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Last edited by specsaregood; 05-18-2016 at 07:38 AM.
Originally Posted by specsaregood
The US constitution.
Disrupt, Deny, Deflate. Read the RPF trolls' playbook here (post #3): http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...eptive-members
The Old Man and the Boy
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Last edited by specsaregood; 05-18-2016 at 07:38 AM.
The Game of Thrones books A Song of Ice and Fire.
I'd prefer realistic fiction
"We", "Oman Ra", and "1984". ETA: "Shogun", "A day in the life of Alexander Denisovich", "Moscow To The End of the line". ETA2: "Envy" and anything else by Yuri Olesha. "The Master And Margarita" is considered "high brow" lit, but it has moments of levity (like the talking cat and various comical black majick things).
Anything by these might interest you:action, sci-fi, mystery, historically based
Micheal Chrichton (sphere)
Dean Koontz (cold fire)
Kurt Vonnegut (cats cradle)
Last edited by presence; 11-23-2014 at 08:45 PM.
'We endorse the idea of voluntarism; self-responsibility: Family, friends, and churches to solve problems, rather than saying that some monolithic government is going to make you take care of yourself and be a better person. It's a preposterous notion: It never worked, it never will. The government can't make you a better person; it can't make you follow good habits.' - Ron Paul 1988
Awareness is the Root of Liberation Revolution is Action upon Revelation
'Resistance and Disobedience in Economic Activity is the Most Moral Human Action Possible' - SEK3
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.
...the familiar ritual of institutional self-absolution...
...for protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment...
Destination:Void series by Frank Herbert..
Revelation Space series by Allistair Reynolds
The ultimate minority is the individual. Protect the individual from Democracy and you will protect all groups of individualsRightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. - Thomas JeffersonI must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
The Iron Web
http://www.amazon.com/The-Iron-Web-L.../dp/1607437325
Rated 4.9 of 5 stars with 25 reviews on Amazon.
"Sorry, fellows, the rebellion is off. We couldn't get a rebellion permit."
//
Last edited by specsaregood; 05-16-2016 at 09:43 PM.
I dont know if you like westerns but one of my favourite books is Bendigo Shafter by Louis L’Amour.
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Last edited by specsaregood; 05-18-2016 at 07:38 AM.
I've wondered about Anne Rice's stuff.
There are historically based books about the American Revolution and Magellan that were good. I think they were technically fictions, based in the history.
The bigger government gets, the smaller I wish it was.My new motto: More Love, Less Laws
With Vonnegut , I would go with Slaughter House Five . Of course , Catch 22 ( Heller) ,King Rat ( Clavell ) , I like Moby Dick and a lot of Hemingway ( maybe , Farewell to Arms ) .
Louis Lamour then , try something from the Sackett series .
James Fenimore Cooper is good , you have probably heard of The Last of The Mohicans .
I really do not read much fiction , so that's the best I can do for you Specs , enjoy your vacation !
The Complete Sherlock Holmes (two volumes w/all 4 novels & 56 short stories)
The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)
- "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
-- The Law (p. 54)- "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
-- Government (p. 99)- "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
-- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)- "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
-- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)· tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
It's a fun weird read. I love that book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitterbug_Perfume
“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
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Last edited by specsaregood; 05-18-2016 at 07:38 AM.
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Last edited by specsaregood; 05-18-2016 at 07:38 AM.
Babylon's Banksters: The Alchemy of Deep Physics, High Finance and Ancient Religion
Trust me.
You'll be like this once you've finished...
Last edited by Natural Citizen; 11-24-2014 at 12:26 AM.
Anything by PJ O'Rourke.
Eat the Rich and Republican Party Reptile are two of my favorites.
A sample:
High-Speed Performance Characteristics of Pickup Trucks
P. J. O'Rourke
I'm an experienced pickup truck driver. I was driving my pickup the other Saturday night after having -as I made very clear to the police- hardly anything to drink and while going -honest, officer- about thirty miles an hour when, I swear, a deer ran into the road, and I was forced to pull off the highway with such abruptness that it took the wrecker crew six hours to get my truck out of the woods.
