non-profit pushing for a binding national popular vote.” Hundt declined to respond to Cleveland.com’s request for comment.

Making Every Vote Count is a 501(c)(3) organization registered in Washington, D.C., that is “dedicated to electing the president by a national popular vote,” according to the group’s website.

The Ohio Ballot Board has ten days to decide whether to approve the submitted ballot language and the attorney general must validate the signatures submitted with the petition. If approved, supporters will have until July 3 to collect 442,958 valid signatures (10 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial election) from registered voters in 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties.

A ballot measure, of course, is the worst possible way to change a law. The outcome largely depends on which activist organizations have the best fear-fueled ad campaigns. It’s the whole reason a comprehensive union reform law — passed by the duly elected legislature in Ohio and signed by the governor — was overturned by a popular-vote referendum in 2011.

I assume they will be able to collect those signatures. All they need is 442,958 Ohio voters who are on the left, and enough workers to reach them. Many many resources will be given to this effort, I’m assuming, because the left certainly realizes that success could change things, big time. Does the right understand what’s going on, and is it ready to fight this with enough resources to make a difference?

[ADDENDUM: I see that John Hinderaker has written on the same topic today. Good. He has a lot more traffic than I do, and I hope his post gets a lot of publicity and raises the alarm. His piece also contains a lengthy discussion of possible constitutionality issues connected with this movement.]

Trump’s creepy Creepy Joe Biden tweet

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, I admit it. I must be a bad bad person, because I find this Trump tweet very funny:

And yet I’m not supposed to find it funny. The Powers That Be have excoriated Trump for posting such an awful thing.

For example, we have this piece at Vox, “Trump, of all people, tries to score political points on Biden’s treatment of women: The utter shamelessness of the Trump administration, in one tweet.”

Oh yes; shame, shame on Trump. Utter shamelessness.

Sorry, I just don’t share that notion. Nor do I think that Trump “of all people” needs to hold back. I missed the part where Trump is accused of pawing all sorts of women, and doing so in public. What he used to do in private is another story, but it’s his wife’s (or wives’ or ex-wives’) problem, as far as I’m concerned.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think this creepy behavior of Biden’s should disqualify him from office. I think plenty of other things disqualify him from getting my vote, though, mainly his political policies and his role as Obama’s veep (that’s not meant to be an exclusive list). His behavior with women is creepy indeed, and inappropriate, and doesn’t enhance his resume in my eyes, but it’s not nefarious although it’s evidence of a tone-deafmess to the personal boundaries of other people.

More on the fossil site described in that New Yorker article about the dinosaur die-off

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter Ted Clayton.]

Wednesday I wrote this post about a New Yorker article on a huge fossil find that purports to be evidence of the asteroid strike that caused widespread geological perturbations that swiftly killed the dinosaurs and many other creatures around the globe. Now the Smithsonian magazine has weighed in on the find and what’s been claimed about it:

Many paleontologists were quick to raise an eyebrow at the findings presented in the New Yorker, however, particularly because some of the claims in the article are not mentioned in a scientific paper about the site. That research, published by DePalma and colleagues, was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The only dinosaur fossil mentioned in the paper is a weathered hip fragment, but the study is nevertheless causing a stir as a window into the extreme effects caused by the asteroid impact.

“Unfortunately, many interesting aspects of this study appear only in the New Yorker article and not in the scientific paper,” says Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “This is a sloppy way to conduct science and it leaves open many questions. At the present moment, interesting data are presented in the paper while other elements of the story that could be data are, for the moment, only rumors.”

