William Meinert

@ContrarianSaver @WarrenGLewis1 Have to disagree. I paid for school with a part time job back in the early 90's. Now I had to take out a home loan to finish my degree. My son is paying much more per hour then I did.

@WarrenGLewis1 School debt is lower than it’s been in decades. Don’t believe everything you read on social media

I’m not saying “no one should go into the trades” - just that the media (especially social media) underplays the downsides: - takes a physical toll on your body; work life is limited - virtually no upside unless you start your own business - job gets harder as you age; white collar jobs get easier and better compensated with experience You can be a plumber if you want just please - don’t fall for the hype

@warrioraspie Well done. Solid, practical advice that helps everyone, not just veterans.

The majority of my writing is ghost writing content for friends. I would like to expand outside of that. That requires judgement and honesty. I am going to attach an article that means a lot to me personally. I would appreciate some honest input on it. It's very niche but I would appreciate input in and out of the veteran sphere. warrioraspie.com/from-dysfuncti…

@WiseguyThreeOne When told to do a poem, I chose "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner". Short, easy to memorize, and even drew an illustration of a B-17. I'd probably wind up meeting with the school therapist today.

Minor example. Fourth grade English, we had to do an "informative lecture" on any particular subject. Me being me, "Oh, fuck, was that today?" Me also being what would now be termed an autistic weirdo with a particular interest in WWII, I had just finished"Enola Gay" by Thomas Gordon and Max Witts. That meant I knew more about how atomic bombs actually worked than Harry Truman did. So that meant my classmates got a five minute lecture on how to build nukes, including the gun-type U-235 Little Boy and why everything since is implosion and therefore a child of Fat Man. These days, I'd get Homeland Security at the door.

If I did a fraction of the shit I did from age 6 until 18, I'd be be on a by-name basis with the local FBI office and probably be locked up somewhere.

@SarahAHoyt Here in Georgia we are teaching phonics and sounding the word out, breaking it down, etc. Problem is motivating students (like you were) to read instead of screen time which is much easier and faster for their entertainment fix. You have to practice reading to get good at it.

@JQPublic001 Average price for a home is 350,000 (GA). Mortgage averages 2500 a month. Salary as new PD or FD is 50,000. (Can be way less) Take home pay 3000 a month. Even teacher (4 year degree) makes only 60,000 with take home 3500 a month. Tell me this isn't a problem.

The worst part is that nobody’s even trying to fix this. The right tells young people to move to the middle of nowhere and work 3 jobs to pay for a collapsing house in the woods. The left says if they can just raise your taxes and bring in more migrants, everything will improve.

@WiseguyThreeOne @johnkonrad You know, when you consider how many millions of dollars the Soviets poured into Vietnam that could have been used at home, it is a very interesting perspective. And, Wild Weasel and precision munitions came out of Vietnam which has saved hundreds of aircrew lives.

@johnkonrad I was the junior member in a vets' group of Vietnam guys when Hanoi got its first McDonald's and Club Med signed a contract for the old R&R site at China Beach outside Da Nang. The consensus was "Shit, maybe we did win?"

What if everything you were taught about the Vietnam War is wrong? What if the domino theory was not wrong? What if America’s strategic objective wasn’t simply winning battles in Vietnam, but containing the spread of communism across Asia? What if I told you the communists lost that war? What if I told you America won? What if the United States achieved its broader strategic goal? What if the 58,220 Americans who gave their lives, including my father, whose death was linked to Agent Orange, did not die in vain? What if that sacrifice was the essential prerequisite for decades of unprecedented security, prosperity, and economic growth across the world? What if millions of people, especially in Asia and Europe, owe a debt of gratitude to those who fought that war? What if the story of an American “defeat” became politically useful because it absolved allies of any obligation to carry more of the burden? What if I told you recognizing America’s victory in that war would strengthen the case for asking prosperous allies to do more for their own defense, allowing the United States to focus our resources on rebuilding at home? What if I told you that ending socialist spending overseas and lowering the tax burden while rebuilding America is the essential prerequisite for defeating socialism here? And what if the debate over Vietnam isn’t really about the past but about how we prepare for the next great struggle against authoritarianism? What if everything you were taught about the Vietnam War is wrong? What if I told you Vietnam today looks nothing like the communist utopia of Ho Chi Minh dreams? What if I told you America won the Vietnam War?

