One day the One True Libertarian will appear and not set you straight.
(exiled to ) Taos, NM
Joined January 2016
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ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
Declassified photos from Polish government archives show a team of safecrackers inside the vault of the US consulate in Poznan one night in the early 1980s.
The men were specialists from Section IX, Department II of the Secret Service of the Polish People’s Republic. Throughout the Cold War they regularly penetrated foreign embassies and consulates throughout Poland at night when they were unoccupied. The team didn’t just break in once but entered many of the supposedly secure facilities on a weekly basis, disabling security systems, picking locks, and photographing documents.
One of the keys to their success was also their greatest danger: radiation. Section IX built powerful, portable x-ray machines to bombard vault doors and reveal their inner workings. Team members were exposed to radiation 500x greater than was safe, and many succumbed to cancer later in life.
In the case of the consulate pictured here, a curved steel rod holding a radioactive isotope was inserted through a tiny hole drilled below the vault door. X-ray film was then placed in front of the Mosler combination lock, and the isotope would reveal the inner workings of the wheel mechanism within approximately 90 minutes, all while bombarding the Section IX men with radiation as well.
Once they were inside, the Mosler file cabinet was not bolted to the floor so it could be tilted forward and the isotope again placed behind it, and the x-ray film in front. They only needed to use these methods once until the combination was changed.
Section IX was so good at their craft that Polish records show they broke into the US consulates in Krakow and Poznan 44 times in 1982 alone.
For episode 122 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I spoke with Tomasz Awlasewicz, author of Invisible: The Greatest Secret of the Secret Services of the Polish People’s Republic. We discussed the methods used to access the most secure rooms of foreign embassies and consulates inside Poland, and the heavy price the technicians and operatives of Section IX paid for their groundbreaking work. The episode is available now.
#coldwar #consulate #safecracker #radiation #xray
youtube.com/watch?v=Xp0IbveH…
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
Guy goes after Chicago firefighter with female officer standing right there. Firefighter smacks him in the face with a halligan tool 😂
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
The Russian Ministry of Defense can't meet December payroll. Officers not engaged on the frontlines are having December paid withheld until the start of the new fiscal year.
Everything is going to plan.
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
Tesla is celebrating Halloween this year by having a Cybercab autonomously drive around Austin with skeletons inside haha 🎃
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
Multiple fires raging at the Novokuybyshevsk oil refinery in Russia's Samara Oblast following Ukrainian drone attack carried out in the early hours of October 30.
In the video below, at least six separate piles of smoke rising from the territory of the refinery can be seen.
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
In 1917 a French microbiologist found a virus that kills only bacteria. The West forgot about it. A lab in Tbilisi didn't, even after its founder was executed in Stalin's purges.
This month, a startup bet AI can bring it back.
The microbiologist was Félix d'Hérelle. He called the viruses bacteriophages, "bacteria eaters." Each one hunts a specific strain and leaves your own cells alone.
In 1919 he used them on a 12-year-old boy dying of dysentery in Paris. The boy recovered.
A young Georgian scientist, George Eliava, met d'Hérelle at the Pasteur Institute and brought the idea home. Together they built a phage institute in Tbilisi.
In 1937 Eliava was arrested and shot.
Then penicillin arrived. Antibiotics were cheap, broad, and easy to mass-produce, and the West dropped phages almost completely.
Georgia didn't. Eliava's institute kept going for decades. Today, patients with infections no antibiotic can touch still fly to Tbilisi as a last resort.
Meanwhile, resistance caught up. In 2019 alone, drug-resistant bacteria directly killed 1.27 million people.
The catch with phages was always speed. You have to find the right virus for one patient's exact strain, and that can take months of searching.
On 20 October a California startup, Radical Numerics, said it had used its AI model to design phages for a patient with drug-resistant E. coli. They were given under a single-patient FDA approval after killing the bacteria in the lab. It's one case, and the outcome hasn't been shared.
But the bottleneck that made the West give up on phages, finding the right one fast enough, is exactly the kind of problem AI is good at.
We may have spent 80 years with one answer to antibiotic resistance sitting in a lab in Georgia.
Which abandoned idea would you bet AI revives next?
