Month: October 2023

US Meteorologist Warns: “Winter This Year Going To Be Very Different” As El Nino Ramps Up 

US Meteorologist Warns: “Winter This Year Going To Be Very Different” As El Nino Ramps Up 

“Winter in the US this year is going to be very different. El Nino is ramping up in the Pacific. Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are still off the charts, and we’re going to have an amplified southern jet stream,” US meteorological analyst and YouTuber Ryan Hall said in a video published on Saturday. He said the El Nino weather phenomenon will “affect how much snow we get and how often we see it, but it’s also going to change when the snow starts.”

Hall constructed a map of the US regions that usually see the first measurable snowfall: 

  • Moving on to this light blue region, this is where we have a lot of data supporting an average first snowfall of around December 30th. This includes Raleigh, North Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, Little Rock, and Dallas. Essentially, sometime in January is when you’re going to see your first snow down here. But beyond this, we can get a little bit more detailed with our first snowfall date because we have a lot to work with as far as historical averages go.

  • In the darker blue here, we typically see our first snow either after December 15th or before December 30th. So that narrows it down a lot. This includes places like Bowling Green, Kentucky, and St. Louis. 

  • This light purple zone indicates an area where we expect to see snowfall sometime between December 1st and December 15th. And now we’re talking about places like Washington DC and Cincinnati and Peoria, Illinois. 

  • Now, once we get into this darker shade of purple, we’re talking about a large area of the US seeing their first measurable snowfall between November 16th and December 1st. This is Chicago, Pittsburgh, and a lot of southern New England. It’s very important to remember that these are just historical averages.

  • Especially in this pink zone, where on average, we see our first snow between November 1st and November 16th. There tend to be some major swings up here. 

  • And then, of course, the final gray zone here shows us where snow can occur as early as October 2nd, which is actually around the time that this video goes up. But there you have it.

Here’s the first snowfall prediction map:

Hall pointed out, “But I want you to think back to what I said at the beginning of this video. This is not a typical year. The 2023-2024 winter season is going to be very different” due to “2023-2024 winter is an El Nino pattern.” 

He said for the past three La Nina winters have kept “areas in the South and East drier and warmer, and it keeps the North and Northwest a little bit colder and wetter. But for the first time in a while, we’re entering this upcoming winter in a full-blown El Nino.” 

“This is when those waters down in the Pacific are warmer than usual, and the thunderstorm activity starts going crazy. This actually amplifies the Southern Jet Stream, sending several storm systems flying across the Southern US. And a lot of times, those storm systems are very strong, and they can latch on to some of the colder air up north and cause very big snowstorms. For example, some of you guys might remember the North American blizzard of 2003,” Hall explained. 

He also reminded folks of the “January blizzard of 2016 dumped three feet of snow across a huge chunk of the Mid-Atlantic region, and caused $500 million in damage. Now, we can’t say that either of those storms were directly caused by El Nino, but it’s something to keep in mind as we develop our forecast. And El Nino years are notorious for keeping things mild, especially in the East.” 

Here’s the full forecast: 

Besides Hall, Peter Geiger, editor of the Farmer’s Almanac, warned in an August weather note: “The ‘brrr’ is coming back! We expect more snow and low temperatures nationwide.”

Last week, we pointed out several notable meteorologists who expect average temperatures to dive across the Lower 48 as early as next weekend. 

And all we hear from corporate media and their climate warrior cheerleaders is crickets as the climate changes into fall. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/02/2023 – 05:45

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Government Watchdog Calls Out Dangers in Section 702 Surveillance


Security guards monitor a bank of CCTV security cameras. | Serezniy | Dreamstime.com

Ten years after Edward Snowden sparked a debate over domestic (and international) spying by the U.S. government and its allies, arguments continue and so does the snooping. This year, one key component of the surveillance state—Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—is up for congressional reauthorization. Now, the executive branch’s own civil liberties watchdog says that, while Section 702 plays an important role, it’s also dangerous to our freedom and needs reform.

