Because Billionauts got nothing better to do.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/2695055-tesla-reported-deliveries-dont-seem-to-jibe-with-external-data
Nov. 20, 2014 9:47 AM ET
I am a big fan of Elon Musk, a visionary who may change the world.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dont-forget-declare-income-stolen-211751546.html
NBC News
Don't forget to declare income from stolen goods and illegal activities, IRS says
Ben Popken
Wed, December 29, 2021, 2:21 PM
As you wind down the year, cleaning out drawers and emptying wallets of receipts, don’t forget to report to the IRS any income you brought in from drug deals, bribes, stolen goods, prostitution or other illegal activity.
https://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/1F16.html
Burns' Heir [ The Simpsons ]
Original airdate in N.A.: 14-Apr-94
(from internet transcript)
It's another day at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Homer sits idly at his work station, rolling a donut morosely back and forth.
Homer: [sighs] Lousy job. Nothing exciting ever happens.
[A fanfare plays; an emcee and a scantily clad woman appear]
Emcee: Congratulations, Homer Simpson! You've just won the employee raffle.
Homer: Woo hoo! What do I get?
Emcee: The job of industrial chimney sweep.
[Silence; a "BIG WINNER!" sign flashes in the background]
Homer: Woo hoo!
-- Delayed reaction, "Burns' Heir"
The job consists of being strung from a crane with batting wrapped around oneself and dipped into tall smokestacks. Homer is pulled from the chimney coughing from the soot -- "Hey! This isn't such a great prize" -- but he consoles himself with the fact that the big guys at the top work even harder.
Cut to Mr. Burns sitting in his bathtub watching Homer on TV. Burns sports a top hat and cigar; an open bag of extra fancy potato chips rests on a stool next to him. Munching on a chip, he sighs, "Will five o'clock _never_ come?"
Burns: Careful, Smithers! That sponge has corners, you know.
http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/7F02.txt
The Simpsons tv-series episode "Simpson and Delilah", 10/18/1990
(from internet transcript)
then a hair restoration treatment commercial comes on the television...
Dimoxinil can help me grow as much, or as little, hair as I want to.
-- advertisement for a hair restoration treatment, ``Simpson and Delilah''
For your free brochure send five dollars to Dimoxinil, 485 Hair Plaza, Hair City, Utah.
-- advertisement for a hair restoration treatment, ``Simpson and Delilah''
Homer goes to his medicine cabinet...
Marge, weren't you listening? This is a miracle breakthrough! Not one of these cheapo sucker deals! [tosses a cheapo sucker hair restoration product in the trash]
-- Hope springs eternal in Homer, ``Simpson and Delilah''
Homer pays a visit to the center, to find that it costs $1000.
We do have a product that is more in your price range. However, I must assure you that any hair growth you experience while using it will be purely coincidental.
-- ``Dr. H'', ``Simpson and Delilah''
Homer: [breaks down in tears] Of all the rip-off, screw job, chip joint... [gets up] Forget you pal... [sobbing] thanks for nothing. [leaves, crying] [at the nuclear plant]
Homer: So I say, [angrily] Forget you, pal! Thanks for nothing! And I storm right out of there.
-- A matter of perspective, ``Simpson and Delilah''
Dry fish-sticks! This sucks!
-- Homer complains about cafeteria fare, ``Simpson and Delilah''
Worker: Quit complaining, chrome-dome.
Homer: D'oh! If I had hair, you wouldn't be calling me that!
One of his co-workers suggests putting it on the company medical insurance, figuring that all it will mean is that Burns won't be able to buy another ivory back-scratcher
http://www.simpsonsarchive.com/episodes/7F02.txt
The Simpsons tv-series episode "Simpson and Delilah", 10/18/1990
(from internet transcript)
Burns asks Homer to give an inspirational speech to the executives. Smithers informs Burns of his discovery...
Smithers: One of your executives has bilked the company insurance plan out of $1000.
Burns: What!? Blast his hide to Hades! [thunder roars outside] And I was going to buy that ivory back-scratcher...