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
10k Starship launches/year is just from Starbase Louisiana
In a comment to the FAA, SpaceX says it wants to launch 10,000 times per year.
The FAA asked for input on where to build new spaceports and how to give rocket launches priority in US airspace. They're preparing for 10,000 launches a year by 2035.
SpaceX replied that rockets aren't the bottleneck anymore, the FAA's outdated air traffic processes are. They created their own airspace tool (Cleared) that most major US airlines already get for free.
They also noted that Starbase Louisiana is designed for ~30 launches and reentries PER DAY (!!)
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
Male bears will kill another bear's cubs on purpose, so the mom is ready to mate again in a few days instead of up to two and a half years.
Some mother bears figured out how to protect their cubs from it. They started living closer to people.
That cub with her paw up is learning to stand, which is how bears check for danger over tall grass. Brooke Bartleson, who filmed her, said cubs this age are so wobbly they flail their arms just to stay upright. That's the "wave." She tipped over a few seconds later.
She has good reason to learn fast. Park biologists at Katmai in Alaska figure only a third to half of brown bear cubs make it through their first year, and other bears are a big part of why. One study in Interior Alaska found 69% of cub deaths happened in a 17-day stretch in early June, right in the middle of mating season.
So researchers in Sweden set out to see what the successful moms were doing differently. They put GPS collars on 26 mother bears and tracked them from 2005 to 2012. Sixteen of them raised their cubs and ten lost them.
The moms who kept their cubs lived about 780 meters from the nearest people. The moms who lost theirs stayed around 1,210 meters away.
Male bears avoid humans, and the mothers seem to know it. The ones who made it moved toward villages full of bear hunters, because the woods full of male bears were worse.
Now go back and look at the mom in that first photo. She's got her head down eating grass while someone stands right there filming her kids. I can't tell you what was going through her head, but now you know who she was keeping an eye out for.
We all grew up being told to stay far away from a mama bear with cubs, and some of those mamas decided the best place to raise them was right next to us.
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
Any delivery driver who's worked a route knows when a stop doesn't look right.
A driver in Peoria, Arizona noticed 30 to 50 packages under different names piling up at the same house over just a couple of days and called it in.
That one tip just blew open an alleged $1.23 million fraud ring. Police and federal agents arrested six people, allegedly led by 30-year-old Hoài Nguyen Nguyen, after investigators say the crew used hacked Walmart accounts and stolen cards to place 15,500 orders, funnel the boxes through two boba tea shops, haul them to California in a U-Haul, and ship them in cargo containers to Vietnam. Officers even seized $35,000 in cash and $45,000 in gold bars.
As Peoria Police Officer William Kennedy put it: "Without that delivery driver, I don't know if it would have come across our radar."
Never underestimate the guy on the route who actually pays attention.
I had this happen many times when I was a driver, and I reported every single one. I hate thieves.
azfamily.com/2026/10/22/6-ar…
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
I used this treatment last year and my tinnitus is basically gone.
A groundbreaking treatment pairing auditory tones with mild electrical shocks rewires the brain to quiet chronic tinnitus.
Chronic tinnitus, the agonizing perception of ringing in the ears without an external sound source, affects millions worldwide and has long eluded effective medical intervention.
However, innovative research in neuroscience shows that bimodal neuromodulation—a technique combining audio tones with gentle electrical stimulation delivered directly to the tongue—can effectively quiet these phantom sounds.
By stimulating touch receptors on the tongue while simultaneously playing targeted acoustic signals through headphones, the treatment leverages the brain's natural neuroplasticity. This dual-sensory approach encourages the central nervous system to reframe its sensory processing, essentially retraining the brain to ignore hyperactive auditory signals.
In a landmark clinical study involving over 300 adults suffering from chronic subjective tinnitus, more than 86% of compliant participants experienced a significant reduction in symptom severity following 12 weeks of daily treatment.
Remarkably, these therapeutic benefits persisted for up to 12 months post-treatment, representing a major leap forward in long-term tinnitus care. Described by patients as feeling like a mild fizzing sensation on the tongue, this non-invasive therapy offers a promising and safe alternative to traditional management strategies, bringing renewed hope to millions seeking lasting relief.
source: Conlon, B., Langguth, B., Hamilton, C., Hughes, S., Meade, E., Connor, C. O., Schecklmann, M., Hall, D. A., Toal, P. D., & Lim, H. H.. Bimodal neuromodulation combining sound and tongue stimulation reduces tinnitus symptoms in a large randomized clinical study. Science Translational Medicine, 12(564).
