$1,661.87 in cats (R...

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S)

$1,661.87 in cats (ROCKETMAN_S)
  • Updated:August 1, 2011 4:03 pm
  • Last visit:December 28, 2023 8:20 am
  • Member Since:January 10, 2000 7:05 pm
Milky Way galaxy, most of the time anyway.

They say I'm usually off in space somewhere, but I still have to occasionally deal with hassles on earth.
Male
Engineering (Non-computer related)
"The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery." - Sir Winston Churchill

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve." - Henry David Thoreau

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are." - Ayn Rand

"What's the difference between California and the Titanic? Those on the Titanic didn't vote to hit the iceberg!" - Captain_B

"I like my beer dark, cigars strong, coffee black, bourbon straight, and politicians on the end of a rope." -Mark Twain

“Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.” - Blaise Pascal

"Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and--never attempting to learn the difference--in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts." - The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. II, No. 12 March 12, 1973

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau

"It is not that power, in and of itself, is inherently corrupting, but that power is magnetic to the corruptible." - Frank Herbert

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage." - author(s) unknown

"Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well." - Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." — H.L. Mencken

"A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell!" - Thomas Fuller (June 19, 1608 - August 16, 1661)

"The attempt to regulate, control, and prescribe all manner of conduct and social relations is very old. It was always the practice of primitive peoples." ~Calvin Coolidge

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C S Lewis

"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority." - Eric Hoffer

"There are two ways to acquire the niceties of life: to produce them or to plunder them. When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." - Frederic Bastiat

"I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." -Robert Hei

"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely." - Jerry Pournelle (Iron Law of Bureaucracy)

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."
--James Madison (likely), Federalist No. 62, 1788

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.
- Ayn Rand

"You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves" - Abraham Lincoln

"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security."--Edward Gibbon

"There is an obligation to forgive but it does not extend to the unrepentant. To give them aid and comfort is to support their evil doing and to become what is known in law as an accessory after the fact. A government which does that is a reproach to civilization and will soon have on its hands the blood of its citizens." ~Calvin Cooledge

"Life is what happens while you're busy making plans" - John Lennon

"If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little." - George Carlin

"We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.... Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do." - Ben Rich, former Head of the Lockheed Skunk Works, in a lecture shortly before he died

"I am a most unhappy man. I have ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - former President Woodrow Wilson

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves." -
Abraham Lincoln

"The budget should be balanced,the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced,the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled,and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

"Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed." - Barry Goldwater, K7UGA (silent key)

"Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes." - Zig Ziglar
 

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Personal

5 ft 11
170-180 (target) 196-202 actual
Brown / green
black & grey
whatever is clean and functions well You mean people actually waste money on clothes for fashion? If it doesn't have holes in it, or really bright glaring colors, wear it. Boots and blue jeans are comfortable and practical.
When the trumpet blows I'm outta here.
Does "homo sapiens" count? Most of us are Tau'ri [Earthlings]. Although some others might have escaped from Area 51 and be hiding out in singles bars.

There are all those hypersensitive types that screech "racism!" if one acknowledges that every person on earth doesn't have the exact same DNA or look alike. If we were all cookie-cutter identical like circuit boards coming off an assembly line, then we would have total genetic stagnation in a couple of generations like some family trees that don't branch. It is the character of the person that trumps their particular ancestry. If they demand special preferential treatment because of it or demand "reparations" for something that happened to or was done by their ancestors, then I DO have a problem with that.
Disappointed by how far the Republicans have strayed from the faith, terrified of what the Democrats will do in angry retaliation, resigned to the libertarians not having a snowball's chance in hell, so mostly just watching as the far left and the far right work as a tag team to send the country down the tubes.
Horizontal, sometimes vertical, zero gravity ought to be interesting in longer than 30 second intervals.
divorced but the ex is like a boomerang and washed ashore on the doorstep again in mid 2003, penniless after discovering that the only place "success" comes before "work" is in the dictionary.
Um, as organized as my life was in the peak years for such things, adding children to the task list would have been a train wreck. It would have crashed the system worse than trying to upgrade Windows 95 to Vista on a 100 mhz Pentium with 4 meg of RAM, a 1.2 gig hard drive, and 14.4k modem. I delegate having and raising children to those with much superior people skills, relationship security, and earning power than I ever attained.
 

