this video is a must-watch if you’re following the Florida Learjet crash: A meteorologist and pilot wanted to know how is it that a plane equipped with Doppler radar did not see the storm ahead? Turns out that the onboard radar can tilt and if the pilots had tilted it downwards, they would have seen that stronger storm building up. How did they figure this out? They took the actual National Weather Service Doppler radar data from the storm, then recalibrated and resampled it to simulate exactly what a Learjet’s onboard Collins WXR-840 X-band radar (the 3 cm wavelength system many of these jets carry) would have seen at 35,000 feet in −47 °C air. The result is striking. At a normal 0° tilt, the returns look like faint ice-phase echoes. A nothingburger, basically. Tilt the same radar down roughly 5° and it suddenly lights up with the stronger lower core of a rapidly intensifying storm directly ahead. NWS data shows the storm tops were around 31,000 ft just before the jet penetrated, shot up to 40,000 ft while they were in it, then collapsed back to ~33,000 ft after they exited. This confirms that they flew into a storm cloud with explosive growth and collapse with violent updrafts and downdrafts, exactly the kind of thing an X-band radar looking straight ahead at cruise altitude can easily under-sample. @EricBurrisWX walks through the radar geometry, the crystal reflectivity at those temperatures, and low-key gives one of the clearest, most technically grounded explanations out there.

China is the final boss of cancel culture because 99% of celebrities and global brands will prostrate themselves for access to the single largest consumer market on earth that has its own permanently online outrage mob with state backup

The way @MIT’s bloated DEI bureaucracy was weaponized to serve an imaginary feminist crusade and naked personal vendetta against a tenured male professor over unrequited love must never ever ever happen again. Federal agencies @NIH and @NSF fund and oversee a large share of MIT’s research (yes - your tax dollars!) to the tune of hundreds of millions annually, which means that they have enormous leverage through grant conditions, compliance reviews, and enforcement. It’s up to the government to throw their weight and pressure MIT to maintain fair processes that do not destroy top scientific talent. The obvious move is to withhold or condition funding on gutting the rot. @DOJ: Enforce civil rights statutes (including Title IX-related conditions on federal funding) and investigate potential patterns of discriminatory, retaliatory, or abusive HR/DEI processes that undermine due process or scientific productivity. Sabatini’s was a major career criminally terminated resulting in untold losses to science and to humanity. I’m not even being hyperbolic. The stakes are high and they demand accountability and widespread reform across all institutions of import @HarmeetKDhillon @DrJBhattacharya @regardthefrost

Another day, another China cancellation. First Mbappé, now Hello Kitty. And the worst part is, both La Liga and Sanrio completely folded. The target this time was a Japanese spy thriller TV show. Chinese state media claimed its torture scenes mirrored what Japanese troops did to Chinese fighters in WWII, and used it to whip up the usual frenzy about Japanese atrocities. Sanrio (Hello Kitty’s company) responded by killing its merch and marketing collab with the drama. What’s insane is the double standard. China pumps out endless anti-Japan movies and shows specifically to breed hyper-nationalism among its youth, but you don’t see Japan weaponizing its culture against China the same way. Yet China managed to get a beloved JAPANESE 🇯🇵 cartoon icon to yeet itself from a JAPANESE show made for a JAPANESE audience. It's just as infuriating as La Liga promising to develop an “awareness and communications protocol” to re-educate its league players on Chinese sensitivities. This is pure submission to an insecure foreign power. STOP BEING CUCKS and just exit the Chinese market ffs

The intense backlash for plainly describing Mao as a dictator is an exercise in psychological conditioning. Consider what is actually happening when activists insist that others affirm that biological males can become women. Publicly endorsing claims that contradict observable evidence and common sense imposes a significant reputational cost on the speaker. That cost makes defection more expensive and demonstrates that the speaker is a fully committed member rather than a free-rider who might abandon the tribe when conditions change. The more prima facie absurd the claim, the stronger the signal. In this respect, “Mao was not a dictator” functions in the same way. Its defiance of readily available historical evidence turns it into a sacred shibboleth - those who affirm it at the expense of their own credibility show that the group’s moral authority supercedes everything else. It is therefore a mechanism for sorting the compliant from the non-compliant. The people who readily accept the claim or remain silent while others are punished for rejecting it, are those who prioritize commercial access, relationships, and social standing above dignity and truth. The tremendous penalties incurred by Mbappé and La Liga for failing the slightest of slights on Mao’s legacy are meant to be noticed and internalized by everyone else. They illustrate the practical consequences of refusing to toe the line. What follows is a gradual narrowing of acceptable statements that foreign individuals can hold without commercial penalty. You may not be a Chinese citizen, but you will live under their moral codes and law. Each time someone subordinates evidentiary scrutiny to the demands of solidarity, this habit is reinforced. Repeat a falsehood often enough, and the distinction between what is useful to believe and what is true begins to erode. ✍️ Me in @TheSpectator: (btw I'm quite proud of the title IYKYK)