As for the paper itself, the details are part of a broader picture of what transpired 66 million years ago in western North America, along the margins of a vanishing seaway that was draining off the continent at the time. According to DePalma and colleagues, seismic waves emanating from the asteroid impact reached the Tanis area within minutes. The disturbance sloshed local bodies of water in a phenomenon called a seiche—similar to water flowing back and forth in a bathtub—tossing fish and other organisms around in the wave. “As far as we can tell,” DePalma says in an email, “the majority of the articulated carcasses are from animals that were either killed when they were encapsulated by the muddy sediment, or very shortly prior as part of the same violent inundation surge event.”…

Sites demarcating the K/Pg boundary have been found all over the world, and vertebrate fossils at or within the boundary have also been discovered before. Part of what makes the Tanis site stand out, DePalma says, is that “this is the first known example of articulated carcasses, likely killed as a direct result of the impact, associated with the boundary.”

Despite the controversy over how claims of the site hit mass media before the peer-reviewed science paper was available, outside experts note that Tanis truly does seem to be an exceptional spot. “This isn’t the only site that preserves fossils at the K/Pg boundary, but it seems this might be the most sensational one ever discovered,” says Shaena Montanari, a paleontologist and AAAS science and technology policy fellow. The fossil preservation of the fish in particular stands out as unusual.

Here are some of the fish (the site is from 66 million years ago):

More reservations, not about the site itself but about its interpretation and meaning:

Other geologic details of the site also merit further investigation. “It seems like the geochemical data are scant and in some cases being stretched a bit to make interpretations,” Montanari says, “although this is not a new thing for paleontology.”,,,

University of California, Berkeley paleontologist Pat Holroyd says that the estimations of when and how quickly the Tanis site formed are based on models without consideration of other possible interpretations. “I don’t think there is any way to conclusively determine the exact amount of time represented in the site,” she says, “but it would have been useful to see how they estimated it.”

The details of what the site actually looks like, and how the layers were deposited, is not clear from what was published in the paper, Holroyd says. Such data is needed to compare Tanis to other K/Pg sites around the world.

It’s good to be cautious, although there are some very exciting things about this find. I also have to say that although computer modeling is certainly of interest, unless we know every variable (and certainly every variable of any importance) that goes into an event, modeling can mislead and create a false state of certainty where none exists.

Remember George Papadopoulos? Touted as the reason the whole Russiagate thing started?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s easy to get lost in Russiagate minutiae, and perhaps that’s part of the plan.

For example, George Papadopoulos, remember him? Perhaps not. Let me refresh your memory (and mine):

When the special counsel was appointed by Rod Rosenstein in May 2017, the special counsel took over an existing counterintelligence investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into what proved to be Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and numerous secretive links between Trump associates and Russian officials. According to reports, Australian officials informed American officials that in May 2016, a Trump presidential campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, told the Australian High Commissioner to Britain, Alexander Downer, that Russian officials were in possession of politically damaging information relating to Hillary Clinton, the rival presidential candidate to Trump. Since the FBI, in response to this information, opened an investigation into the links between Trump associates and Russian officials on July 31, 2016, the meeting between Papadopoulos and Downer is considered to be the ‘spark’ that led to the Mueller investigation.

Actually, it is considered to have been the “spark” that led to the pre-Mueller investigation, the counter-intelligence one launched by the FBI while Obama was still in office, the one that investigated candidate Trump and/or his associates.

You may have forgotten Papadopoulos or at least the details of his story. But Papadopoulos himself certainly hasn’t, and he’s being quite active on Twitter lately:

Papadopoulos sums it up this way:

Much more at the link.

[ADDENDUM: More here.]

Dan Davies was an accident waiting to happen…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and unfortunately for both Davies and Illinois State Trooper Gerald Ellis, that accident did in fact happen, and both are now dead.

It is indeed tragic, as well as a failure of the justice system:

…[O]fficials of the Illinois Secretary of State’s Office say they cannot find any evidence Davies ever got a driver’s license.

Despite that fact, Davies was stopped by police dozens of times – receiving over 70 tickets – including repeated citations for driving without a license. Each time he was cited for having no license, a “suspension” was added to his record at the secretary of state’s office, which would make it more difficult for him to get a license, if he ever applied for one.

He also was arrested twice for drunk driving…

Investigators say Davies was driving the wrong way on the Tri-State tollway near Libertyville early Saturday, when he rammed a squad car driven by Trooper Gerald Ellis. Both were killed in the crash.

