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Aussie BoM confirms third consecutive La Niña year

Aussies will have crocodiles on their driveway again.
As per usual, the Cauliflornians will likely look at blue dry skies and the Israeli laser satellites will start forest fire unimpeded (that is, assuming there are still forests in California, I haven't checked recently).

"The problem with a triple La Niña is that the ground is very wet already, our rivers are quite high, our creeks are full and our dams are quite full," according to Dr Margaret Cook, environmental historian and lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast and researcher at Griffith University.
...
But with catchments already sodden, it wont take much for the creeks and rivers to rise again this summer and La Niña is not the only driver out there pushing us towards rain.

We are currently in the positive phase of the Southern Annular Mode and negative phases of the Indian Ocean Dipole.

"All these phases, negative Indian Ocean Dipole, positive Southern Annular Mode and La Niña, all tend to promote increased rainfall across parts of Australia in various seasons," Dr Gillett said.

The super-rich 'preppers' planning to save themselves from the apocalypse:

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I don't usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin what's left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. That's how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as "ultra-wealthy stakeholders", out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: "How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed "in time".

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Don't just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That's when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir's Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they've reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that's fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where "winning" means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It's as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let's call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our society's most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter – to surprising effect.

Two firearms were stolen from the home of a California congresswoman, she said in a statement.

Rep. Karen Bass said Saturday that Los Angeles police were called after she came home the night before to find there had been a break-in.

The two firearms were safely and securely stored when they were stolen, she said. Cash, electronics and other valuables were left behind.

"It's unnerving and, unfortunately, it's something that far too many Angelenos have faced," she said.

Bass is running for mayor of Los Angeles. Her campaign released her statement.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/karen-bass-guns-stolen-from-los-angeles-home/

Of course, CBS is reporting less than half of the news.

Not only does news of the burglary at her home further illustrate that nobody is safe from the endemic crime in L.A., but it illustrates something much deeper.

Karen Bass — who’s currently running to be the Mayor of Los Angeles — is, of course, a staunch advocate of limiting the rights and taking guns out of the hands of the little people.

The number one job of the mayor is to keep Angelenos safe.

        One of my top priorities will be to get guns off of our streets and out of our communities.

        Gun violence has no place in our city.https://t.co/LrgZgdmQAg

        — Karen Bass (@KarenBassLA) July 22, 2022

Yet despite the public rhetoric, far-left hypocrite Karen Bass knows the truth about guns…that when seconds count, a firearm is the best tool for good to use to stop a bad person with evil in their hearts.

She knows this so deeply and fundamentally that she owns — er, owned — at least two firearms to protect herself and her family, while at the same time advocating that your family go without them. And we can thank the burglar for exposing Karen Bass’ grand hypocrisy.

In the statement, she said she called LAPD for assistance. She says two firearms were stolen, despite them being ‘safely and securely stored.’ She says nothing else was stolen from her home, despite cash, electronics, and other valuables being visible.

“It’s unnerving and, unfortunately, it’s something that far too many Angelenos have faced,” Bass stated.

The guns were registered. Bass said she bought the guns years ago for personal protection.

She remarked in a statement how the guns were purchased for self-defense…just like tens of millions of other Americans have done. Yet she wants to strip the little people of the ability to buy and own guns for the same reason.

If this kind of hypocrisy sounds familiar, it should. Bass has a long history of supporting the kind of far-left political positions that benefit and protect elites while keeping average citizens disarmed and disempowered.

Like many in California’s ruling political elite, Bass comes from the far left. In the 1970s, she travelled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, an international group of sympathisers with Cuban communism. In 2016, when Fidel Castro died, she issued a praise-filled obituary to ‘El Comandante’. More recently Bass has distanced herself from this Castroite past and from policies such as defunding the police. But she can certainly be expected to follow the ‘progressive’ policy agenda typically backed by the city’s public-sector unions.

Video here: https://www.foxla.com/news/karen-bass-says-two-guns-stolen-from-her-house-during-break-in

Quite obviously, the guns were NOT safely and securely stored. And, we're to believe, further, that the burglars broke in, and passed by all the other valuables in the house, just to break into a gun safe, or whatever she considers "safe and secure"??? Maybe someone needs to send Bass this link? http://www.dontlie.org/

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/hypocrite-gun-grabbing-california-congresswoman-karen-bass-reveals-two-of-her-guns-were-stolen-in-a-break-in/

As always with the Democrats, "Guns for me, but not for thee!"

