screw u thermo tron
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Yeah, we've had a few interviews in before talking about how they can fix anything, and there isn't much they haven't seen. Then we take them out into the plant where these are made and some become humbled very quickly. I've actually had 2 that we've flown in town say, uhhh....this is a little beyond me. All it takes is a willingness to learn...we'll teach you. Extensive training program for sure. Thanks for your well wishes
THE STATELY mansion at 1057 South Shore Drive in Holland, Michigan, is about as far from Fallujah as one could imagine. The home where young Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, grew up sits along the sleepy banks of Lake Macatawa, an inlet of Lake Michigan in the American Midwest. Trees shimmer along the edges of the driveway on a summer day; the sun glints peacefully off the lake. Occasionally, a car clips by or a boat motor starts, but otherwise the neighborhood is calm and quiet, the embodiment of affluent, postcard American society. Two middle-aged women power-walk past a man lazily riding his lawnmower. Other than that, the street is deserted. As they trot by, one of the women glances over to her companion, their sun visors almost colliding, and asks whether the Prince family still owns the mansion. The estate is well-known, the family more so. In Holland, Michigan, the Princes were indeed royalty, and Erik's father, Edgar Prince, was the king.
Much like Blackwater's compound in Moyock, North Carolina-a seven-thousand-acre peat bog with a constant rattle of machine-gun fire-is Erik Prince's personal fiefdom, the idyllic Dutch hamlet of Holland was his father's. Aself-made industrialist, Edgar Prince employed nearly a quarter of the city. He shaped its institutions, planned and funded its downtown, and was among the biggest benefactors to its two colleges. A decade after Edgar's sudden death in 1995, his presence and legacy still permeate the town. On the corner of two of the busiest streets in Holland's soccer-mom-chic downtown, there is a monument to Ed Prince: seven bronze footsteps embedded in the ground lead to a raised platform upon which stand life-sized bronze statues of a trio of musicians-a tuxedoed cello player, a mustached violinist, and a young woman wearing a skirt who is blowing into her flute. Another statue depicts a little girl standing with her arms wrapped around a small boy, holding a book of music notes, their mouths frozen in song. On the pedestal below the group is a small plaque memorializing Edgar D. Prince: "We will always hear your footsteps," it reads. "The People of Downtown Holland honor your extraordinary vision and generosity."
If there was one lesson Edgar Prince was poised to impart to his children, it was how to build and maintain an empire based on strict Christian values, right-wing politics, and free-market economics. But while the landscape of Holland today is dotted with memorials to the Prince family legacy, Edgar was not the town's original emperor. Dating back to the community's founding, Holland had long been run by Christian patriarchs. In 1846, with a sea-weary clan of fifty-seven fellow Dutch refugees, Albertus Van Raalte came ashore in western Michigan. Prince's predecessor had fled his home country because he had "undergone all manner of humiliation and persecution through his defiance of the religious restrictions imposed by the State church," according to the city.
Van Raalte was a member of a sect of the Dutch Reform Church opposed by the Dutch monarchy at the time. After arriving in the United States aboard his vessel, the Southerner, Van Raalte led the clan to the shores of Lake Michigan, where he envisioned a community free to live and worship within the tenets of his brand of Dutch Reform, and without any outside influence. After some scouting he came upon a perfect spot, next to a lake that ran into Lake Michigan. On February 9, 1847, Van Raalte's community was founded, on the site where Erik Prince would later spend his youth, perhaps some of it on the creaking dock that sneaks out into the Lake Michigan inlet. But Van Raalte's perfect vision would not be realized quite as he expected, according to a biography produced by Hope College, which he founded and which has seen millions of dollars in donations from the Prince family: "[Van Raalte's] goal of developing a Christian community governed by Christian principles was visionary but was shattered in 1850. Holland Township became the basic unit of government. Van Raalte's ideal of Christian control was lost." But Van Raalte sought alternative means of establishing his Shangri-La in Holland. "His influence was felt because he became active in politics and he continued to own large tracts of land," according to the biography. "Although many of the means to achieve a Christian community broke down, Van Raalte was still the pastor of the only church, member of the district school board, guiding light of the Academy, principal landowner, and a businessman with major property holdings." Virtually the same description could be applied to Edgar Prince and, eventually, to Erik, born nearly a century after Van Raalte's death.
