Authored by Anna Mason and Daksha Devani via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Instead of slurping from their cereal bowls and scrolling through their phones, Glade and Bethel Smith’s children start their day by eating breakfast as a family followed by a reading of the Bible.

The Smith kids—Madeline,13, Everett, 11, Annabeth, 10, Vivian, 7, Penelope, 6, and Henry, 3—are eager to read the verses but wait for their turn, after which they clean up the kitchen and get ready to start their day.

“We homeschool our kids,” 41-year-old Glade, from Nebraska, told The Epoch Times. “None of our kids have a phone or any electric devices. None of our kids play video games. [Instead] our kids love to read and love to use their imagination.”

Homeschooling and Helping Out at the Farm

The kids begin their homeschooling day at 8.30 a.m. with their stay-at-home mom reading novels aloud that align with what they are learning at school, followed by a fun session of singing together.

The Smith children, who read at least 25 to 30 books per year, are always begging for one more chapter to be read, said Glade, who owns Family Beef Farm Box—their family business that ships dry-aged, hand-cut beef across the country.

If they complete their school work by lunchtime, the kids are encouraged to help their dad on the farm—with 3-year-old Henry, who isn’t in school yet, spending most of his time doing just that.

“He’s probably our most animal lover of any of the kids,” Glade said, adding that the little boy loves milking cows and is not afraid of getting in there.

On Mondays, the older kids join Glade to pack beef boxes.

In the last couple of years, the parents have instituted the idea of paid jobs, with each child getting paid some money for completing their daily chores.

“My oldest daughter is in charge of some calves that need to be fed,” said Glade, who is also a multi-generational cattle producer and bred cattle marketing specialist with Wright Livestock. “My son is in charge of caring for 60 chickens. One of my younger daughters is in charge of gathering and washing eggs.”

The Smith kids—who were introduced to farm life at birth— have shown a strong work ethic despite being young.

Their proud father recalled a work trip to Oklahoma with his son, Everett, who won a fellow cattleman’s heart with his diligence.

“We’re gathering several hundred head of cattle, sorting and loading trucks. One of these hard-working, blue-collar cattlemen was blown away watching my [son] running cattle around doing a good job and gave him a $20 bill,“ he said. ”A year later, my boy still has that $20 bill. That meant so much to him.”

Over the last year, Everett has worked laboriously in the muddy fields laying out heavy 30-foot-long tubes for irrigating crops in the scorching heat. His tireless efforts have won neighbors’ hearts with many asking Glade for his son’s assistance in irrigating their fields.

“I was amused because I found myself being my son’s secretary, as neighbors were calling, [asking] ‘Can your son come help me today?’” Glade said, adding that he believes his hardworking son will become a “hot commodity” to farmers in the near future.

Read the rest here…

This morning, the Supreme Court rejected former Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s appeal to bring back his civil rights claim against the former president.

Cohen alleged former President Donald Trump, former Attorney General William Barr and other federal officials put him back in prison as retaliation for promoting a book critical of Trump.

“[A]s it stands, this case represents the principle that presidents and their subordinates can lock away critics of the executive without consequence,” Cohen’s petition states.

As Sam Dorman reports for The Epoch Times, Cohen had argued that two lower courts wrongly dismissed a claim that former President Donald Trump violated his rights by ending his prison furlough during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Cohen’s petition, he had objected to a federal form that probation officers asked him to sign, which prohibited him from engaging with the media, including posting on social media.

At the time, he was writing a book critical of the former president.

Cohen’s attorney, Jon-Michael Dougherty, said the ruling “signals a dangerous moment in American democracy,” and raises questions about free-speech rights.

Both Trump and the Justice Department filed briefs opposing Cohen’s petition.

Cohen had attempted to claim a private right of action under the Supreme Court’s 1971 precedent in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents.

While that case upheld a cause of action related to unlawful search and seizures, Cohen asked the Supreme Court to consider whether it should apply to his circumstances.

He alleged that he faced “retaliation for his refusal to waive his right to free speech.”

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar similarly raised concerns about separation of powers and argued that Cohen could have pursued alternative remedies such as the Bureau of Prisons’ Administrative Remedy Program.

