David Germack

@allenanalysis You know what they say…

A Great Example of Mentoring In June 1970, I was an SP4. I had been doing EOD in Vietnam for less than 100 days when I was confronted with my first 500-pound bomb to defuse. First Cav was setting up a fire support base they were calling FSB Camelot. While they were putting in M102 105 mm howitzer gun positions, they ran across dud bombs. So, SFC Fearnow and I were called in to get rid of the bombs. Two of the bombs had a red window, meaning they were armed. So, immediately we evacuated the FSB by having everybody move 300 meters away. Even if they both had shown green windows, we would treat them as armed, but when red was showing, there was no doubt. One of the bombs was only about twenty feet from a 105 mm gun position. If it went off, it would take the gun and the crew with it. It would destroy a significant part of the FSB. My mouth went dry as I took one bomb and Fearnow took the other one. He said that we’ll deal with the two bombs at the same time. This was my first big bomb to render safe. I used my bare hands to turn the fuze counterclockwise to unscrew the fuze from the bomb.  Luckily, the fuze was not on it too tight. I started turning. The threads were smooth. The fuze rotated. I could feel every rotation through my hands, through my whole body. It's like I became connected to the bomb, like we were one thing, and if it decided to detonate, we would become nothing together. Turn. Turn. Turn. As I unscrewed the fuze, I wondered what would happen if it detonated. Would I see the bomb swell and a bright flash? Would I still have consciousness without a body? The fuze came free. I stood up and looked over at Fearnow. He was grinning. "Not bad, Vining." "Yeah," I said. My voice sounded strange. "Not bad." Since my childhood, I had always wondered what it would feel like to disarm a large bomb when I saw a British bomb disposal officer do it in a movie. It was a large German bomb in a catacomb under London, England. We walked fifty meters into the jungle, placed both fuzes in a small crater, rigged them with C-4, and a priming system. The explosion was sharp and clean. Two red windows were gone. We pulled it together, no drama, no red windows. Just another piece of ordnance rendered safe. By 1600 hours, we were done. The bombs would be sling-loaded out by helicopter. I describe this incident with a lot more detail in “Blasting Through.” But for today, I wanted to use this story as an example of mentoring. At FSB Camelot, I recognized a great mentor in SFC Fearnow. He allowed me to defuse my first big bomb while he defused his bomb. We worked side by side. Close enough that he could help if I needed it, but far enough away that I had to do it myself. Mentoring doesn’t have to be complicated. It should be a natural extension of your leadership. It’s not so much about teaching or supervising. Fearnow was just there to assure me that I could do it but that if I ran into trouble, he was there. This was one of the first times I noted to myself how important mentoring is. I decided to catalog in my mind each time I saw a great example of mentoring like I had witnessed with Fearnow that day in June 1970. I figured that if I lived long enough, I would be the one on the ground with the most experience. And then I could pull out those filed away memories of good mentoring and help others practice the skill and build their confidence at the same time.

@NoahMF Nice! Welcome back to downtown. And great shot of my office (I’m in the TC Energy building).

🎶 Each time I find myself flat on my face/ I pick myself back up and get back in the race 🎵

Buttigieg: And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, “Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023.” That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need. So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

..... spacex misses LITERALLY every goal from getting to orbit to landing on the moon. Spacex fan..... 'Spacex hasnt failed to meet any Artimis contract obligations yet' 🙄🙄🙄

@WatcherGuru He won’t do it , it another game for more money He has always be like that

He has sent swarms of Officers to harass our people He has kept among us Standing Armies without Consent of our legislatures Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us Protecting them from punishment for Murders which they commit on the Inhabitants - Thomas Jefferson, 1776

1/ This is what @megbasham espouses when she ineptly tries to invoke Romans 13. The photo below is the from the Lörrach city archive and shows Nazis forcibly escorting Jewish citizens out of their homes ... while "good" Christian Germans watch from the windows.

"A man ran to the Broadview ICE facility today searching for his wife of five years. They were following the legal process, showing up for her court case, when ICE took her to another room and disappeared her. He tracked her phone to Broadview where the signal cut off. Police told him to just look up her name online. He sat in a parking lot weeping, confused, with no answers." 🥹😭👇

@lyndonbajohnson Sadly this is totally accurate. Those folks are totally bonkers.

TX SD9 no longer goes into Denton or Dallas Counties. It grabs more of Fort Worth than it used to, which makes it a pretty Hispanic (and decently Black) district, but the White Republicans in it are cuckoo-banana-pants -- Southlake. Westlake. Keller. -OS

@Acyn THIS is what he is sacrificing, and doesn't give a shit about.

1/ The quibbling over the definition of Christian Nationalism is silly. CN has a denotative definition and exists on a spectrum, which sadly gives room to CN adherents to try and defend it. However, the fastest and simplest way to define Christian Nationalism is by its fruit.

To the Idiot Who Killed Charlie Kirk: Against all odds, I hope you somehow come across this before they catch you, or I hope you’ll somehow read it before you take the coward’s way out by putting a gun in your own mouth. I want you to know that there isn’t a rational adult in this country who thinks you’re a hero. There is no reasonable person who is thankful for your all-time act of self-important, destructive idiocy. You have singlehandedly managed to make an increasingly unstable country that much more unstable, veering as we’ve been toward violent chaos, and the people who will suffer the most for it are those who were already fearing for our safety on a daily basis. You have given some of the worst people in society the propaganda they desire to push their hateful agenda against the least protected among us. I don’t care about your supposed reasons. Whatever your motivation happens to be, it’s definitely bullshit. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. If you did happen to care about this country and preserving our democracy and protecting the most marginalized, you’d have taken enough time to reflect on how this will only lead toward more violence and instability. With a modicum of common sense, you’d have reached the obvious conclusion that political violence solves nothing. It is always immoral. It always self-serving. It only leads to further violence and ultimately enables scapegoating of vulnerable communities. Committing acts of violence against those who disagree with us helps no one. Your narcissism is now a national cancer that will likely metastasize, and the rest of us will have the responsibility for doing everything we can to stop its spread. Your sociopathic fuck-up is now everyone else’s problem. While law enforcement is busy looking for your moronic ass, we’re going to be flooded with the most asinine commentary blaming everyone else for your stupidity. Trans people, Muslims, etc. Take your pick. We’re all being forced into this cycle of blame by shameless propagandists because of your selfish bullshit. You have helped no one in doing this. We are all now less safe because of you. I’m not supposed to root for anyone’s suffering, but I’ll make an exception in this case. I really do hope you suffer for all the pain you’re about to cause so many innocent people who didn’t get a say before you decided to pull that trigger. Fuck you.

@NoahMF Tell me you live in Houston without telling me you live in Houston.

My brother in Christ all the oil companies left downtown. It’s all lawyers in these tunnels. I’m begging you to not loudly talk about your case strategy.

Tune in next Wednesday for an @AmerChemSociety/@POLY_ACS Co-produced webinar! Experts include @Frank_Leibfarth, Damien Guironnet, and Luke A. Baldwin. Complete details at: acs.org/acs-webinars/l… #ACSPOLYwebinars

@EODHappyCaptain My neighbor EOD.

Ok, so are we watching this movie? What would it be called?