Erik Mertens

#H2P 🇺🇸 #XRP

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@Matt_Calkins @Zigmanfreud Great article. Come to Pittsburgh and write for one of our papers.

[Vince Langman @LangmanVince]

We don't deserve dogs! 🤣❤️

[TheFeedski @TheFeedskiVids]

Ryder Williams was sitting in his lifeguard tower at Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz, California. It was his first season on the job. He was 16 years old.

Then he saw a 10-year-old boy named Nathaniel lose his footing in ankle-deep water and get swept out by the surf.

Ryder radioed it in, threw his radio and sunglasses at the base of his tower, grabbed his fins and buoy, and ran into the water after him. What followed was one of the most intense ocean rescues captured on camera in recent memory.

The waves were enormous. Bystanders who tried to help were immediately overwhelmed and pushed back to shore. A photographer named Scott Vander Dussen, who had been taking pictures on the beach and first spotted Nathaniel disappearing into the sea, watched as Ryder fought through wave after wave, never letting go of the boy. Witnesses said the struggle lasted far longer than the two-minute viral video shows.

By the time Ryder got Nathaniel to shore, the boy had lost consciousness. He was limp in Ryder's arms.

Nathaniel's father, Sumit Rai, watched the rescue for the first time on video. He hadn't been at the beach. "Another two or three seconds," he said, "I don't think my son would have made it." He added that Nathaniel had known he was drowning. He had blacked out assuming he was going to die.

Nathaniel was reunited with his family and evaluated by paramedics. He survived.

The video went viral almost immediately, racking up millions of views. Ryder's response to the attention was simple. "This is my job and I love what I do," he said. "I'm thankful to my fellow lifeguards who perform rescues just like this every day."

What the video didn't show is that Ryder made five saves that same day. His grandfather told reporters the other rescues were, in his words, "more gnarly."

It was his first season.

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@RealSportsStat You fail to mention they rolled Georgia 27-3 in the sugar

[𝐍𝐒𝟗 @NorthShoreNine]

This is who you pulled Bubba for at 84 pitches with the Yanks doing shit against him tonight.

[Chris Dokish @ChrisDokish]

And 28-14 when he doesn’t start. What are we doing here?

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@johnkroboth Manager is minor league. He’s cost us at least 5-6 games this season with his shitty decisions

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

Does Don Kelly realize his bullpen is garbage? 84 pitches for Bubba and he’s rolling. Let’s pull him for a 6+ era bullpen guy who might work. We have a great team with a shitty bullpen and a minor league manager making decisions. #letsgobucs deserve better.

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@colin_beazley Don Kelly is not a major league manager interested in winning games. Bullpen is garbage. Fans know it. Opposing teams know it. DK has no clue how bad his bullpen is. His decisions are horrific at best

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The biggest meme in sports right now is a WNBA player pointing a finger. The White House posted it. Max Holloway recreated it in the UFC cage. Shein is selling the shirts. And the WNBA players' union just banned its own partners from making a dollar off it.

Think about how backwards that is. This is a league that reportedly lost about $40M last year and whose players just fought through a CBA battle over pay. The most marketable moment of its entire season fell into its lap for free. Every brand in the licensing program, 2K, Panini, Lids, Funko, wanted it. The union said no.

The stated reason is that the point was aimed at DeWanna Bonner, another member, and the union won't license "conduct from a confrontation." A dignity policy. Fine in theory.

Except the ban does nothing to protect Bonner. The shirts exist anyway. Etsy, TeePublic, and Shein are shipping them right now. The point is everywhere, on every platform, in a White House video. The only thing the union actually controlled was who gets paid, and it chose: bootleggers yes, players no.

Cunningham can still license it herself, without league logos, if she builds a merch operation from scratch mid-season, inside the few-week window before the meme dies. That's the union telling its own member to go compete with Shein alone.

This is the same player who said on her podcast this month that even under the new CBA, salaries aren't enough to fund retirement.

A union has one job: capture money for members. This one looked at the sport's most valuable viral asset of the summer and handed 100% of the revenue to counterfeiters on principle.

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@MarkMaddenX If we had Francona counsell, cash or even the last guy that won the wpial championship as a manager we might have a chance. The decisions made by our manager are confounding