Trump told the court that Cohen’s attempt to expand the precedent under Bivens would disrupt the constitution’s separation of powers. He added that the doctrine of presidential immunity presented an “insurmountable obstacle” to Cohen’s claim.

Trump attorney Alina Habba said the Supreme Court had correctly denied Cohen’s petition, and “he must finally abandon his frivolous and desperate claims.”

Authored by Andrew Singer via CoinTelegraph.com,

A report that Chinese researchers have employed a D-Wave quantum computer to breach encryption algorithms used to secure bank accounts, top-secret military data and crypto wallets is at first glance a matter for deep concern. 

“This is the first time that a real quantum computer has posed a real and substantial threat to multiple full-scale SPN [Substitution-Permutation Network] structured algorithms in use today,” wrote Shanghai University scientists in a peer-reviewed paper, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on Oct. 11.

The paper talks about breaking RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) encryption, one of the oldest and widely used public-key cryptosystems.  

Details about the latest research have been slow to emerge so it’s difficult to say for sure how dire the threat is to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. The paper had yet to be released in English as of Oct. 11, and researchers weren’t taking any interviews, supposedly “due to the sensitivity of the topic,” according to SCMP.

But if the researchers’ results hold up, and can be duplicated by others, “it is a step forward” in the evolution of quantum computing, Marek Narozniak, a physicist with a background in quantum computing, and founder at sqrtxx.com, told Cointelegraph.

Would it mean that the password-protection mechanisms used in many industries, including banking and cryptocurrencies, might soon be vulnerable, as many fear, however?

“From the paper many details are missing, so it is difficult to provide a definite answer” with regard to its possible significance, Massimiliano Sala, Full professor and head of the Laboratory of Cryptography at the University of Trento, told Cointelegraph.

Much depends on whether the scientists were able to break RSA keys of a certain size — i.e., keys as large as those used by banks to secure customer’s savings and checking accounts today. “There is no evidence of that,” said Sala.

But if they had, it would be “huge,” he said.

Quantum computing, (QC), which uses atomic “spin” instead of an electrical charge to represent its binary 1’s and 0’s, is evolving at an exponential rate, many believe. But full purpose QC devices have yet to emerge at scale.

The D-Wave machines used in Shanghai, sometimes called quantum annealers, are really proto-quantum computers, or forerunners, capable of conducting specialized tasks only. 

D-Wave 2X 1000 Qubit quantum annealing processor chip mounted and wire-bonded in its sample holder. Source: Mwjohnson0

However, if and when universal quantum computers do emerge, they could threaten the elliptic curve cryptographic structure which has served Bitcoin and other cryptos very well until now, some worry.

It could be only a matter of time before quantum computers will be able to identify the enormous prime numbers that are key constituents of a BTC private key — assuming no countermeasures are developed.  

“However, we must keep in mind that D-Wave quantum computers are not general-purpose quantum computers,” added Sala. Moreover, D-Wave’s “ability to factor RSA keys was already established by one of my colleagues a few months ago,” he said.

Takaya Miyano, professor of mechanical engineering at Japan’s Ritsumeikan University, also questioned the significance of the scientists’ results — and along similar lines as Sala. 

The length of the integer that the Shanghai researchers factorized, 22 bits, “is much shorter than that of actual RSA integers, which is usually equal to or greater than 1024 bits, e.g, 1024, 2048, and maximally 4096 bits,” he told Cointelegraph.

Moreover, “the D-wave machine is a kind of quantum simulator for solving optimization problems, not a universal computer,” Miyano added. It isn’t clear that it would be able to conduct rapid factorization of large RSA integers in the real world.

Why prime factorization is important

Factorization is a mathematical process where a number can be written as the product of smaller whole numbers. For instance, 12 can be factorized, or written, as 3 x 2 x 2. Efficient prime number factorization has been called “the holy grail” of breaking a RSA public-key cryptosystem.

RSA is more than encryption, after all. It is also a ‘key’ generation scheme that typically involves multiplying large prime numbers. Two parties — a bank and its customer, for example — typically receive a set of prime numbers that are used to compute their private and public keys, Narozniak explained.

