Clarke Thomas

Sporting photo taking wanderlust that geeks out on tech & loves fine food/drink.

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

Weird how Black Sheep's are represented by docile creatures. Yet Black Swans are represented by regal but violent creatures. 🤔🤔

[Vfynn_🥷🏼 𐙚 @Vfynn_]

🚨🗣️New: Luis Suárez reacts to Uruguay’s arrival in the United States for the World Cup, where the squad faced sniffer dogs and rigorous security checks:

“I’ve been in football a long time, and I’ve seen tournaments all over the world. But what we’re witnessing here with the USA hosting this World Cup is deeply concerning. Take the Uruguay team arriving — world-class players like Manuel Ugarte, standing there with arms folded, looking utterly bewildered as sniffer dogs go through their bags like they’re common criminals. That image says it all. These are ambassadors of the game, not suspects at the border.

This isn’t hospitality; it’s humiliation dressed up as security. You’ve got a Somali referee, one of Africa’s best, denied entry despite a valid visa — a man who dreamed of officiating at the pinnacle of his career, turned away at the airport. African and South American delegations facing extra screenings, visa chaos for fans and officials from qualified nations. This is the ‘land of the free’ rolling out the red carpet? It feels more like a fortress with razor wire.

The beautiful game deserves better than being turned into a political football or a paranoid checkpoint. FIFA chased the dollars — and there are billions to be made, no doubt — but they’ve sold the soul of the tournament to a host that treats global football stars and supporters like potential threats. Meanwhile, American taxpayers and host cities are left holding a bill running into hundreds of millions for security and logistics that FIFA largely pockets.

Football has always been about unity, passion, and bringing people together across borders. Right now, under this hosting, it’s being strangled by suspicion and overreach. The world is watching these scenes and cringing. If this continues, it risks leaving a bitter taste that lingers far longer than any on-pitch glory. We needed a celebration of the game — not a showcase of division. Something has to change.”

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Norway have qualified for their first World Cup since 1998, and the first thing they did was ship in their own cheese, fish and 6,000 oranges. A touching show of faith in the American food supply.

Start with the cheese, since they hauled 116 kilograms of it across the Atlantic. Dairy in the United States can come from cows injected with a growth hormone called rBST, which has been banned across Europe for years and does not even have to appear on the label over here. Norwegian cows never go near it, so the players would sooner bring their own.

The fish follows much the same logic. A good deal of American tuna is treated with carbon monoxide, sold to the trade under the lovely name "tasteless smoke," which fixes that bright red colour and keeps it looking fresh long after it has quietly stopped being so. Europe banned the practice in 2003, while America still permits it.

Then the oranges, all 6,000 of them, because the US happily lets growers spray the skins with Citrus Red 2, a dye the World Health Organisation's cancer agency calls a possible carcinogen, all so a slightly green orange can pass for a ripe one on the shelf. Europe will not let it anywhere near food.

So when a side with one shot at a World Cup takes a long look at the local cheese, fish and fruit and flies in a tonne of their own instead, you can understand how they got there.

A ringing endorsement of American food, obviously.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Nearly every company on this map traces to a single decision made in Pasadena in 1930.

That year the Guggenheim family paid to bring Theodore von Kármán to Caltech to run its aeronautics lab. His graduate students, a crew known on campus as the Suicide Squad, lit their first liquid rocket motor in a dry riverbed north of the Rose Bowl on Halloween 1936. That test site became JPL.

The aircraft industry stacked in around it. Lockheed, Douglas, Northrop, and Hughes built planes across the same basin through WWII and the Cold War. Each generation of engineers trained here, then trained the next batch, then sent their kids to the same schools.

The talent never left. That is the whole story of this map.

SpaceX headquarters sits at 1 Rocket Road in Hawthorne, inside the old Northrop plant that built aircraft on that spot for 70 years. The same building once turned out 747 fuselages. Elon put the rocket factory there because the workforce was already standing in the parking lot.

You can move a headquarters with a single post. No one has figured out how to move tens of thousands of aerospace engineers and the knowledge sitting in their heads. When the SpaceX HQ move to Texas got announced, this map barely lost a dot.