Favorites

Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, George Orwell, and many others who saw the future either as one of unbounded opportunity, or as confining as one's secret fears.
*** Currently reading *** :, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia by Gregory Benford, "The Five Thousand Year Leap - a Miracle that Changed the World" - Principles of Freedom 101, *** Favorites ***:, "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age" by Maggie Jackson, "When Technology Fails - A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency by Matthew Stein, "Welcome to Obamaland: I have Seen the Future and It Doesn't Work" by James Delingpole, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." by Dr. Lyle Rossite, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality: Jerome R Corsi, Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders by James D. Scurlock, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosake, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 by Dinesh D'Souza, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by John Stossel, State of Fear by Michael Crichton, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Life After Doomsday by Bruce Clayton, Earth Abides by George R Stewart, 1984 by George Orwell, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years by Rich Lowry, Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter, The Fuel Alcohol Distiller's Handbook, The ARRL Handbook, The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? by Tony Blankley, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America -Bernard Goldberg, Do As I Say (Not As I Do)Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy -Peter Schweizer
QST CQ QEX Nasa Tech Briefs Popular Science Popular Mechanics Astronomy Discover Scientific American Readers' Digest The Limbaugh Letter And there's probably others in the stack of stuff
Washington Times, Dallas Morning News, Midland Reporter Telegram http://www.mywesttexas.com , Odessa American http://www.oaoa.com
Dilbert, BC, Wizard of Id, Mallard Filmore, Shoe, Luann, Blondie, and many from the past: Peanuts, Steve Canyon, Dick Tracy, Lil Abner, many of which will likely never have any new material, and are sorely missed along with the era they came from.
Stargate: Continuum Stargate: Ark of Truth Maxed Out, The Great Global Warming Swindle, Star Trek (all), James Bond (all), Star Wars (all), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001 a Space Odyssey, Apollo 13, The Right Stuff, Independence Day. There haven't been any decent movies that got Oscars or anything in the past 20 years - well, maybe an exception or two, but Hollywood seems more intent on political indoctrination than entertainment, and don't even care if they lose money with that stuff. So they don't get my hard-earned dollars since supporting them is like giving aid and comfort to an enemy in time of war.
Falling Skies, Stargate Universe, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, The Unit, Jericho, Flashpoint, The Mentalist, CSI Miami / NY / Vegas, Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, Without a Trace, Cold Case, Bones, Nightline, Good Morning America. And now that a buddy of mine has cable and a TiVO and tools to edit out commercials and burn a bunch of History Channel and National Geographic and Discovery Channel stuff to DVDs, I'll have more ways to waste time. Kids spend way too much time in front of the TV and too little time getting outside these days, which is why 14 year olds are developing Type 2 diabetes and 17 year olds are having heart attacks from arterial plaques.
Charlton Heston, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn and a bunch of others that are mostly dead now. Those they have now are too young cause they were in diapers back when I used to watch a lot of movies.
Do they still have music? Well, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is awesome around Christmas time. The good old heavy metal rock from the 70s and Woodstock classics from the 60s has been replaced with that stuff teenagers listen to these days and thought fingernails on a chalkboard sound better. But then most kids today have probably never seen a chalkboard because it was made obsolete by desktop computers before they were even born, just like 12 inch vinyl records that REAL music is recorded on, not stored in an Ipod where the evil recording labels can make it quit working and make you buy another one when the Ipod becomes obsolete in a couple of months. And back when there was real music, some people worried about backwards masked subliminal stuff on some records. But the Sony / BMG rootkit virus / spyware infection they put on their newer music CDs is pure evil. Vinyl records didn't infect your other albums and tattle on what other music you had or make it quit working. Doesn't stuff get obsolete real fast these days where whatever you paid good money for just quits working even though the hardware ought to last for another 100 years?
