Philip Turmel

@MichaelFKane Works for me.

Alright. What do you guys think on this little piece of dialect. Do you understand what you are reading from context or is a little too uncommon for the average reader. I'm torn on this one. “I’ll be waitin' right here for ye aw to return,” he said. “Duncan, you take care of this whelp.” Explanation below

@japan_nobunaga One of the great joys of American culture is not needing to know someone to feed them. Similar to helping someone move. 😅

A man in Kansas City told me the meat would be ready at four in the afternoon. He started it at three in the morning. Thirteen hours. For one meal. I want that understood. In my country we have fought entire battles in less time and gone home. I asked if I could keep him company. He said, "If you want." That was the longest sentence he spoke for two hours. I prepared for the vigil the way a man prepares for a vigil. I brought a notebook. I intended to record what the fire did, in case I was ever called upon to do this alone. I asked what wood he was using. He said, "Oak." I wrote down oak. He watched me write down oak, and he said nothing, and I have decided that his silence was a kindness. He sat in a folding chair beside a black iron drum and watched a fire that did not need watching. Every so often he opened the lid, looked inside, and closed it. He adjusted nothing. He consulted no device. He was simply confirming that the fire was still keeping its word. I offered to take the second watch. He told me there was no second watch. There was only him. And now, apparently, me. At 4:15 in the morning he handed me a beer. I drank it with both hands. I want to explain what I understood, sitting in the dark beside that drum. He was not cooking. Cooking is a thing you do to food. This was something else. Thirteen hours before one single guest would arrive, alone, in the cold, with no one to watch him and no one to thank him and no possibility of ever being properly thanked, he was tending a fire so that people who were still asleep would eat well. He was keeping a promise to people who did not know he was awake. Where I come from we would have built a shrine to a man like this. We would have carved a poem into it. We would have forgotten his name within a century. Here he is called Dave. He does this most weekends. He has a coupon for the wood. At six he stood, stretched, and held out the tongs. He said nothing. He simply held them out. I want to be clear about the gravity of what was being transferred. A man does not hand his fire to a stranger. Where I come from, this is an adoption. I took the tongs with both hands and bowed so deeply that my forehead very nearly met the lid. He said, "Just don't open it too much." I did not open it. I did not open it for forty minutes. I did not open it while a bee conducted a full investigation of my face. When the people arrived at four in the afternoon, they ate, and they laughed, and they said it was good, and not one of them asked who had been awake at three in the morning. Dave did not tell them. I have decided that I will not tell them either. But I would like it recorded somewhere, by someone, that a man named Dave rose in the dark to keep his word to a backyard full of people who had not arrived yet, said nothing about it afterward, and ate his own plate standing up. I have bought a black iron drum. I do not yet know anyone here well enough to feed. I am starting the fire anyway.

Former Maine BMV examiner quits over rampant corruption handing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens with no standards. A longtime Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles license examiner named John Morin resigned after more than ten years on the job because of widespread corruption in the licensing process. Morin described a "Dirty Permits" scheme in which translators were providing answers to non-English speaking non-citizens during written exams, resulting in a 100 percent pass rate for those applicants compared to roughly 70 percent for English speakers. He witnessed as many as ten to twelve Class C learner’s permits issued per day under these conditions, often without any road test being administered. Morin repeatedly reported the cheating to supervisors and even referred cases for criminal investigation, only to be ignored or disciplined himself for raising the issue. The same faces appeared day after day, and the process required multiple interpreters in some instances while standards and vetting were effectively abandoned. This corruption turns American roads into a danger zone by putting unvetted drivers behind the wheel with no real demonstration of knowledge or skill. What is happening in Maine under current leadership reveals how open borders policies combined with bureaucratic failure create real threats to public safety. This kind of breakdown demands immediate investigation and accountability to protect American drivers from the consequences of unchecked corruption. Amplify this man's voice EVERYWHERE! #MaineCorruption #SecureOurRoads

