Clavius

Amateur astronomer. Dad. Husband. Long time IT worker, primarily in the Entertainment Industry.

[Willis Eschenbach @WEschenbach]

HOW SOCIALISTS DO IT

Mamdani is rich.
Hasan Piker is rich.
Bernie Sanders is rich.
Jessica Tisch is rich.
Elizabeth Warren is rich.
El-Sayed is rich.
Ro Khanna is rich.
Gustavo Gordillo is rich.
28% of DSA members make over $100,000.

"Socialists", my aσσ …

w.

[Juanita Broaddrick @atensnut]

🎯 🎯 🎯

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

Sunlight at Earth's surface has surged since the 1980s.

Germany's Potsdam station shows 15 more W/m² of solar energy reaching the ground than during the 1970s dimming era.

The Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan all show the same trend. Austria shows even more: 23 extra W/m².

It's called 'global brightening.' As air pollution dropped, the atmosphere cleared and sunlight flooded back in.

That increase in surface radiation is 10 times larger than the forcing from CO2 over the same period.

In short: the air got cleaner, the sunlight stronger and the land a little warmer. The data say so, the physics say so, it's only the narrative that doesn't.

[Jesse Proudman @jesseproudman]

I spent the time. I put my name and credibility on the line to write a factual, honest argument for the Yes side of the voters' pamphlet because that's what voters deserve.

The No side? Their rebuttal tells voters that future income tax changes would go to the ballot. That's a lie. A legislature can enact or expand an income tax with a floor vote and a governor's signature. No ballot required.

The Secretary of State's office: "We do not verify arguments for truth or fact."

So the pamphlet mailed to every registered voter in Washington will print whatever the union-funded No campaign wants to say. No fact-check. No accountability. Just continued trickery and deceit to ram through their unconstitutional law.

Vote yes to stop the tax.

https://t.co/xY9QrGvMq5

[The Timeless Traveler 🇺🇸 @TimelessTrvlr]

The United States and Britain once came close to war over the San Juan Islands because an American settler shot a pig.

It sounds ridiculous, but the story explains why this group of islands between Washington and Vancouver Island ended up in the United States.

San Juan Island had been Coast Salish homeland long before either country started arguing over it. The dispute came from the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which placed the international border through the channel separating Vancouver Island from the mainland.

Two channels fit that description, and the San Juan Islands sat between them. Britain favored the channel east of the islands. The United States favored Haro Strait to the west. Both interpretations put the islands on their side of the border.

The Hudson's Bay Company established Belle Vue Sheep Farm on San Juan Island in 1853, strengthening the British presence. American settlers followed.

Then, on June 15, 1859, Lyman Cutlar found a pig rooting through his potato patch and shot it.

The pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company.

What should have been a dispute between neighbors escalated quickly. American settlers asked the U.S. military for protection, and Captain George Pickett arrived with 64 soldiers. Four years later, Pickett would become famous for a very different reason at Gettysburg.

Britain responded with warships.

By the end of August, 461 American troops were on San Juan Island with 14 field cannons. British naval forces nearby had 52 guns.

Both sides were armed, but neither wanted to fire first.

President James Buchanan eventually sent General Winfield Scott west to settle things down. Britain and the United States agreed to jointly occupy the island until the border dispute could be resolved.

For the next 12 years, American soldiers lived at one end of San Juan Island while British Royal Marines lived at the other.

The two garrisons visited each other for Christmas, the Fourth of July and Queen Victoria's birthday. They competed in athletic contests, drank together and held dances that included people from the local community.

The Americans stayed at what became known as American Camp. The British established English Camp on Garrison Bay about 13 miles away.

The border question was finally sent to international arbitration. In 1872, Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany sided with the American interpretation and placed the boundary through Haro Strait.

The San Juan Islands became part of the United States.

British Royal Marines left English Camp later that year. The last American troops eventually departed too.

The only casualty of the Pig War was the pig.

You can still visit both camps today. American Camp spreads across open prairie and shoreline at the southern end of San Juan Island. English Camp sits on Garrison Bay among forest and surviving historic structures.

