A thread looking at the first month of 2022 from a very zoomed out perspective. A series of 30 day animations of satellite imagery from @NASA Worldview.
We begin in the South West Indian Ocean which is currently being monstered by a new Cyclone Alley.
@mentions@NASA Next stop the South West Pacific which has had several Cyclones, but thankfully none making landfall in NZ. << touch wood >>.
@mentions@NASA Staying mostly in the Southern Hemisphere we now look at South America and the extraordinary Amazon Basin which has experienced record flooding and had a remarkable impact this winter on both North and South Africa producing massive atmospheric rivers to the NE and SE.
@mentions@NASA In the Northern Hemisphere we begin in the North Western Indian Ocean and travel East. Here we see the Indian Subcontinent, Central Asia, the Himalayas and Western Pacific.
In both the Northern and Southern Hemisphere (except in the tropics) the flow of water is West-East.
The Tropical and North Pacific.... the largest expanse of Ocean on the Planet & source of a very large portion of the world's atmospheric moisture.
Nth. America's weather patterns this January were driven in large part by flows of Pacific and water south eastwards from the Pacific and north eastwards over Mexico, where they joined tropical water flows from the Tropical Atlantic and Amazon producing a series of bomb cyclones.
Europe has also had a stormy winter as these two sources of water joined over the North Atlantic and then proceeded Eastwards and South Eastwards where they had a significant impact on weather in the Middle East.
In the above animation you can see there was a brief period of fairly clear air over Europe in Mid January when the North Atlantic was less effected by tropical water flows, but that period of relative calm is now over.
North Africa and the ME was where this effort of climate observation began last year and in January focussed on Sahara water transport which produced a series of spectacular rain events over the Middle East.
The data set overlays used for this thread are provided by a new service provided by @NASA's enhanced geostationary satellite service which has an open data set of satellite images of the planet dating back to 2000. worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov
This can be accessed by clicking on the highlighted square (highlighted in yellow) top left when you open the home page.
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.