@raconteur_press Never without my Leatherman!

Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815. Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did. Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”

Fahrenheit is superior to Celsius and I’m tired of pretending this is a debate. Fahrenheit feels like temperature was designed by an human being who walks outside, feels the air, and says, “Yeah, that makes sense.” Zero is freezing. 100 is brutally hot. 70 is comfortable. 80 is warm. The numbers feel like what they are describing. Celsius feels like it was designed by a committee of people who hate joy and want every conversation about the weather to sound like a chemistry lab. “It’s 22 degrees outside.” What does that even mean to a normal person? Am I wearing shorts? Am I grabbing a jacket? Nobody knows. You need a conversion chart and a government employee standing next to you explaining the vibes. Fahrenheit gives you range. That’s the point. It gives you more numbers for the temperatures human beings actually live in. You can feel the difference between 68, 72, 76, and 80. Those numbers matter. Fahrenheit lets you describe the world with more precision without having to break into decimals like a lunatic. And here’s the other thing... Celsius is connected to the metric cult energy that came out of the French Revolution. And the French Revolution was evil. Both of the Revolution were to rip out tradition, faith, monarchy, hierarchy, the Church, the calendar, the clock, and anything that reminded man he was not God. CELSIUS IS INHERENTLY EVIL So yes, Celsius may be useful if you’re boiling water in a lab. Congratulations. But Fahrenheit is for living LIFE because Fahrenheit is for walking outside and instantly knowing what kind of day you’re about to have. 100 means hot. 70 means beautiful. Zero means don’t go outside unless you have a death wish. That’s a real system.

