Justin Hopkins

Accounting nerd

[Martyupnorth®- Unacceptable Fact Checker @Martyupnorth]

I've had to do some crazy repairs in the bush to get myself home, but never anything like this.

[Grant Williams @OGGrantWilliams]

@ClayTravis Just like that 10 million Americans realized why we don’t watch soccer.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

In 1903, John Muir did something no politician, no senator, no army of lobbyists could do. He took the President of the United States away from his entourage, away from the speeches and the crowds, and led him deep into the heart of Yosemite. Just two men. A campfire. The open sky above Glacier Point.

That night, dusted by fresh snow under the giant Sequoias, Theodore Roosevelt felt something shift inside him. Muir didn't lecture. He just showed him the truth a magnificent wilderness being eaten alive by logging, grazing, and greed. By morning, the President had seen enough.

Roosevelt later told a crowd that sleeping beneath those ancient trees felt like resting inside a temple built by God himself. Within three years, Yosemite Valley was transferred to full federal protection.

One man. No weapon. No army. Just an unshakeable love for the American land and the courage to speak its truth to the most powerful person on earth.

John Muir didn't just save a valley. He saved America's soul.

Father of the National Parks. Guardian of the American Wilderness.

[Restoring Your Faith in Humanity @HumanityChad]

The moment this baby realizes he can give a thumbs up 😭😭😭😭

[Primzy @lovyPrimzy1]

My grandfather had a rule:
Every grandchild got $500 on their 18th birthday.

No exceptions.
When my cousin turned 18, he gave her the money.

Instead of using it for school, she spent almost all of it on clothes, parties, and a new phone.
The family was furious.

"You should have given it to someone who would use it wisely."

Grandpa just shrugged.
A few years later, another cousin turned 18.

She was responsible, hardworking, and had already been accepted into university.
Grandpa gave her the same $500.
She complained.

"Why does she get the same amount after wasting hers?"
Grandpa replied:

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@bobbyminor @ShawnGillespi The fact that he said “16 year olds” tells you that he doesn’t have experience there.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@SpencerDevino @contractorkeith Just make sure you don’t have an interruption in your service or your house will collapse.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@SpencerDevino @contractorkeith Wow. Just wow. I’ll be laughing at this for awhile. Thank you sir.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@alexchristy17 It’s because the south is known for its poor manners. That’s why we call it southern inhospitality.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@allie__voss @luinalaska He or she. A baby is not an “it”.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@x_Aurelion @VoicesofWW2 For sure. When your industrial base can crank out an aircraft carrier a month you’re not going to lose. Great story nonetheless.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

84 years ago today, a pilot running out of fuel made a decision that won the Pacific War. Most Americans have never heard his name.

June 4, 1942. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's navy is undefeated. Four of the carriers that burned Pearl, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, are steaming toward Midway to finish off the US Pacific Fleet.

At 7:52 AM, Wade McClusky launches from USS Enterprise leading 32 Dauntless dive bombers. Here's the detail nobody mentions: McClusky is a fighter pilot. He'd been given the air group weeks earlier and had barely flown a dive bomber in combat. Now he's leading every SBD the Enterprise has at the most important target in the Pacific.

9:20 AM. He arrives at the intercept point where the Japanese fleet is supposed to be.

Empty ocean. Nothing for miles.

The Japanese had turned. Nobody knew where. And now McClusky owns the worst math problem in naval aviation: his fuel is bleeding away, and every minute he keeps searching, he condemns more of his own pilots to ditch in open water where nobody will find them.

Doctrine is clear. Turn back.

McClusky keeps going. He works a search pattern, squeezing miles out of dying fuel tanks.

9:55 AM. Far below, a single Japanese destroyer is cutting a white scar across the ocean at flank speed. It's the Arashi, racing to rejoin the fleet after depth-charging the American submarine Nautilus. Think about that. A failed sub attack is about to give away the entire Japanese navy.

McClusky reads the wake like an arrow and follows it.

10:02 AM. The horizon fills with the entire Japanese strike force. Four carriers, their decks crammed with planes being refueled and rearmed. Fuel lines snaking everywhere. Bombs stacked in the open.

And here's the miracle: the sky above them is empty. Minutes earlier, American torpedo squadrons had attacked at sea level and been annihilated. Torpedo 8 lost all 15 planes. One survivor, Ensign George Gay, watched what came next while hiding under his seat cushion in the water. Those doomed pilots dragged every Japanese fighter down to the waves. The door upstairs was wide open.

10:22 AM. McClusky pushes over from 14,500 feet. Both squadrons follow him down onto Kaga. It's actually a mistake, doctrine said split the targets, but Lt. Dick Best catches it mid-dive, pulls out with two wingmen, and goes after Akagi alone. His single bomb pierces the flight deck into the packed hangar. It's enough.

By 10:28, Kaga, Akagi, and Soryu, the third hit simultaneously by Yorktown's bombers, are floating infernos. Six minutes. Three carriers that attacked Pearl Harbor, gone. Hiryu follows them to the bottom that evening.

The cost of McClusky's gamble was real. Many Enterprise bombers never made it home, some shot down, others swallowed by the sea when their tanks ran dry. McClusky himself was jumped by two Zeros on the way out, took five bullets through his shoulder, and still flew his shot-up Dauntless back to the Enterprise.

Admiral Nimitz said McClusky's decision "decided the fate of our carrier task force and our forces at Midway." Japan never won another major battle.

One borrowed pilot. One destroyer's wake. One choice to keep flying when every gauge said go home.