The process of actually generating private and public keys is complex, but if ‘p’ and ‘q’ are prime numbers, and ‘n’ is the product of those two prime numbers (i.e., n = p x q), then one can say that p and q are related to the private keys and n is related to the public key. 

The basic mathematical principle behind RSA encryption is that while it is easy to multiply two prime numbers, it is very difficult to do the reverse, i.e., find the two prime numbers that are factors of a product — and this becomes harder as the numbers get larger. 

Sala’s University of Trento colleagues earlier this year used a quantum annealer to uncover the two prime factors of the number 8,219,999 (i.e., 32,749 and 251) “which, to the best of our knowledge is the largest number which was ever factorized by means of a quantum device,” wrote the researchers.

In Sala’s view the recent Shanghai University paper is significant “only if they have found a way to factorize huge numbers.” 

The University of Trento researchers also cited the great potential of quantum computing to solve complex problems that have long remained “intractable” for classical computers. 

Prime factorization — i.e., the problem of breaking down a number into its prime factors — in particular, “is a good candidate to be effectively solved by quantum computing, in particular by quantum annealing.” 

Crypto keys are safe — For now

Let’s assume, however, that the Shanghai scientists really did find a way to use a quantum annealer to successfully breach cryptographic algorithms, including those like SPN which are foundational for the advanced encryption standard (AES) widely used in the military and finance. What would that do to the crypto industry?

“Symmetric ciphers such as AES-128 used for data encryption are not vulnerable to this kind of attack as they do not rely on number factorization,” said Narozniak.

There might be exceptions, of course, like if the cipher is a shared secret derived via RSA-based key exchange protocol, he continued. But “properly encrypted passwords and other data in general will remain encrypted even if the approach presented in that research scales up and becomes widely available — and if true,” he said. 

A history of unproven RSA claims

Narozniak cautioned against rushing to conclusions. “Before we re-evaluate our level of optimism, let us wait for someone to repeat and confirm this result,” he said. “Claims of breaking RSA are not so uncommon.” 

In early 2023, for instance, Chinese researchers said they had factorized a 48-bit key on a 10-qubit quantum computer, a claim “which still has not been peer reviewed,” commented Narozniak. 

“And two years before that Claus Schnorr, who is an authority in the community, made an honest mistake and claimed RSA to be broken. I personally take such big claims with a grain of salt.”

According to Sala: “Breaking RSA would mean that a lot of software should be updated, but not drastically changed,” because there are already-implemented standards that provide alternatives including elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), used to secure Bitcoin. He added:  

“More drastic would be the impact on credit cards and the like, which would have to be withdrawn massively, to radically change their software.” 

One might wonder why cryptocurrencies are not using RSA widely — as banks do. The crypto industry favors elliptic-curve cryptography because ECC makes it possible to achieve the same level of security with much smaller keys using fewer bytes, said Narozniak. This opens up digital space which enables chains to grow faster. 

Is Buterin’s ‘hard fork’ solution viable?

Elsewhere, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin suggested in March that a “hard fork” could subvert a quantum attack on Ethereum were it to arise. “We are already well-positioned to make a pretty simple recovery fork to deal with such a situation,” he posted on Oct. 17. Users might have to download new wallet software, but few would lose funds.

Is it really so easy, though? “I disagree that such a hard fork would be ‘simple,’” said Narozniak. And looking ahead, quantum-safe signatures, such ML-DSA, would need to have significantly larger keys and signatures compared with those used today. This could slow on-chain performance and raise gas fees, he suggested.

Executing a hard fork would “be complex, require broad community consensus, and may not restore all lost assets or fully repair trust in the network,” Samuel Mugel, chief technology officer at Multiverse Computing, told Cointelegraph. “Therefore, it’s crucial to implement quantum-resistant cryptography before such an attack happens to avoid this situation.”

Safeguards are needed

“We most certainly need to revisit our current cybersecurity defenses,” Christos Makridis, associate research professor at Arizona State University and CEO/Founder of Dainamic, told Cointelegraph. 

More attention needs to be paid to network capacity loads (i.e., defending against distributed denial of service attacks) and to passwords (e.g., to protect data from hackers) in a world with quantum computing. He further observed:

“One of the emerging views is that the expansion of quantum computing and generative AI has enabled offensive cyber more than defensive.”