Surveillance, American-Style

To hear America’s professional spooks, Section 702 is made up of equal servings of mom, apple pie, and a trench coat.

“In 2008, Congress enacted Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a critical intelligence collection authority that enables the Intelligence Community (IC) to collect, analyze, and appropriately share foreign intelligence information about national security threats,” insists the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.”

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), established in 2007 in an effort to limit the excesses of the burgeoning post-9/11domestic intelligence apparatus, sees things a little differently.

“The Board finds that Section 702 poses significant privacy and civil liberties risks, most notably from U.S. person queries and batch queries” in which multiple query terms are run as part of a single action, according to the PCLOB’s Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, published September 28 and following up on a 2014 report on the same topic. “Significant privacy and civil liberties risks also include the scope of permissible targeting, NSA’s new approach to upstream collection, a new sensitive collection technique that presented novel and significant legal issues approved by the FISC in 2022, how data is initially ingested into government repositories, incidental collection, and inadvertent collection.”

The report points out that the definition of “foreign intelligence information” is very broad and that 246,073 non-U.S. persons were targeted for surveillance in 2022, up 276 percent from 2013. While Section 702 surveillance isn’t “bulk” surveillance of the sort that hoovers up mass quantities of information, it “lacks individualized and particularized judicial review of targeting decisions” with the result that “targeting can be overbroad or unjustified.”

Foreign Intelligence Isn’t Always So Foreign

The result of broad and somewhat indiscriminate data collection is that “the government acquires a substantial amount of U.S. persons’ communications as well.” This interception of Americans’ communications “should not be understood as occurring infrequently or as an inconsequential part of the Section 702 program.” In particular, “FBI’s querying procedures and practices pose the most significant threats to Americans’ privacy.”

Why is the FBI of such particular concern? Because the FBI focuses on domestic law enforcement and “one of the most serious risks to individual civil liberties associated with the incidental collection of U.S. person information is that this classified information collected for intelligence purposes could be used in a criminal prosecution,” notes the board. The government is required to disclose when it uses Section 702 intelligence in criminal cases, but it has done so only nine times—which is not the same as saying that it rarely uses such information. “In multiple cases, rather than providing notice to criminal defendants of Section 702-derived information, the government has instead sought to develop evidence through other sources” so prosecutors can avoid admitting they used foreign intelligence tools.

The Real Targets Are Often Americans

Often, federal agents seem to explicitly use Section 702 to bypass safeguards. “The large amounts of incidental collection may include communications between attorneys and their clients,” adds the report. It also notes that “the government has identified a significant number of noncompliant queries where government personnel have conducted queries related to instances of civil unrest and protests.”

How often does this happen?

“In the Annual Statistical Transparency Report for calendar year 2021, FBI reported that it ran 3.4 million [later revised downward to 2.97 million] U.S. person queries of Section 702-acquired information in all its systems,” according to a report footnote.

The Debate Over Reform

The divided five-member PCLOB recommends multiple reforms, including a specific prohibition on “about” interceptions that are neither to or from targets, but merely mention them, and a requirement for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approval of U.S. person query terms. Even so, the report concludes “the United States is safer with the Section 702 program than without it.” Despite that call for reauthorization, two of the five board members voted against the report for being excessively critical and demanded that it not be attributed to them.

Civil liberties groups quickly noted the report’s contribution to the debate over Section 702.

“Congress has the power to safeguard the constitutional rights of Americans by fundamentally reforming this invasive and unconstitutional mass surveillance program,” Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, commented in an emailed statement. “As the Board rightly points out, requiring the government to obtain individualized judicial approval is critical to ensuring that Section 702 cannot be used by the FBI, NSA, and CIA to quietly circumvent Americans’ constitutional rights.”

