Aj

Mother, reader, thinker, traveler. IA born, CA grown, AK rooted. Married to a real man. Face for radio, voice of reason & tenacity🇺🇸Live M-F 11am-noon AK time

[The Buy American Movement - BuyDirectUSA ❤️🇺🇸 @BuyDirectUSA]

In 2005, Oneida shut the flatware factory in Sherrill, New York.

A town that had made silverware for MORE THAN 100 YEARS was supposed to be finished.

Two men refused to let that happen.

Their names are Matt Roberts and Greg Owens.

Roberts had managed that factory. Owens was another former Oneida manufacturing manager. When the company ended U.S. production, they bought the plant and the equipment and reopened it the NEXT DAY as Sherrill Manufacturing.

They did not have a giant rescue fund.
They did not have a Hollywood ending waiting.
They had a building, some machines, and a workforce that knew how to make forks, knives, and spoons.

At first they kept making product for Oneida.

Then Oneida pulled the remaining American work and sent it overseas.

That should have been the end.

It wasn’t.

They took government flatware contracts to keep the lights on. In 2010 they filed Chapter 11. They sold unused equipment. They sold space they could no longer fill. They leased back only the part of the factory they could still run.

They came out of bankruptcy in 2013.

Then they did the thing that saved the company.

They built their own brand: Liberty Tabletop.

They sold 18/10 stainless flatware straight to customers who wanted tableware MADE IN THE UNITED STATES.

Not through a department store that could drop them overnight.
Direct.

Today Liberty Tabletop is the only company still manufacturing stainless steel flatware in America.

Same town.
Same trade.
U.S. steel.
About 70 jobs.

They did not bring back 2,000 workers. Nobody did.

What they saved was the last line.

If you want American-made forks and spoons, this is the factory that still makes them.

Support Liberty Tabletop.
THIS is what keeping manufacturing in America actually looks like. 🇺🇸

[Oscar @HeyOscarx]

A woman walked into an audiologist's office for a hearing test. She had AirPods Pro in her ears. She took them out, set them on the desk, and said: "I think I need hearing aids."

The audiologist looked at the AirPods on the desk. Then she looked at the woman. Then she said something the woman didn't expect:

"You might be holding them."

The audiologist spent 15 years fitting clinical hearing aids devices that cost $2,000–$6,000 per pair. She told me something that should make every AirPods Pro owner look at the case in their pocket differently:

"In 2024, Apple turned AirPods Pro into FDA-authorized clinical-grade hearing aids. Not a hearing 'boost.' Not an amplifier. A legitimate, software-defined hearing aid with a built-in hearing test, a personalized hearing profile, and real-time frequency amplification calibrated to your specific hearing loss. For $249. The devices I fit for $4,000 do the same thing."

"But the hearing aid feature is just the beginning of what most AirPods Pro owners don't know they have."

"These earbuds have a noise cancellation system that removes 4x more sound than the originals. An Adaptive Audio mode that reads your environment and adjusts in real time without you touching anything. A Conversation Awareness system that detects when you start talking and automatically lowers your music. A Live Listen mode that turns your iPhone into a remote microphone you can place across a room. A real-time translator for 20+ languages. A head-nod gesture system that answers phone calls without touching the earbuds. A hearing protection system that monitors decibel levels and reduces volume before it damages your ears. And a spatial audio system that uses the camera on your iPhone to map the shape of your head and create a personalized surround sound profile."

"250 million AirPods are in people's ears right now. Most of them are being used as wireless Bluetooth earbuds the same way they'd use a $30 pair from Amazon. The $249 they paid bought a hearing clinic, a translation device, a hearing protection system, and a spatial audio computer. They're using it for Spotify and phone calls."

Here are 10 AirPods Pro features most owners have never turned on and exactly how to set up each one:🧵

[Christopher Ward @modelstrangers]

“Do you have any regret in life?”

Over 50 million views across social media for this conversation with an 88 year old man on a bench.

📸 WATCH!

[The Alaska Landmine @alaskalandmine]

Governor Peninsula, Episode 13: The Primary. In the race for the Den, Nancy Dahlstrom makes some announcements following the primary. #akleg

[The Alaska Landmine @alaskalandmine]

Missed the Kodiak fisheries debate for the governor’s race? Check out this recap featuring Sen. Gary Stevens. #akleg

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: Outrage is erupting after a 22-year-old who runs into BURNING BUILDINGS as a volunteer firefighter was told he isn't qualified to be a paid firefighter...

...because he was HOMESCHOOLED.

Then the city changed the job posting to cover it up.

His name is Andrew Coates. He's 22 years old, in Nebraska.

