Today's recent rainfall update. 24 hours rainfall across Horn of Africa and Eastern Sahara. There are now reports of flooding in Sudan, which had very heavy rainfall yesterday.
And a live satellite image of the same area from @zoom_earth
And a three day 72hour satellite rainfall estimate for the same area. The green areas over Ethiopia's highlands show rainfall of 2-3 inches (50-75mms) over this period.
Further west the West Africa Monsoon is bringing unusually high level of rains to northern parts of Chad, Niger and Mali. Climate data via Wikipedia [Src. earthwise.bgs.ac.uk/index.php/Clim…]
In the red (arid desert) area (BWh) around 35mms of rain is expected. According to @Meteoblue 10-75mms has fallen in the past 72 hours.
This is a rain forecast plot for the same area showing 72 hours rainfall till Saturday midnight (from tomorrow) as the rain band moves west Nigeria sees significant rain and Mali's rains move north.
Climate data for Mali predicts around 27mm for the red area in an average July. Here we see 5-20mms of rain over 72 hours. earthwise.bgs.ac.uk/index.php/Clim…
According to forecasts a big burst of precipitable water is growing in this area as jet-stream winds carry wind south from the Mediterranean over Egypt and Libya.
The animation above shows PWAT anomaly, i.e. the level of variation form normal areas of water patterns at this time of year. This animation shows a view of the raw PAWT data. Rainfall forecasts show significant rainfall in Mali and Mauritania in coming days.
Watch this space. I will be keeping an eye on this. In terms of the climate change implications of all of this it is worth having a read about the "Sahara Pump Theory". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_pu….
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.