From 3/3/1959 ( the birthdate in Hawaii of my biological brother Thomas Reagan ) To 9/27/2007 ( by me, Kerry Burgess, excerpt from my private journal ) is 17740 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 17740 days
From 12/23/2006 ( premiere US TV series episode "Celebrity Moments" ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 2714 days
2714 = 1357 + 1357
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 7/21/1969 ( my biological brother Thomas Reagan the United States Navy Commander circa 1969 was United States Apollo 11 Eagle spacecraft United States Navy astronaut landing and walking on the planet Earth's moon ) is 1357 days
From 3/20/1993 ( premiere US TV series episode "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles"::"Princeton, February 1916" ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 7740 days
7740 = 3870 + 3870
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 6/7/1976 ( my biological brother Thomas Reagan the civilian and privately financed astronaut in deep space of the solar system in his privately financed atom-pulse propulsion spaceship this day was his first landing the Saturn moon Phoebe, just before beginning his strike to divert Comet Lucifer, threatening all life on planet Earth ) is 3870 days
From 11/26/1976 ( my biological brother Thomas Reagan the civilian and privately financed astronaut in solar system deep space in his privately financed atom-pulse propulsion spaceship this day makes his first landing the Jupiter moon Callisto ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 13698 days
13698 = 6849 + 6849
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/3/1984 ( premiere US film "The Philadelphia Experiment" ) is 6849 days
From 3/16/1991 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: my first successful major test of my ultraspace matter transportation device as Kerry Wayne Burgess the successful Ph.D. graduate and possibly the date of the secret, doctorate-degree credential from Princeton University, I can only theorize, struggling to understand ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 8475 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/15/1989 ( from The Washington Post newspaper: Reagan Leaving Legacy of Surprises ) is 8475 days
From 10/18/1993 ( the launch of the US space shuttle Columbia orbiter vehicle mission STS-58 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps officer and United States STS-58 pilot astronaut and my 2nd official United States of America National Aeronautics Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 7528 days
7528 = 3764 + 3764
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 2/22/1976 ( The Point Of No Return - my biological brother Thomas Reagan the civilian and privately financed astronaut in his privately financed atom-pulse propulsion spaceship survived a catastrophic collision with a meteor and at extreme personal risk to himself he continues the mission as planned to intercept and divert the Comet Lucifer in the outer solar system ) is 3764 days
From 11/7/2006 ( as me, Kerry Burgess, from my official United States of America Veterans Affairs psychiatric-hospital documents, the final appointment with the psychiatrist ) To 5/29/2014 ( ) is 2760 days
2760 = 1380 + 1380
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/13/1969 ( US Air Force colonel Buzz Aldrin accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom for US Apollo 11 Eagle on behalf of my biological brother Thomas Reagan the United States Navy Commander and the US Apollo 11 Eagle and US Navy astronaut ) is 1380 days
https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-partner-spacex-unveils-human-carrying-dragon-v2/
NASA official
NASA Partner SpaceX Unveils Human-Carrying Dragon V2
May 29, 2014
By Steven Siceloff, NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida
The Dragon spacecraft, designed to carry people into Earth's orbit, received a few upgrades as SpaceX refines its vehicle in partnership with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Today, SpaceX revealed these changes as it unveiled the Dragon V2 at the company's Hawthorne, California, headquarters.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/07/25/jeff-bezos-federal-aviation-administration-astronaut-wings/8087596002/
USA Today
Sorry, Jeff Bezos, you're still not an astronaut, according to the FAA
Josh Rivera
Publish July 25, 2021
USA TODAY
Just because you were in space doesn't mean you get the wings of an astronaut.
The Federal Aviation Administration set rules concerning the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program and the criteria used to award those commanding, piloting or working on privately funded spacecraft with the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings badge.
