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"Master of Deceit" by my good friend Jodi Andes.  It's a totally insane non-fiction read. Scams by Veteran's organizations?  Ya won't believe it!

 

Name:  Jodi Andes

Book Title: Master of Deceit

 

What is your book about?  Retired Army Intelligence Capt. John Donald Cody spent more than a decade on top-secret missions to protect national security, before he became a wanted man. The FBI wanted him for espionage, the U.S. Marshals for fraud. And the IRS wanted him for filing fake tax returns. He stayed one fake identity ahead for more than 20 years.

Federal agents believed he was hiding abroad. In 2008, though, officials needed to look no further than the White House. Using a fake ID and a stolen identity, Cody was welcomed not just to the White House, but into the Oval Office. Cody had been hiding in plain sight under the name Bobby Thompson. Donations convinced Republicans leaders that Thompson was an official with the U.S. Navy Veterans Association and that the group was one of the nation’s largest veteran groups in the country.

Like Thompson, the association, its board of directors, and its members were fake. The only thing that was real was that Americans had donated more than $100 million for what they thought was going to veterans, and Thompson used the money to earn an invitation to chat with President George W. Bush.

Cody would later claim that he had been working with the CIA and that both he and his organization were supported by the federal government. His claims weren’t all a lie. One Ohio Attorney General called it the “Bernie Madoff of charity scams,” but it may have been more apropos to say John Donald Cody is one of the nation’s most formidable con artists of all time. Master of Deceit is the untold story about the spy and the scam. It is a nonfiction narrative that takes the reader through Cody’s training, how he became Bobby Thompson, and the manhunt that ultimately nabbed him.

More importantly, it is an unbelievable yet true story about how money and politics trumped national security at the expense of U.S. veterans.

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54 minutes ago, Could sound better said:

 

Can you elaborate with a short synopsis?

 

O.K., wow. This is gonna be hard, but I’ll try.

I met a 13-year old girl when I was 12 who had a thing for me, but I was too stupid to know it.  She finally got the guts to show me when she was 16. Through the summer of us making googly eyes at each other she got into an unrelated argument with her parents and was busted trying to run away. Her/our school sent her to a psychiatrist but as she was leaving from her first session……(gasp….sniff)… she was abducted by an unknown man that tried to kill her. She was able to get away and finger him to the cops. At the same time she was relocated and told by the courts and cops not to tell any of her friends what was going on for fear of the attacker’s family retaliating by attacking us. We lead separate lives till I couldn’t take it anymore. 3-years ago I finally found her again and we’re together once more with what time we have left.

If there’s some way I can get 2 PDF files to ya I can. I would really, really like to see this become a book if not a movie. In the movie version, I chose what music I would want under-dubbed into the scenes. I started writing my story about her about 12-years ago (long before I went looking for her again). She voluntarily started writing her story about me to answer the thousands of questions I had/have.

She stopped writing right where she meets her second husband who was of no count as well as her first one. It’s been hard to get her to finish her story.

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16 minutes ago, Mighty Favog said:

 

O.K., wow. This is gonna be hard, but I’ll try.

I met a 13-year old girl when I was 12 who had a thing for me, but I was too stupid to know it.  She finally got the guts to show me when she was 16. Through the summer of us making googly eyes at each other she got into an unrelated argument with her parents and was busted trying to run away. Her/our school sent her to a psychiatrist but as she was leaving from her first session……(gasp….sniff)… she was abducted by an unknown man that tried to kill her. She was able to get away and finger him to the cops. At the same time she was relocated and told by the courts and cops not to tell any of her friends what was going on for fear of the attacker’s family retaliating by attacking us. We lead separate lives till I couldn’t take it anymore. 3-years ago I finally found her again and we’re together once more with what time we have left.

If there’s some way I can get 2 PDF files to ya I can. I would really, really like to see this become a book if not a movie. In the movie version, I chose what music I would want under-dubbed into the scenes. I started writing my story about her about 12-years ago (long before I went looking for her again). She voluntarily started writing her story about me to answer the thousands of questions I had/have.

She stopped writing right where she meets her second husband who was of no count as well as her first one. It’s been hard to get her to finish her story.

 

Amazing! This story should be a carefully crafted book first.

thanks for sharing.

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On 5/25/2020 at 12:55 PM, Chris A said:

Greg, when you get to chapter 24 (System Considerations) of the Horn Loudspeaker book, let me know.  This should be the punchline for the entire book, and well...