Records obtained by NBC5 Investigates show that Davies’ first citation for driving without a license was in 1996. Since then, he had received 71 tickets during 25 traffic stops. The Secretary of State’s office had used every tool available to them, including placing him under revocation following his second DUI arrest last November. That would have required him to go to an administrative hearing if he ever wanted to obtain a license in Illinois.

Only one problem: Davies didn’t want to get a license in Illinois. Why would he? He was able to drive without it, despite having been stopped 70 times.

But it appears nothing was ever done by local authorities to stop Davies from getting back behind the wheel.

“The only alternative is to put someone in jail,” Druker said. “They have no respect for the concept of law or a driver’s license.”

That didn’t happen. After his November drunk driving arrest, Davies’ case was eventually transferred to Cook County Criminal Court, where he faced multiple charges of aggravated DUI. But in that case, he was granted a $3000 I-bond, meaning he had to post no cash, and he was never jailed – despite what authorities say was one of the worst driving records in the state of Illinois. And remember – he had no license in the first place.

Hmmm—Cook County, Cook County—now where have I heard about Cook County letting people off easy? (That’s a rhetorical question).

A spokesman for Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx did not respond to NBC5 Investigates’ repeated inquiries about what position prosecutors took to try to keep Davies in custody.

Well, you know, she’s busy with other things.

But that’s not all:

Davies was no stranger to the Cook County Criminal Court. NBC 5 Investigates has learned that since he was a teenager, in addition to his dozens of traffic stops, he also was charged in 22 additional criminal cases… where he faced repeated charges of criminal damage to property, assault and battery – including battery on a police officer and domestic battery – drug-dealing, and drug possession.

Davies was found guilty in seven of those cases, but served a total of only 53 total days in jail – less than two months, including a sentence of just ten days for a conviction stemming from his first DUI arrest in 2010.

This is a horrific and broken system all the more awful because it seems it was purposely broken to feed liberal social justice needs. Not only did this cause the death of Trooper Ellis, but it didn’t do Davies any favors, either. He’s dead, too.

RIP. But the Cook County “justice” system shouldn’t rest in peace.

Where would the MSM be without shaky and suspect speculations?

The New Neo Posted on by

Before the findings of the Mueller report were released, the MSM’s meat and potatoes had been speculating about its content for years. The speculation just about always went in one direction only: it would sink Trump. This was an audience-getter and a money-maker, as well as wish fulfillment.

Once the Mueller findings were out, it didn’t take long to regroup. Barr’s summary statement was parsed to mean that Trump is probably guilty of obstruction (of a crime that didn’t take place) and it just didn’t rise to the level of legal proof although there was plenty of evidence for it, evidence that would come out in the full Mueller report. That’s what’s driving them now.

Today we have this ray of hope for the left:

…[A]n article was released last night by The New York Times claiming that members of Robert Mueller’s team were “simmering” over AG Barr’s characterization of the report.

There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of that [Times article’s] report. There were zero named sources. There weren’t even any direct anonymous sources. Instead, we got the ridiculous “people familiar with” trope that used to never pass as responsible journalism. In regards to details, there were none, with the Times reporting that no one elaborated on what they were actually upset about.

That didn’t stop the Times from reporting on it. Nor did it stop the Twitter folk; for example:

I actually have little doubt that there are indeed people on Mueller’s team who are upset. There are plenty of people there who would probably have dearly loved to take Trump down, and who would be more than willing to interpret every smidgen of evidence (and it stands to reason there are such smidgens) in an unfavorable light. However, the Times didn’t even say it talked to such people, just to “people familiar with.”

The WaPo had an article too:

Shortly after The New York Times piece, a more sanitized leak from Mueller’s team was printed in the The Washington Post. This time saying they were simply frustrated with how little Barr disclosed in his initial summary. This time, they stopped short of actually accusing him of misrepresenting matters.

