From Peter Stickney:
On Sat, 10 Feb 2018 12:37:19 -0800, Dean Markley wrote:
snip
You're a democrat, aren't you?

No, just an idiot, although he's wandered farther afield into delusion
and, perhaps, paranoia.
Consider his "You won't have CT to kick around any more" manifesto from
29 Nov 2001, where the tried, in a passive/aggressive manner to pass
himself off as an SR-71 driving MiG Killer (Something that only exists in
Martin Caiden books) Test Pilot with a purported list of firsts that even
Caiden wouldn't think credible.

I never thought I'd see the day when Henry Spencer, Pat Flannery, OM,
Derek Lyons, John Beaderstat, et al would be gone, and the corridors echo
with the shrieks of Stuffie, jonathan, and Bbo Hallerb.

You can be as abusive as you want to be. For whatever it is that you get out of it.

As for that old post, there was something from that which pertains to these current batch of posts:

"I have flown multiple simulated shuttle approaches with John Young,"


John Young is no more. But it was sure great to have had him around.
As stated over in that other thread, I was not all that close to him.
But it would have been interesting to hear what he would have had to say about these points about racism. I expect that there are many who were born & bred in the Deep South during his era who were totally blind to such things.

And maybe throughout his years in the military and then at NASA, there was some epiphany that happened in his life that gave him some sense of perspective over the attitudes he was raised with.

And maybe even at some point before taking that last breath, he had the thought...
I could have chosen something other than Stone Mountain.

....or perhaps not.

As for my own accomplishments in my own life, I never got to walk on the Moon. That was the closest I ever got. And along the way, my own epiphany was about how silly such an aspiration was to have. Even though it is fun to fantasize about. It's kinda hard to beat Earth as far as planets go.

It's clear that the most important things in life are relationships, right here, down on Earth. So then the question becomes why would someone persist in engaging in interactions with those who are persistently and consistently abusive? Surely there are better things that someone can do with their time.

The criticism here is somehow being passive-aggressive. But perhaps the accurate problem is more along the line of that thing that has been termed "co-dependence". Being part of the problem by enabling abusive behavior.

And that is a question that I have examined, and rejected. The answer I arrived at is that if I am not contributing to the problem, then I am not responsible for the problem.

SSH is a cesspool. Absolutely atrocious behavior, consistently. Like just today, with calling someone "an idiot", or these other insults having to do with chestnuts, etc.

I have decided that I am perfectly fine with my own actions so long as I am not contributing to the negative aspects. If I can exercise sufficient discipline to maintain my own behavior on the side of being constructive, then the fault for all the nasty stuff is not my own.

In the end, we are all responsible for our own actions.

For those who subscribe to the concept of freewill, even then there is an extremely limited set of variables that we have actual control over. Most of human behavior is a result of genetic & memetic programming. The racist legacy types of stuff that John Young did, I see to be a result of this kind of programming. I did not see him to be a hateful person in any way.

Same with these clocks. All a result of programming, where a disease creeps in, and then gets perpetuated and people get habituated.

Like all of the vile behavior that is so rampant here, across Usenet, and in just about every internet forum, and more generally across the spectrum of human interaction. Or just human behavior.

We are programmed by the examples we are raised around to do things like eat cow muscle for our own pleasure, with absolutely no regard to how horrific slaughterhouses are.

And we use our mouths and our minds as slaughterhouses of people we've decided that we don't like, for whatever reason. Kill with thoughts. Kill with words. It happens every single day. Many many times a day.

All I have control over is myself. And the degree of control that even the most disciplined person has is just a sliver. So that's what I choose to focus on. That sliver.

So part of that sliver manifests in the form of these words that I'm typing, in an effort to invite anyone else who might be interested to possibly have a moment of expanded consciousness, however slight, where awareness to these issues of racism might see the light of day.

I knew going in that the probability is extremely small. I've never let long odds stop me before. Passion and desire are FAR more important than probability.

Take John Young. Of the many billions upon billions of human beings who ever existed, only 12 got to walk on the Moon. And not many more than that ever got to meet those 12. And FAR fewer ever got to be co-workers with those 12. Fewer still as co-workers within the space program, getting to do something like fly space shuttle missions with the person who flew the very first.

So if you go in with the attitude that the odds of that every happening are so slim that it is essentially impossible, then you will be correct. It will never happen.

But if instead you go in with the passion and desire and the hope that it is actually *possible*, regardless of how improbable, then you have just taken the first step of opening up the possibility that this version of reality just might unfold.

And that is how our universe works. It is those who strive toward what is possible who realize the huge breakthroughs and huge accomplishments.

Real life has the potential to be MORE AMAZING than what a person like Martin Caiden can imagine and write into the plot of a fictional book. A perfect example of that happened this week...

Imagine reading a book, or going to see a movie, where this person decides to start a rocket company, and then a decade and a half into this project launches the most powerful rocket in the world, and recovers the boosters to that rocket by landing them back at the launch point in a perfectly synchronized way.

There would be many many people who would have the reaction that this was a bogus story, maybe even demanding their money back from the ticket office for being subjected to such an unrealistic story.

Yet it is not fiction. It is the reality that we live in today, as of this week of February 2018. And it is people like Elon Musk, and people like John Young who make those kinds of things become our reality.

That VERY SLIM SLIVER of humanity that is making a difference. While the vast majority of the rest of humanity is doing mundane stuff like insulting each other on message boards, getting whatever satisfaction that is to be derived from that kind of activity.

So the question is what kind of a person do we want to be? And what kind of legacy do we want to leave behind after we are gone?

I recently heard Keanu Reeves explain his motivation for starting a motorcycle company. Absolutely bizarre for a crazy-wealthy Hollywood actor do get involved in something like that. But it became crystal clear to me that the reason he did this is because he belongs to the same category of people like Musk & Young.

And that is the same category that I choose to strive to be a part of. I want to leave a legacy where someone can google a post I made from 16 years ago and see that it was part of something that someone out there, maybe just one person, might find some inspiration in.

I am totally ok with that. It is my goal to live a full life, and leave a positive legacy. Just today I was contacted by someone who wants me to give guitar lessons to. And I am not going to charge her a penny. The motivation includes the hope that these skills will spread, and perhaps one day she will do the same for someone else. It may lead to absolutely nothing. It might turn out to be an utter waste of my time. But the probability of that will not prevent me from trying.

Just as the probability of my words presented here on this forum are an utter waste of my time does not prevent me from maintaining the hope that they might be helpful to at least one other person out there.

I intend to present the info about these clocks. That too is out of hope that it might be helpful. I won't do that today. Perhaps I will wait a year, as I did with the Debbie Reynolds stuff. Or maybe someone will actually express interest in this particular aspect of space history, in which case I would be glad to share it sooner.

As I had stated on that other thread from so long ago...

Goodbye for now.

~ CT