Right now, today, he runs into burning buildings as a volunteer firefighter for Cedar Bluffs Fire. He is a state-licensed EMT.

He is doing the job. For free.

All he wanted was to get PAID to do it. In his words: "Make a career out of it would be the goal. To get paid to do what you love."

So he applied to the Fremont Fire Department.

And in April, the city rejected him. Why?

Because his high school diploma says he was homeschooled.

That's it. That's the whole disqualification.

Not his EMT license.
Not his fitness.
Not his record.
Not his experience pulling people out of fires ALREADY!!

...how he was educated.

The job posting he applied to said "graduation from high school."

That's all it said.
He graduated high school.
He has a diploma.

And AFTER they rejected him, the city went back and added the word "accredited" to the job description.

His own fire chief, the man who has watched Andrew work, showed up to defend him:

"I feel the city of Fremont is really missing out here, and in my mind, because of his homeschooling, you guys are discriminating against him."

Over THIRTY homeschool families showed up to stand behind this kid.

And the Civil Service Commission? They said it isn't their job to touch city policy.

Homeschoolers are literally a generation of kids who read ABOVE grade level, who work with their HANDS, who volunteer in their communities, who show up for their neighbors.

And this young man is the proof.

At 22, he's a certified EMT and a volunteer firefighter, while plenty of his peers are on a couch.

When your house is on fire at 3 a.m., I promise you will not ask the man dragging your children out where he went to high school.

You will not ask if his diploma was accredited.

You will thank GOD he came.

Andrew isn't even fighting for himself anymore. His words:

"I think now it's turned into we want to make sure that every homeschooler has an equal opportunity."

That's a better man than the policy that rejected him.

Fremont, you have a licensed EMT and an active firefighter begging to serve your city. And you turned him down over paperwork, then rewrote the paperwork to cover it.

Fix this.

Hire him!!!!!!!

[Alan Poirier @alan_poirier]

In case anyone is wondering what #Greenland is all about.

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

Unbelievable display of improvisation. His trumpet gave out in the middle of the national anthem, so he just kept going without it.

[Concerned Citizen @BGatesIsaPyscho]

CNN & BBC Viewers had a shock this week - turning on the News and hearing US Director of Health RFK Jnr - confirm the Trump Administration “would investigate the effects of Chemtrails”

So just in case you’re new to this, and only catching up - here is what they have been spraying on us all, all this time.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is not a photograph.

Every leaf and every reflection was put there by hand, in oil, by the Danish painter Peder Mørk Mønsted in 1894.

It is called Wooded path by a river, and it captures the hardest thing there is to paint: a forest in full sunlight. Light through trees never falls evenly. It scatters into countless flecks of brightness and shadow, a glow on one leaf, darkness on the next, a glint on the water that would vanish the moment a cloud passed. Get those even slightly wrong, and the whole thing collapses into a green blur.

Mønsted got every one of them right, and in doing so he captured something anyone who has stood alone in a wood will recognize immediately: that hush that falls over you, the sense of being completely at peace, and the feeling that the whole world has paused to breathe…

[McMich @McMichelSim]

Nous en sommes EXACTEMENT LÀ... 🤬🤬🤬
"La prophétie la plus troublante de toutes"

Il y a 70 ans, une vision fut gravée dans les mots, décrivant avec une effrayante précision ce que nous vivons aujourd’hui.

Le 2 février 1905, à Saint-Pétersbourg, naissait une âme qui allait marquer la pensée et les lettres : Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, plus connue sous le nom d’Ayn Rand. Philosophe et écrivaine américaine d’origine russe, elle laissa derrière elle des mots qui résonnent encore, comme un écho prophétique dans les tumultes de notre époque.

Elle écrivit ces paroles :
« Lorsque vous réalisez que, pour produire, vous devez obtenir l’autorisation de ceux qui ne produisent rien… Lorsque vous voyez l’argent couler non pas vers ceux qui créent des biens, mais vers ceux qui trafiquent en faveurs… Lorsque vous comprenez que certains s’enrichissent davantage par la corruption et l’influence que par le labeur, et que les lois ne vous protègent plus d’eux mais, au contraire, les protègent contre vous… Lorsque vous découvrez que la corruption est récompensée tandis que l’honnêteté devient un sacrifice, alors vous saurez, sans le moindre doute, que votre société est condamnée. »

Un avertissement gravé dans le marbre de la pensée, un miroir tendu à un monde vacillant.

[Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 @TRobinsonNewEra]

America encourages you to live, and Canada encourages you to die.