An experienced pickup truck driver is a person who's wrecked one. An inexperienced pickup truck driver is a person who's about to wreck one. A very inexperienced pickup truck driver doesn't even own a pickup but will probably be mistaken for a wild antelope by people jack-lighting pronghorns in somebody else's pickup truck. The foremost high-speed-handling characteristic of pickup trucks is the remarkably high speed with which they head from wherever you are directly into trouble. This has to do with beer. The minute you get in a pickup you want a beer. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but personally I blame it on Jimmy Carter having been President.
You see, everyone in America has always wanted to be a redneck. That's why all those wig-and-knicker colonial guys moved to Kentucky with Davy Crockett even before he got his TV show. And witness aristocratic young Theodore Roosevelt's attempt to be a "rough rider." Even Henry James used the same last name as his peckerwood cousin Jesse. And as Henry James would tell you, if anyone read him anymore and also if he were still alive, the single most prominent distinguishing feature of the redneck is that he drives a pickup truck. This explains why all of us are muscling these things around downtown Minneapolis and Cincinnati.
You may be wondering where Jimmy Carter comes in. Well, Jimmy Carter was a redneck just like we're all trying to be, but he was a sober redneck. Most of us had never seen a sober redneck, and we have the Reagan landslide to testify that none of us ever want to see one again. It was a horrifying apparition. And ever since Jimmy Carter all of us rednecks have had to be very careful to be drunk rednecks lest we turn into some kind of awful creature with big buck teeth and a State Department full of human-rights yahoos.
Thus the pickup truck has become the world's only beer guided motor vehicle. Let's examine one unit of this guidance system. Let's examine another. Let's examine the whole six-pack. Now let's drive over and see if any ducks have come in on Hodge Pond. Whoops! Crash! Forgot the camper back wasn't bolted down.
THE PICKUP: DESIGN AND ENGINEERING
A pickup truck is basically a back porch with an engine attached. Both a pickup and a back porch are good places to drink beer because you can take a leak standing up from either. Pickup trucks are generally a little faster downhill than back porches, with the exception of certain California back porches during mudslide season. But back porches get better gas mileage.
Another important difference between back porches and pickup trucks is the suspension systems. Back porches are most often seated firmly on the ground by means of cement-block foundations. Nothing nearly that sophisticated is used in pickup trucks. The front suspension of a modern pickup truck is fully independent. Each wheel is independently bolted right to the frame. The rear suspension is a live axle usually attached by a rope to someone else's bumper while he tries to pull you out of the woods.
This suspension design is ideal for use in conjunction with the pickup's 100 percent front/0 percent rear weight distribution. This weight distribution is achieved through engine placement. The engine is placed just where you'd place it on a back porch: hanging off one end so you can get under it and take a look at the giant dent in the oil pan you got when you ran over the patio furniture last night.
Theoretically such forward-weight bias should cause gross understeer. But everyone involved with pickup trucks is whooping it up too much to have any grasp of theory, so the forward-weight bias causes oversteer instead. What happens to an unloaded pickup truck in a curve is that the rear end has nothing to do-is unemployed, metaphorically speaking-so it comes around to ask you for work, up there in the front of the truck where all the weight is. And the result is exactly like one of those revolving restaurants that they have on hotels except it's on four bald snow tires instead of a hotel, and it's in the middle of the highway, and it tips over.
In order to correct this handling problem, the pickup's load bed is filled with leaf mulch, garden loam, hundred-pound bags of dog food, two snowmobiles, half a cord of birch logs, your son's Cub Scout pack, and a used refrigerator to put beer in out on the back porch. The result is an adjusted weight bias of 0 percent front/100 percent rear that causes a handling problem different from either understeer or oversteer, which is no steering at all because the front wheels aren't touching the ground.