“The PCLOB report is damning, in terms of both the frequency with which government agencies conduct warrantless searches of data collected under Section 702 and the purposes for which those searches are conducted, yet the report’s recommendations don’t go nearly far enough to ensure Americans’ privacy from this overreaching, oft-abused digital dragnet,” agreed Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia.

Damning it may be, but the White House National Security Council has already rejected part of the report’s call for modest reform as “operationally unworkable.”

Given the current debate over Section 702, it’s easy to forget about other legal authorizations for domestic surveillance. These include other parts of FISA, Executive Order 12333, and national security letters, which often are subject to looser safeguards. But, the PLCOB adds, “Section 702 enables the government to target a broader array of persons,” including those who aren’t suspected of violating American laws or acting against the United States, “which also increases the risks of privacy and civil liberties harms.”

Section 702 expires in December with its fate, and that of proposed reforms, in the hands of Congress.

The post Government Watchdog Calls Out Dangers in Section 702 Surveillance appeared first on Reason.com.

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Love, Trade, and Force: The Machinery of 
Freedom at 50


ednote2 | Illustration: Joanna Andreasson

“The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.”

This spicy little sentence is typical of the zingers littered throughout David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom. The anarcho-capitalist classic turns 50 this year, and it’s worth revisiting for both its spirit and substance.

The book has a chaotic energy. Just a few pages after the epigraph—which pairs a moderately profane joke by Lenny Bruce with a verse from “libertarian troubadour” and future U.S. congressman Dana Rohrabacher—we’re deep into a discussion of the Federal Communications Commission’s role in spectrum allocation before bouncing back out for chatty speculation about how to “sell the schools,” a riff on “socialism, limited government, anarchy, and bikinis,” and a treatment of the vital question, “is william f. buckley a contagious disease?” (Stylish ’70s lowercase in the original, of course.)

But there is a method to the madness. In his “postscript for perfectionists,” Friedman hammers home what is not included in the book: “I have said almost nothing about rights, ethics, good and bad, right and wrong.” This strategic agnosticism is what captured my attention as a 19-year-old college student, already weary of banging my head against the wall of deontological disagreement.

It’s very hard to convince someone to change their mind about what is right and wrong, but as Friedman observes, “it is much easier to persuade people with practical arguments than with ethical ones.” Perhaps not coincidentally, that postscript was written right around the time that James R. Schlesinger was coining the phrase, “You are entitled to your own views, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” If, as Friedman hypothesized, “most political disagreement is rooted in questions of what is, not what should be,” many people have been going about the project of consensus building and political change all wrong. “I have asked, not what people should want,” he says, “but how we can accomplish those things which most of us do want.”

This approach suggests a methodology: Scrutinizing existing, highly effective voluntary institutions and systems for alternative ways to perform functions that even a minarchist libertarian might reserve for the state, and then extrapolating from there toward shared goals of peace, prosperity, and justice.

Asking how the world works nearly always yields more interesting and productive discussions than asking how the world should be. Often accused of utopianism, anarcho-capitalists are the opposite. (“I have wondered whether I might have originated ‘Utopia is not an option,’ but probably not,” Friedman mused while casually popping into the comments section of a 2015 Slate Star Codex post about his greatest work.) Friedman’s comfort with uncertainty is inspirational, heroic even. He isn’t quite sure how things would play out if roles currently performed by the state were instead accomplished via market mechanisms, but he’s happy to make a guess. After all, if he knew for sure, he’d be the CEO of the Court Services Co. or Professors Incorporated instead of being a guy who writes books.

***

“There are essentially only three ways that I can get another person to help me achieve my ends,” Friedman writes: “love, trade, and force.”

In a world where individuals are free to pursue their own interests and desires, people are more likely to engage in mutually beneficial relationships driven by genuine connection rather than social expectations or legal obligations. Love—or “more generally, the sharing of a common end”—is a powerful coordinating tool in society, and one too often underestimated or undermined by other political theories.