The industry can’t become complacent. “Dangerous quantum computers will come, it’s just a matter of time,” Sala warned. 

“The blockchain world must get ready as soon as possible, by planning a roadmap towards a transition to post-quantum cryptography,” he added, developing safeguards able to resist attack even by a “fully-fledged quantum adversary.”

Speaking on the sidelines of the Singapore International Energy Week conference, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said he was “fairly bullish” on China’s oil demand, especially after Beijing rolled out a series of stimulus measures to revive the world’s second-largest economy.

“We see more demand for jet fuel and naphtha, especially for liquid-to-chemical projects,” Nasser said on the sidelines, adding, “A lot of it is happening in China mainly because of the growth in chemical needs. Especially for the transition, for the electric vehicles, for the solar panels, they need more chemicals. So that’s huge growth there.”

China, the world’s largest crude oil importer and second-largest oil consumer, is Aramco’s largest crude oil customer. Nasser noted that Aramco plans to increase liquids-to-chemical capacity to 4 million barrels a day, with most of the increase directed at Chinese markets. 

“China is a great market. We are investing with our partners,” he said, adding his firm has increased investments in China. 

He also noted that the demand for aviation fuel has been a “bright spot” in the country.

In markets, Brent crude prices were up nearly 2% to the mid-point of the $74 handle on mounting risks that Israel launches a counterattack on Iran. Last week, prices fell 7% as China’s slowdown dominated themes.

Nasser pointed out that Asia’s energy transition is occurring much slower than initially anticipated. He said that over decades, the Global South will increase oil demand as living standards rise—and this will eventually be followed by a long plateau.

“Most analysts agree that even when the growth in global oil demand stops at some point, no abrupt drop in overall demand is anticipated, and that stage is likely to be followed by a long plateau,” he said, adding, “Rather than an energy transition, we are really talking about energy addition.”

“If so, more than 100 million barrels per day would realistically still be required by 2050,” he said at the conference. 

“This is a stark contrast with those predicting that oil will, or must, fall to just 25 million barrels per day by then. Being short 75 million barrels every day would be devastating for energy security and affordability,” Nasser warned.

He said countries should use a mix of energy sources that push them closer to their climate ambitions, adding, “Our main focus should be on the levers available now.”

In a recent report, the IEA wrote that crude oil demand could slide by the end of the decade because of the “Age of Electricity.”

Despite forecasts of a sharp and sudden plunge in global crude oil demand, that’s not what’s happening. In fact, fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, will continue to power the global economy for decades to come.

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you”. – Orwell’s 1984

“They do not even need evidence to condemn someone they believe is guilty”. – Orwell’s 1984

Many people have joked that Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual, but now it’s not a joke. Orwell’s cautionary warning about authoritarianism, mass surveillance, and the suppression of free speech through the use of propaganda, censorship, and threat of imprisonment and torture, has come to fruition, especially since the Party’s rollout of the covid plandemic in 2020. Despite virtually every student being required to read 1984 at some point in their schooling, none of Orwell’s strident warnings seem to have been grasped. Therefore, the ruling oligarchy has used virtually every totalitarian tool in the novel to their fullest extent.

I don’t believe anything the government says, reports, instructs me to fear, or demands me to hate. I have felt this way for at least the last two decades. And my mistrust has proven to be entirely warranted, as our freedoms, liberties, and rights have been trampled upon and discarded by our overlords. With the proliferation of social media platforms, which should have vastly expanded our free speech opportunities and free flow of information, we’ve seen a massive effort by “The Party”/Deep State to censor anything that deviates from the approved state narrative and career ending punishment of those willing to contradict the lies, mistruths, and disinformation.

As Ron Paul stated many years ago: “Truth is treason in an empire of lies.” And this empire of debt, destruction, delusion, and decadence is sustained only by lies and false narratives at this pivotal point in history. The bloviating neo-con authoritarian tyrants fall back on the same old tired narrative of the U.S. being the beacon of light in a dark world, when it is the failing American empire spreading death, destruction, and disarray around the globe. Hanging their hat on the most powerful military in the world and having the dominant currency in the world is a losing proposition.