[Rodney Smith Jr @iamrodneysmith]

Dear @WhiteHouse, my name is Rodney Smith Jr., founder of Raising Men & Women Lawn Care Service in Huntsville, Alabama. Through our 50 Yard Challenge, over 6,000 kids across the country have signed up to mow free lawns for the elderly, disabled, veterans, active-duty military, first responders, and single parents. With America celebrating its 250th birthday this year and me also being born on July 4th, I wanted to humbly ask if a few kids from our program and myself could travel to Washington, D.C. to help mow the White House lawn for this historic celebration.

More than anything, I want these kids to see how a simple act of service something as ordinary as mowing a lawn for someone in need can lead to extraordinary places. What better lesson in community service than showing them that helping others can take them all the way to our nation’s capital? I’d also love to bring my American flag-themed mower in hopes that the President might sign it, so I can later auction it off and donate 100% of the proceeds to a nonprofit supporting veterans. It would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to highlight the importance of service, patriotism, and the impact young people can have when they choose to make a difference. 🇺🇸

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

The richest man in America signed a document that could have gotten him hanged, and when someone sneered that he was safe because no one would know which Charles Carroll to come for, he picked up the pen and told the British exactly where to find him.

His name was Charles Carroll, and the colonies were crawling with men who shared it. His own father was Charles Carroll of Annapolis. So when the Declaration of Independence came to him for signing in 1776, a delegate made a cruel little joke. He said Carroll risked nothing by signing. There were so many Charles Carrolls that the King's men would never know which one to hang.

Carroll didn't argue. He leaned over the page and added three words to his signature: "of Carrollton." The name of his estate. His address. He was the only signer in the entire room who wrote down where he lived, and he did it on purpose, so that if the British wanted to come hang the traitor, they would know exactly which door to knock on.

That is who Charles Carroll of Carrollton was.

Here is what makes the moment even sharper. He was not a man with little to lose. He was the single wealthiest man in the thirteen colonies and the largest private landowner among them. While George Washington and John Hancock get talked about as rich men, it was Carroll who topped them all. When he signed, he was wagering the biggest personal fortune in America against a noose.

And he was the last man anyone would have expected to be there at all. Carroll was Catholic. In colonial Maryland, a colony founded as a Catholic refuge that had since turned on its own, Catholics could not vote. They could not hold public office. They could not worship in public. The most educated, wealthiest man in America was, in the eyes of the law, a second-class subject barred from the very government he was helping to create. He had spent seventeen years being educated by Jesuits in France and spoke five languages fluently, and back home he still could not legally cast a ballot.

So he became the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, putting his name on a revolution that he hoped would build a country with room for men like him. That was its own enormous bet, made by a man the existing system had already shut out.

Then he simply outlived everyone.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same astonishing day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years after the Declaration. When they were gone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton was the last living signer left on earth. For six more years he was the final human link to that room in Philadelphia, the last hand that had signed, a living relic of the founding that ordinary Americans traveled to see and shake.

He finally died in November 1832 at the age of ninety-five, fifty-six years after he wrote his address on a treason document and dared the empire to come find him.

The richest man in America. The only Catholic. The last one standing. He had more to lose than any of them, every legal reason to stay quiet, and he signed his full address anyway.

We remember the names we were handed in school. We forget the man who made sure his couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's.

Which Founding Father do you think history shortchanged the most?

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

Why am I just seeing this now? This might be the greatest MLB X account interaction. A lot of screenshots but definitely worth your time. Follow along in the thread below because this might be the best thing you’ll see on here all week.

I wonder if these two are married or still together.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@MichelleMaxwell Excellent post. I'd only add that a tick can stay longer in a freezer. Put it in a ziplock and on that bag write the date and person who was bitten. Also, get some chickens or ducks. They take care of the tick problem the old fashioned way.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@uscfan981 They are south of Canada

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

In 458 BC, Rome was on the brink of collapse.

An invading army had trapped the Roman consul and his legion in a mountain pass. Panic spread through the city. The Senate did the only thing they could think of:

They sent messengers to find a 60-year-old farmer plowing his field.

His name was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He had once been a senator, then lost his fortune paying his son's bail. Now he worked his own four-acre plot just to feed his family.

When the Senate's envoys arrived, they found him sweating behind a plow. They asked him to put on his toga so they could deliver an official message.

The message: Rome was making him dictator. Absolute power. Total command of the army. No checks. No oversight. No term limit.

He accepted.

Within 16 days, Cincinnatus had raised an army, marched out, surrounded the enemy, and forced their surrender. The republic was saved.

He had legal authority to rule for six months. He could have stayed. He could have expanded his power. He could have done what every other ruler in human history did when handed unlimited control.

Instead, he resigned on day 16.

He took off the toga, walked back to his farm, and finished plowing the field he'd left half-done.

Twenty years later, when Rome faced another crisis, they called him back. He was 80 years old. He took command, crushed the conspiracy, and resigned again, this time after just 21 days.

He died poor. On his farm.

2,200 years later, when George Washington was offered a kingship after winning the American Revolution, he refused and went home to Mount Vernon. The reason he was hailed as "the American Cincinnatus" is because Europeans literally could not believe a man who had won would willingly give up power.

King George III, on hearing Washington would resign rather than rule, said: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

The lesson isn't that Cincinnatus was humble.

The lesson is that for most of human history, the people most qualified to lead were the ones who didn't want to. And the moment a society starts rewarding those who chase power instead of those who flee from it is the moment the republic begins to die.

Cincinnati, Ohio is named after him.

Most people who live there have no idea why.

[Justin Hopkins @contableserio]

@theguardrailguy It’s a beautiful thing to see someone find their calling in life.

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Life is too short to worry about little things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing, and don't let people bring you down. Study, think, create, and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.