The startups are new. The cluster feeding them is almost a century old, and it compounds every year a fresh graduate walks out of Caltech or USC into the company next door.

[Lawrence Whittaker @ListerLawrence]

As a new Farmer myself who bought our farm 4 years ago, I can’t tell you how accurate Clarkson’s Farm actually is!

We spent £3.5m buying our farm and subsequently in the past 4 years we’ve had to spend at least £527,000 on farm machinery and much, much more on running the farm. We’ve lost money every year since so far, and have had challenges or refusal from local authorities everytime we’ve tried to diversity, or do something to generate extra income. I cannot stress how difficult it is for farmers who have to rely on farming for their only income.

We don’t get any subsidies or BPS payments at all (because we’re new farmers) and the grant system might as well be in Greek! As a CEO and professional businessman of some note, I felt I could easily apply for the grants myself. I kid you not, you’ve never seen a more complicated form - for ANYTHING!

The farm we bought had been in the same family for 3 generations, but it was sold because it was getting tougher to support the farmers growing family and now I’ve been in it for 4 years I can see why.

It’s a crying shame that more and more food is going to be imported and more skills lost because, for some unknown reason, the government obviously don’t value farmers. Sad.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

BREAKING: JD Vance just accidentally confirmed the DIRTY SECRET about Trump's Iran deal.

JD Vance went on CBS News and tried to spin Donald Trump's Iran deal. Instead, he CONFIRMED exactly how badly Trump got fleeced.

CBS correspondent Ed O'Keefe asked Vance point-blank whether Iran would have access to a $300 BILLION reconstruction fund. Vance's answer? Essentially yes — "funded by the Gulf Coast coalition so long as they honor their end of the obligation."

So let's do the math that the Trump administration desperately doesn't want you to do. Let's compare Trump's Iran deal to the one Republicans spent a DECADE calling the worst deal in American history — Barack Obama's.

OBAMA'S IRAN DEAL:
• $1.7 billion in unfrozen Iranian assets
• In exchange for a 98% reduction in Iran's uranium stockpile
• And strict limits capping enrichment at 3.7%

TRUMP'S IRAN DEAL:
• $24 BILLION in unfrozen assets and cash
• A $300 BILLION reconstruction fund
• Lifted sanctions
• In exchange for an "opened Strait" under Iran and Oman's control

Read those numbers again. Trump is handing Iran roughly FOURTEEN TIMES the unfrozen cash Obama did — plus a $300 billion reconstruction windfall — after starting a war that nobody wanted, spiking gas prices, and killing the existing ceasefire because he found negotiations "boring." AND the deal just kicks what happens with Iran's uranium stockpile to future negotiations!

Republicans screamed for YEARS that Obama "gave Iran billions" and "appeased the mullahs." They called his deal treasonous. They tore it up. And now their guy is giving Iran an order of magnitude MORE money for a far weaker arrangement.

But here's the part Vance accidentally revealed. He warned that Iranian hardliners would "over-emphasize the benefits that Iran gets while under-emphasizing all the things they have to concede."

That's PROJECTION. Because it's the TRUMP administration that's been over-emphasizing the "wins" while burying the $24 billion, the $300 billion fund, the lifted sanctions, and the fact that the strategic Strait would fall under Iranian and Omani control. Vance is accusing Iran of doing EXACTLY what his own administration is doing — hiding the real terms of the deal from the public.

The man who promised to be tougher than Obama on Iran just handed Tehran the biggest payday in its history — after dragging America into a war first.

$1.7 billion versus $324 billion. That's the difference between Obama's "terrible" deal and Trump's "great" one.

Someone should mention that.

Please like and share!

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

@mark_slapinski False belief that he could *win".

[Mark Slapinski @mark_slapinski]

I'm still very confused

What was the point of the war in Iran??

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

Signing a deal for a future deal, is like penciling an event.