Friday Harbor is where the ferries arrive today. On the western side of the island, Lime Kiln Point looks across Haro Strait toward Vancouver Island. Its lighthouse has stood there since 1919, and the shoreline is well known for whale watching.

Haro Strait is also the channel at the center of the old border dispute.

Stand at Lime Kiln Point looking toward Canada and you're looking across the boundary Britain and the United States spent decades arguing over.

That little bit of history is one of the reasons I'd want to spend time here. It gives you something else to notice beyond the ferries, water and islands.

I write about places like this in my newsletter. Subscribe if you like knowing the story before you go.

https://t.co/eW2kBY27EE

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy. Spoiled rich kids become socialists because they hate themselves for not being as successful and worthy as their parents, so they seize the power they couldn’t obtain. It’s all just self-loathing being projected onto society. Scammers.

[Steve 🇺🇸 @SteveLovesAmmo]

2021: Riots
2022: Riots
2023: Riots
2024: Riots
2025: Riots

2026: SPLC indicted, Act Blue under investigation, USAID defunded — no riots.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The rector of @ugent is Petra De Sutter (photo below). This is the person who is ultimately on watch as @nathancofnas is fired for having pointed to the unimaginable fraudulence of Jason Arday at @Cambridge_Uni. Petra, who is a biological male and a gynaecologist, is a trans "woman." I presume that Dr. De Sutter does not believe that human beings are a sexually dimorphic and sexually reproducing species consisting of two default phenotypes: male and female.

This story understates the Orwellian and Kafkaesque world of academia in every conceivable manner.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Five hundred goats saved the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and they charged a thousand dollars an acre, which is the best value the American taxpayer has had in a generation.

Simi Valley, California. Every spring the library and the Ventura County Fire Department hire a herd to eat the hillside. In May 2019 the contract went to a firm called 805 Goats, run by Scott Morris and his wife, and the animals went up to clear thirteen acres of chaparral.

They were moved round the slope in shifts behind a bit of electric netting and they took it to the dirt. Nothing was left standing that could be persuaded to burn. The Morris children name the herd, which is why the strategic fire defence of a presidential archive was executed by animals called Vincent Van Goat, Goatzart and Selena Goatmez.

None of them were briefed. Goats do not require a briefing. Put a goat on a hillside covered in flammable woody scrub and it forms its own view of the situation, usually from the top of something it should not be on top of, chewing, watching you.

The arrangement predates that herd. Ventura County Fire has been sending goats up there since 2012, when J.O. Goat Co of Bakersfield delivered 900 of them, and the annual tender is now competitive, which is a sentence about goats.

In October the Easy Fire came over the ridge and went at the complex. It split and burned round both sides. Flames got within thirty yards of the buildings. Seven hundred personnel were on it, aircraft were dropping water, and what bought them the time was a belt of ground where five hundred goats had eaten the fire's supper in May.

The buildings the fire never reached contained Air Force One and a section of the Berlin Wall.

A library spokeswoman said the firefighters told them afterwards that the break made their job easier. Scorched outside. Untouched within.

Fire needs fuel. Goats climb what a mower cannot reach and a tractor cannot hold, they carry no spark, they need no diesel, and they leave the ground dunged rather than scraped. The oldest fuel management system on earth, and California pays the market rate because nothing else works up there.

Which sits oddly beside the other thing California holds to be true, that ruminant livestock is a climate liability requiring reduction.

Same animal. Same gut. Same gas.

Hired by the fire department in May, indicted by the air resources board in June, back up the hill the following spring, and never once mentioned it.

[U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Bill White @USAmbToBelgium]

The United States Mission to Belgium condemns, in the strongest terms, Ghent University’s retaliation against an American scholar following his accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud.

The United States government regularly funds and supports research, academic exchanges, and other engagements with overseas universities. Dishonest, corrupt institutions that engage in, or reward, scapegoating mob behavior are not desirable partners for us. This is particularly true where the purpose and effect of the scapegoating is to punish accurate journalism unearthing academic dishonesty. We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University.