One of the most eye opening conversations I have had in recent years was with a retired Coast Guard admiral who ran sexual assault investigations. During his entire tenure, he arrested zero rapists aboard ship. He knew rape aboard 🇺🇸 ships was a serious problem. He dedicated serious amounts of time and effort to the problem yet made zero arrests. I call out admirals often. This one was different. He was genuinely, visibly disappointed in himself. He started where they all start: the difficulty of collecting evidence from a ship a thousand miles from shore. No lab. No detectives. A crime scene the crew keeps living in. Then he pivoted somewhere I did not expect. The vast majority of these men, he said, are the kindest, gentlest, most well liked people aboard. The great teammate. The guy who covers your watch. And it holds ashore too: family, friends, everyone back home vouches for the good heart. “People came out of the woodwork to defend these guys.” Some of the crimes were brutal. Many of these men stalked and harassed their victims for weeks, cornering them whenever they were alone. And still, to everyone else: “really good guy, best crewmate I ever had.” Before ww2 started too many Germans said the same about Hitler and his devotion to protecting animals. The Nazi government passed a series of animal welfare laws in the 1930s: restrictions on cruelty, rules on hunting, limits on animal experimentation. It was camouflage. A kind face made the rumors about his brutality to humans sound absurd. Then the admiral said something almost nobody considers. Enormous money goes into the arts, and the internet is saturated with free instruction on acting. How to project warmth. How to seem harmless. TED alone has hundreds of hours of instruction. He was careful here: he said specifically the theater kids are not the problem. But somewhere along the line, a lot of predators picked up acting skills to cosplay as Mr Rodgers to everyone but their victims. Another investigator told me he was shocked to learn the captain gave one rapist a master key. “Did you give anyone else aboard a master key” “No” “You didn’t even trust your chief mate or chief engineer with the key?” “No” “Why did you give this man a master key” “Because if anyone could be trusted to hold the spare key if something happened to me it was this man” “But that man wasn’t even an officer” “No but he was more trustworthy than any officer I’ve met” That guy was a brutal rapist who left his victim with injuries requiring medical assistance. So the danger is doubled. People cannot bring themselves to believe that a smart, articulate, well informed person can be genuinely evil. And truly evil people have learned, quite deliberately, how to appear to be the nicest guy on the ship. And let’s not forget that Mamdani, whose likely not a rapist but is a communist which is evil that is scientifically proven to result in death and destruction, grew up on the sets of movies with award winning actors. I don’t know if he is pure evil or just adopting pure evil ideology for fame and power… but the man does know how to act exceedingly relatable, nice and non-threatening.

Hey, @elonmusk, we have a Tesla Model X but we can’t really fit both parents and five kids, and the new SUV only has six seats. On behalf of those who are doing our best to repopulate the West, any chance Tesla can make a minivan or SUV with 7 or 8 seats?

Long post about getting a job in a crappy job market, and the boomer advice about firm handshakes: Several things can be true at once. 1. A lot of my generation was told that comp sci was a "safe" bet. This was false, it turned out, as the major companies offshored or H1B'd most of it away and so it is now more difficult to get a traditional 9-5 job in it. 2. Employment portals at big corpos are exhaustingly bad. They use online forms and those forms are spammed w/ 10k fake applicants by 3rd world scambots every day. 3. Telling demoralized gen-Z dudes that they are just lazy and spoiled, even if it is true for some of them, is not going to help. You're not going to shame a generation into fixing the society which older generations helped vote into existence, Ds and Rs, whether they meant to or not. 4. Some people are just losers who want to be victims, but that is not the overall issue with young people today. 5. Showing up in person can work, but not for everyone, and not for every type of job. If you show up to Starbucks or Best Buy or something, they will tell you to go apply online. They do not care. It is more likely to work if you network outside of the actual job office/location if you are looking to get into a larger company. But you still need to be at least somewhat good at communicating with people. Walking on to an RV lot and giving a firm handshake works if you're halfway charismatic. If you have good social skills, cold approach may very well work for you. Anecdote: I applied for many many jobs online at the "big" oil company I eventually ended up working at. Never got a reply back, except for one THREE YEARS LATER that rejected me... for the job that I had at the time. I was exhausted after applying to literally hundreds of jobs online with an engineering degree AND being female, I never heard back from anyone. Granted I had mediocre grades, and no internship. The first few dozen applications went to things I thought I was qualified for, and I re-adjusted lower and lower as time went on, until I was applying for work I was vastly overqualified for (on paper anyway). So I did the boomer thing. I packed a bag and flew to Houston to go to an oilfield tech conference (not a job fair.) I paid to attend, I printed personal cards, I printed resumes, and I gave them to everyone who made the mistake of making eye contact with me lol I got 0 job offers directly from that effort. After two days of this, I was chatting with some guys at my hotel bar, and they turned out to own an oilfield construction company, and they invited me to interview. It didn't work out but it was encouraging! I found out from someone at the conference that there was an alumni meetup from my university that was being hosted that same week. I extended my trip to attend. That event is where I met 2 people who were able to put in a good word for me at their companies. I got a call from HR of one, which had ignored my applications previously through official portals, and had a job offer in hand soon thereafter. It absolutely will NOT work for everyone, and will not work for every job. Even in person networking is a numbers game until Providence steps in. I am aware that I have an advantage in face to face networking that not everyone has, due to 1. being female and 2. being good at socializing. It's worth a shot if you're willing to get creative, (and possibly spend some $ to show up at social events) but you have to be realistic about what you're looking for AND NOT HAVE A BAD ATTITUDE THAT OTHERS CAN SENSE. The boomers at the trade shows will often be sympathetic if you tell them the stupid computers make it harder to get a job right out of college. But again, it's really extremely tough out there. DEI has not left corporate HR departments. If you are a white male (especially with low social skills) it is harder for you. What that means, though, is that while nerds like me try to support and develop policies that will make things better at the government level, you've gotta get creative. Most of you are not lazy (some of you are and you know it), it is not unreasonable to feel demotivated, demoralized. You gotta pull yourself out of it though, even if you think it's irrational, because otherwise you'll hurt your own chances when tiny glimmers of opportunity do arise. Self-sabotage is real. It is healthy to be realistic and understand the state of this economy, while also allowing yourself a little bit of optimism, as a treat.

