David Eliff

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

— Thomas Jefferson

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On this day in 1778, a 25-year-old frontiersman conquered a huge chunk of what would become the American Midwest on Independence Day, and he did it without firing a single shot. Almost nobody knows his name, and he may have doubled the size of the country.

His name was George Rogers Clark, older brother of the Clark who would later lead the Lewis and Clark expedition. With only about 175 men, he made a grueling secret march through the wilderness to a French village called Kaskaskia in the Illinois country, then held by the British. He arrived at night on July 4 and slipped in completely undetected.

Here's the genius part. The village was full of French settlers, and Clark was carrying a piece of news they hadn't heard yet: France had just allied with the Americans against Britain. Instead of storming the place, Clark told them. He promised them freedom of religion and won over the local priest, Father Pierre Gibault. The stunned villagers rang the church bell in celebration, a bell now remembered as the "Liberty Bell of the West," and swore allegiance to Virginia. The next day his men took the nearby town of Cahokia the same bloodless way.

That quiet Fourth of July night helped pry the entire Illinois country loose from British control. When the war ended, American claims to the vast Northwest Territory, the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, rested heavily on what Clark had grabbed out here. One young man, 175 tired soldiers, and a well-timed piece of news, and the map of America changed forever.

[Kev Posobiec @KevinPosobiec]

It's the 4th of July, on the 250th, and you find out The Liberty Bell has the Bible verse Leviticus 25:10:

"Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof."

25 x 10 = ??? Ring That Bell 🇺🇸

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@BiblicalBeauty Watched it tonight!

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it ‘cancelled’ in the U.K. but ‘canceled’ in the U.S.?

Because we gave them that L in 1776.

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@Wilson__Wagers Ohtani hadn’t given up a run In the first all year til tonight. SMH

[dustin hamilton @dustinhamilto12]

95⁰ out today. Which would you want to play on?

[Peter Navarro @RealPNavarro]

In 1776, Americans looked at a statue of King George III, adorned in Roman garb, and saw something the British didn't:

Four thousand pounds of lead bullets.

[John VanderWal @VandyonTigers]

The Biggest Lie in Baseball Today

The biggest lie in baseball today isn’t that pitchers throw harder.
It’s that people who’ve never played the game at the highest level think they know more than the people who actually did.
I’ve got to laugh at the fucking know-it-alls on here.
Some of us spent 14–15 years in the big leagues. We played 162 games a year. We stood in against 85 mph, 100 mph, 101, 102. We didn’t read about it. We lived it.
Then you’ve got people who never played at that level, never stood in the box against elite velocity, never spent a day in a professional clubhouse, telling the people who actually did that they’re wrong.
That’s fucking hilarious.
Now we’ve got keyboard gurus and pitching-school salesmen acting like they unlocked some secret that’s never existed before.
Give me a fucking break.
Hard throwers have always existed. Triple-digit arms have always existed. Filthy breaking balls have always existed. What changed was the technology used to measure and report pitches—not the fact that freak athletes have been blowing baseballs by hitters for decades.
And here’s what these geniuses never talk about…
Modern hitting instruction has become so obsessed with lifting the ball and launch angle that we’ve created worse hitters. When your swing is built to hit underneath the baseball instead of driving through it, you’re going to struggle more against elite velocity. Pitchers look more dominant in part because the hitters have gotten worse.
But that doesn’t fit the narrative.
Instead, they pretend pitching schools reinvented the human arm.
The funniest part is the absolute confidence. They read numbers off a screen and think they’re qualified to lecture people who spent decades living this game at the highest level.
Here’s a little advice: before you tell someone who’s actually been there what big league velocity looks like, make sure you’ve done more than watch YouTube clips and stare at TrackMan numbers.
Until then, quit pretending you’re the smartest guy in the room.
You’re not baseball people.
You’re fucking dumbasses.
#VandyOnTigers #VandyDandyReport #DetroitTigers #MLB #Baseball

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@MattSnyderCBS @wolfbearpack You said they were all curmudgeons. We can have opinions but we are all old decrepit mongrols apparently. There are more hard throwers in the league now but that doesn’t make them pitchers.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On this day in 1776, the United States was actually born. Not July 4. July 2. That's the day the Continental Congress voted to break from Britain, and John Adams was so certain of it that he predicted July 2 would be the great American holiday forever. He nailed everything except the date.

The vote came down to the wire, and one man had to ride through the night to save it. Delaware's delegation was split, one for independence, one against, which meant the colony's vote canceled itself out. The tie-breaker, Caesar Rodney, was 80 miles away in Delaware. He got word that he was needed and rode all night through a summer thunderstorm, sick and in pain, boots and spurs still on, and made it into Philadelphia just in time to cast Delaware's vote for independence.

The other holdouts fell into place too. In Pennsylvania, the men most opposed, including John Dickinson, deliberately stayed away from the chamber so their colony could swing to yes. South Carolina came around for the sake of a united front. When the roll was called, twelve colonies voted for independence and not a single one voted against. New York simply abstained, waiting on permission from home.

And so, on July 2, 1776, it was done. The colonies had legally, officially declared themselves free. The next day Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that this day "will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival," with "pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations." Fireworks and all. He was describing the Fourth of July two days early.

So why do we celebrate the 4th? Because that's the day Congress approved the final wording of the document explaining the decision, the Declaration of Independence. The vote to be free happened on the 2nd. The paperwork got finished on the 4th, and history remembered the paperwork.

The country was actually born in a rainstorm and a roll call on July 2, thanks in part to one sick man who refused to let a tie decide the fate of a nation.

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@rationalyankee @PapaJoesBucket No. The guys today do not throw harder than Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, Rob dibble, mark wohlers, and I can keep going

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@rationalyankee @PapaJoesBucket I still cannot fathom how all
Of these people cannot read major league baseballs own website that states radar guns read out of the hand now and back years ago
They measured right before home
Plate. The speed hasn’t changed, the measurement has

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@UT4x_champs @KirkHerbstreit I never heard anyone say it was dying when I was playing baseball in the 80s and 90s. Not once did I hear that those guys couldn’t play like the guys of the 50s-70s and I was around plenty of guys who knew baseball.

[David Eliff @DavidEliff3]

@JRuffnut @rogerclemens Yeah there’s not a Yankee on the list

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The most metabolically ill country on Earth has a control group living right inside it, and the results are deeply inconvenient.

The Amish eat butter, lard, eggs, meat, and raw milk straight from their own cows, by the bucket. They cook in animal fat. They eat the saturated fat the rest of us were told to fear for fifty years. Their obesity rate sits around 4%. The country around them is closing on 40%, four in ten adults. Ten times lower, on the diet that was supposed to be killing them.

They are not dropping from heart attacks at the rate the theory demands either. Their overall cancer rates run lower than the surrounding American population, despite skipping most of the screening that is meant to be saving everyone else.

Now, honesty, because it matters. The Amish are not low-carb. There are pies and bread and plenty of sugar on an Amish table. This is no clean carnivore case, and I will not pretend it is.

What it is, is a controlled experiment sitting in plain sight across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Same country. Same supermarkets down the road. The Amish simply opt out of two things: the ultra-processed food and the sitting still. Their men walk upward of 18,000 steps a day. They eat food their grandmothers would recognise, and they move like their lives depend on it, because for most of history they did.

The animal fat was never what made America sick. The seed oil, the sugar, the packet, and the sofa did that, and the Amish skipped all four. They ran the experiment by accident, by living in the same country as everyone else and politely declining to join in.