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
EXCLUSIVE: California has spent $618 million on environmental impact reports for its doomed high-speed rail project. We printed out all 130,000 pages and tried to shoot a .50-caliber bullet through them.
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
June 17, 1825. Exactly 50 years after the Battle of Bunker Hill.
An estimated 200,000 people packed into Charlestown, Massachusetts, to witness an important moment in American history: the laying of the Bunker Hill Monument cornerstone.
Marquis de Lafayette was standing at the center of it all on his year-long farewell tour of the United States. He used a ceremonial silver trowel to help lay the foundation, applying the first course of cement to the cornerstone.
In Lafayette’s speech, he tied America's future stability to the survival of global democracy. His words during the ceremony called the American Revolution a global blueprint for liberty, rather than just a local victory. He predicted that the fires of liberty lit at Bunker Hill would eventually spread and consume the kings of Europe.
“Bunker Hill is the holy resistance to oppression, which has already disenthralled the American hemisphere, and the anniversary toast at the jubilee of the next half-century will be to Europe, freed.”
The monument stands as a symbol to the world that human beings are fully capable of governing themselves.
Daniel Webster was also there delivering a historic address. Rather than just focusing on the battle, he challenged Americans to think about their future legacy. He reminded the crowd that heroes from the previous generation, like Lafayette, had given us this great country, but the current generation bore the heavy burden of preserving, and maintaining it.
“Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also in our day and generation may not perform something worthy to be remembered.”
Standing side-by-side, they symbolically passed the baton of freedom. Lafayette represented the blessings of the founders, while Webster challenged Americans of the future to never forget what they fought for, telling Americans that their new duty was not to win freedom, but to preserve it.
🇺🇸 Robert E. Lee. Edgar Allan Poe. Walt Whitman. Lafayette’s farewell tour collected a unique set of names.
In Alexandria, on October 16, 1824, about 2,000 militia marched Lafayette down King Street. Seventeen-year-old Robert E. Lee was in that column. He already had his West Point appointment.
In Richmond, 15-year-old Edgar Allan Poe turned out as a lieutenant in the Junior Morgan Riflemen, the honor guard picked for the visit. For the occasion the boys were allowed to draw arms from the state armory. A month later he co-signed a letter to the governor asking to keep them. His first surviving letter.
In Baltimore, Lafayette personally asked for Poe’s grandfather, David Poe Sr. During the war he had given Lafayette $500 to help the troops, and his wife had cut 500 pairs of pantaloons for them too. Lafayette never forgot. He was informed David had died, and visited the widow the next day.
On July 4, 1825, at a library groundbreaking in Brooklyn, Lafayette picked up a 6-year-old, carried him, and kissed him on the cheek. The boy was Walt Whitman. He never forgot it.
He also sat with Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. Jefferson wept when they embraced.
He went to Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. He went down into the vault alone, and came out in tears. Then he took his son, Georges, and his secretary in with him.
Forty years earlier Washington had written that he did not expect to see him again. He was right.
ThadiusVanLandingham retweeted
🇺🇸 This is Ralph Rose. He was the U.S. flag bearer at the 1908 London Olympics. Every nation that marched past King Edward VII dipped its flag. Except Ralph and the United States.
Rose, a big shot-putter, kept the Stars and Stripes upright as the team passed the royal box.
The line later attributed to teammate Martin Sheridan, “This flag dips to no earthly king,” is almost certainly legend. The act itself was real.
The practice wasn’t locked in right away. Americans dipped at some Games and held the flag high at others. It became fixed policy ahead of the 1936 Berlin Olympics so the flag would not be lowered before Adolf Hitler.
In 1942 Congress wrote it into the U.S. Flag Code: the flag “should not be dipped to any person or thing.”
It has stayed that way. When the American flag passes a head of state at an Olympic opening ceremony, it stays aloft.
Thanks, Ralph! 🫡🇺🇸