The same kind of thinking that went into pickup truck suspension design has also been applied to the pickup engine, which is basically the same device Jim Watt was using to pump water out of coal mines in 1810 except that, in accordance with recent EPA rulings, a hanky soaked in Pinsol has been stuffed into each cylinder to cut down on exhaust emissions. There are three types of pickup truck engines: the six-cylinder engine, which does not have enough cylinders; the eight-cylinder engine, which has too many; and the four-cylinder engine, which is found in "mini pickups" driven by people who think John Denver is the right kind of redneck to be and believe they can talk to whales.
The less said about four-cylinder engines the better. But all these engines have a common fault in that they continue to run after the ignition has been switched off, a phenomenon known as "dieseling." Engines that actually are diesels have been introduced for pickup trucks and they rectify this problem by not starting in the first place.
It doesn't matter. The real power for pickup trucks is generated inside the gearbox, or at least it seems to be because it's so noisy in there. And if it isn't, it soon will be after you get blotto and start shifting without the clutch.
There are usually five gears in a pickup. One is a mystery gear which is illustrated on the shift knob but cannot be found. Then there is first gear, which is good for getting stuck in the woods.
When you aren't stuck in the woods it's good for yanking your bumper off while trying to help a friend who owns a pickup when he's stuck in the woods. First gear has a top speed of three. Third gear has a slightly higher top speed but you can't climb a speed bump without downshifting and the truck still only gets eight mpg. It is not known exactly what third gear is for. All normal pickup truck driving is done in second. Pickups also have a reverse gear, which is good for getting more completely stuck in the woods than first gear can do alone.
Because pickup trucks get stuck in the woods so often, four wheel drive has become a popular option. The four-wheel-drive feature is either operated by a lever which fails to put the truck in 4WD or by a lever which fails to take it out. Four-wheel drive allows you to mire four wheels axle-deep in the woods instead of just two.
Perhaps the most novel aspect to pickup truck engineering is that pickups have no brakes. True, there is a parking brake which, if you set it, allows you to let your driverless pickup roll downhill into a busy intersection with a clear conscience. And there is a brake pedal, but stepping on it only produces a poignant desire for one more beer before you crash into the woods. There are, however, a number of methods of bringing a pickup truck to a stop, most of them involving trees in those woods, but sometimes the spare tire, which hangs down behind the bumper in the back, will fall partly out of its mounting and produce drag force. And very often a pickup will run out of gas and coast to a stop. And right in front of a bar too-according to what you told your wife.
That just goes to show how thoroughgoing the relationship is between pickups and drinking. I mean it sure looks like these things were designed by people who'd been drinking. And the level of finish indicates they were built by people who'd been drinking. It only stands to reason they should be driven by people like us who are half in the bag. As a result, the most popular pickup truck performance modification is-you guessed it-having a drink. For instance, at sixty miles an hour take a tight turn and notice that if you hadn't been tight you never would have taken that turn in the first place. Now you call a wrecker and I'll go get some tall ones.
DRIVING TECHNIQUE
Driving a pickup at high speed is a difficult skill to master. The first step is to assume the proper driving position: Use one hand to firmly grasp the drip rail on the roof. This takes the place of shoulder harness, lap belt, and air bag and lets you give the finger to people with anti-handgun bumper stickers on their cars. Then place your other hand on the gearshift knob so you'll always know what gear you're in (which is second, as I pointed out before). Now take your third hand ... Perhaps some picture of the difficulty is beginning to emerge. Anyway, be sure to balance your beer can carefully in your lap.
The second step is to drive over to the 7-Eleven and get more beer. Use your down vest to mop up the one you spilled all over your crotch as you backed out the driveway. The third step is cornering technique. There are three ways to take a high-speed curve in a pickup. The first way is to use the traditional racecar driver's "late apex": Go deep into the curve at full speed doing all your downshifting and useless brake-pedal pumping in a straight line. Then, in one smooth motion, turn the wheel to the full extent necessary for the curve. Aim for an apex slightly past the geometrical apex of the inside edge of the curve and slowly bring the steering wheel back to straight-ahead as you reapply the throttle. This will put your truck into the woods. The second way to take a fast curve is to come into the curve slightly slower, dial in a greater amount of steering, and stay on the throttle so as to propel the truck into a "power slide." This will put your truck in the woods too. The third method is to come to a full stop before entering the curve and have a beer. While you're doing that someone else will come along in another pickup truck and knock you into the woods anyway.