Most of the good bands and artists have gotten old and white haired and a bunch of them either died or ended up in nursing homes. It is a shock to see that old man playing that electric guitar at the Super Bowl. They say it's Mick Jagger with the Rolling Stones, but this fellow is older than I remember Grandpa. He was a young fella at Woodstock way back when there was real music. Maybe the place to hear real music in a few years will be in the nursing homes, jamming down and cranking it way up while the nurses bring em lots of pills.
Geocaching! I guess that's a sport that gets you outdoors into a few parks and pastures and sometimes remote corners of the desert to locate camouflaged film canisters and ammo cans using a GPS to find 50 cent toys that come with Happy Meals or Wal-Mart and sign a log sheet to say "Kilroy was Here". Yeah, it's the hunt that is the fun, and the toys are to keep kids interested when the grownups go 60 miles out in the middle of nowhere burning $3 a gallon gas. I think I've found close to 100 or so geocaches so far, and another 50 or so new ones beckon in the immediate area. NASCAR is a sport, too. So is high powered rocketry competition. There is something awesome about pushing a button and with a roar of fire and smoke, something you built leaps into the air and shrinks to a tiny speck at the end of a long vertical contrail, and you hear this distinctive sonic boom as it passes 1, 100 feet per second and keeps on accelerating. Oh, you have to get FAA clearance to launch the big stuff, and after 9/11 have to get a background check and fingerprinted by the BATF to get the bigger engines, because they are scared to death that Ahmed will get hold of a bigger rocket motor and build something to shoot down an airliner. Obviously the government paranoia sufferers have never done the total impulse and delta-V calculations or tried to design flight avionics to get a big payload to that kind of speed and altitude. It just has about killed the hobby, however, and deprived a whole new generation of the wonders of "October Sky". Curling in the winter Olympics, which is sliding 42 pound stones down a wide frozen shuffleboard and using brooms to guide them is another cool sport - literally 0ºC cool. Now skeleton would be fun, sliding head first down a chute of ice at 80 mph 2 inches above the ice on a cookie sheet. But we don't get ice and snow down here unless it's indoors with a huge air conditioning bill. We have a hockey team. People go to the games when it's 110 degrees F outside because they refrigerate the heck out of the arena to make ice in the rink. But the meat packing plant where the freeze whole beef carcases is a good place to cool off, as long as you get used to all the sweat that is pouring out from the 115 degrees outside start freezing on your forehead and back when you step into the -30 degree freezer and go "aaaahhh that feels good" until you start shivering because 30 below zero while shirtless and sweating cools you off really fast and you're ready to get out of there.
Dallas Cowboys of course. But I bet Permian High School's football team can beat them these days. If Permian or Midland Lee were to play the Cowboys, there would be a point spread of maybe 20. I can see that score in the paper, now: Midland Lee Rebels 48 Dallas Cowboys 8. That's two field goals and a safety. Those Cowboys would punt on 4th down and 32. Maybe in another decade they will end up in the Super Bowl again. It seems to run in 11 to 13 year cycles like the sunspots. Someone ought to correlate the sunspot cycles and peak flare intensities with Cowboys Super Bowls. Next solar maximum is around 2011 or 2012.
Vacation? What's that? You mean people really take vacations? They spend their own money to go places that aren't work related? Oh I guess HamCom in Dallas isn't really work related although I try to sell some of my boat anchors to pay for the gas and eat Ramen noodles on the trip and bring someone to drive us back so I can sleep unless there's rare DX on 20 meters.
I'll try anything at least once. I say I'm on the "seafood diet". I see food, I eat it.
 

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