Tuesday ‘Say it Ain’t So’ liars

So what do January 6 and the Panama Canal have in common?

We always associate informers with totalitarian states, especially the anonymous tippers that get people in enormous amount of trouble. Sometimes it’s malicious, like the well-known SWATting.  Call up the cops, tell them your neighbor has a gun, is making wild threats and beating his wife, pop a cold one, and watch the fun. Coming soon to neighborhoods near you, someone invoking a ‘red flag law’ can allege almost anything against someone, include the phrase “he has lots of guns he threatens people with” and watch said gun collection get confiscated.

Miguel Zapata was arrested Thursday in Chantilly, Virginia, in connection with providing materially false statements to law enforcement, according to an arrest warrant.

Zapata submitted at least seven anonymous tips via the FBI’s tip portal from February to April of 2021 that accused former government co-workers of playing a role in the attack on the Capitol, according to an FBI affidavit. The affidavit doesn’t identify Zapata’s government employment history.

The logs cited in the affidavit indicate his account used the unidentified service to visit the FBI tip line, to conduct research on some of the people he submitted tips on, and for a Google search of the term “fbi mole.”

None of the folks he accused were even in Washington that day; all were at work in Virginia. But imagine the fun they have had for the last few years!

And now we move to the Panama Canal, which  had more than its fair share of  drought in 2022.  That damned global warming! But a recent study raises questions:

That dryness reduced water levels at the reservoir that feeds freshwater to the Panama Canal and provides drinking water for more than half of the Central American country.

The group used more than 140 years of rainfall records collected from 65 weather stations — a “statistician’s dream,” said Clair Barnes, a researcher at Imperial College of London and one of the study’s authors.

To test whether climate change had a role, the team of scientists analyzed weather data against computer simulations precise enough to capture precipitation in the region. Such models simulate a world without the current 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times, and see how likely the lack of rainfall would be in a world without fossil fuel-charged warming.

The climate models did not show a trend similar to the drying that Panama experienced last year. In fact, many models show a wetter trend in the region due to climate change from carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Meanwhile, the analysis showed that El Nino reduced the 2023 rainfall by about 8%, and that it’s unlikely Panama would have experienced such a dry rainy season without the influence of the weather phenomenon.

Color me shocked – SHOCKED – that something other than climate change may be to blame. Unless someone wants to try to spin El Nino into a climate-change result?

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Dick Stepping