Now that you've wrecked a pickup and are an experienced pickup truck driver, it's important to know what to tell the police. Tell them a deer ran into the road. This happens very frequently in the places where we rednecks live, especially when we've been drinking. For example, below are the five most common explanations made to the North Carolina Highway Patrol by drivers who have put their pickup trucks into the woods:
1. A deer ran into the road.
2. A deer ran into the road.
3. A deer ran into the road.
4. A deer ran into the road.
5. I was stopped at a stop sign but I had to start up again real fast and run my pickup into the woods because otherwise it would have been smashed by this deer that ran into the road.
PURCHASE, REPAIR, AND MAINTENANCE OF
THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE PICKUP TRUCK
If, however, you still haven't wrecked a pickup truck and are weighing the obvious delights of having an opportunity to do so against such considerations as wanting to be a redneck but only having enough money to be middle-class or having a wife who thought she was marrying a college-educated account executive, here are some points for you to consider.
First, how much will a pickup truck cost?
Pickup
$9360.00
Beer
$2.89
Another pickup to replace first one that you wreck
$9360.00
VW Rabbit for wife, who won't drive truck
$8750.00
TOTAL
$27,472.89
That's a fair piece of change. But on the other hand, pickup trucks are virtually maintenance-free. In fact, all pickup repairs can be done with a long chain. Attach one end of the chain to the pickup truck, drop the other end of the chain on the ground, and go buy a real car.
You may also want to know if a pickup truck is truly useful. I'm afraid the answer is yes -all too much so.
UTILITY COMPARISON: Pickup vs. Real Car
USE
PICK-UP
REAL CAR
Brush hauling
Yes, I'll do it tomorrow.
Good excuse not to haul brush
Taking trash to dump
Really, I'll do it tomorrow. The Falcons are playing Dallas.
Call Goodwill.
Furniture loads
Room for five-piece bedroom set and expensive oriental rug.
Have plenty of furniture already,don't need any more.
But, when all is said and done, it really would have looked silly at the end of Easy Rider if Peter Fonda and Dennis Hooper had been shot by a couple of guys in a Fiat Brava. And what's life for if you never get a chance to shoot the likes of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper? Besides, you'll never really appreciate the profound and astonishing beauties of nature if you don't get stuck in the woods now and then.
And you won't appreciate them half as much if you don't have a lot of beer along.
Last edited by Anti Federalist; 11-24-2014 at 12:41 AM.
Reamde by Neal Stephenson.
The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming and social networking to the criminal methods of the Russian mafia and Islamic terrorists.Writing in the Irish Examiner, Val Nolan called Reamde "one of the smartest, fastest-moving, and most consistently enjoyable novels of the year". It is, Nolan went on, a "painstakingly-researched, deftly-plotted roller-coaster of gigabytes and gunplay, a pitch-perfect pastiche of Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy-style techno-thrillers and a comment on contemporary digitality and the ubiquity of online interconnectivity."[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReamdeCory Doctorow writes in his Boing Boing review: "Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs (including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself."[5]
Last edited by phill4paul; 11-24-2014 at 06:04 AM.
Pulling Through - bring a pen, you are going to be doing a lot of underlining and note taking. It's not exactly all fiction. It's about living through a nuclear attack.
Burning Chrome - cyberpunk short stories.
Heart of the Comet - SF about hitching a ride on a comet as a form of interstellar travel. I believe the author is a physicist.
-t
ps: I shouldn't have to mention it, but there are some books you don't want to bring if you are going to expose yourself to a TSA molestation queue...
I enjoyed this;
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2309748.Lights_Out
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