Adel Anwar

Amplifying signal from the noise

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

4:00 yesterday Trump announces they’ve made a deal

About 2 hours later a man with a long history of mental illness who was literally involuntarily committed by the secret service last July somehow gets access to a gun and shows up and opens fire on the White House.

11 hours after that Benjamin Netanyahu decides to make a public post specifically about this shooting that is very reminiscent of his weird ass posts following Charlie’s murder. He made this one before ever even publicly acknowledging the very unpopular Iran deal.

And within hours, it looks like the whole deal is off again.

Call me crazy, IDGAF, this shit is not coincidence. I don’t know how they’re doing it, probably some kind of mind control or hypnosis but it’s them. I cant rove it but its them.

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

Let me explain what just happened today because it deserves so much recognition.

GalaxEye is a Bengaluru startup founded in 2021 by IIT Madras engineers. Today they launched Mission Drishti on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It is India's largest privately built satellite at 190 kg. And it carries a technology that no commercial satellite has ever carried before.

Normal satellites take photos of the Earth using optical cameras. Like your phone camera, but from 500 km up. The problem is obvious. Clouds. Night. Fog. Smoke. If any of these are in the way, the photo is useless. India has monsoon cover for 4 months a year. That is 4 months where optical satellites are partially or fully blind over large parts of the country.

The alternative is SAR. Synthetic Aperture Radar. Instead of taking photos with light, it sends radar waves down and reads what bounces back. Radar goes through clouds, through darkness, through smoke. A SAR satellite can image a flooded village at 2 AM during a cyclone when no optical satellite can see anything.

The problem with SAR is that the images look nothing like photos. They look like grainy black-and-white radar maps. A military analyst or a trained geospatial engineer can read them. A farmer, a disaster response team, or a city planner cannot.

Until today, if you wanted both optical and SAR data for the same location, you needed two different satellites, passing over at different times, at different angles. Then someone had to manually align and fuse the two datasets. Expensive, slow, and the data never perfectly matched because the satellites saw the same spot minutes or hours apart.

GalaxEye put both sensors on one satellite. Optical and SAR, fused into what they call OptoSAR. Three times more information than a single sensor. Processed onboard by an NVIDIA AI chip at 1.8 metre resolution.

Now in practice, during the next cyclone hitting Odisha, one satellite pass gives you a clear image of which villages are flooded, which roads are cut, and which buildings are standing. Day or night. Cloud or clear. In near real-time.

For defence, it means you can monitor a border area 24/7 regardless of weather. For agriculture, it means tracking crop health across an entire monsoon season without a single cloud gap. For infrastructure, it means monitoring construction progress on highways and bridges without waiting for a clear day.

GalaxEye tested their SAR tech on ISRO's POEM orbital platform. The satellite was tested at ISRO facilities. IN-SPACe provided regulatory clearance. NSIL, ISRO's commercial arm, will distribute the imagery globally. And it launched on SpaceX because ISRO's PSLV doesn't have the right orbit slot for this mission.

Yes, four IIT Madras graduates built a world-first satellite in 4 years in Bengaluru.

Take a bow!

[Darab Farooqui @darab_farooqui]

Look at this map.

Nagpur 45°. Ahmedabad 44°. Prayagraj 43°. Delhi 42°. The entire country is a single dark red mass. This is not a heatwave. This is a country that was told its forests were fine.

And this is April. Not May. Not June. The hottest months have not even arrived yet.

The past few days have been hell. So I did what I always do when something bothers me. I went looking for answers.

What I found was a policy con job that has been running for over two decades.

But before I explain what happened, let's clear some definitions.

A garden is not a forest. An orchard is not a forest. A plantation is not a forest.

A forest is a living system. Soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, mammals, decades of accumulated complexity, specific to its land and climate. It cannot be designed. It cannot be harvested. It regulates water, cools land, shelters hundreds of species. It takes decades to become what it is.

You can plant a forest. But it will take decades to become one.

In 2001, India's forests were disappearing. The Indian state, led by the Vajpayee government, faced a choice. Protect what remained, or change what the numbers said.

It chose the numbers.

The Forest Survey of India quietly changed the definition of what a forest means. Any land with 10% tree canopy cover and more than one hectare in area was now a forest. Your mango orchard. A coconut plantation in Tamil Nadu. A tea garden in Assam. Lodhi Garden in Delhi.

All forests, on paper.

The FSI will tell you that 10% canopy cover follows international norms. The FAO also uses 10% as its threshold. But the FAO's definition comes with a crucial exclusion that India's FSI quietly dropped. 

The FAO explicitly states that fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards, and agroforestry systems are not forests. The World Bank says the same. India adopted the number but discarded the exclusion. 

It took the cover of international legitimacy while gutting the standard that gave it meaning.

The government will also tell you this was never hidden. That it was publicly stated in every report, disclosed in Parliament. That is technically true. But a disclosure buried in a technical government document is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency. 

I did not know any of this until I went looking. Neither do most Indians whose forests, whose land, whose air this directly concerns. The con is not in what was hidden from experts. It is in what was never explained to the people it was done to.

This is not a technicality. This is the con.