We spent over $2 trillion fighting the Taliban from 2001 until 2022 and were defeated by a bunch of third world goat herders. Most powerful military in the world, my ass. Every military conflict we initiate or sponsor becomes a clusterfuck. The U.S. initiated the Ukraine war in 2014 with the CIA overthrow of the legitimately elected government and we have poured over a hundred billion into this quagmire since provoking Putin to invade. We fund all sides in the Middle East debacle, that threatens to expand into WW3. This doesn’t even count the hundreds of billions wasted in the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Syria. But at least the military industrial complex extracted enormous profits as the empire crumbled.

The U.S. dollar is no longer king. Its demise is being signaled by the all-time highs in gold and crypto-currencies. Russia, China and their expanding coalition of BRICS countries are rapidly building a new economic paradigm that will further reduce the world’s dependence on the USD. But, these external forces are nothing compared to the death spiral initiated by our own corrupt politicians, central bankers, and government bureaucrat drones.

Your government added $500 billion to the national debt in 3 weeks, and is now adding at a rate exceeding $2 trillion per year, while paying $1.2 trillion per year in interest on the existing national debt of $35.8 trillion. For perspective, at the beginning of this century the national debt was $5.7 trillion, after 211 years as a country, and we were running small surpluses annually. Gold is always a good barometer of how well a country’s finances have been managed. It stood at $275 per ounce on January 1, 2000 and now is up by a factor of 10 at $2,736 today. The financial situation of this country is dire, but everyone continues to pretend everything is normal. It’s not normal and the crash will mark the end of this empire and possible the end of America as a country.

I’ve been committing thoughtcrime every day since I began my blog in 2009. I’ve been punished through demonetization, censorship, career damaging suppression, and the disdain of the majority of sheep in this country as nothing more than a crazy conspiracy theorist. It has been a lonely fifteen year slog, but my will to resist the government and their false narratives has never wavered or waned. My faith in the fact that the existing social order is always swept away during Fourth Turnings, keeps me fighting the good fight, day after day.

I feel the tide beginning to turn, as those in power desperately seek to retain their wealth, power and control. Their condemnations of truth tellers is losing its luster. Less and less people are believing their bullshit. The regime controlled media is now a laughingstock, as they flail about and are caught in their manipulative actions by the thoughtcrime brigade in the alt-media. With the censorship during the covid scamdemic they almost achieved Orwell’s dystopian vision, but they have failed. I know things are going to get far worse over the next several years, but they will not win. Their Newspeak strategy to eliminate our thoughtcrimes has failed. The truth will ultimately prevail.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”. – Orwell’s 1984

In an unexpected and somewhat bizarre new development out of Israel, government authorities say they’ve busted up a significant spy network, arresting seven Israeli citizens for gathering information on behalf of Iranian intelligence.

Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet announced Monday that it “successfully dismantled a spy network involving seven Israeli citizens who were operating on behalf of Iranian intelligence.”

The detained have been identified as Jewish residents of Haifa and the north, even including an IDF soldier who had deserted the military. They have been named in Israeli press reports as Azis Nisanov, Alexander Sadykov, Vyacheslav Gushchin, Yevgeny Yoffe and Yigal Nissan – with the other two names not disclosed as they have been deemed minors.

Shin Bet has said the group conducted hundreds of small operations on behalf of Tehran, mostly focused on photographing and monitoring sensitive military sites, even the locations of where Iron Dome battery sites are positioned.

They reportedly spied on Kirya defense headquarters in Tel Aviv and the Nevatim and Ramat David air bases, along with other bases of the Israel Defense Forces.

Some of these very sites were targeted by Iran’s Oct.1st ballistic missile attack, or else they have also been targeted by Hezbollah rockets from the north.

The tasks also allegedly involved the exchange of maps with their Iranian handlers, detailing locations of military sites. It is being called one of the “most serious cases” of Iran-related spying in memory.

“In return for their actions, the suspects were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of it in cryptocurrency, investigators say,” Times of Israel writes. The report notes further that “all of them have carried out espionage activities since the start of the war.”