Every carton of milk you have ever pulled from a refrigerator was designed by a woman locked inside a freezing boxcar in 1905. Her name was Mary Engle Pennington. She was thirty-two years old. She was a Quaker-raised bacteriological chemist from Philadelphia with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first woman ever hired as a scientist by the Bureau of Chemistry — the federal agency that would eventually become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Her job, on paper, was to sit at a back desk and file paperwork. Instead, she strapped a thermometer to her belt, climbed into a moving freight train in the Chicago rail yards, and let them lock the door behind her. Then she did it again. And again. Five hundred times over two years. In 1905, most Americans died young because of food. Milk shipped from Wisconsin dairies to Manhattan tenement apartments arrived in wooden barrels packed with dirty lake ice harvested from frozen ponds. By the time it reached the city, half of it was curdled. Dairies covered the sour smell with formaldehyde. Butchers rubbed borax on decomposing beef to hide the rot. Children in New York and Philadelphia were dying by the thousands every summer from milk-borne bacterial infections. The federal government had almost no power to stop it. Dr. Harvey Wiley, the head of the Bureau of Chemistry, was fighting to change that. He needed a scientist willing to prove — in hard, incontrovertible temperature-log data — exactly how and why the American food supply was rotting in transit. He needed someone who would ride in the refrigerator cars. He knew exactly who he wanted. Pennington was the daughter of a Quaker family that had moved from Nashville to West Philadelphia when she was three. She had discovered chemistry at twelve by borrowing a college-level textbook from the public library. She had completed the coursework for a bachelor of science in chemistry at Penn's Towne Scientific School — and the university's trustees had refused to grant a woman a degree. They handed her a "certificate of proficiency" instead. She stayed anyway. She kept working. She wrote a doctoral thesis. She forced the same trustees to grant her a Ph.D. at twenty-two. Wiley had known the Pennington family for twenty years. He knew what she could do. In 1905 he had her take the federal civil-service exam under the signature M. E. Pennington. The score guaranteed a hire. When she walked into the Bureau of Chemistry office the following Monday, the personnel officer realized what had happened. Federal law required them to hire her anyway. They tried to bury her at a back desk. She spent one week doing filing. Then she walked into Wiley's office and asked for the rail schedules. The Bureau had no cold-weather field gear cut for a woman. She went to a Washington department store and bought her own — heavy wool skirts, oversized men's sweaters, thick wool socks, leather-lined boots. She packed a glass thermometer, a set of sterile glass sampling vials, a leather-bound ledger, and a fountain pen. She walked into the Chicago slaughterhouse rail yards at dawn. She climbed into the ice bunkers of moving freight cars packed with raw poultry and beef. The doors were locked from the outside. She sat in the freezing dark for hours. She measured the temperature wall by wall, floor to ceiling, corner to corner. She sampled the meat every three hours. She wrote everything down in the ledger. She did five hundred of these expeditions over the next two years. She slept in cabooses on rural sidings. She caught pneumonia twice. She kept going. The rail companies had believed for fifty years that cold air, once loaded into a boxcar with ice, would fill the space evenly. Pennington's measurements proved them wrong. Cold air fell to the floor. It stayed there. Warm air generated by rotting cargo rose to the ceiling and stagnated. The meat stacked near the roof was slowly cooking in its own bacterial gases while the meat near the floor was flash-frozen solid. The corners of the cars had dead zones the cold air never reached at all. She discovered that a constant thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit — exactly at the freezing point of water — completely halted the growth of the specific bacterial strains that caused most food-borne deaths. The average American refrigerator car was operating at forty-five degrees. She drafted a complete redesign specification. Exact ice-bunker dimensions. Elevated floor racks so cold air could circulate underneath the cargo. Precise insulation thickness in the walls. Ventilation channels to move air through the dead zones in the corners. The rail industry fought her. Their lawyers, their lobbyists, their Congressional influence, and the political backing of the meatpacking monopolies. They argued a female chemist could not tell railroad engineers how to build trains. She did not argue back. She published the temperature data. The rail companies could not dispute the math. They eventually adopted her specifications wholesale. Spoilage rates collapsed. Big-city childhood mortality from milk-borne infection dropped inside a decade. Her defining test came in April 1917. The United States entered the First World War. The War Department needed to move thousands of tons of perishable American beef across the Atlantic to the Western Front. The commercial rail industry contributed forty thousand refrigerator cars to the war effort. Pennington evaluated every single one. Only three thousand of the forty thousand — seven and a half percent — met her institutional standard. She spent the next eighteen months personally overseeing the emergency retrofit of the other thirty-seven thousand cars. She standardized freezing at the slaughterhouses before the meat ever touched a train. She specified the exact temperature the ocean cargo holds had to maintain from Chicago to Brest. The spoilage stopped. The troops were fed. She served on Herbert Hoover's War Food Administration through the end of the war. In 1919 she left the federal government. In 1922 she founded her own refrigeration-engineering consulting firm, which she ran until she died. In 1923 she founded the Household Refrigeration Bureau to educate American consumers about the emerging home-refrigerator revolution. In 1940 the American Chemical Society awarded her the Francis P. Garvan Gold Medal. She was still consulting on a commercial refrigeration project the week she died — on December 27, 1952, in New York City, at eighty years old. In 2018, sixty-six years after her death, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. You walk into a grocery store in July. You pull a carton of milk from the back of the case. You do not smell it for rot. You open it. You pour it. You are drinking from the specification of a woman who let them lock her in the freezing dark for two years to prove she was right. If her story stayed with you, drop one word in the comments — Mary, ice, thirty-two, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

American Exceptionalism XXXV: The Jeep The World Before: Armies once moved at the pace of horses, trucks, mud, and luck. War punished anything too delicate, too heavy, or too dependent on perfect roads. The American Answer: The Jeep was ugly, simple, stubborn, and almost impossible to kill. It carried officers, radios, machine guns, medics, ammunition, scouts, and exhausted men across every kind of terrain the war could invent. It was not built for elegance. It was built to keep moving. The Legacy: The Jeep became the mechanical animal of American war. From North Africa to Normandy to the Pacific, it gave mobility to a citizen army fighting across the planet. Small enough to go anywhere, strong enough to matter everywhere. The Threat: The enemies of this country hate practical strength because it cannot be faked. The Jeep was not theory, branding, or bureaucracy. It was American industry stripped to purpose. Four wheels. One mission. Move.