It was a trick as old as power itself. If you cannot fix the problem, fix the measurement.

For ten years after 2001, Congress governed India. Two terms, two environment ministers, including Jairam Ramesh, one of the more serious ones. They saw the numbers. They knew what the numbers meant.

They did nothing.

Because the lie was convenient. India looked good in international climate negotiations. The fiction of a greening India served everyone in power, so everyone in power kept it. Congress did not create this lie. It simply chose, year after year, to live inside it.

The BJP is different.

When they returned to power in 2014, they came with something Congress never had. An absolute majority, and no coalition compulsions. They did not merely inherit the lie. They built on it. And in 2023, they legislated it.

The Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 removed legal protection from "deemed forests." Forests that existed outside the official definition but were ecologically real. 

Forests that Adivasi communities had lived in and depended on for generations. Forests that cooled land, held water, sheltered species. They were not on the right list. Since the amendment, forest destruction on Adivasi land has accelerated. 

The people who knew these forests best, who had protected them longest, now watch them being cleared. Legally.

CONT++

[Merlijn The Trader @MerlijnTrader]

THIS IS CRAZY:

🇺🇸 Weeks ago we started tracking a whale.

11 oil trades. 11 wins. Perfect timing. Every time.
BBC validated it. White House denied it.

Now a reporter asked Trump directly.
"Are you concerned about insider trading?"

Trump: "The world is a casino. It is what it is."

Trade on a tip from your friend. Federal prison. Front-run a war decision with $17 million. No consequences.

The President just told you the rules don't apply to everyone.

The game is rigged. He just confirmed it.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

Holy fucking batman!!

An Israeli-linked project called “Generative AI for Good” creates AI-generated portrayals of Iranian “victims” to stir support for regime change. They held a conference in New York last week, here’s a clip from one of their recent videos.

[Adel Anwar @adel]

@soleio @southpkcommons @rsms @playbit_ Would love to join. How do I get an invite?

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

UAE to Trump Administration: "You started this war; if we run short of USDs as a result of it, either you will give us USD swap lines, or we will be forced to start transacting oil and gas in CNY and other currencies."

-WSJ, just now

Via @ces921

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Savages

[Adel Anwar @adel]

@danmall TAX DAY

[Ethan Levins 🇺🇸 @EthanLevins2]

Apple has removed Lebanese village names in Southern Lebanon.

As Israel invades, they are already setting the state to justify occupation.

I’ve never seen something like this.

[Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE]

CONFIRMED: Netanyahu hijacked negotiations midstream, giving orders to @JDVance which led to a predictable failure - which is what Israel wanted…

[Najat @theafroaussie]

Thought Israel isn’t involved in Sudan?

Think again.

Avi Dichter, former Security Minister:

"For 30 years we have destabilised Sudan. It is important that Sudan be permanently destabilized by its internal conflicts."

“We had to weaken Sudan and deprive it of the initiative to build a strong and united state. That is necessary for bolstering and strengthening Israel’s national security. We produced and escalated the Darfur crisis to prevent Sudan from developing its capabilities”.

#KeepEyesOnSudan

[Mahmoud Massri | مَحْمُود 🇵🇸 @MahmoudMassri15]

One of the most terrifying scenes for children in the world.

A five-year-old girl was playing next to a school sheltering displaced people when suddenly a missile struck the area, resulting in a horrific massacre.

The girl ran in a state of extreme panic, hysterically, likely driven by the adrenaline rushing through her body, trying to escape the horror of what had just happened.

[Julian Andreone @JulianAndreone]

Members of Congress calling for invocation of the 25th Amendment, a thread 🧵:

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

25TH AMENDMENT!!!
Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization.
This is evil and madness.

[Mirza Shahzad Akbar @ShazadAkbar]

The world should bookmark and remember this moment, a statement from the US Secretary of State openly acknowledging the punishment of two adult women, not for who they are or for any wrongdoing of their own, but simply because of who they are related to.
This alone exposes the hypocrisy and double standards at play. It raises serious questions about how firmly the US truly stands by its stated principles on women’s rights and individual accountability

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Remember the largely blind, elderly genocide survivor from Myanmar, Mr. Shah Alam, whom immigration officers picked up and then dumped on the street near a CLOSED cafe in Buffalo in the middle of the winter? Mr. Shah Alam died trying to get home, and the medical examiner has found that he perished of dehydration and hypothermia. Immigration agents never bothered to call his family. I'm sure they didn't intend for him to die, but the incident speaks to the casual disregard they show for the lives and dignity of those they deal with. Having covered the Rohingya genocide, I think of this man who survived so much, then is admitted to America -- and perishes because immigration agents can't be bothered to make a call. https://t.co/Km4IxivPMj

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Firing the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war is always a sign that things are going great

[Esmaeil Baqaei @IRIMFA_SPOX]

Heartbreaking, cruel, despicable, and utterly outrageous: the American-Israeli aggressors have attacked the Pasteur Institute of Iran — the oldest and most prestigious research and public health center in Iran and the entire Middle East, founded in 1920 through an agreement between the Pasteur Institute of Paris and the Iranian government.
This is not merely another war crime committed as part of an illegal war; it is a barbaric assault on basic human core values.