[Q MASTER POOL @QMasterPool1]

Trumpification: Why Blair, Carney, and Jamie Dimon Are Suddenly Sounding Like Trump #prometheanupdates #Trump #MarkCarney #Blair #American

[Kanwaljit Arora @mekarora]

50 legendary internet rabbit holes you can spend hours exploring 📩

1. https://t.co/b5SBLaGQV1 — Watch the world via live satellite imagery
2. https://t.co/jnwTMhag7e — See every plane currently in the sky
3. https://t.co/xHa80uDH1m — Track all ships at sea in real time
4. https://t.co/FGDaeaU5Em — Live map of winds and storms
5. https://t.co/eIDu7R4sy8 — Watch lightning strikes hitting Earth in real time
6. https://t.co/6rFSF1zrpO — Live list of recent earthquakes
7. https://t.co/CGYZQkebbi — Ocean cables carrying the internet
8. https://t.co/OppV29C4rR — Watch forests disappear from space
9. https://t.co/rHyVpqRz5p — The world's statistics, second by second
10. https://t.co/TaF47T5vCB — Current number of tweets and searches being posted
11. https://t.co/Rf2bSlBRwi — Compare the true sizes of countries
12. https://t.co/04wu7wmWBu — Maps from centuries ago
13. https://t.co/gTK4w8An33 — Archive of 150,000 historical maps
14. https://t.co/jAWtbO5WPd — World map drawn by volunteers
15. https://t.co/cxjImE6EZL — Look out the window of a random person around the world
16. https://t.co/1CjzYKCTzf — Virtual walks through cities
17. https://t.co/uNIPhnwR7t — Teleport to a random spot on Earth
18. https://t.co/NdnjpfPZrO — Catalog of the world's strangest places
19. https://t.co/kd2y0XYh5q — Interactive knowledge experiences
20. https://t.co/F7ugSoBTVs — Scale journey from atom to universe (Updated HTML5 link)
21. https://t.co/HPDMmYnN0p — Explore the solar system in 3D
22. https://t.co/ufusbFtNlj — Real sky map in your browser
23. https://t.co/dwdM45seEM — NASA's astronomy picture of the day
24. https://t.co/dffUurnOid — NASA's entire visual archive, free
25. https://t.co/vAp2FI36fJ — Visual articles told through data
26. https://t.co/X92Recqwke — The state of the world with real data
27. https://t.co/XHs0hqO6HY — What we mistakenly think we know about the world
28. https://t.co/i7KXiv2P8s — Visualizing complex data
29. https://t.co/Rj6gWA26fE — World Bank's open data
30. https://t.co/aN8jGgsu51 — Turkey's official statistics database
31. https://t.co/ApNx1Wwrn1 — Archive of millions of books, films, and software
32. https://t.co/RbRiDBa6Xr — 70,000 free books whose copyrights have expired
33. https://t.co/lE7QGKsfCN — Record of every book in the world
34. https://t.co/wWAYRmFS2V — U.S. Library of Congress digital archive
35. https://t.co/JR1oMzNXYk — Europe's cultural heritage archive
36. https://t.co/k6QMPiJNZ8 — America's digital library collection
37. https://t.co/jmjeo55fFX — Tour museums from home
38. https://t.co/TH5nfKRI5j — Download artworks in high resolution
39. https://t.co/NKSBWu1bp0 — Archive of 250,000 artworks
40. https://t.co/HYmNec0qMY — Forgotten visual treasures of history
41. https://t.co/vR9JOX7ZpP — Free archive of culture and education
42. https://t.co/jqxzniu2cc — Met Museum's open collection
43. https://t.co/QeDnKRWxF8 — Family tree of music genres
44. https://t.co/w7xet4sdwE — Pick a country and decade to listen to that era
45. https://t.co/eeZDFVm61w — Turn Wikipedia edits into audio
46. https://t.co/OVj3vwIEsI — Random knowledge well
47. https://t.co/UqBaX2YpBX — Time, sunrises, and sky events
48. https://t.co/Cd2GfXr5UK — Live stream of science news
49. https://t.co/CC4DZtCKyJ — Free preprints of scientific papers
50. https://t.co/bW0w8HImUc — Visualize data with live code

Save this. You’ll definitely need some of these later.

[Shaughn_A @Shaughn_A2]

Nature finds a way…then greedy drug companies weaponize it and keep giving us much less effective versions. If you know anyone who has Lyme disease, maybe have them give this a see…🤷🏾‍♂️

[Viora Tech @Viora_Tech_Ai]

A woman just upgraded to the iPhone 18 Pro Max. She spent $1,499. She transferred her photos. She logged into her apps. She set her wallpaper.