All of that was followed by a statement from the DOJ:

The Department of Justice released a statement Thursday morning slamming new reporting from the New York Times and Washington Post. Both newspapers accuse Attorney General William Barr of mishandling the release of material in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel report, in addition to mischaracterizing the findings of the report in the four page summary released two weeks. ago…

“As the Attorney General stated in his March 29th letter to Chairman Graham and Chairman Nadler, he does not believe the report should be released in ‘serial or piecemeal fashion.’ The Department continues to work with the Special Counsel on appropriate redactions to the report so that it can be released to Congress and the public,” the statement continues.

I don’t know about how much the word “slamming” applies. But it certainly is a correction. Barr’s office and Mueller’s office are working together to release as much as possible of the report. I can practically guarantee that, when that happens, unless the full report declares Trump guilty (and I think we can safely say that is highly unlikely), the anti-Trump forces will pick through every single word to find a hook on which to declare Trump guilty. Every slight equivocation, every bit of evidence of even the remote possibility of something that can be interpreted as supporting guilt or even suspicious behavior, will be emphasized and repeated and harped upon.

The word bun can have many meanings

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this link at Instapundit: Man Buns: Proof Positive That Western Civilization Is Doomed.

I thought it meant buns in the old-fashioned sense of butt. I imagined there must be some new men’s fashion that emphasized said area in some way. That’s how old and out-of-it I am.

But (that’s with one “t”) I was wrong, wrong, wrong. We’re talking about hairstyles.

However, this is good advice I think:

Most of the “man buns” I’ve seen have been on male model types who have little to lose by going “ugly.” In other words, because these men tend to be extremely attractive, they can afford to take gross liberties with their looks.

A partially balding man with bifocals who struggles with weight problems might be advised to stay away from the “man bun,” because, as is the case with women with top knot muffin buns, it will only showcase his physical imperfections.

I stopped wearing any sort of bun years ago because at a certain point buns generally become unflattering, and I’d reached that point. But I almost never used to wear a bun outside of the ballet setting anyway, even when I was quite young. The reason was that I found them uncomfortable, probably because I have the sort of unruly hair that requires an arsenal of hairpins and other paraphernalia to keep it all in place. Far from being convenient, a bun took a lot of time and effort, and what did I get out of it? Practically nothing.

Solitary imaginings

The New Neo Posted on by

Hope you never need this information: how to survive solitary confinement.

It seems to come down to the ability to focus imagination on positives, what is called intentional imagination rather than uncontrolled imagination:

Mental imagery can supplement perceptual input—but it can be equally useful when perceptual input is painful, tedious, or lacking. A prisoner in supermax can use mental imagery to create the space and time that confinement strips away…

He also used his imagination to time travel, imagining “alternate endings to past interactions with people—what if I said this? Or what if I would’ve invited her for coffee or something like that?” He wrote about painful relationships and episodes, reframing them and extracting a lesson. Memory is both constructive and reproductive, says Alex Schlegel, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In fact, imagination and memory run on parallel tracks in the brain. By engaging the imagination, [the prisoner in solitary] was able to “rewrite” his past in a more positive light, and reframe his future.

This is similar to a technique some therapists use called reframing, but in intentional imagination the scene is played out in great detail and the entire thing acts as a powerful reframe.

Venezuela is a train wreck…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and as a result, South America has its own refugee problem:

On one end, these countries are trying to pressure [President] Maduro now to step down, because they know that this migrant crisis is going to get even worse the more politically unstable the country gets. Countries like Colombia understand that Venezuela used to be a country that took their immigrants, especially during the darkest days of the paramilitaries and the guerrilla fighting, but at the same time, they understand they can’t take every Venezuelan that comes.

And not only that, because of this crisis that’s getting worse and worse, because of lack of medicine mainly, people are coming into these countries with diseases that should be controlled in Venezuela — diseases like diphtheria, malaria, tuberculosis have made a huge comeback in Venezuela. So if you’re a neighboring country like Brazil or Colombia or a country like Ecuador or Peru, who are farther away but are also taking immigrants, this is a very scary situation that’s right on your doorstep.