A huge thank you to all the sponsors of the upcoming Solar & BESS Discovery Day! EXECUTIVE: @Advantech_USA, @RRCcompanies, @RoviSys, @opto22, @MoxaInc WELCOME RECEPTION: @CirrusLink, @TigerDatabase, @TeamVertech MEDIA: EnergyTech Podcast Learn more: bit.ly/4vEu7zB

Hear me out…

⚡️This chart is the largest destruction of household wealth in recorded history, executed deliberately by the state that owned it. And the world's gold bid is its shadow. Twenty years of real gains gone means the primary savings vehicle of 1.4 billion people, sixty to seventy percent of Chinese household wealth, round-tripped to 2006. Nothing in the American 2008 experience approaches this scale. The transmission runs from real estate to gold, the Chinese piggy bank. That connects this chart directly to the nineteen-month PBoC accumulation streak and the retail gold frenzy running through Shanghai and Shenzhen. The domestic store of value died, the capital account is closed, and the surviving vessels inside the wall are gold, deposits yielding nothing, and quietly, Hong Kong crypto rails. The sovereign gold bid and the household gold bid are the same event: capital fleeing a dead asset class with nowhere else to go. This chart is why gold took the fiscal-hedge flow all year. The deliberateness is the part Western commentary refuses to metabolize. Xi drew the three red lines in August 2020, and the chart peaks within months. "Houses are for living, not for speculation" was a demolition order, executed to redirect national capital from land finance into manufacturing and strategic technology. The demolition succeeded and then kept falling past the point of control, which is the signature failure mode of command economies: they can start avalanches and cannot stop them. The state chose this trade, prosperity of the household balance sheet exchanged for industrial supremacy, and the chart is the receipt. What it does to the world: a China that cannot sell its citizens apartments sells the world overcapacity instead. The property bust is the engine of the export deflation machine, EVs, solar, chemicals, chips at the mature nodes, flooding out at prices that reflect a state subsidizing employment rather than seeking margin. The darkest layer sits in legitimacy mechanics. The Party's compact was prosperity for obedience, and the prosperity was denominated in apartments. A regime that can no longer deliver the wealth escalator has two remaining legitimacy channels: nationalism and security. Every percentage point this index falls raises the marginal value of the Taiwan card, the anti-American frame, the external enemy. The chart does not predict war. It repriced the incentive structure that decides one, and the direction of the repricing is unambiguous. The compressions: The gold thesis strengthens at its root, because the largest population on earth just lost its default asset and the replacement flow has years to run. The US disinflation-in-goods leg has a structural sponsor. And the "China's fine" versus "China collapses" debate is two wrong answers to one question. The true state is a managed, chronic, exported depression, too controlled to break, too deep to fix, and the rest of the world's asset prices are already living inside its consequences.