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

Fox to acquire streaming platform Roku for $22bn - https://t.co/X9IbBRhjh6 WTF

[Alec Torelli | Poker & Decision Making @AlecTorelli]

Something I've been thinking a lot about lately that's very hard to admit and took me about a decade to accept.

America is by far the best place to get wealthy, yet one of the worst places to enjoy one's wealth.

The average family has a better quality of life taking home 60K a year in a quaint European town than 600K in even a relatively prominent city in the U.S., say Phoenix or Denver.

I say this after traveling the world full time since 2005, visiting 50+ countries and living in 7, as well as all across the States.

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

First time ever at a World Cup: FIFA forcing 3-min ‘hydration breaks’ in EVERY match, even in air-conditioned stadiums. Officially for player welfare, but we all know it’s ad slots for broadcasters. Turning football into quarters with built-in commercials. Momentum killer. Not a coincidence it happens in the USA.

[Juez Central @Juezcentral]

La FIFA preguntó a una japonesa que por qué recogen la basura en todos los estadios a los que asisten.

Ella lo explicó: "Es nuestra cultura. Pero también es una señal de respeto hacia el país y estadio que nos acoge y hacia nuestros jugadores. Para nosotros es un honor que nos reciban aquí y no podríamos dejar todo hecho un desastre".

Japoneses TQM 🫶

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Iran says the US has agreed to pay $300 billion in reconstruction funds directly to Iran as part of the deal Pakistan announced, alongside the release of $24 billion in frozen funds with $12 billion released before negotiations even start, per Mehr News.

This directly contradicts Trump's & Vance's claim that no funds will be transferred to Iran at all.

If Trump denies this is true, there never was a deal. If Trump confirms, the US has fully capitulated to Iran's demands.

[Vfynn_🥷🏼 𐙚 @Vfynn_]

🚨🗣️New: Thierry Henry reacts to the USA vs Paraguay stoppage for TV commercials:

“I’ve spent my entire life in this beautiful game — as a player at the highest level, as a fan, and now as someone who analyses it every week — and what unfolded during that USA versus Paraguay match left me deeply frustrated. The fourth official standing there on the touchline, arm raised high, instructing the referee to hold the restart… not for any injury, not for tactical reasons, and not even primarily for player hydration in that scorching heat. No. It was because the broadcast team hadn’t finished airing all their commercials. That’s not football. That’s a television show pretending to be a World Cup match.

The beautiful game is being strangled by greed. Players are out there in the heat, ready to restart, momentum building like a storm about to break — and we pause everything so the sponsors can cash in. It’s like stopping a symphony mid-crescendo because the advertisers want their jingle heard. Football didn’t conquer the world by turning into American sports with endless timeouts and ad breaks. We had rhythm, flow, emotion that flowed like a river. Now? It’s dammed up for dollars.

This isn’t about hydration or player welfare anymore — it’s a slippery slope where the soul of the game is sold piece by piece. Fans deserve better. Players deserve better. The referee on that pitch looked like a puppet on strings controlled from some broadcast truck. Enough is enough. We need to protect what made this sport the greatest on Earth before it disappears completely.”

The World Cup should be football’s cathedral. Instead, we’re turning it into a shopping mall with a pitch in the middle.

And here’s the question nobody wants to answer: if the fourth official is waiting for commercials, then who is really running the game? FIFA? The referee? Or the broadcasters?

Because the moment football starts asking advertisers for permission before asking the players, you’ve crossed a line.

The World Cup is supposed to be the showcase of football. Not the showcase of who paid the most for airtime.”

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

Gates is to Epstein, as Musk is to Trump. Rich nerds buying access to perceived clout....and then blowing up their clout.

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

https://t.co/weFJxZ3Ax6

Iran media says Tehran 'not yet' taken final decision on US peace deal

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

Why do employers think it’s OK to ghost job applicants? - https://t.co/wbejidarPr

[Troll Football @TrollFootball]

Fan sneaked tequila into the stadium in a flask disguised as a mobile. Mexicans are light years ahead of us.

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

@nickroberts317 Also need the coast lines

[Clarke Thomas @needcaffeine]

@JohnPetersonFW Tariffs on Canadian booze?