From an article in the Guardian:

A senior member of a far-right Italian political party tipped to win general elections this month has appealed to state broadcaster Rai not to screen an episode of the globally popular children’s cartoon series Peppa Pig over the inclusion of a same-sex couple in its cast of characters.

Apparently a recent episode shown on UK TV for the first time shows co-parenting lesbian polar bears.

A character called Penny announces: “I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti.” The family then sit down for a meal together.

The popular TV series is aimed at pre-schoolers and it should be noted that nowhere does it include any sexually-explicit material.

Still, the old misery-gutses get all in a tizzy about it. Stupid fascists.

Biden’s DOJ Relies on Racist and Anti-Catholic Bigotry to Defend The ATF’s Gun Rights Ban for Marijuana Users

Back in April TTAG told readers about a lawsuit filed by Florida’s Agriculture Commissioner and then-candidate for Governor Nikki Fried. Here office issues concealed carry permits in the Sunshine State and the lawsuit challenges a federal prohibition on firearms possession for people lawfully using marijuana under state laws. Fried herself is a marijuana card holder.

Fried sued the the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms on behalf of three Floridians who held Florida medical marijuana cards and were denied firearms purchases based on their answers to the 4473 form.

In the wake of NYSRPA v Bruen, which holds government gun control schemes to a much higher standard, the federal government now has a much steeper hill to climb in defending limits on Second Amendment rights. So when the ATF justifies the law making medical marijuana users prohibited persons, they now have the burden to prove that similar laws affecting gun rights not only existed, but were common and widespread practice around the time the Second Amendment was ratified.

In a post-Bruen world, we can expect governments responding to challenges to their gun control laws to dig and scrape to unearth whatever rights-denying precedents they can find. If anyone at any level of government has done anything remotely similar with gun laws in the past, those precedents will be cited in their responses, along with a big dose of hope that what they’ve found might be enough to impress a federal judge.

That’s exactly what we’re seeing in the government’s latest response to the Fried lawsuit (for which you can get from recap here).

In their desperate search for any sort of precedent to prop up limits on gun ownership for lawful users of drugs, the DOJ has decided that some very bigoted laws against Catholics, Native Americans, and even the homeless will do to justify today’s prohibition against marijuana users.

As the DOJ writes . . .

In England and in America from the colonial era through the 19th century, governments regularly disarmed a variety of groups deemed dangerous.

If there’s a more terrifying prospect than governments “deeming” certain groups as dangerous and deserving of disarmament, it’s hard to think what that might be.

The DOJ goes on to list these “dangerous” people, a list which includes Catholics, as if those who follow the Pope’s teachings are the equivalent of MS-13. They reference laws that disarmed Native Americans, with no justification for the supposed “danger” they posed. They also listed the mentally ill, panhandlers, and “persons refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the state or the United States” as people that have historically been disarmed.

The obvious — even to a non-lawyer like me — counterargument here is that all of these laws were passed in a time prior to the passage of the 14th Amendment, which further limited governments’ legal ability to discriminate against people like these groups. So even if those policies were widespread, they wouldn’t be remotely unconstitutional today.

The Biden Administration lawyer who got the unenviable job of defending the government’s case here knew that counterargument was coming, so he pointed out that after the 14th amendment, it was still common practice to prohibit intoxicated people from possessing or using firearms. While that’s certainly true, the prohibition on carrying guns while drunk hardly justifies a blanket ban on ownership or possession by cannabis users even while they’re not high.

Never mind the inconsistency of the President’s stated position on marijuana use. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum pointed out . . .

…the Biden administration says, prohibiting medical marijuana users from owning guns is a perfectly rational policy that is consistent with the historical understanding of the right to keep and bear arms. Never mind that the president himself has said the current legal treatment of cannabis makes no sense, or that there is no 19th-century precedent for prohibiting people from owning guns based on the medicine they use.

While the government’s position is ludicrous, it’s still more than a little shocking that they’d cite past discrimination against religious and racial minorities as justification for maintaining the ban on gun ownership.

Not only does such an argument not really help their case, but the optics of looking like you’ve got something against “dangerous” Catholics and “untrustworthy” Indians — not to mention the homeless — doesn’t really play well in the current culture.