Canada, as it happens, is the reason we are not Canada. For which we can be grateful. In Canada, like Australia, Charles is their monarch to this day. They have parliamentary governments, with governor generals appointed by the king who have to sign off on everything. Everything's royal this, and crown that. It's symbolic, but it's there. More to the point, Canada and Australia, like Britain, lack free speech. You can be prosecuted for saying the wrong thing. No First Amendment. No Second Amendment either. The last thing they want is an armed citizenry capable of defending themselves. But Canada is the reason we are not Canada. For which we can be grateful. The French and Indian War, British troops with American militia alongside them take out the French in Quebec. That war cost the British government the equivalent of $22 billion in today's money, and they wanted the Americans to help pay. The American view was, we supplied troops at our expense and took losses. If we owe something more, let's have a negotiation. Parliament just hits them with arbitrary taxes instead. The Americans, largely self-governing, taxed themselves. They saw these British taxes as a taking not only of their money, but of their autonomy. Proximate cause of the dispute. Canada. But you don't go to war if you don't know how to go to war. In New England, being next to Canada, they were very heavily armed. Their militias full of combat veterans of the French and Indian War. They had the experience and the wherewithal to defend their liberties. So I suppose we should say, thank you, Canada. For aiding us thusly in becoming everything you are not.

The European mind simply cannot comprehend a random citizen playing the national anthem with a semi automatic rifle in their backyard shooting range

Ship captain here, and I run the most visited maritime news site in the world. It’s clear many of you need a lesson in how actual naval conspiracies are perpetrated. I’m getting pushback from all sides on my suggestion that Mamdani conspired to keep U.S. Navy warships out of yesterday’s NYC 250th 🇺🇸 birthday parade. Let’s break down the specific criticism I’ve received. “It looked great on TV” and “my cousin’s uncle was in NJ and saw Navy ships.” Yes. It’s called a Potemkin village. The term comes from Grigory Potemkin, who erected fake, impressive-looking villages along Catherine the Great’s 1787 tour of newly conquered Crimea to exaggerate the region’s prosperity while hiding the poor who lived nearby. The VIPs got one story. The villagers got another. That’s what happened yesterday. If you watched MSM on TV or from the anchorage in NJ, you got a spectacular event. If you showed up to the Navy’s designated viewing areas, you got nothing. “I saw a Navy ship anchored right off the Battery” and “here’s a photo of a destroyer I took.” The warship anchored off Manhattan was Dutch, not American. The American warships anchored far from the crowds. The one Navy warship that did sail before the parade was retreating from Manhattan, not entering it. “It’s laughable to think Mamdani called the SECNAV to block Navy ships.” I agree. That’s not how the system works. Democrat socialists, like the Soviets before them, use safetyism and bureaucracy to wield power and shrug off accountability. Mamdani didn’t call the CNO or SECNAV. He doesn’t want a paper trail. “You’re just jealous you didn’t get on a ship.” My family owns yachts in New York. The Coast Guard and U.S. Merchant Marine invited me aboard ships. My job as a maritime journalist is not to collect the official story from VIPs. It’s to get the ground truth. “So how did the conspiracy play out?” The following comes from unverified sources involved in planning the event. Take it with a grain of salt, but here’s the best I can piece together. A source inside NYC government says a person close to Mamdani made a “big deal” about safety, invoking last year’s tragedy when a tall ship struck the Brooklyn Bridge and killed Mexican Navy cadets. A midlevel bureaucrat relayed those concerns to a midlevel naval officer: the wake from Navy ships could kill tall ship sailors. This is ridiculous. The Navy has paraded with tall ships for over two centuries and that incident had nothing to do with a ship wake. But it “sounds” reasonable to “avoid killing midshipmen”, and Navy admirals are so paranoid about safety they won’t even let sailors rappel down the hull to paint anymore. So some admiral signed off. Not literally signed off, you can’t leave a paper trail, but approved NYC’s unreasonable terms in a closed door meeting. But communists don’t want to “seem” unreasonable, so they offered parade grounds on Governors Island, close to the Navy ships, for patriots who wanted a look. Making patriots take an old, broken ferry off Manhattan to see their own Navy is wholly unreasonable, but next to “midshipmen falling from masts” it sounds fair and a reasonable concession. And since communists never miss a chance to squeeze you for cash while slathering VIPs with praise, they sold ferry tickets to what should have been a free event. Then, the night before the parade, the ferry suffered “storm damage” and “had to” close. Sounds reasonable, there was a storm. But if it wasn’t storm damage, it would have been mechanical failure or something else. And I have a source who got on the island and didn’t see much structural damage. “You blame Mamdani but this was Trump’s parade and JD Vance was one of the VIPS and @SECNAV hates commies”. Trump and JD and even Hung Cao can’t be at every meeting, the aren’t micromanagers. And even if they did pushback, which sources say is likely, what happens when they over ride or fire an Admiral? 1/2