The conservative Dutch Reform Church that provided the religious guidance for Van Raalte, and eventually the Prince family, based its beliefs on the teachings of a seventeenth-century minister, John Calvin. One of the main tenets of Calvinism is that of predestination-the belief that God has predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation. Calvinists believe that people have no business meddling or vainly trying to divine God's decisions. The religion also teaches strict obedience and hard work, acting on the belief that God will steer followers but that they are responsible for the work. Calvinists have long taken pride in their work ethic. The town of Holland boasts that its villagers dug the canal to Lake Michigan-that would prove valuable for trade-with their own hands, and then set down their shovels and immediately constructed the bridge over their new channel.
It was this famed work ethic that found Erik Prince's grandfather Peter Prince, owner of the Tulip City Produce Company, on a truck heading to Grand Rapids, thirty miles away, for a business meeting in the early morning hours of May 21, 1943. Shortly into the trip, Prince complained of heartburn to his fellow wholesale produce dealer, and they pulled over for a few minutes. Soon, they continued on, and near Hudsonville, halfway through the trip, Prince slumped over against his colleague, who was driving. A doctor in the town pronounced him dead on arrival at the age of thirty-six. Peter's son, Edgar, was eleven years old.
A decade later, Edgar Prince graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree and met Elsa Zwiep, whose parents owned Zwiep's Seed Store in Holland and who had just completed her studies in education and sociology at nearby Calvin College. The two married, and Edgar followed family tradition and joined the military, serving in the U.S. Air Force. The couple moved east and then west as Edgar was stationed at bases in South Carolina and Colorado. Though it's unclear whether Peter Prince was a veteran-he came of age for the draft during the window between World War I and World War II-four of Peter's five brothers were in the Army at the time of his death. Though Edgar Prince had traveled far and wide during college and the Air Force, his hometown of Holland beckoned him and Elsa back to Lake Michigan and to the strict religious and cultural traditions embraced by the Prince family. "We find Holland a very comfortable place to live," Edgar Prince said in a book written about Holland's downtown, which included three chapters on the family. "We have family here. We enjoy the recreational opportunities. We like the community's heritage, which is based on the Dutch reputation for being neat, clean, orderly, and hard working. Their standard has always been excellence."
Upon returning to the town, Edgar rolled up his sleeves and started working in die-casting, rising to the position of chief engineer at Holland's Buss Machine Works. But Edgar had much bigger ambitions and soon quit. In 1965, Prince and two fellow employees founded their own company that made die-cast machines for the auto industry. In 1969, he shipped a sixteen-hundred-ton machine capable of creating aluminum transmission cases every two minutes. By 1973, Prince Corporation was a great success, with hundreds of people working for the company's various Holland divisions. That year, the company began production of what would become its signature product, an invention that would end up in virtually every car in the world and put Edgar Prince on his way to becoming a billionaire: the ubiquitous lighted sun visor.
Posted on Sun, May. 27, 2007
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"BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU IN LIFE. ULTIMATELY, GOD IS STILL ON THE THRONE. THE SUN CAME UP THIS MORNING. THE WORLD WILL NOT END." KEVIN HOLT
A job lost and perspective gained
Gastonia man was fired a week after notifying his firm he had been deployed.
MIKE DRUMMOND
mdrummond@charlotteobserver.com
Kevin Holt of Gastonia bears little likeness to the chiseled warriors depicted in Army posters.
He's 41, heavyset and has a habit of pushing his eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose.
He's a citizen-soldier.
The former sailor enlisted in the National Guard in July 2004 as a way to supplement his income and heed a call to service.
Last summer, between supervising a chow line at Camp Speicher outside Tikrit, Iraq, and running food convoys, Holt sat at dusty computer keyboards, hunting and pecking the answers to his online college course. He hoped a business degree would help him land a job.
Thermotron Industries, based in Holland, Mich., fired Holt in April 2005,
near the height of the Bush administration's call-up of National Guard members and just a week after Holt told the company he was being deployed to Iraq.
Holt serviced Thermotron's environmental test chambers, which expose electronics and other devices to temperature extremes. He covered a patch of the Southeast for the privately held, mid-sized company, making about $54,000 a year.
Holt says Thermotron accused him of trying to bill the company for Yellow Pages advertising he had ordered for his side repair business.
BellSouth had mailed the bill to Thermotron by mistake, an error Holt said his boss had resolved more than eight months before.
The married father of two worked seven years for Thermotron, which has a growing defense-contract business.
The termination was an about-face for a company that two months before firing him had given Holt another glowing annual evaluation.