Still, love only gets you so far. Force, the preferred tool of toddlers and tyrants, too often leads to unintended consequences while failing to actually achieve its stated ends. That leaves trade as the primary mode for getting things done. Part of the charm of The Machinery of Freedom is that it proceeds on the assumption that voluntary exchange is largely up to the task of organizing society. Friedman underscores that trade is not just limited to material goods but can also encompass intangible assets such as knowledge and ideas.

The most striking thing about The Machinery of Freedom is its cheerful, eclectic optimism. It weaves back and forth between history, politics, and speculative fiction in ways that are enlivening and energizing. Friedman was not the first to make market anarchist arguments, but in the decades that followed the book’s publication, they grew in appeal as an alternative to the angry polarization gripping those who preferred to fight over state power. He is generous with his ideas. If you don’t like his plan for voucherizing university classes, he’s happy to offer you another option for education reform. If you are skeptical about market provision of national defense, he’s happy to suggest a theory of change inspired by the French monarchy’s habit of selling tax exemptions. If you’re worried about who will pay to build the roads, he’s happy to tell you a weirdly prescient story about “electronic recording devices, computer-controlled entrances, and three-to-eleven working days” while conceding that those innovations “sound like science fiction.”

The appeal of Friedman’s anarchism is not that he has the answer, but that he has dozens of them and he’s not at all bothered by the idea that none may be the perfect one. “It is fashionable,” writes Friedman, “to measure the importance of ideas by the number and violence of their adherents. That is a fashion I shall not follow. If, when you finish this book, you have come to share many of my views, you will know the most important thing about the number of libertarians—that it is larger by one than when you started reading.”

The post Love, Trade, and Force: <em>The Machinery of 
Freedom</em> at 50 appeared first on Reason.com.

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Latest Mood-Check Shows Unequivocal Support For Ukraine Is Waning Among Europeans

Latest Mood-Check Shows Unequivocal Support For Ukraine Is Waning Among Europeans

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

Fewer Europeans fully back the continued financial and humanitarian support of Ukraine by the European Union than at the start of the conflict, the latest Eurobarometer data revealed.

The collection of pan-European public opinion surveys conducted regularly on behalf of the bloc showed support is waning among EU citizens for the conflict in their own backyard, which continues to show few signs of easing.

In April last year, a majority of Europeans said they “totally agreed” with opening the borders for Ukrainian refugees, providing humanitarian aid to those who remained in the war-torn country, and imposing economic sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine two months prior.

However, a mood check in August 2023 shows none of these efforts now have the total support of a majority of EU citizens.

Those who fully approve of providing humanitarian support to people affected by the war have dropped from 64 percent in April last year to 47 percent. Support for welcoming Ukrainian refugees into the European Union has decreased from 55 percent to 36 percent, while unequivocal support for the continuation of economic sanctions against Moscow has dropped from 55 percent to 46 percent.

Similarly, just 26 percent of Europeans now totally agree with the European Union providing financial support to Ukraine, down from 42 percent, and less than a quarter (24 percent) totally agree with the supply of military equipment to Kyiv.

It is important to note that all of the above categories, with the exception of supplying military equipment, still garner a majority of support when factoring in those who opted for “tend to agree” in the survey, but the latest polling shows an undeniable slide in unequivocal support for a conflict that has now been raging for more than 18 months without a solution.

Ukraine was dealt a heavy blow earlier this month when Poland, one of Kyiv’s staunchest allies in the conflict against Russia, announced it would no longer be supplying weapons to its neighbor and would instead be focusing on stockpiling its own national defenses.

And it isn’t just in Europe where fatigue is starting to set in among the electorate. A recent SSRS poll commissioned by CNN revealed that a majority of Americans believe that Washington D.C. should withdraw financial support to Kyiv.

A total of 55 percent of respondents said that the U.S. Congress should not authorize further funding for Ukraine and 51 percent of those polled said that NATO’s largest contributor had already done enough to help the country.