This is especially true coming from a compassionate Democrat administration which says it wants to save the nation’s soul and is part of a party that ostensibly opposes discrimination based on religion, race, or the status of someone’s housing (or lack thereof).

What Fried’s lawsuit has done is highlight the administration’s hypocrisy and put them in a difficult position in conflict with some of the Democrats’ supposed core tenets…civilian disarmament versus identitarian politics and group rights.

In the DOJ’s argument, the Biden administration has made it clear what’s more important to them. There’s literally no low to which they won’t go in defense of laws that further limit and eventually remove Americans’ gun rights…no matter how morally repulsive the foundation for their policies and laws may be.

Odd that no one mentions African Americans, or slaves, or black freed men in this little exchange. To be clear, most gun laws in US history were specifically written to prevent black folk from defending themselves against whites.

https://www.sedgwickcounty.org/media/29094/the-racist-roots-of-gun-control.pdf

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/bidens-doj-relies-on-racist-and-anti-catholic-bigotry-to-defend-the-atfs-gun-rights-ban-for-marijuana-users/

How would you recognize Brandon at a KKK rally? He would be the robed figure falling off the bike. Or falling up the stairs.

EDIT: The term "Injuns" is considered a racial slur, so I was asked to edit the term. Nevermind that the terms chosen were meant to highlight the US government's position on various demographics . . .

Full story at TheHill.com.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) leaders on Friday sued an executive of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (GNF) on charges of syphoning $10 million in donations to the organization for use as his own “personal piggy bank.”

Walter Mosley, an attorney representing BLM Grassroots — a separate entity from GNF — filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against GNF and GNF board member Shalomyah Bowers, as well as his consulting firm.

The initial complaint, seeking financial relief and a court order halting GNF’s use of the BLM identity, accuses Bowers of becoming a “turned usurper” and charging fees for BLM donors, which he then used for his own personal funds.

[...] “Global Network Foundation has been taken away from the people who built it,” she said. “Global Network Foundation is now led by a highly paid consultant who paid himself upwards of $2 million in a single year.”

Previously:
BLM Activist and Husband Indicted on Federal Fraud Charges
Amazon suspends BLM from its charity platform
BLM's millions unaccounted for after leaders jumped ship

Pilot faces criminal charges after threatening to 'intentionally crash' into Mississippi Walmart

A pilot who threatened to “intentionally crash” into a Walmart in Tupelo, Mississippi, Saturday morning was taken into custody hours later after landing the plane in a field.

The pilot, identified by police as Cory Wayne Patterson, stole the twin-engine Beechcraft King Air 90 from the Tupelo Regional Airport around 5:30 a.m.

Patterson called 911 from the aircraft to say that he was going to crash into Walmart, Tupelo police chief John Quaka said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.

Latest 'Bombshell' From Trump Raid Delivers Side-Splitting Hilarity

I’ve got an admission to make, and you may want to sit down for this. I’m ashamed to say that I got fooled by a headline today, not because I thought it was real when it wasn’t, but because I thought it was satire when it was real.

I know what you are thinking, but before you call me a moron, take a look for yourself and tell me this doesn’t look like something from The Babylon Bee.

F.B.I. Found 48 Empty Folders That Had Contained Classified Documents at Trump’s Home https://t.co/uJqPfBW58r

— Adam Goldman (@adamgoldmanNYT) September 2, 2022

Yes, you read that right. The FBI supposedly found 48 folders that were empty but once held classified information while raiding Donald Trump’s Florida residence. We literally went from “he stole the nuclear codes” to “he had some empty folders” in the course of a few weeks. If that doesn’t mimic parody, nothing does.

Just as hilarious as the original story, though, is that the lunatics on the anti-Trump right are actually running with this as a major bombshell.

I think the folders had copies of the Steele dossier, the pee tape, and Alfa Bank datahttps://t.co/KsVZhgKXEE

— Julie Kelly ?? (@julie_kelly2) September 2, 2022

Yes Trump packed all the boxes dunce https://t.co/s5Q5XjrBsR

— Julie Kelly ?? (@julie_kelly2) September 2, 2022

The insinuation here is that the bad orange man sold or destroyed the documents that were once inside the folders with classified banners. Yet, there’s no evidence of that, and I’m not even sure that claim is being made by the DOJ. What we are seeing is simply an inventory from the execution of the search warrant. It’s perfectly possible that the folders ended up in the boxes after having their classified contents turned back in by White House officials. More likely is that the folders were empty and just ended up in the jumble of documents taken by Trump.