Fellow soldiers in the National Guard's 505th Engineer Battalion said they thought the timing of the firing looked fishy. They told him about the law designed to protect civilian jobs of part-time soldiers called to active duty.
Holt tried to get his job back.
He filed complaints with state and federal labor departments.
He thought his case was a slam-dunk.
Thermotron sent letters in its defense.
It produced copies of the Yellow Pages bill it said proved Holt tried to deceive the company.
The company denied that a supervisor had told Holt the billing mistake had been resolved.
Holt provided documents but couldn't produce anything showing Thermotron fired him because his military service conflicted with the company's need for a repairman in the Southeast.
Channels prove fruitless
Like thousands of service members,
Holt's journey through government channels proved futile."They wanted documents," Holt says of labor officials. "But I was getting ready to go to war."
By November 2005, with Holt in Iraq, state and federal labor officials had sent letters to his house.
The agencies ruled Thermotron fired him "for cause."
Richard Castillo, the U.S. Labor Department's assistant director in Michigan, said Holt could request the agency refer the case to the Justice Department for possible litigation.
But Castillo would recommend "no further action be taken."
Ronald Lampen,
Thermotron's vice president of service operations, noted agencies ruled in the company's favor.
"Holt's allegations are unfounded and untrue," Lampen told the Observer in a phone call.
He refused to answer further questions, then hung up.
A call to a job
Above Kevin Holt's backyard workshop, a massive portrait of Jesus stands watch.
"Bad things will happen to you in life," Holt says.
"Ultimately, God is still on the throne.
The sun came up this morning. The world will not end."
Last October Holt returned home to hugs, red-white-and-blue bunting around the mailbox ... and a job interview.
Espec North America had heard Holt was no longer with competitor Thermotron.
After e-mailing Holt in Iraq, the company agreed to talk with him when he got back.
In November, he became Espec's newest employee.
Going from civilian to soldier, from Gastonia to Tikrit and back, from unemployed to employed in a little over a year has imbued Holt with perspective.
"I grew up a lot during the experience," he says. "I never lost a job before. Never experienced unemployment. I always feared facing that.
But the calamity I thought was going to happen, didn't happen."
He enrolled in school again, this time to work on a master's in theology through an online program.
"I feel called," Holt says, "to serve as an Army chaplain."
As a Guard member, Holt says he's willing to return to Iraq or wherever his country needs him.
He also abides by the gospel of Luke, the passage that admonishes
"Love your enemies," and "pray for those who mistreat you."
Russells Technical Products began when Russells Refrigeration Co., a commercial and industrial refrigeration sales and service company, was acquired in 1972 by Mr. Donald Bench. Since then, Russells has been designing and manufacturing environmental test systems and providing a comprehensive and varied product line including both pre-engineered and custom/specialty chambers. This has allowed Russells to attract and retain the technical expertise required in this field. Mr. Bench has been in the environmental test chamber manufacturing business since the 1950's starting with Conrad Inc., one of the original pioneering companies in this industry. Mr. Bench served Conrad as Chief Engineer and later becoming its President.
Webster's Dictionary defines "placebo" as "a medication prescribed more for the mental relief of a patient than for the actual effect on his disorder, or something tending to soothe."
The doctors tell us that if we know we are being treated with a placebo, it does not work. In our minds we must think that it is a real medication and has the strength or power to heal. If the patient believes this, then the treatment has been known to work wonders in many cases that otherwise could not have been treated.
Placebo treatment is, in fact, nothing of substance, but in the mind of the patient it is real. In order for this kind of treatment to work, the doctor must convince the patient of the work of the medication.
My friend, I declare unto you that this is the exact "treatment" that most "mouth-professing" Christians are using today. The doctor administering this "medication" is Satan himself. He gives the "patent" a sugar-coated religion, a shallow experience, and whispers half-truths into his ears.
He then tells the "patient" that it is real and that it is all the "patent" needs. The "patent", having been taken in by Satan, believes this and goes on his merry way declaring to all that he has been born again, his salvation is real, and this experience is all that he needs.
Doctor Satan will allow his "patient" to continue to go to church and will allow him to take part in any church, that is, singing, leading in prayer, teaching Sunday School, and even preaching.
He will allow the "patient" to make any kind of statement in connection with his "mouth-professing" religion, even to the point of the saving power of Jesus.
Yes, he will allow the "patient" to do all and say all with one exception. That exception is that the "patient" will not be allowed to live the life that he confesses with his mouth ...
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