I can see why she tried to prevent these texts from seeing the light of day in court. They are incriminating. It’s hard to believe a woman would be talking like a horny sailor with the man she accuses of sexual assault. The facts of the case speak for itself

The intense backlash for plainly describing Mao as a dictator is an exercise in psychological conditioning. Consider what is actually happening when activists insist that others affirm that biological males can become women. Publicly endorsing claims that contradict observable evidence and common sense imposes a significant reputational cost on the speaker. That cost makes defection more expensive and demonstrates that the speaker is a fully committed member rather than a free-rider who might abandon the tribe when conditions change. The more prima facie absurd the claim, the stronger the signal. In this respect, “Mao was not a dictator” functions in the same way. Its defiance of readily available historical evidence turns it into a sacred shibboleth - those who affirm it at the expense of their own credibility show that the group’s moral authority supercedes everything else. It is therefore a mechanism for sorting the compliant from the non-compliant. The people who readily accept the claim or remain silent while others are punished for rejecting it, are those who prioritize commercial access, relationships, and social standing above dignity and truth. The tremendous penalties incurred by Mbappé and La Liga for failing the slightest of slights on Mao’s legacy are meant to be noticed and internalized by everyone else. They illustrate the practical consequences of refusing to toe the line. What follows is a gradual narrowing of acceptable statements that foreign individuals can hold without commercial penalty. You may not be a Chinese citizen, but you will live under their moral codes and law. Each time someone subordinates evidentiary scrutiny to the demands of solidarity, this habit is reinforced. Repeat a falsehood often enough, and the distinction between what is useful to believe and what is true begins to erode. ✍️ Me in @TheSpectator: (btw I'm quite proud of the title IYKYK)

> be a high-flying MIT scientist > discover mTOR > expected to win a Nobel Prize some day > have consensual relationship with younger female biology MIT professor > she accuses him of sexual harassment, coercion and grooming after he declines a long term relationship with her > MIT launches investigation > MIT lets the accuser’s allies help pick the judges and threaten the president if he wasn’t destroyed > lo and behold, investigation finds he violated MIT’s sexual relationship and anti-harassment policies > he gets fired and resigns under threat of termination > loses his lab > he sues her for defamation > jury awards him $6 million in defamation case and rejects her claims that she was coerced in any way How did 13 members of a civilian jury come to a different conclusion than @MIT? Answer: MIT’s investigation was not exactly independent thanks to coordinated female faculty collusion. It was a kangaroo court and the verdict was pre-determined

Pretty cool that General Motors was able to retool a car factory to make the outer shells of the Patriot missiles. They've managed to make the delivery to Lockheed just 22 days after signing the contract. (22 days!!!!! We still got it...🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸) Lockheed says this work normally takes months or years for the previous supplier (General Dynamics) to fulfill. There's a strain of neoliberal thinking that says if domestic carmakers can’t compete, they should just be allowed to fail. No bailouts. Just let Japan or China make cars because of comparative advantage or whatever. Imagine if we had believed that automobile manufacturing was something to offshore. It's now clear that the argument for preserving that industrial base is not simply nostalgia for a previous bygone era. It simply is the case that you cannot improvise precision manufacturing overnight once it has disappeared.

One of the most toxic fallouts from the Trump years is this reflexive need a lot of people have to automatically side with anyone going up against him. Mark Carney is banking on that and exploiting it hard. He knows the press will paint Trump as the irresponsible, blustery provocateur in the collapsing Canada-US trade talks, so by going all-out against Trump he scores easy political points.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The truth of the matter is that the playing field has been uneven and unfair between Canada and the US for decades. Canada imposes lofty tariffs - sometimes nearly 300% - on American cheese and milk once a tiny quota is filled, and they even give the Europeans better access than they give the Americans. Provinces yanked American wine and spirits off the shelves in government liquor stores. They hit US cars with extra tariffs and quotas. Softwood lumber has been a long-running game too. But the biggest problem is the Chinese back-door scam: steel, auto parts, and EVs from China get lightly processed or just relabeled in Canada, then shipped into America under USMCA rules so they dodge the tariffs Trump put on Beijing. That lets China keep flooding the North American market, undercutting American (and Canadian) workers, and basically laundering its way around the sanctions and trade barriers meant to stop its cheating. The Trump admin wants to end the free ride and make Canada shut down the transshipment loophole that China is exploiting. Carney walking away from a near-done deal and playing the victim just keeps Canada in bed with Beijing while American (and Canadian) workers pay the price.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ And he’s hoping you don’t look beyond the headlines and find out the truth

Btw this is not a brain fart: El-Sayed obviously knows the difference between circumcision and castration. He just can’t say it out loud without pissing off the trans activists who make up his base now. This is pure queers for palestine brain rot and it’s hilarious watching Muslim DSA types get caught out in non-Euclidean moral geometries that collapse the moment anyone measures them. Because he is locked into defending every absurd piece of gender ideology, he can’t actually answer Jesse Waters’ simple question of whether he supports gender-affirming care for under 18 year olds. So his pivoting to “what about circumcision” is just a tactic to appear as gender-affirming as he possibly can