One of the locations that the group of alleged spies are believed to have passed information to the Iranians on is Golani Brigade training base, which just last week was hit by a Hezbollah drone. Four soldiers died and dozens were injured when a kamikaze drone slammed into a crowded mess hall as troops were dining.

In recent years there have been multiple examples of Israeli intelligence operations on Iranian soil, either for assassinations or nuclear sabotage actions, but much more rare is to hear about Iranian intelligence operations conducted inside Israel.

Meanwhile, the US is scrambling to figure out the source of a recent leak of highly classified intelligence documents related to Israel’s preparations to attack Iran…

BREAKING: U.S. officials are investigating the apparent leak of two top-secret U.S. documents that show American spy agencies tracking possible Israeli preparations for conducting an attack on Iran, U.S. officials say. https://t.co/EzuNVZi33S

— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) October 20, 2024

Just last month there was a prior major alleged spying incident. At that time Israeli police identified 73-year-old Moti Maman from Ashkelon as being an Iranian intelligence asset. He reportedly expressed willingness to conduct an assassination campaign inside Israel at the behest of his Iranian handlers.

An Israeli Jew, Maman was accused of agreeing to receive one million dollars in total from Iranian intelligence if assassinations of some top Israeli officials were carried out. He’s described as having used frequent trips as a businessman in Turkey and in the region as cover.

Authored by Jane Yang via The Epoch Times,

How many people in the United States are moving to the Golden State and how many are moving to other states? Newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2023 provides a glimpse into these numbers.

The statistics released Oct. 17 showed that an estimated 422,000 people moved to California from other states and an estimated 690,000 moved to other states in 2023. This resulted in a net negative domestic migration of 268,000.

The top five destination states for Californians were Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, and Florida, with people moving to these states making up around 39 percent of the domestic migration out of California.

The top five states people left behind when moving to California were Texas, New York, Washington, Nevada, and Oregon.

The data also showed that of the other three most populated states in the U.S., New York state also had a net loss in domestic migration, while Florida and Texas both had gains in domestic migration.

In comparison, for the year 2022, census data showed around 475,800 people moved to California from other states, while 817,700 people moved out of state, indicating that domestic migration into and out of the Golden State slowed slightly since the previous year.

In 2021, California saw 433,400 move into the state, while around 841,000 people moved to another state.

Immigration Data

The census bureau data also show that although California lost more people to other states in 2023, it had a higher number of immigrants—an estimated 315,700 people from foreign countries—moving in last year, legally or illegally.

More than a million people moved from abroad into the four states with the highest population in the U.S. in 2023, including California.

In 2022, 303,100 people moved to California from abroad, and 188,700 people moved to the state from other countries in 2021.

California leaders earlier this year pointed to immigration as an important factor in California’s population growth.

The California Department of Finance reported in April, “For the first time since 2020, California has once again experienced positive population growth in 2023,” and one reason was the rebound of “foreign legal immigration.”

California’s population grew by more than 67,000 in 2023 to 39.1 million and the rebound of foreign legal immigration brought California “a net gain of 114,200 persons in 2023 compared to 90,300 in 2022.”

The department cautioned against comparing its numbers to those of the Census Bureau, since they refer to different points in time.

The state Department of Finance also stated, “Net domestic migration no longer offsets the population gains from natural increase and international migration.”

Mild weather across the Lower 48 has capped natural gas demand, keeping futures locked in a bearish sideways trend, unable to breach the $3 per million British thermal units level.

Goldman’s Thomas Evans published a note on Monday about the US NatGas market, pointing out that October’s unusually warm weather in the Lower 48 has led to the third-lowest Heating Degree Days (HDDs) for October since 1963.

“The big picture since the start of last week is that not much has changed except that we’ve rolled one week forward with warmer forecasts for start of November, and price has sold off to keep pace with the HDD shedding. 

… 

We gained some HDDs in overnight runs with a secondary trough digging into the East, but it is still really warm – we’re looking at the third lowest HDDs for October since 1963.  This warmth (in the East) could extend into the first half of November – the long range European models keep the warmer bias:

Looking at forecasts for this winter, Evans expalined to clients:

Nevertheless, as with last week, we could argue that we haven’t really learned anything new for December to March. We still don’t know anything about (proper) winter weather, and we still don’t know anything about winter production – although we seem to be asking producers not to give us more gas until at least December (and we dropped 2 gas rigs last week).

