"We're already in a bad position, and La Nina puts us in a situation where fire-weather conditions persist into November and possibly even December," said Ryan Truchelut, president of Weather Tiger LLC. "It is exacerbating existing heat and drought issues."

The effects are already evident. Rising temperatures and an extreme mega-drought across the US West are fueling fires from Washington to Arizona. California is having its worst fire season on record, torching an unprecedented 2.5 million acres. And in the Atlantic, a record number tropical storms have formed by September, including Hurricane Laura, which killed more than a dozen people across the Caribbean and the US last month.

Across the 11 Western states, nearly 87% of the landscape was abnormally dry, a slight up tick from a week ago, the US Drought Monitor said Thursday. More than half of California is in drought. La Nina doesn't just mean more heat. It also raises the chances for a colder winter across the northern US and increases the prospects of floods in northern Australia and more rain in Indonesia and in Brazil's three southern most states.

On Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell another 632 points, but that wasn’t the real story. Far more noteworthy was the fact that the Nasdaq was down another 4.1 percent, and that means that it has now dropped a total of more than 10 percent since it hit a brand new record high last week.

Only two times since 2001 has the Nasdaq fallen more rapidly over three trading sessions. The index is now officially in correction territory, and the losses have been staggering. In particular, the six largest tech stocks have collectively lost more than a trillion dollars in value during this three day stretch… A trillion dollars is a serious amount of money.

Of course I am among those that are entirely convinced that a stock market crash is definitely coming at some point. At this moment in history, stock prices are absurdly overvalued. Back in 1990, the total value of all US stocks was sitting at a level that was approximately 60 percent of US GDP, and these days that number has been hovering around 200 percent…

In the short-term, we will see what happens. Ten of the 20 worst single day percentage declines in stock market history have happened during the months of September and October, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see some huge waves of volatility during the weeks ahead.

Stock market indexes have recently rocketed to record highs. The NASDAQ traded up at 12,050.46, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index traded at 3,588.11, achieving another benchmark. Stock valuations are the highest they’ve ever been, exceeding the crash of 1929 and the 2000 technology bubble. Just six stocks have driven this rally: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Tesla.

Should you worry that the world has never witnessed a stock mania that has seen valuations skyrocket during the worst economic depression the world has ever experienced? Yes, indeed, you should step back from the cliff's edge immediately.

“I can assure the American people that the senior leaders would only recommend sending our troops to combat when it is required in national security and in the last resort,” McConville, a Trump appointee, said during an online conference on Tuesday. “We take this very, very seriously in how we make our recommendations.”

The general added that many of the US commanders have sons and daughters that currently serve in the military and some of them “may be in combat right now.” The general declined to more directly respond to Trump’s allegations, saying the military should remain out of politics.

As the banking crisis unfolds, major central banks worldwide are totally losing control and the world economy is wandering around without any hope or direction. From 2006 up until now, major central banks, as the Fed, ECB, BOJ & PBOC, have expanded their balance sheets from $5 trillion to $25.5 trillion, and the biggest share of the extra $20 trillion that was created has been destined to prop up the financial system.

Simply put, central banks are recklessly and endlessly creating money out of thin air, which means, in real terms, that this money doesn’t have any value. Even with these extra $20 trillion, the world economy keeps crumbling down. and to make it worse, the global debt has massively increased from $125 trillion in 2006 to $280 trillion today.

The Financial Stability Board has released a report listing the financial institutions whose size and power are so great that their bankruptcy could influence in a systematic global crisis, what they referred to as “too big to fail”, meaning that the failure of one of these institutions could cause unprecedented consequences and endanger the survival of the whole financial system.

My disappointment, however, was soon tempered by two things:

- I gained information on how fear poisoning works.

- That human neurology is immensely variable, that there are exceptions to everything, and that if the whole picture were actually as dark as the most troubling findings, we’d have devolved into nothing but murderous monkeys long ago.

I barely need to say this, but 2020 has been The Year of Fear. I’m a bit amazed by the extent of it. There is a certain appeal to soaking up all the fear stories in normal times – our ability to look evil in the eye makes us appear vibrant – but 2020 has pushed far beyond that level. What we’re encountering is much more than simple fear porn, and there are certain outlets (including websites) that I can only describe as obscene.

This is more destructive than people realize.

I’m going to quote from Sapolsky, who is one of the best neuroscientists of our time. I’ll edit a bit to simplify and to remove the brain-area references, and will follow the passages with a few elaborations.

“During sustained stress, we’re more fearful, our thinking is muddled, we assess risks poorly, and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.”

Under a long stream of fear (like scary headlines), our thinking breaks down. Let me put that very simply: You may be very bright in essence, but when you consume hours of fear every day, you become stupid. And please understand: This is biological. Your brain operations become those of a stupid person.

In one of its latest reports, The Wall Street Journal, has uncovered a facility constructed in a remote area in Saudi Arabia for extracting uranium yellow-cake from uranium ore. Ironically, the facility is located near a solar-panel production area.

Such undeclared nuclear capabilities in the hands of the KSA are extremely worrying, in light of the abysmal Saudi human rights record, the last thing anyone would wish for is a nuclear armed KSA. Granted, yellow-cake is critical for nuclear fuel production, however, it is also used for the production of The Bomb.

The latter use is the greatest cause for concern, since Saudi Arabia, for all intents and purposes, is run by Mohammed bin Salman. The defacto ruler of KSA is well known for taking extreme, often wild, courses of action even when dealing with simple issues.

Alongside that quote is a photo of a man’s face covered in dust particles after sawing sheetrock wearing a Class II medical earloop facemask, with the caption, “Each particle of sheetrock dust is 10 microns. Coronavirus is 0.125 microns. Any questions?”

The coronavirus is nearly 100 times smaller than sheetrock dust. In other words, surgical masks cannot and do not block the coronavirus (or any other virus for that matter). Surgical mask boxes are even printed with the warning that the mask “will not provide any protection against COVID-19 or other viruses,” and “does not reduce the risk of contracting any disease or infection.”

Ditto for medical N95 respirator masks, as they only block particles larger than 0.3 microns. N95 masks are used in hospital settings to protect against tuberculosis, as the TB virus is 3 microns. You must, however, wear the correct size, it must be properly fitted to your face, and you must follow certain procedures when putting it on and removing it to prevent cross contamination.

OSHA respirators, used by construction workers and other industries, also screen down to 0.3 microns, but they are equipped with a one-way valve. So, it only screens the air coming in, not the air going out. So, you’re in no way protecting others when wearing such a mask.

Mr Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal. It was only the latest evidence that Mr Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.

“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation. Germany — a nation generally supportive of a government that has handled the pandemic better than most — may seem an unlikely place for Mr Trump to gain such a status. Few Western nations have had a more contentious relationship with Mr Trump than Germany, whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and scientist, is his opposite in terms of values and temperament. Opinion polls show that Mr Trump is deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans.

But his message of disruption — his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers — is spilling well beyond American shores, extremism watchers say. In a fast-expanding universe of disinformation, that message holds real risks for Western democracies, they say, blurring the lines between real and fake news, allowing far-right groups to extend their reach beyond traditional constituencies and seeding the potential for violent radicalization.

Mr Trump’s appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risks to German democracy.