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

He told his students to go to the windows.
Get out. Jump if you have to.
Then Liviu Librescu walked to the classroom door and pressed his body against it.
He was 76 years old. He weighed 140 lbs
The gunman was in the hallway.
It was April 16, 2007. A Monday morning. Solid mechanics class at Virginia Tech, Room 204. Twenty-two students, most of them 19 or 20 years old.
At 9:45 AM, gunshots echoed through Norris Hall. Room by room, the shooter was working his way down the corridor.
Liviu heard it. He understood immediately.
He had survived the Holocaust. He had survived a labor camp. He had spent decades living under Communist oppression. He knew exactly what evil sounded like.
He told his students to escape through the windows. Second floor — it was a drop, but they'd survive. Then he walked to the door and held it shut with his body.
The shooter tried to force it open. It wouldn't move.
He fired through the door. Wood splintered. Bullets came through.
Liviu stayed.
Behind him, students were climbing out the windows. Dropping to the ground. Running. One by one, all twenty-two of them got out.
The shooter kept firing through the door.
Liviu held it shut until every student was safe.
Then the bullets killed him.
When police arrived, they found his body at the door.
All 22 of his students survived. Not one was injured.
Liviu Librescu was born on August 18, 1930, in Ploiești, Romania.
He was Jewish. In 1941, when he was eleven years old, Romanian authorities sent him and his family to a labor camp. His father died there. Liviu survived. When the war ended, he was fifteen.
He went back to school. Studied engineering. Earned a doctorate from the University of Bucharest.
But Communist Romania had no interest in allowing a Jewish intellectual to succeed. He was blocked from academic positions. Passed over for jobs he deserved. He applied to emigrate. The government kept refusing.
Finally, in 1978 when Liviu was 48 years old — Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened. Romania let him go.
He had spent most of his adult life trapped in a country that didn't want him.
In Israel, he taught at Tel Aviv University. Published over 300 papers. Became an international expert in aeroelasticity — the science of how air flows over aircraft wings.
In 1985, Virginia Tech offered him a position. He moved to Blacksburg, Virginia. He taught there for 22 years. His students loved him — demanding but kind, high standards, genuine care.
He was still teaching full-time at 76. Still publishing research. Still showing up every Monday morning for solid mechanics.
April 16 was the first day of Passover — the Jewish holiday celebrating liberation from slavery and oppression.
Liviu Librescu died on the day his tradition sets aside to celebrate freedom.
He spent his entire life escaping death and oppression by luck, by persistence, by the intervention of others. And on his last morning, he chose to stand at a door so that twenty-two young people could have the future he had fought so hard to reach.
He could have run. He could have hidden. He could have climbed out a window with his students.
He chose to stay.
The Virginia Tech shooting killed 32 people that day — the deadliest school shooting in American history at the time.
Room 204 had zero casualties.
Because a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor held a door with his body until every student behind him was gone.
His funeral was held in Israel. Students from Virginia Tech flew across the ocean to honor him. The Israeli government awarded him the Star of David Medal posthumously. Virginia Tech named a scholarship in his memory.
His son said his father died the way he lived — protecting others.
A man who survived everything evil threw at him for 76 years.
On his last day, he made sure 22 kids survived too.
Professor Liviu Librescu. August 18, 1930 — April 16, 2007.
Holocaust survivor. Labor camp survivor.
302 published papers. 22 years at Virginia Tech.
22 students out the window.
He held the door.

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@AmandaFGodsey @TheLoyalSons PSU guy. They get worked up over everything except the one thing they should’ve.

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[𝐍𝐒𝟗 @NorthShoreNine]

A lot of people throw the term out "serious teams don't do this" and a lot of times it's over exaggerated.

I am here to tell you serious teams don't do this...

[nduka omeife @ndukaomeife]

When I watched the Ecuador coach celebrate so passionately after his team's victory over Germany yesterday, I was reminded of a profound truth often associated with Napoleon Hill:

"The most powerful mastermind alliance a man will ever form is in his marriage. A woman, rightly chosen, aligned in vision, and honored in spirit, can make a man unbreakable. But a woman wrongly chosen or unaligned in purpose will drain him of vision, strip him of confidence, and sentence him to spiritual poverty.

Many men fall not because of failure in business, but because of conflict in the home. They rise with vision only to have it mocked. They speak with clarity only to have it questioned. They act with courage only to be met with resistance. This is not partnership. This is war. And a man at war with his household cannot build peace outside of it.

But when a woman supports a man's purpose, when she believes in his destiny, when she reflects his greatness before the world sees it, that woman becomes the mastermind in motion. Her energy fuels him. Her intuition sharpens him. Her peace steadies him. Her presence becomes a sanctuary. And the man with that kind of partner is dangerous to every limitation.

You must choose this alliance with wisdom. And if you are already in one, you must train it, not ignore it. Share your aim. Speak your plan. Invite her insight. Draw strength from her spirit. This is not weakness. This is wisdom. This is law."

[American Nightmare 🇺🇸 @thewakeninq]

A German fan said it best:

“If you want to hate America, watch the news. If you want to love America, drive through it.”

Over 3.6 million fans packed stadiums for the World Cup, breaking attendance records. Millions came from every corner of the globe and experienced what the headlines never show: welcoming people, incredible hospitality, and a country unlike any other.

The media sells outrage. America sells itself.

[@amuse @amuse]

https://t.co/5tedBik5II

[Erik Mertens @emerts1]

@rjohnston4 @DOMISMONEY There is no link because it didn’t happen