This morning's rainfall forecast is actually last nights (I am in the process of moving - a bit stretched. There is a lot going on.
Here we see the ongoing impacts of a #WestAfricaWaterPlume coming into the Middle East and 2 large storms, one over Syria and one over Medina
Here are last night's 10-day rainfall forecasts for North Africa which are nothing short of astonishing with respect especially to what is expected in #Algeria and #Mauritania. The largest forecast #DesertRain event to date.
This animation is from the is morning and shows the current status of both #WestAfricanMonsoon events. The Plume directed at the #MiddleEast is continuing and the one in the west Sahara is strengthening.
This animation shows the #MiddleEast stream yesterday morning, a little bit later in the morning.
This animation CMC model shows the next three days of activity in the West Sahara as modeled. If you look closely you can also see the activity over Chad and the Sudan directed at the #MiddleEast and the comparative size of the events is obvious.
But it doesn't stop there. This animation shows the remainder of the week and through next weekend. Note that the CMC is the most bullish of the models when it comes to this phenomena. Both about the strength of the plume and its resulting #DesertRain impacts.
.. and their three day counterparts. The skies are relatively clear over the area today providing possibly some needed respite from the massive levels of precipitation since April 13th.
These images from yesterday show the extent of growth underway in Eastern Ethiopia Sudan and South Sudan.
This image shows the same areas in January for comparison.
Moving to the Middle East here are last night's 10-day rainfall forecasts. The KMA model seems to be the first to be incorporating the #WestAfricaWaterPlume impact.
And here are the longer range forecasts. Again so far only the KMA is capturing the reality on the ground. And the impact seems to be mainly in the north of the #MiddleEast over the Levant. and Iraq.
Moving further east all the models are now in agreement about the arrival of a #BayOfBengal Tropical Storm mid next week over the Ganges Delta.
This animation from this morning shows the two active cyclone formation areas one in the Bay of Bengal which shows #Invest93B which has now strengthened from a disturbance to a depression.
Here are this mornings 10 day rainfall expectations for the area from the latest model runs. Note however that the predictions around the strength of #Tauktae fell significantly short of the reality. So people in the region should be planning for a possible catastrophic landfall.
Ok so this is a bit weird, but in a kinda chill way so do bare with me and and I will be happy to answer questions afterwards. It’s about a castle on a virtual island in a massive online role playing game called Evony and it involves a possible but speculative discussion about @elonmusk and @X.
All will be revealed but first a picture or four actually from the game. More will come.
Ok. So here’s what I think is going on in a nutshell. I think elonmusk has invested in a MMORPG: a “Massive Multimedia Online Role Playing Game” which is a bit of a mouthful, called EVONY.
I liked its Twitter ads and finally clicked. It’s huge. Someone else can do the business story here which I am sure is interesting too.
But the this bit is weird.
The mysterious knight on the red horse arrived this morning beside my castle and he had some treasure.
I hadn’t a clue who it was so I grabbed the treasure and tried to kill the horse and rider as that’s what you do. But we got smashed badly.
This interview with working class Uk financial markets savant Gary Stevenson - who has just published an autobiography - is seriously terrifying. He now has a @YouTube channel it seems and I’ll post a link shortly.
James O'Brien meets Gary Stevenson | LBC via @YouTube
His prognosis for the collapse of social democratic nation state finances due to the very sharp rise in income distribution inequality in the UK is horrific.
The consequences of unfettered transfers of money over decades due to neoliberal economics initially and more recently quantitative easing driven transfers of wealth from the middle class to the top 5% of the population is the cause of his concern.
It’s very hard to imagine what can be done politically to rebalance this.
Thomas Piketty’s thesis which among other things warned about all of this based on long term historical analysis of wealth inequality appears to be colliding with Western Civilisation in a manner that threatens the very foundations of that civilisation.
Gary’s YouTube channel which addresses all this is here.
Well this was actually pretty good… very little crazy right wing stuff - none in fact - some light criticism of wokeness and a consensus that Hitler was a socialist or communist dictator not a rightwing liberal fascist - mercifully no discussion of Greenland Panama or Canada
The bit at the end was actually quite nice and agreement about ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Importantly and probably deliberately there was very little to zero overt electioneering - a little bit of criticism of Weidel’s Spitzencandidat competition from Weidle but nothing extreme.
So nothing imo that could be seen as being election interference IMO - nor any reason for the DSA to be concerned or to get involved.
I didn’t even hear any particularly overt endorsement that went beyond that you might hear in passing in a podcast interview.
It ended with a discussion of mars - Elon’s favourite subject of conversation - which was quite interesting including a reference to the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy series and Douglas Adams.
From Weidel’s point of view though there was a lot of positive moderate exposure of her party and probably around 200k + listeners. Which may give her a bounce in the polls.
Also the final segment talking about space was quite delightful and genuine and portrayed the AFD Leader in a positive light.
And I’d say the two of them have both found a new friend.
This is an update thread on this OCCRP story on @StateDept and @USAID funding for several large investigative journalism projects which has had a lot of downstream impacts it seems. Especially in Europe,
The underlying original story about govt funding for investigative journalism projects was initially flagged by @ryangrim.
This organisation - OCCRP that not many people seemed to have been aware of - was responsible for a series of outstanding investigative journalism consortia projects including the Panama papers.
This is a leaked rough cut of the NDR (German public broadcaster north west Germany) investigation into what happened With the OCCRP story.
It was never officially published but was recently leaked publicly by Wikileaks.
With the benefit of hindsight arguably Wikileaks ought to be the international organisation that coordinates these large investigative consortia, though it’s not clear that they want to do so.
What is clear from the fallout from all of this is that the system that was in place for running these consortia is no longer fit for purpose.