That article is at NPR, and I wonder whether they acknowledge the fact that those arguments are similar to what President Trump and the right are saying about our very own illegal immigrants.

Here’s an interesting piece from someone who’s not a Trump lover, criticizing the left for its embrace of Maduro. I think some of these clips of Democratic Maduro-love could make a good campaign video for Republicans in 2020:

The dying of the dinosaurs

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments to yesterday’s post about climate change, a lot of people mentioned this article that appeared in The New Yorker and caused a big sensation.

I had already read the article and found it to be absorbing. It helps that the author of the piece is a novelist, because not only did the article zip right along, but it read almost like a short story, a very dramatic one. The picture it created of the aftereffects of the asteroid hit that is presumed to have ended the dominance of the dinosaurs as a group and paved the way for mammals to rise was both fascinating and terrifying:

Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system…

There’s much much more, but you get the idea.

The description of the discoverer of the fossil find that supposedly documents this event is fascinating as well. He appears to be monomaniacal about bones and how they fit together; obsessed with them from around the age of four, helped along by a great-uncle who was a renowned orthopedist.

“We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments,” DePalma said. “With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died.” No paleontological site remotely like it had ever been found, and, if DePalma’s hypothesis proves correct, the scientific value of the site will be immense. When Walter Alvarez visited the dig last summer, he was astounded. “It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the best sites ever found for telling just what happened on the day of the impact.”

As I read the article, though, one thing that struck me was this question: hasn’t earth a lot of impact craters from fairly large asteroids? Did they cause similar extinctions? Was this the largest asteroid ever? The extent of the cataclysm described in the article is based on computer modelings, but how accurate are those modelings?

The following was in the article as well:

Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

So how did the mammals survive? What did they eat, for example? I’d like to know a lot more about that.

Would a similar-sized impact always and inevitably have a similarly horrific result? Haven’t many asteroids hit earth, and were some of them almost as big? I found this article that goes into the question a bit, enough for me to conclude that we aren’t entirely sure how big the Chicxulub crater (the impact described in the New Yorker article) actually is, although it’s certainly very very big. But I noticed that about five million years prior to Chicxulub, there had been another large impact (called the Kara crater) that doesn’t seem associated with any mass extinction (at least, I couldn’t find any discussion of it in a brief perusal). If not, then why?

I certainly don’t know. But I found an article from 2017 that raises some interesting points:

Of all the places in the world an asteroid could have walloped ancient Earth, the Yucatán Peninsula was possibly the worst…

According to the paper, this mass extinction happened because the space rock slammed into an oily tinderbox, blasting enough soot into the atmosphere to cause extreme global cooling…

The impact chilled the planet by a global average of 14 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit, with a drop of 18 to 29 degrees over land, the study finds.

Only 13 percent of Earth’s surface is made up of rocks that could have burned off that much soot, the team argues this week in Scientific Reports. That means if the asteroid had landed almost anywhere else, the nonavian dinosaurs may not have died out after all.

“This is a fascinating paper that … argues that even given the large size of the impactor, the mass extinction itself was of low probability,” says Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The possibility of a catastrophic asteroid impact is the meat-and-potatoes of many science fiction stories and films. Often they feature humankind attempting to head the asteroid off at the pass, and in real life we do have some rudimentary efforts to move in that direction:

In 2016 a NASA scientist warned that the Earth is unprepared for such an event. In April 2018, the B612 Foundation reported “It’s 100 per cent certain we’ll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we’re not 100 per cent sure when.” Also in 2018, physicist Stephen Hawking, in his final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, considered an asteroid collision to be the biggest threat to the planet.[4][5][6] In March 2019, scientists reported that asteroids may be much more difficult to destroy than thought earlier. In addition, an asteroid may reassemble itself due to gravity after being disrupted.

If you’re interested in some of the contemplated approaches, see this. Suffice to say that our skills in this direction are in their infancy.

[NOTE: Here’s a database of known impact events.]