Bad-faith idealogues will try to make this a referendum on the content of Cofnas’s scholarship – or polemical distortions of it. That’s wrong. Free speech means that controversial views are protected. And Cofnas’s views were known to Ghent University when he was hired.

The ultimate purpose of freedom of speech is to overturn lies, fraud, and false ideologies. This is precisely what Cofnas was doing, and precisely the reason his home institution wants to silence him.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Clavius @camelopardalis]

@grok @skdh OK, explain it like I only finished one year of college physics

[Clavius @camelopardalis]

@grok @skdh Please translate into less technical language.

[Chris Martz @ChrisMartzWX]

Miami, Florida hit 100°F yesterday for the first time since July 21st, 1942.

On June 28th, 1877, Miami also reached 100°F. That was long before the urban heat island effect was significant.

In other words, this happens from time to time and it has little or nothing to do with climate change.

[Sann @san_x_m]

In the 1971 war, India lost a warship at sea. Its sonar had not been able to find the submarine that sank it.

India then tried to buy better sonar. The countries that made it would not sell.

So the Navy told one of its own officers to build it himself.

His name is Arogyaswami Paulraj.

He was born in Pollachi, a small town in Tamil Nadu. He joined the Indian Navy as a teenager and stayed for about 30 years.

The Navy spotted him early and sent him to the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi for a master's degree. His professors told the Navy not to stop there. He finished a doctorate.

After the 1971 war he was given the sonar problem.

He had no foreign help, no foreign equipment and no permission to buy either. His team built the system from the ground up. It was called APSOH. It went into the fleet in 1983.

It was not a compromise. It is still considered one of the best sonars in the world.

He went on to set up 3 national research laboratories in India, in computing, artificial intelligence and military electronics. India gave him the Padma Bhushan.

Then he left the Navy and joined Stanford University in America as a postdoctoral researcher, starting again at the bottom.

While running wireless experiments there, he noticed something odd in his results about how signals could be separated from one another. He followed it.

What came out of it is called MIMO. In simple terms, instead of one antenna sending and one antenna receiving, you use several at both ends at once, and the signals stop fighting each other and start carrying far more data.

That is the foundation of every WiFi connection and every 4G and 5G phone on the planet.

The chairman of the Marconi Society put it plainly. Every WiFi router and 4G phone today uses MIMO technology pioneered by him.

He founded a company on it, which Intel bought. He founded another, which Broadcom bought. He holds around 80 patents.

He has the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the Faraday Medal, and a place in the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The internet in your house is running on his idea right now, and almost nobody in this country knows his name.

[Natalie Winters @nataliegwinters]

EXCLUSIVE: I found dozens of taxpayer-funded researchers who worked on Pentagon defense projects or in U.S. weapons labs.

They later went to work for China’s military—including its nuclear-weapons complex and blacklisted military universities.

Here are their names. 🧵

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

You need to listen to every word of this. Senator Sheehy is spot on with the wildfire crisis. We lost my town because we couldn’t trim back some stupid milk vetch plants because eco-activists sue to block it. How much more life and property are we going to lose til we grow up?

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Noble People: We will rape your daughters. We will f**k your civilization. We will erase your history. We will force you to submit to our religion. If not, we will kill you and all of you disgusting non-believers.

American lawyers: Woah! That's illegal.

Noble People: Our religion allows us to do this.

American lawyers: Oh apologies. Carry on. We have freedom of religion here.

Civilizational Seppuku via Suicidal Empathy.

[Bjorn Lomborg @BjornLomborg]

As smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed parts of North America, much of the commentary portrayed it as evidence of an escalating climate crisis.

But the latest data tell a very different story:

By August 12, North America was at a record-low burn. Indeed, the world has burned unprecedentedly little, and is on track for the lowest burn in a century.

My latest op-ed for WSJ:
https://t.co/MTTzxn2anY
https://t.co/TjPwh2nJs6
Fire data: https://t.co/rQ3ahG6eYG