The order was issued July 20, the same day billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin rocket crew made history by blasting off from the West Texas desert, reaching space and returning to Earth.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/10/politics/astronaut-wings-bezos-branson-shatner/index.html
CNN
First on CNN: The US gives Bezos, Branson and Shatner their astronaut wings
By Kristin Fisher
Updated 12:58 PM ET, Fri December 10, 2021
(CNN) The US government is making it official -- Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and William Shatner have earned the title of "astronaut" after their flights to the edge of space.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/01/15/reagan-leaving-legacy-of-surprises/
The Washington Post
REAGAN LEAVING LEGACY OF SURPRISES
By Lou Cannon January 15, 1989
Ronald Wilson Reagan, a popular president who spoke to the future of America with a compelling vision of the past, returns to California this week, leaving behind a legacy of surprises. Reagan departs on a crest of public approval, with even critics saying that he restored confidence in the presidency. His geniality, optimism and self-deprecating humor commended him to Americans who did not necessarily share his political opinions or his policy prescriptions. As a master communicator with a background in radio, films and television, he proclaimed old values and new policies in carefully scripted Oval Office television speeches consciously modeled on the radio "fireside chats" of his first political role model, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But as Reagan prepares to leave Washington as the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower to complete two terms, commentators and historians are finding him hard to pigeonhole. While Reagan championed conservative values, he barely tinkered with the edifice of social welfare programs launched during the New Deal and widely supported by Americans. While he promised to eliminate the Cabinet departments of education and labor, he instead enlarged the Cabinet by creating a Department of Veterans Affairs. While he conducted the largest peacetime military buildup in history, he was for the most part reluctant to use military force except when the odds, as in the 1983 invasion of Grenada and in the 1986 bombing of Libya, were overwhelmingly in the United States' favor. Even on environmental and regulatory issues, where Reagan's preference for market solutions was clear, his record defies easy ideological classification. "It's such an interesting mixture of brilliance and inadequacy," said Princeton University historian Fred Greenstein, who described Reagan as displaying unsurpassed personal skills in his public presidency but showing a staggering lack of curiosity and inattention to White House management. History Prof. Alan Brinkley of New York City University contends that Reagan essentially did "easy things" in office and "squandered his opportunities" to carry out the conservative social revolution he had promised. But former Senate Republican leader Howard H. Baker Jr. (R-Tenn.), who as White House chief of staff played a crucial role in rescuing the Reagan presidency from its crisis of confidence after the Iran-contra disclosures, thinks that Reagan combined a constancy of values with a "capacity to surprise." The surprises are everywhere to be found, even in the most casual review of the Reagan presidency. Reagan promised fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget, yet leaves office with a federal debt that has nearly tripled to $2.6 trillion. He warned constantly of the dangers posed by an alleged Soviet superiority in nuclear arms, yet signed the first treaty eliminating a class of nuclear weapons and last week in his nationally televised farewll speech celebrated the "satisfying new closeness with the Soviet Union." In that speech, Reagan gave a ringing endorsement of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he met five times in the last three years of his presidency. Reagan said the United States must always match Soviet promises against Soviet deeds, but he emphasized his view, still anathema to some conservatives, that Gorbachev is committed to reform. These big surprises surround many lesser ones, some ironic in their implications. Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild and leader of this union in a successful strike, was the first head of a labor union to be elected president of the United States. He is proud both of his union membership and of his negotiating skills and used his union background in his campaigns to deflect accusations that he was anti-labor. But when 11,438 air traffic controllers walked off the job on Aug. 3, 1981, Reagan fired them and broke their union. Nonetheless, labor voters gave Reagan a majority when he ran for reelection in 1984. Perhaps the largest irony was Reagan's impact on American attitudes toward government. Even before he formally became a Republican in 1962, Reagan had earned favor among conservatives with his attacks on government, which he described as the foe of individual freedom. His bedrock belief was that government had become so large and intrusive that it no longer derived its consent from the governed but was instead "reversing the order of things" and, through high taxes and myriad regulations, stifling individual initiative. "This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years," Reagan said in his televised speech last Wednesday. But Reagan's success in reviving confidence in the presidency also tranlated into renewed public faith in government institutions, according to various polls. This in turn has increased public confidence in the Democrats, the more pro-government of the two major political parties. In 1986, the Democrats recaptured the Senate majority they lost when Reagan won the presidency in 1980. They hold an iron grip on the House and a big lead over Republicans in state and local offices. One explanation for government's return to favor is that Americans paid more attention to Reagan's example in projecting an image of confident leadership than to his opinions. But public confidence in Reagan increased even more than it did in government. He leaves the White House with his approval rating near the two-thirds mark in most surveys. In 1980, though he won an electoral landslide, he received only 50.7 percent of the vote. "The crowning paradox of Ronald Reagan's presidency is that he spent all these years campaigning against government and wound up restoring trust in government, which is the salvation of, among other things, the Democratic Party," said columnist George F. Will, a friend of the Reagan family. Up close, the surprises and the paradoxes have been even more evident. Reagan, who will be 78 next month, is eight years older than Eisenhower was when he completed his second term in 1961. But Reagan's strongest political support came from young Americans, perhaps because of his quintessential American view, most prevalent among