Total Demand should recover through the end of the month:

In NatGas markets, he advised clients on how to trade through December: 

Given how well the bear trend has worked for November, folks may keep pressing shorts into December – if we roll warm this will work, however CTAs look max short here and our metereologists assure us that there’s little statistical follow through from a warm Nov start into Dec (“the warmest November on record (2001) rolled into the 7th warmest December on record. However, the 2nd warmest November (2016) rolled into a colder than 30-year normal December instead – CWG”). Selling December $2.25 puts to own $3.25/$3.75 call spreads doesn’t seem crazy, especially as Z 95-75d call skew looks a little rich:

The January/April spread is now just 2c over where we expired last year, and last year we had a big November flush of production, a warm start to November, and a very warm December.  In fairness the spread was pricing weaker in mid-December ’23 before indications of SSW causing a PV intrusion started to crop up near the end of the month, lending strength to the January into expiry. Nevertheless, it still feels a little early to write off so much deliverability risk premia.

If you do think that winter is over and gas is doomed – or that any pop in weather will get flooded with production, then you’ll be worried about cash pricing next shoulder season. You might just generally worry about cash pricing in the shoulder season given continued solar and battery deployment – if so then the April/Octoberspread might be a better sell than the January/April.  We like it as a box vs the J/V 26 – we’ll need to be calling for Haynesville growth into X5H6, and JV26 might actually be tight, and if April/October25 rallies, you probably get a bit of a sympathy move in April/OctoberV26 to protect you (while being limited to the downside given you’re sat on the other side of November25/March26. Although we’ve done some of the work a little early, these boxes have tended to roll down.  Early blue maps probably hurt the trade, but there are better ways to get long gas in front of it (see above).

A separate but recent note from the Energy Information Administration and the Natural Gas Supply Association forecasted colder winter weather trends for the Lower 48. 

“We assume this winter will be colder than the last winter across much of the country, especially in the Midwest,” the EIA said.

NGSA wrote that November-March will be 7% colder than last year. Based on more frigid temperatures, the group projects around a 14% increase in residential and commercial demand and a 7% increase in industrial demand. 

NatGas futures trading in New York has been range-bound for nearly two years, primarily because of lower demand and abundant NatGas supplies. 

The latest data from Bloomberg shows that the average temperatures for the Lower 48 are sliding down the 30-year trend line. 

Winter is ahead. 

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Philip Zimbardo, the renowned psychologist whose controversial Stanford Prison Experiment explored how social situations influence individual behavior, has died at the age of 91.

Stanford University, where Zimbardo was a professor emeritus of psychology, announced his death on Oct. 18. An obituary on his personal website stated that he died peacefully at his San Francisco home on Oct. 14, surrounded by his wife and children.

During a career spanning more than five decades, Zimbardo researched a wide range of topics including why people are shy, why people choose to be bystanders in the face of wrongdoing, and how cult leaders exert mind-control over followers.

However, his Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 was the one that brought him the most attention—and enduring scrutiny.

For $15 a day, 19 male college students were recruited to role-play as either guards or prisoners in a mock prison set up in the basement of Stanford psychology department building. Zimbardo, acting as the “prison superintendent,” and his team observed the interactions, with minimal instructions given to the participants.

Initially, the participants were expected to interact peacefully. Yet, to the shock of Zimbardo and his team, the “guards” quickly began acting in a tyrannical manner and abusing their power. “Our guards became sadistic, and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress,” Zimbardo recalled.

The experiment, intended to last two full weeks, was called off after six days and, over the decades since, has drawn strong criticism.

Critics have questioned many aspects of Zimbardo’s stories, noting that only a third of the “guards” exhibited sadistic behavior, and that some “prisoners” might have faked their mental breakdowns to secure early release because Zimbardo failed to make it clear that they were free to quit at any time. Zimbardo’s dual role as the “prison superintendent” and head researcher, siding with the guards, also fueled ethical concerns.

