TCL

Draw your own conclusions.

[TCL @TCL]

“Sorry, no girls in the band.” -Tom Petty to Stevie Nicks

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

What is the biggest "what if?" in rock'n roll history?

[Chase Oliver @ChaseForLiberty]

When you lose Milli Vanilli you know you're scraping the bottom of the barrel.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[TCL @TCL]

@katiebakes For some reason, I have an enduring memory of watching Anthony Mason play when I was young and thinking, he runs like he’s wearing shower slides

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

They did, it was called America

[TCL @TCL]

My concern at this point: Putin will never “declare victory and go home”; there’s nothing pushing him to do so like, say, the bond market for the US Pres. So the war will just continue until Ukraine bombs the Kremlin, and then Putin drops tactical nukes.

[Yaroslav Trofimov @yarotrof]

Russia is so winning. Here is Russia’s main Black Sea port of Novorossiysk tonight. It accounts for about one-fifth of Russian oil exports.

[Werner Zagrebbi🇦🇿 @zagrebbi]

As summer comes into view, always remember that more Europeans regularly die in heat waves than Americans die in guns violence.

[Ivan @BarrioEnergy]

Do data centers spike your power bill? A peer-reviewed study in The Electricity Journal (Berkeley Lab, 2025) says no. 32 of 50 states saw real residential rates FALL 2019-2024 — the states with the most data centers led the drop. (1/5)

[Dominic Pino @DominicJPino]

Look at all the 🇺🇸 trade that's now happening without the Jones Act in effect.

And the Jones Act fleet is still fully booked. This is all extra shipping, from Americans to Americans, that's happening just because government got out of the way.

[TCL @TCL]

I suspect that if I grew up on LI, I’d call it “the train”?

[Dan Amira @DanAmira]

I’ve never felt more gaslit. I’m from Long Island. I’ve taken the LIRR my whole life. I’ve never once heard a single person pronounce it “lurr,” ever

[TCL @TCL]

@ryangben @AliceFromQueens People lost their shit when Obama slightly bowed to some Saudi sheikh

[TCL @TCL]

@default_friend Non-Jewish, 58. Agree.

[TCL @TCL]

Does everyone else’s mind work like this these days: Listening to Bloomberg Daybreak, they announce Putin is visiting China. First thought: Wonder what Kalshi contracts there are—ooo, bet there’s one on whether Xi shows up at the airport.

[Libertarian Party of Pinellas County @PinellasLP]

👔🇺🇸

[Jason, @jasonc_nc]

We have a chance to do the funniest thing right now.

[TCL @TCL]

@nmewrath Also you’ll be dead so big wup

[TCL @TCL]

I think @MrChuckD probably has something to say about this
10 years back tho

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

245 years ago today, a 35-year-old Spanish nobleman fired a single artillery shell that redrew the map of North America, broke British power in the Gulf of Mexico, and arguably saved the American Revolution. His name was Bernardo de Gálvez. He's not in your textbook. He should be.

When Spain entered the war against Britain in June 1779, the American cause was bleeding out. Washington's army was unpaid and shrinking. The Continental dollar was worth pennies. The British had taken Savannah and were preparing to take Charleston. France was helping, but France alone couldn't bankrupt the British Empire.

Spain could. And in New Orleans sat the man who would prove it.

Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid was 33 years old, the governor of Spanish Louisiana, a battle-scarred career officer who had been wounded fighting Apaches in northern Mexico and Algerians in North Africa. The day he learned Spain had declared war, he didn't wait for orders from Madrid. He raised an army of Spanish regulars, Louisiana Creoles, free Black militia from New Orleans, Acadian refugees, German settlers, and Choctaw scouts, and he went on the attack.

In three months he took Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Natchez. The next year he took Mobile. The British presence on the Gulf shrank to one last fortress. Pensacola, the capital of British West Florida, defended by Major General John Campbell with 1,500 redcoats, the 3rd Waldeck Regiment of German mercenaries, loyalist battalions from Maryland and Pennsylvania, and a powerful alliance of Creek and Choctaw warriors led by the brilliant mixed-race chief Alexander McGillivray.

Gálvez arrived off Pensacola in March 1781 with 7,000 men and a fleet. The Spanish naval commander, Admiral Calbo de Irazábal, refused to enter Pensacola Bay. The entrance was narrow, raked by British guns at Fort Barrancas Coloradas, and treacherous with sandbars. So Gálvez did something insane. He boarded his own little brig, the Galveztown, hoisted his personal pennant, and sailed her into the bay alone, in full view of the British batteries, daring the Royal Navy to sink him. The British fired and missed. The Spanish fleet, shamed, followed him in. For this he was awarded the right to put the words "Yo Solo," meaning "I alone," on his coat of arms by the King of Spain.

The siege ground on for two months. Gálvez was shot in the abdomen and the finger directing artillery and refused to leave the field. The British defenses at the Queen's Redoubt, also called the Crescent, held against everything thrown at them. And then, on the morning of May 8, 1781, a Spanish howitzer crew lofted a shell over the parapet. It dropped, by pure luck or perfect skill, directly into the open powder magazine.

The explosion killed roughly 100 defenders in a single instant. Waldeck grenadiers, British regulars, loyalists, all gone. The blast tore the redoubt's wall open like paper. Spanish grenadiers and Louisiana militia poured through the breach within minutes and turned the captured British guns on the inner works. Campbell knew it was over.

The next morning, May 9, white flags went up. By May 10 the entire province of West Florida belonged to Spain. Over 1,100 British troops marched out as prisoners of war.

The strategic consequences were catastrophic for Britain. The Gulf Coast was lost. The Mississippi was a Spanish river from source to sea. Britain could no longer reinforce its southern armies by sea from the Caribbean, and the Royal Navy's Caribbean squadron had to be redeployed. Five months later, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, in a siege funded in part by 500,000 silver pesos that Gálvez and the people of Havana raised in a matter of days to pay French Admiral de Grasse's fleet to come north.

Without that money, no French fleet. Without the French fleet, no Yorktown. Without Yorktown, no independence on those terms.

Gálvez was made Count of Gálvez and Viscount of Galveztown. The bay he charted in Texas still bears his name, Galveston. His portrait hangs in the United States Capitol by act of Congress. In 2014, he was made an honorary citizen of the United States, an honor given to only eight people in American history, including Lafayette, Churchill, and Mother Teresa.

He died of yellow fever in Mexico City at 40 years old, three years after the war ended.

Most Americans have never heard his name.