the young, that Americans can solve nearly any problem with optimism and technology. Reagan was viewed -- and views himself -- as a strong leader. But he showed less concern for the management or workings of the presidency, in historian Greenstein's view, than any president since Warren G. Harding. On the other hand, Greenstein scoffs at the widespread notion that Reagan was a passive president, noting that he set a powerful agenda and then depended on those around him to execute it, a quality that made him dependent on the ability of his principal aides. "But he wasn't passive, he was a powerhouse," Greenstein said. On what is arguably the most important foreign policy accomplishment of the Reagan presidency, the arms-control negotiations that led to the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987, Reagan progressed from almost total ignorance to a high degree of understanding. On his big foreign policy blunder of selling of U.S. arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, Reagan was the prime mover, pushing forward over the opposition of Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. Officials who dealt with Reagan were never certain when he would be focused on an issue, or sometimes, even if he would remember their names. "There were times and issues when he knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish, and no one could deter him," a present White House official said. "But if he wasn't really interested in something, it was just totally off his radar screen." Sometimes entire policies seemed off the screen. Reagan had been environmentally minded as governor of California, but he basically left the issue to others in Washington. This produced wild swings in policy in the Environmental Protection Agency, when one of the most conservative of his appointees ran into trouble and was succeeded by moderates. Civil rights enforcement was left to the Justice Department with the result, according to Will, that "the civil rights era ended in the Reagan years." Governmental ethics became almost a private affair. Reagan believed that his own public office was a public trust, but there is no record of him having insisted or even asked that appointees adhere to a particular code of conduct. Contradictions and surprises abounded in every policy arena. Leaving aside his first budget, which was basically Jimmy Carter's, and his latest budget, which will become George Bush's, the Reagan budgets are responsible for about 92 percent of the more than $1 trillion the federal deficits added to the national debt during these six years. Reagan acknowledges that this was "one of my greatest disappointments," though he usually blames Congress, which was responsible for the other 8 percent. But it is also true that Reagan's reliance on the market, his squeezing of inflation (with a big assist from the Federal Reserve Board) and his tax policies fueled a dramatic and long-lived economic recovery that is still continuing. Historian Brinkley's observation that Reagan squandered his opportunities to reverse the direction of the New Deal assumes that the president's rhetorical goal was the same as his real one. David A. Stockman, Reagan's star-crossed but perceptive first director of the Office of Management and Budget, put Reagan to the test on social welfare programs by giving him a multiple choice test on budget options and found that Reagan's hard line concealed a soft heart. The president consistently rejected the most extreme budget-cutting options that Stockman presented, a principal reason the Bush administration confronts a mountain of unpaid bills. Reagan's foreign policy record was also often at war with Reagan's foreign policy rhetoric. He promoted the "Reagan doctrine" of aiding anticommunist insurgencies with a high degree of success in Afghanistan, limited success in southern Africa and southeast Asia and no success in Central America, which Reagan did not even mention in his farewell address. Reagan's personal role in sponsoring the anti-Sandinista adventurism of firebrands in the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security staff remains to be sorted out by history, but it is clear that his own actions rarely matched his verbal militancy in dealing with the despised Marxist government of Nicaragua. Early in his presidency, for instance, Reagan brushed aside the recommendation of his first secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., that he should "go to the source" of the Nicaraguan problem by issuing an ultimatum to Cuba and, if necessary, to the Soviet Union. Perhaps the principal reason Reagan proved a surprise in the White House is that he took a different view of the presidency than his recent predecessors. Reagan saw himself, in Will's phrase, as a kind of "constitutional monarch," whose purpose was to rally Americans behind the values of freedom and the market place and proclaim America's purpose to the world. Reagan's view of his high office resembled Theodore Roosevelt's description of the presidency as "bully pulpit," amplified a thousand times by the electronic marvels of the television age. "I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things," Reagan said in his farewell address. "And they didn't spring full blown from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation -- from our experience, our wisdom and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries." This was Reagan's view of his mission and of his presidency. His secret, if he had any, was his belief that he was in tune with the tide of American history and the aspirations of ordinary Americans. Asked by a radio reporter on the eve of his election in 1980 what people saw in him, Reagan replied, "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I'm one of them? I've never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them." In the eight years of his presidency, Reagan never lost this perspective or his capacity for surprise.
from my private journal, as me, Kerry Burgess, typed after being released from the USA Veterans Affairs psychiatric hospital enduring many months sitting in a grungy two-computer room in a homeless shelter on the waterfront in downtown Seattle:
by me, Kerry Burgess, excerpt from my private journal: 09/27/07 4:12 PM
I have these undescribable sensations that have quitely lingered in my mind for a long time that I can only describe as probably being how it felt in my space suit to walk on the surface of the Moon. I might be thinking of the other places I went too. I don't think I walked on the surface of the comet. Or I just haven't got to the point to begin the process of remembering any of those details.
09/27/07 4:15 PM
Mostly what I feel is probably a surface similar to ash, but that isn't quite right. There has been past sensations that would be similar to walking on cinders, but that seems separate from that sensation that is almost like walking through ash.
- posted by me, Kerry Burgess 5:25 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Thursday 12/30/2021
