Daniel Loxton 🇨🇦

Publisher too. (They’re also my children’s books publisher.)

Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger Europe is in direct violation of the NATO Treaty. Americans signed up to protect free democracies, not authoritarian censorship states. I will travel to Europe next week to directly warn EU lawmakers that the @EU_Commission is putting their security and lives in danger. 米 Michael Shellenberger: You say it's not about censorship ("content moderation") but it is. You want to censor who gets verified. And you want X to give government-picked "researchers" special access to data so they can demand censorship. The Twitter Files...

Michael Shellenberger, University of Austin expert on climate, whales, UFOs, energy, free speech, homelessness, urban policy, trans medicine, the intelligence community, and 9/11 —and Hugo Chavez’s former PR flak— is going to Europe to lecture them on authoritarianism.

Regulating X violates NATO.

Movie you've watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR or Marvel
[harder mode: no movies your children watched repeatedly]

I don’t usually talk about stuff like dating and beauty in public, but this is well said. The manosphere promotes poor values. The people who will be attracted to those things are also often motivated by poor values (plus trauma, inexperience, etc). It’s a road to misery and emptiness for everyone

I don’t wanna sound too naive or utopian about this—people do gotta get by. But “learn to code” people get laid off too! No one can control the risk of financial devastation from divorce, accident, disease, etc. If you’re doing what you love, opportunities often arise from motivation and practice

This life philosophy has served me well (admittedly sometimes with extremely limited resources). Thing is, we can’t control what other people or the world are going to do anyway. Many of my conventionally “smartest” financial and life decisions worked out poorly!

In skeptical monster studies circles, “Montauk Monster” is used as a collective term for critiquing a particular type of ultra-low quality mystery / evidence, much like “blobsquatch.” It’s difficult for regular people to identify animals when their appearance changes through disease or decomposition

Heartbreaking!

Ah, super—low end cryptozoology x conspiracy theories at the top of the FDA

“[P]assionately ideological transphobia is, at present, almost exclusively an obsession of political and media elites.”

Cynical political operatives can gin up bigoted sentiments with the right wedge propaganda (sports), but as a class, trans folks aren’t that numerous, and don’t affect voters much

Perhaps best not to

Interesting! Glyphosate was our (vastly larger) competition back in my sheep vegetation management days. I’ve never held strong personal opinions about its safety either way, but this latest doesn’t look great for the “it’s probably fine” argument

As a political matter: no one needs to first become a staunch ally or “gender ideology” proponent to oppose pseudoscience, scapegoating, & bigoted propaganda & conspiracy theories targeting a vulnerable minority, or to oppose turning the might of the US federal government against individual freedom

Transphobes sell a false dichotomy of “gender realism” versus “gender ideology,” but the most common positions are more like “no strong opinion” or “this is none of my business” or “well, this part seems fine but idunno about this one other thing specifically”

“[P]assionately ideological transphobia is, at present, almost exclusively an obsession of political and media elites.”

Cynical political operatives can gin up bigoted sentiments with the right wedge propaganda (sports), but as a class, trans folks aren’t that numerous, and don’t affect voters much

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food”

Oh no! I’m so sorry to hear!

It’s sort of a funny bit of bureaucratic history that the US Air Force had like one guy at a desk somewhere working on this for years—just the exact opposite of men in black imaginings

Oh hey, they digitized the thing! That would have saved me a small fortune—hard copies were expensive! media.defense.gov/2010/Oct/27/...

The plausible connections are all covered by the Air Force’s second Roswell Report

I had fun learning about Kittinger’s feat many years ago, when I kinda-sorta ghost wrote a long Roswell article for meteorologist “Duke” Gildenberg, who was involved in all that secret balloon stuff. (He sent tons of notes, but it all had to get written up. I gave myself a “contributions by” credit)

It’s argued that precursor dummy drops got folded into confabulated Roswell testimony decades after the fact. Some think Kittinger himself was a specific mysterious character in the expanded lore

This seems right to me, thanks! I was kinda slowly getting there, but it’s tough to wrap my head around this stuff without any real technical knowledge

I love that Kittinger’s insane dive is connected one or another respect to Roswell flying saucer lore

It might be that you just go into a slightly more elliptical orbit?

I’ve got two pieces of non-mathematical half knowledge competing in my head: that one can change an asteroid’s trajectory over a long period with fairly small forces, and that reaching the sun takes a ton of energy because you need to shed a crapton of orbital velocity

Drag would get you eventually and you’d definitely burn up, but if we just hand-wave away the atmosphere altogether, could you get to the surface without drag, just by pushing off the ISS?

Naturally there are YouTube videos tackling my “jumping off the ISS” question, but the first I’ve watched doesn’t really get at it. It ignores the propulsion I have in mind (just physically pushing off toward earth with your legs) and introduces rarified atmospheric drag that will decay your orbit

In college we had a rule, “no quantum mechanics at the dinner table,” because we all wanted to argue about philosophical beeswax and none of us knew bupkis about quantum physics. I enjoy noticing that I don’t really understand Newtonian physics either