Zimbardo defended his work, which was frequently cited by scholars seeking to understand the psychology behind atrocities including the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. In 2018, he emphasized that the experiment should be viewed as a “cautionary tale” about “what might happen to any of us if we underestimate the extent to which the power of social roles and external pressures can influence our actions.”

While recognizing that ordinary people have the potential to commit evil that would otherwise be unthinkable, Zimbardo nevertheless proposed the opposite: that everyone has the capacity to do unthinkable good. He termed this the “banality of heroism,” a concept suggesting that we are all potential heroes, simply awaiting the moment in life when we are called upon to perform a heroic act.

“The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in time,” Zimbardo wrote in 2006. “By conceiving of heroism as a universal attribute of human nature, not as a rare feature of the few ‘heroic elect,’ heroism becomes something that seems in the range of possibilities for every person, perhaps inspiring more of us to answer that call.”

In 2010, Zimbardo established the Heroic Imagination Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to prepare everyday people for a moment to help others in a time of need.

“If we lose the ability to imagine ourselves as heroes, and to understand the meaning of true heroism, our society will be poorer for it,” he wrote. “But if we can reconnect with these ancient ideals, and make them fresh again, we can create a connection with the hero in ourselves.”

Born on March 23, 1933, in New York City, Zimbardo grew up in poverty in the Bronx. In high school, he developed a lifelong friendship with fellow classmate Stanley Milgram, who went on to become a psychologist and conduct the famous Milgram obedience experiments, a direct inspiration of the 1971 experiment.

Zimbardo joined Stanford’s faculty in 1968 after teaching at New York University and Columbia University. He retired in 2003.

Zimbardo is survived by his wife of 52 years, Christina Maslach Zimbardo, a former graduate of his who famously persuaded him to shut down the Stanford experiment early after witnessing its disturbing effects firsthand. He is also survived by his son Adam, from his first marriage to the late Rose Zimbardo, and daughters Zara and Tanya.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has of late begun pushing hard new accusations that at least 10,000 North Korean troops are being sent to Ukraine where they will fight on behalf of the Russians.

South Korea’s spy agency had also backed Zelensky’s claim, chiming in on Friday to say that at least 1,500 North Korean special forces have already been sent. The spy agency says it has satellite images tracking these movements. But over the weekend the Pentagon refused to back the reports, with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin explaining  that he can’t confirm this narrative.

“I’ve seen those reports in the media. I can’t confirm those reports at this point in time. This is something that we will certainly continue to investigate,” Austin said Sunday.

Zelensky has been pushing the idea that the ‘enemies’ of the West have formed an axis to fight in Ukraine and ultimately push back NATO. He’s identified them as Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

He’s touted this curiously alongside desperate pleas for more urgent funding and weaponry from his Western backers. Kiev has especially sought long-range weapons for use inside Russian territory.

As an example of this, Zelensky said in a weekend video address, “Now we have clear evidence that people are being supplied to Russia from North Korea, and these are not just workers for industries, but also military personnel. And we expect a normal, honest, strong reaction from our partners to this.” He followed by emphasizing, “In fact, this is another state joining the war against Ukraine.”

But not even NATO leadership is backing these assertions. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte recently said there’s no evidence of an influx of North Korean troops into the conflict.

“At this moment, our official position is that we cannot confirm reports that North Koreans are actively now as soldiers engaged in the war effort,” he stated.

Some video clips of unknown context, origin or location have circulated online in the past days, purporting to show North Korean troops being outfitted by Russia’s military before battle.

Pundits have described one circulating video as showing a base in Russia’s eastern Primorye region, which shares a small border with North Korea, incredibly far away from front lines in Ukraine.

Raytheon salesman and US secretary of defence Lloyd Austin, couldn’t confirm whether North Koreans are in Ukraine fighting for Russia

But Zelenskys delusionsits in Kiev could?

Yeah right.. pic.twitter.com/CDqyjIuLFi

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) October 20, 2024

And yet it seems if there were such ‘proof’ – including alleged satellite imagery – then NATO and the Pentagon would vouch for it. But for now there are still official dismissals of the claim.

So far, the Western alliance is also resisting Ukraine’s demands to greenlight long-range missile strikes deep into Russian territory. Putin has warned that this would cross all ‘red lines’ and unleash major escalation.