Just 48 percent said the United States should be doing more, down considerably from the 62 percent recorded at the outbreak of the conflict in February last year.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/02/2023 – 05:00

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Pope Francis Claims No Migrant Emergency In Europe – Suggests ‘Individualism’ Is The Problem

Pope Francis Claims No Migrant Emergency In Europe – Suggests ‘Individualism’ Is The Problem

If you want to see the real poison at play in the methodology of deconstruction, look at it in the context of illegal and mass immigration in the western world.  Deconstruction argues, essentially, that any truth can be broken down into various parts and reassembled to express a completely different meaning.  Therefore, there is no truth, only the way in which people are taught to perceive the various pieces of the truth, and that can be changed with the right kind of conditioning. 

In the case of illegal immigration, western populations are being taught that the chaos and instability they are witnessing is actually an “opportunity” for them to turn the other cheek and embrace the virtue of victimhood.  Simply accept that the mass migration of incompatible cultures is going to happen, look at it as a gift which allows you to spend your hard earned labor and accomplishments giving charity to people who only showed up on the promise of free handouts, and then you won’t have to be angry about it any longer.

That is to say, under the philosophy of deconstruction you don’t fix problems; you have to change the way you perceive the problems until you don’t see them as problems.  Of course, objective truth exists outside of human perception, and every dishonest or schizophrenic person in the world sees things far differently from the norm – That doesn’t mean their version of events is valid.

What Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis) preaches is not Christianity, but a carefully crafted false narrative of deconstruction hiding behind the mask of spiritualism.  During his recent visit to France, the Pope engaged in a bit of manipulative gaslighting, claiming that Europe is not facing a migrant emergency because Europeans only need to look at the situation in a different way.  It should be mentioned that the Vatican has not offered its own vast estate as a place to take in migrants, either.  

Pope Francis suggested that the real problem was the “exasperating selfishness of individualism.”  The message is relatively clear:  Just conform to the demands of globalism and assimilate into the hive; the more you fight back the more it will hurt.

The Pope’s highly political message comes after multiple European governments including France took a rare hard line stance against mass immigration.  The migrants, mostly from Africa, are already wreaking havoc in Italy and the Island of Lampedusa, and representatives including those in France are finally moving to establish restrictions.  France says it will not take any more migrants from Lampedusa, while Italy and France are deliberating on a naval blockade to prevent any future migrant boats from reaching European shores. 

As we covered this past week, a near decade of open border policies by socialist leaders has caused an exponential spike in crime, which those same leaders have attempted to hide using misrepresented stats, omissions in police reports and media blackouts.  Not to be overlooked is the growing economic uncertainty in the EU, which leaves little room for charity, especially for the over 23 million non-citizens now residing in the region.

Europeans have grown tired of the disinformation and gaslighting, and this has fueled a growing public shift to the conservative right.  Clearly this has alarmed certain globalist interests – The Pope coming to France to lie about the migrant crisis and attack conservative individualism (or the protection of cultural and moral heritage) is a blaring alarm that they don’t like current developments and want to see the destabilization of Europe continue. 

Keep in mind that this is the same Pope that joined with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a project led by Lynn Forester de Rothschild featuring a host of major banks, international corporate interests, the WEF, the UN, etc.  The council is by all appearances the beginnings of an open corporate elitist government.

The CIC is a vehicle for pushing forward the global socialization of all economies into the framework of what the WEF calls “Shareholder Capitalism” and the “Great Reset.”  It operates on the philosophy that corporations should participate in social engineering, that economies need to go cashless, that all religions need to combine into one entity and that national borders need to be dissolved.  

The Pope’s association with a premier globalist club might help to explain his efforts to undermine European security and pressure the public to submit to the Cloward-Piven strategy in their midst.  Will his efforts bear fruit?  So far it looks unlikely.  Even far-left leaders like Macron have to acknowledge that the citizenry is moving away from the progressive program in large part because of years of destructive migration.     

Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/02/2023 – 04:15

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Photo: Argentina’s Libertarian Moment?


topicsphoto | Photo: Sipa USA/Alamy

Javier Milei shocked the world in August by getting the most votes in Argentina’s presidential primary. His coalition, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), got 30 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent and 27 percent for the main conservative and Peronist coalitions, respectively.

Milei and his thick sideburns rose to nationwide fame five years ago for hot-tempered free market critiques of then-Argentine President Mauricio Macri. He has dogs named after Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, and Murray Rothbard.

The first round of the general election is October 22, with a possible second round on November 19.

The post Photo: Argentina's Libertarian Moment? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Brickbat: Deep in the Heart of Texas


Chain-link fence topped with razor wire. | Jim Parkin | Dreamstime.com

A Texas jury has found Clay County Sheriff Jeffrey Lyde guilty of official oppression and tampering with evidence for holding a man in jail longer than allowed by law. He faces up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine for each charge. A judge suspended Lyde from office in February following unrelated allegations of sexual harassment by some female employees of the sheriff’s office.

The post Brickbat: Deep in the Heart of Texas appeared first on Reason.com.

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Greenpeace Canada Co-Founder Admits “We Are Not In A Climate Crisis”

Greenpeace Canada Co-Founder Admits “We Are Not In A Climate Crisis”

Via American Greatness,

The co-founder of Greenpeace Canada told podcast host Dan Proft that “climate alarmism is 100% untrue.”

“They said it was the hottest year in the history of the earth the other day, and it’s not,” Moore told Proft on the “Counterculture” podcast.

“That’s just, period, a lie.”

“The whole climate alarmism – ‘climate catastrophe’ – is 100% untrue,” said Moore.

“We are not in a climate crisis.”

Moore told Proft that “there is nothing really that radical happening” with the climate, and it’s essential to “seek the truth” and “sort out what is true and what isn’t.”

This full interview is available on Rumble, YouTube, and Spotify.

Moore is the co-founder of Greenpeace Canada and is currently directly of the CO2 Coalition, a non-partisan foundation that educates policy leaders and the public about the important contributions of carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy.

In 2013, Moore published Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout – The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, which documents his 15 years with Greenpeace and outlines his vision for a sustainable future.

Proft launched “Counterculture” – American Greatness’ newest podcast — in September 2023. He also is the co-host of “Chicago’s Morning Answer” weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on AM 560 Chicago. A former Republican candidate for Illinois Governor, Proft attended Northwestern University and received his J.D. from Loyola University-Chicago.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/02/2023 – 03:30

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Excess Deaths From Cardiovascular Diseases Up 44% Last Year Among UK Citizens Aged 15-44: Report

Excess Deaths From Cardiovascular Diseases Up 44% Last Year Among UK Citizens Aged 15-44: Report

A new and disturbing analysis reveals that excess deaths from cardiovascular diseases have jumped in the UK over the past several years.

Using official government data for deaths in England and Wales between 2010 and 2022, former BlackRock portfolio manager Ed Dowd and his partners at Phinance Technologies found that excess death rates from cardiovascular diseases were up 13% in 2020, 30% in 2021, and 44% in 2022, which “point to a worrying picture of an even greater acceleration in coming years of deaths & disabilities.”

What’s more, they found that “deaths per year from cardiovascular diseases had been trending lower from 2010 to
2019, with a significant downward slope,” until 2020, when the trend reversed. They also found that in 2022, men began outpacing women in cardiovascular diseases.

The analysis also found that disabilities are skyrocketing.

Dowd and co. conclude that: “When looking at excess deaths for cardiovascular diseases, the Z-score in 2020 was around 3, indicating that prior to the start of the vaccinations there was already a signal pointing to an increase in cardiovascular deaths. That trend however accelerated substantially in 2021 and 2022 where we observe Z-scores of around 7.5 and 10.5, respectively. These are extreme events that we believe need a thorough investigation.”

Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/02/2023 – 02:45

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