Does anything encapsulate the deranged hysteria surrounding Trump more than seeing people losing their minds over empty folders? Here we are, though, with another news cycle being driven by another government leak that ultimately adds up to nothing. It’s almost as if the DOJ is purposely trying to harm the Republicans before the mid-terms by keeping this idiocy rolling, right? Nah, couldn’t be.

But hey, maybe we really will see Trump frog-marched from Mar-a-Lago for the grand crime of having empty folders. Would you put anything past the Biden DOJ at this point? I certainly wouldn’t, and the press is going to keep losing their minds at every mention of the former president no matter what happens.

Still, in the end, my money remains right where it’s been, i.e. that this is all politics and that the DOJ doesn’t want the hassle of breaking the Hillary Clinton precedent in order to prosecute a former president over empty folders. Take these “bombshells” for what they are, which are partisan tools to distract voters from Biden’s incompetency.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/09/02/latest-bombshell-from-trump-raid-delivers-side-splitting-hilarity-n621799

How to get a bug out of your ear

This morning I had the traumatizing experience of having a moth fly in my ear. This is something that you might have heard could happen. I know I've heard that you could get a bug in your ear, but never knew anyone that had it happen to them. It's definitely not an experience I would recommend. Though, if you are in such an unfortunate circumstance at some point in the future. The linked article has various ways to solve the "bug in the ear" problem. Thankfully, I had someone who was able to call a medical professional and get the advice. (While I was busy going bananas.) "Pour lukewarm water in their ear" and it worked. Hopefully you will never need this kind of information, but I thought I would share. Hope your day started out way better than mine!

https://www.cnsnews.com/article/national/susan-jones/sen-rubio-biden-democrats-arent-just-attacking-political-leaders-they

(CNSNews.com) - President Biden, some Democrats, and their media allies are not just attacking Republican politicians -- they're going after voters as well, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on Wednesday, the day before Biden's next political speech, this one to be aired in prime time.

Biden tonight will discuss his version of "the soul of the nation," a phrase of vague meaning that he's been using since before he became president.

"There's two things happening here," Rubio told Fox News:
"The first is, they're criminalizing opposition and dehumanizing their opposition. So this is what they've been doing now for a while.

"If you recall last year when they were doing this fake voter rights thing -- there is no voter crisis in Georgia, for example -- he (Biden) gave a speech basically saying that anyone who didn't support the bill they wanted was a Jim Crow segregationist, which is absolutely outrageous and absurd.

"Then we saw the attacks against the Supreme Court, basically calling them illegitimate -- that these weren't real judges. And we saw a guy come halfway across the country and try to kill a Supreme Court justice in Brett Kavanaugh. We've seen churches vandalized, we've seen pro-life groups being attacked and firebombed.

"The next thing you see is, any criticism -- you know, you criticize the FBI, you get all these news stories about unprecedented threats to the FBI. You criticize the IRS, couple days later, the IRS is saying, oh we're now being threatened.

"In essence, they've now establish this shield where if you criticize them, they will claim that you're putting them in danger. They, on the other hand, do not criticize Republicans. They try to dehumanize, defame and smear Republicans by calling -- not Republican officeholders, Republican voters, everyday people -- by calling them semi-fascists.

"Last week in Florida, Charlie Crist, running for governor once again here, said he didn't want the support of anyone who had voted or supported Ron DeSantis, which is the majority of the state.

"This is the distinction here, they're not attacking political leaders alone, they are attacking voters, which in Florida, is the majority of voters, because Donald Trump won the state by four points."

President Biden has been insulting Republican voters -- anyone who supports President Trump and his policies -- as "MAGA Republicans," and more recently, as semi-fascists.

“It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism,” Biden told an audience in Rockville, Maryland last week.

He told that same audience, "The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security, they’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace — embrace — political violence. They don’t believe in democracy."

Let us not forget that Biden got to define what Black means: "If you don't vote for me, you ain't Black!"

Now Joe Burden gets to define "the soul of the nation", which is funny, because he has no soul.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/30/lying-joe-biden-is-unfit-to-save-the-soul-of-the-nation/