Then she used it the exact same way she used her iPhone 12.

For 3 months.

Her boyfriend a former Apple engineer who spent 5 years on the iOS team watched her pick up her $1,499 phone, squint at a screenshot, and zoom in with two fingers to read the tiny text.

He took the phone out of her hand.

"Why are you zooming in? Your phone can read that to you out loud. It can copy every word from any image. It can translate that screenshot into 15 languages. It can summarize it. And it can do all of that without downloading a single app because it's built into the operating system you've never explored."

She said: "I didn't know it could do that."

He said: "You didn't know it could do any of this."

He spent the next 20 minutes showing her what her phone actually does.

"Your camera has a 48MP ProRAW mode that shoots photos professional photographers charge $3,000 to take. You've been using auto mode. Auto mode uses 12MP. You paid for a $1,499 camera and you're shooting at the quality of a phone from 2019."

"Your keyboard has a trackpad hidden inside the spacebar. Hold it down. The cursor moves wherever your thumb goes. You've been tapping between individual letters trying to fix typos for your entire life. This was added 8 years ago. You never knew."

"Your flashlight has an adjustable beam. Swipe up on the flashlight icon. You can go from spotlight to floodlight. You've been using one brightness since you got your first iPhone."

"Your phone has a Back Tap feature. Go to Settings, Accessibility, Touch, Back Tap. Now double-tap the back of your phone it launches any app, any shortcut, any action you choose. Triple-tap does a second one. You can open your camera, turn on the flashlight, take a screenshot, or launch Shazam by tapping the back of your phone twice. No buttons. No swiping. No unlocking."

"Your phone has a built-in sound recognition system that can listen for doorbells, smoke alarms, baby crying, dogs barking, and water running and send you a notification. It's been sitting in Accessibility since iOS 14. You've had it for 6 years and never turned it on."

"Your phone has a battery charge limit that stops charging at 80% and adds 2+ years to your battery's lifespan. You charge to 100% every night. By year two your battery health drops to 82%. By year three you're in the Apple Store asking for a $99 replacement. One toggle prevents all of it."

"Your phone has a StandBy mode that turns it into a full smart display when you set it sideways on a charger. Clock. Widgets. Photos. Live activities. It replaces the $50 bedside clock you bought on Amazon."

She stared at him.

"I've had an iPhone for 12 years. Why did nobody tell me any of this?"

"Because Apple makes $200 billion a year selling you the next one. They will never teach you how to use the one you already own."

Here are 11 iPhone features hiding on the phone in your pocket right now that Apple never told you about:

🧵

[Secretary Doug Burgum @SecretaryBurgum]

Mapping is critical to unlocking the natural resources that power our economy.

@USGS recently launched an updated digital geologic map covering all 50 states and most U.S. territories, giving Americans an unprecedented look at our nation’s resource potential.

Check it out: https://t.co/EzT4H1hgbW

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island.

Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand.

They were looking for people.

The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it.

Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door.

Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center.

He drove back.

The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way.

The site was empty. So that is where the towers went.

Here is how it worked.

At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip.

At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill.

And then the sorting began.

The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve.

Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt.

And along the belts stood the detectives.

NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time.

When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.

A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe.

A piece of a person.

The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue.

The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months.

A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed.

You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look.

Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow.

Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.

The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months.

By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury.

When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered.

It is a park now.

Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it.

Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place.

Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about.

Here is what you should know.

Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified.

Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket.

Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark.

Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home.

They did that for ten months.

Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch.

They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

This is absolutely sensational! We’re back! 💪🇺🇸🔥❤️

[Mila Joy @Milajoy]

Josephine Harris was 59, a Port Authority bookkeeper with a bad leg, walking down from the 73rd floor of the North Tower on September 11.

By the time the firefighters of Ladder

Company 6 found her in the stairwell, she was exhausted and crying.

They had just been ordered out.

The other tower was already gone.

They did not leave her.

Firefighter Bill Butler put her arm over his shoulder.

“Josephine,” he said, “we’re going to get you out of here today.”

Their pace became hers.

Lower down she collapsed and told them to go on without her.

They refused.

Then the North Tower fell.

Stairwell B held.

The building peeled away around them.

Fourteen people survived in that pocket: firefighters, a Port Authority officer, and Josephine.

People who had passed them on the stairs did not.

The men of Ladder 6 called her their guardian angel.

They believed she slowed them just enough.

Without her they would have been lower when it came down.

Without them, she would not have made it out.

When she died years later, those firefighters carried her coffin.

One of them named a daughter after her.

She was not trying to save anyone.

She was a tired woman who could not walk any faster.

That was enough.