As the planet warms, atmospheric rivers, those mighty storms that sweep across the West Coast, are undergoing transformative changes.

New research reveals that these storms will intensify differently in Southern California compared to the Pacific Northwest, bringing about varied regional impacts such as heightened flood risks and more intense storm surges.

Atmospheric Rivers and Climate Impact

Communities across the West Coast of the United States are likely to see significant changes in the powerful storms known as atmospheric rivers as the climate continues to warm. However, the effects will vary widely between regions. Southern California will experience one set of changes, while more northerly areas like Seattle will face a very different storm evolution.

Recent research led by scientists at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) reveals that warming conditions will amplify ocean evaporation, leading to substantial changes in atmospheric rivers in Southern California. In contrast, atmospheric rivers farther north will be shaped more by increasing temperatures in both the atmosphere and the ocean.

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1. Mump regime. Musk plus Trump. Mu...mp. The real centibillionaire and the fake rich person in the proper order.

2. Mump oligarchy. The regime is an oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few. Trump is the oligarchs' spokesman. He might stay or go. The oligarchs will remain.

3. Mump as illness. Physical illness: we are made sick and scammed blind (think of RFK Jr and Ramaswamy). Mumps is one of the diseases that will return without vaccines. Mental illness: Musk's idea of prosperity is that he hurts you and you thank him. See my work on sadopopulism.

4. In Mumptopia, Americans spend our time in front of screens, instructed whom to hate and worship by algorithms curated by immigrant software engineers. We die pointlessly young on an overheated Earth with the word “Mars” on our lips. The Mump mage performs a ritual rocket dance, leaping a few inches over our graves.

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(Rest of 10 in the glossary)

On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.

As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.

Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.

As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.

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When I started writing about corporate America a little over 20 years ago, the fundamental PR problem capitalism faced was that it had gutted so many retirement funds. Tens of millions of Americans had lost their nest eggs piling into the stocks of companies that had cooked their books, and the populist outrage was so intense and bipartisan that the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting reform bill, which made it a felony for CEOs and CFOs to sign off on SEC filings they knew to be fraudulent, passed both houses with just three “nay” votes in both houses. Still, fully half of Americans that year said they were “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with the size and influence of large corporations.

Eight years later, after corporate America had made trillions throwing millions of American families out of their homes under fraudulent pretenses, that number plunged to 29 percent, and today as Sarbanes-Oxley has been used primarily to pad the sentences of January 6th participants and prosecutions of white-collar criminals are at an all-time low, just 24 percent report being satisfied with the size and influence of corporations; another quarter of Americans—and 41 percent of younger ones, along with an apparent 47 percent of Princeton students—have told pollsters they are “satisfied” with the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

That’s because corporate America, and the political class that professionally enables it, is increasingly synonymous with needless death. Pretty much every story I have written this year seems to have revolved around this unfortunate fact.

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I’m just leaving that classic bit here for your enjoyment on Christmas morning. It never gets old. But if you’re interested, please click over to this great piece by Jeff Maurer breaking down why it’s so great. An excerpt:

In my opinion, this is still funny after 38 years, which is remarkable. One reason why it perseveres might be because it’s all wit and no cheats: It’s not a song or an impression, there are no costumes or pop culture references or celebrity cameos. It’s just a fucking guy sitting in a chair talking — the only “cheat” is that the guy is Steve Martin

So: The writing is doing all the work. And the writing is an especially clean example of the three steps of sketch writing, which are: 1) Establish the game, 2) Heighten the game, and 3) Blow it out.

Read on for what he means by that. It’s fascinating.

Donald Trump has threatened to acquire or invade, by Truth Social post, in just the last few days:

Greenland

Canada

Mexico

Panama

Additionally, the PayPal Mafia and associates have made major moves into El Salvador by installing Bukele who has been trying to replace the currency with Bitcoin, although was forced to scale back once they figured out crypto is terrible as a currency and it’s really only a gambling-“investment” device.

But it doesn’t take a professional analyst to see what’s going on here. This is the attempted takeover of North America.

You may ask: “Wait, are you serious??”

Take a look.
(Picture at link.)

There are three major ideological strains involved in this plan, in my view:

• Putin’s goal is to capture Europe and create a new Russian Empire with Moscow as the Third Rome that stretches across Asia and Europe. This is best expressed by Dugin’s “Eurasianism.”

• The PayPal Mafia’s goal is to destroy liberal democracy and create a North American Empire ruled by a technocratic, eugenicist monarchy with Elon Musk as emperor. Curtis Yarvin and the “Dark Enlightenment” is the effective guru of this movement.

• Anti-communists like Flynn and much of the real “deep state” in the government that prevented any accountability for J6, want to pull Putin away from Xi and create a theocracy to wage holy war on Islam and China. That’s why Catholic cults like Opus Dei and Knights of Malta are involved.




Delicate and mesmerizing, hole-punch clouds — scientifically known as cavum — are peculiar formations that occur when airplanes cut through certain types of midlevel clouds.

These mysterious voids, with their feathery, falling wisps, are caused by supercooled droplets freezing into ice crystals, a chain reaction that creates the stunning spectacle.

Mysterious Hole-Punch Clouds

About 8 percent of Earth’s skies are covered by mixed-phase midlevel stratiform clouds like altocumulus and altostratus, which typically appear as horizontal, layered formations.

Occasionally, particularly near airports during winter, these clouds develop an unusual feature where part of the bottom seems to “fall out.” This phenomenon creates a distinctive formation known as cavum, also called hole-punch clouds or fallstreak holes. On December 2, 2024, the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 captured an image of two cavum formations in the cloud layer over Wichita, Kansas.

A fallstreak hole (also known as a cavum,[1] hole punch cloud, punch hole cloud, skypunch, cloud canal or cloud hole) is a large gap, usually circular or elliptical, that can appear in cirrocumulus or altocumulus clouds. The holes are caused by supercooled water in the clouds suddenly evaporating or freezing, and may be triggered by passing aircraft. Such clouds are not unique to any one geographic area and have been photographed from many places.

Because of their rarity and unusual appearance, fallstreak holes have been mistaken for or attributed to unidentified flying objects.[2]