Call the bluff on a leftist who's claiming that Republican Congressional staffers are involved in an obviously astroturfed white supremacist group and financed by NGOs, and all the idiots come out of the woodwork. Here's a history lesson. This nation was founded on Protestantism. That isn't in dispute. Almost every state had a religious test for officeholding, and they largely required the officeholder to be Protestant. Schools required the reading of KJV, which was seen as an anti-Catholic slight. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote at length on how the United States was founded on Protestant ideology. What changed? Catholics participated in civic life the way the Founding Fathers intended. They built their own schools and other parallel institutions, and voted in different office requirements. In short, Catholics proved themselves capable of being American, and they got full admission as a result. The same pattern repeated with every group. Jews, Irish Catholics, Eastern Europeans... all initially excluded, all earned their place the same way: civic participation, institution-building, proving they could sustain self-governance. That's the American model. It's civilizational. Can you build institutions? Can you govern yourself? Can you participate in the republic? No one steeped in the actual Protestant founding tradition would arrive at "white identity" as the organizing principle because the founding was organized around covenantal self-governance and distrust of centralized government.

Bill Clinton: “The people in charge have unleashed masked agents on American communities to seize people from their homes” Also Bill Clinton:

Yes, but you can’t speak freely in that pub

Hello Mr. Clinton, I'm not going to extend to you the courtesy that your paragraph about lawfare extends to Trump supporters. Because I've studied enough of you, to know what you are truly about. You were President during the post-Cold War sugar high. I have it thoroughly documented that you and your administration met with George Soros frequently, and in short term changed your policy positions to fit whatever George Soros proposed. Which was: continuous military intervention all over the world. Starting with the bombing of Yugoslavia. You were the original neoconservative. Madeline Albright used "open society" phrasing in communicating your foreign policy documents. You are a part of the long string of failures of nation-building in the name of democracy, the Western interventions that resulted in millions of mass migrants overwhelming our borders, artificial famines, and us building the infrastructure that enabled China to take over the Africa continent and extract African resources for themselves. But. Most of all. Those of us -- and there are a good deal many of us -- who have been ruined by lawfare. @GenFlynn sacrificed everything. @JeffClarkUS has had his life ruined and is still rebuilding. At the end of the day, only one President has been the subject of repeated assassination attempts and eighty-plus indictments - and it's President Trump. Not anyone in your orbit. Seriously, Bill. What do you think when you see that a Democrat gets indicted by a grand jury, and a judge inevitably overturns that indictment on grounds that nobody has heard of? "Oh wow the judges are so wise and saw right through a jury of peers! And that wisdom coincidentally happens to always fall on party lines!" Give me a break. Every single one of us on the right-wing side knows that when your side regains power, your side will turn the full might of lawfare on us. You will cheer on mass incarcerations. You openly brag about that. You even toe the line of threatening to jail current military members if they don't refuse orders from Pete Hegseth. You are the evil one here. You cheer on the burning of our cities. You cheer on lawfare of Republicans. You never apologized for the millions of lives disrupted all over the world. You never say a word about the billions or even trillions of dollars that have been robbed by your friends through corrupt NGOs. The fact that none of you are in jail, proves that we are the powerless ones here. You're just afraid that someone sees you for you who are, and you secretly know that image is ugly.

Do you have any idea the rate at which Chinese people were dying when the United States brought the war to an abrupt halt, and how many more would have died. That's before you get to the estimated 1 million dead Americans and up to 10 million dead Japanese if the US had to invade. The Japanese have moved on. And they recognize the United States is their friend, ally, and an example. In opposition to the corrupt communist kleptocracy that you prefer, which uses its people like slaves as Chinese regimes always have.

Patricia and I have a good spot for tonight's laser and fireworks show at Stone Mountain. 😁

@InductiveAuto Pssst! Download access denied... 🙁

This guide addresses best practices for using Ignition and working with software vendors in a CIP-compliant way, with recommendations based on specific CIP standards. Learn more and download the guide here: inductiveautomation.com/resources/arti…

🇺🇸アメリカ建国250周年🇺🇸 心からお慶び申し上げます 日本で行われたドローンショーです✨ 星条旗 自由の女神 ハクトウワシ 大谷翔平 高市早苗首相 トランプ大統領✨ #A250inJapan