Europe has cleared out, the Western Sahara plume has finally slowed down to a crawl and the Leviathan low (as I call it remains in place over the Black Sea. Also there is an interesting burst of activity in the Horn of Africa.
As you can see in this animation there was some intense convection over the the #Ethiopian highlands and Sudan today, certainly more than we have seen for a fair few days.
Here we see a wider angle view of today' convection over the horn before sunset. This storm is continuing strongly into the night. Question of the day is, is this signalling the beginning of the big rainy season for the horn.
This animation relates to the wider picture in the tweet before last and it also relates to the big rains. In this animation at the end you see at the end that the picture stabilises with steady mid-altitude winds (10kms) from India to the horn.
The animation is from the GFS model and covers 10 days. These three show slightly low altitude winds 300hpa vs 250hpa in the GFS in 10 days time. All four models see the position stabilising - and I think this is what we are looking for to power the big rainy season.
Here are today's 12-day and 10-day rainfall forecasts for the broader region. The first one you see is the 12-day KMA forecast. The other three are 10 day forecasts. Significant amounts of rain are falling north of the 15 degree line both the KMA and CMC forecasts now.
And speaking of rain heading north this animation shows clouds sending moisture north from the large storm over the horn today.
Here are three 48 hour forecasts for #NorthAfrica which include the rain clouds shown heading north up the Sudanese Red Sea Coast in the previous tweet.
The Arabian Peninsula was quieter today than it has been since the beginning on June with just a few small clouds forming over Oman and the Yemen Red Sea Coast.
10-Day June 14th, accumulated rain forecasts for the #MiddleEast from the GFS, CMC & KMA weather models.
. @Arab_Storms has no new live storm videos from the Arabian Peninsula for today but he does have some spectacular ones from Europe over the past few days. The first is from Spain yesterday.
There were further significant storms in Northern Spain today. as you can see in this satellite animation. And while things are a lot quieter than they have been recently over Morocco, there is still a fair bit going on.
Also as these images show. Just because you can't see clouds, that doesn't mean that water is not moving through the area.
And finally, June 14th 16-day (GFS) and 12-day (KMA) accumulated rainfall forecasts for the Middle East.
The GFS is again showing rains over the Arabian Sea getting very close to Yemen. This 16 day forecast also shows very heavy rains in #Ethopia in bottom left.
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.