American Exceptionalism XXII: John Browning The World Before: Weapons once evolved slowly, almost grudgingly. Armies changed by inches while men still carried rifles, pistols, and machine guns that belonged more to the workshop than the industrial age. The American Answer: John Browning changed the language of firepower. Pistol, shotgun, rifle, machine gun, automatic action, recoil system, gas operation, belt feed — he seemed to reach into the future of war and pull out mechanisms the rest of the world would spend decades copying. He did not just design weapons. He designed inevitability. The Legacy: Browning armed the American century before it fully arrived. His designs followed Marines through jungles, soldiers across Europe, pilots into the sky, and free men into dangerous places where civilization still required hard metal in steady hands. The Threat: The enemies of this country hate the Browning spirit because it understands something soft minds pretend away: peace is protected by men serious enough to master violence before evil arrives. A nation that forgets this becomes a museum with borders.

“Freedom is not a gift that lasts long in the hands of cowards.” -Theodore Roosevelt

@Aquinas5621 @JosephRardin Whoever said we were sane?

@JosephRardin No one sane wants to be in a war. Sometimes its necessary that's not the same. Especially the civil war. That war was brutal and killed 100s of thousands.

The female mind can never comprehend the male desire to be in this scene.

@NavalInstitute They also had one ship vote to go home rather than go to the Pacific after Germany surrendered.

Happy Canada Day to our friends north of the border! Did you know that by the end of WWII, Canada had the third largest naval fleet in the world after the United States and the United Kingdom?#CanadaDay

@infantrydort Francis Marion. He led militia, despised by the regular army on BOTH sides, so well that he earned the nickname the Swamp Fox from his enemies. It can be argued that without him, Cornwallis returns to Charleston and Yorktown never happens. Great American hero!

Wait, I just had an epiphany. What’s the most triggering thing a communist has to endure? You guessed it: stories of American exceptionalism. We should just flood the zone with these stories all weekend. Ignoring everything else. Just tell the stories of OUR country. The ones that changed the very fabric of existence for the entire world. Yes. Yes we should. We should tell our stories for the next 3 days. Idk how to craft it. Musing on that now. But we should ALL do this. Highlight American Exceptionalism!

@compliantvc @nielsen_pe50582 Your feelings are irrelevant to anybody but yourself. Really, besides your immediate family, who cares about someone else's 'feelings'?

@nielsen_pe50582 I feel so bad for Americans

Of course Americans need air conditioning It's 93 degrees in Dallas today, but only 40 degrees in Paris We'll let the Americans continue to destroy their environment and warm their side of th eplanet We're good over here in Europe

@nielsen_pe50582 @gjmom1 @compliantvc Life expectancy is an average! There is no guarantee in life. That's a specious argument.

@gjmom1 @compliantvc If you live in the US, the average life expectancy is still 4 years lower than in Europe. The US is the only Western country where the average life expectancy is falling. Could it be because it is very expensive to have health insurance and you have such a high deductible?

@InfanteriaComun God Bless. I will be praying for you.

When we went to breakfasf that morning Josh asked for me to grab him some milk and cereal, which I did. Knowing I got my friend his last meal is something I still don't fully comprehend. It goes without saying that it's something I pray heavily about.

@PizzaPotPonder @EWErickson When you put moral superiority over people, that's evil.

@MeinertWilliam @EWErickson It's worse than needless imo, it's for perceived moral superiority

This is the sort of thinking you get from the progressive left and right in this country that insists we put the collective ahead of the individual. It becomes selfish to get A/C because of its social harm.