 

@Chris A; I'm still in chapter 7 of actual reading, though I do skip forward to specific technical chapters as necessary.

 

I find the most interesting aspect of the book to be the fact that almost all of the questions that come up here on the Forum were answered by 1940! Oh, there have been mathematical refinements since then, but the engineers of the past were really smart people, and they found answers by intution and experimentation that were remarkably close to correct.

 

I also find it fascinating that, back in the 1930s, people thought nothing of building horns that were 10-20 feet long. That's dedication.

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The Western Electric and Bell Labs guys were really bright guys--and they were applied to furthering the science of making electrically amplified audio for the masses.  I seems quaint or insignificant by modern day standards but it was a big engineering area in the mid-late 1920s when "talkies" became the entertainment of the masses.  There was simply nothing that could do the job in 1920 to create sound for cinema, and by 1930 all that had changed because of the Bell System.

 

As far as the "nuttiness" of PWK's loudspeaker ideas (as he was obviously viewed by his colleagues), these basic ideas PWK had were largely were gleaned from these guys at the Bell System--particularly modulation distortion and the various forms of distortion we deal with today, along with the problems of efficiency and amplification of the opto-electric signal from film.  [Bell was also the originator of the profession that I took up--systems engineering/architecting.]

 

As far as the book is concerned, I feel it pushes the documented textbook-level information forward from the 1950s that Beranek and Olson originally set the standard for, but which wasn't really updated until this book came along (...it certainly wasn't Geddes' or Toole's books).  It's not that there is a lot of new stuff there, but it's now documented in one place and the bibliography is there to chase things down, instead of having to paw through the JAES and related journals. The book is useful, but not sufficient, I think.

 

I think that there still needs to be a cookbook for loudspeaker design, but a much better one than we have today (which are largely based on direct radiator bass bins and T/S-type of bass reflex thinking).  Today, there's a lot more going on than that and the best sounding loudspeakers I've heard all are horn loaded.  There needs to be at least an engineering text on that subject--not just an updated textbook to teach undergraduates the first course in loudspeaker engineering.  Horns are very useful objects, and the subject matter should be much more accessible by young guys with fire in their bellies to push the SOTA forward.  There is clearly a lot more yet to be discovered and engineered into affordable products that work better.

 

Chris

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6 minutes ago, Chris A said:

The Western Electric and Bell Labs guys were really bright guys--and they were applied to furthering the science of making electrically amplified audio for the masses. 

 

But it's a mistake to believe that it was all done for the pure love of science and mathematics. In those early days, everything at Bell Labs and Western Electric was driven by profit motive. The engineers and scientists there were just fortunate enough that their love of science and mathematics could be funded by organizations with such deep pockets.

 

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There is clearly a lot more yet to be discovered and engineered into affordable products that work better.

 

Even to this day there is enormous prejudice in audiophile circles against horn-loading. People who have never even heard horns (at least, not to their knowledge -- they don't realize that nearly every theater and concert performance is horn-loaded) dismiss them entirely. I'm not sure that will ever change.

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40 minutes ago, Edgar said:

I'm not sure that will ever change.

Yes, it will.  The real question is...when will the present "audiophiles" die out? (Answer: they already are.)

 

40 minutes ago, Edgar said:

But it's a mistake to believe that it was all done for the pure love of science and mathematics.

I wasn't implying it was about science and mathematics as the end goal at all.  Those guys were engineers, not practicing physicists.  They had to produce something that worked...affordably, and on some sort of schedule.  That's a difficult thing to do in my experience (having worked at a national high energy physics lab before).  It's the guys that turn into really good engineers that seem to make everything really go.

 

What was different about them was their technical capabilities, even though there were no computers.  These guys had all the skills they needed (unlike many engineers that I've witnessed today).  They were both very well educated and very well motivated, i.e., by sustained funding to bring the projects to fruition.

 

Chris

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15 minutes ago, Chris A said:

Yes, it will.  The real question is...when will the present "audiophiles" die out?

 

As long as there are twenty-somethings repeating the stereotype that horns are "shouty" without even having heard them, the problem will persist.

 

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Those guys were engineers, not practicing physicists.  They had to produce something that worked...affordably, and on some sort of schedule.  That's a difficult thing to do in my experience

 

And that, in my experience, it is the difference between engineers and mathematicians or scientists.

 

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(having worked at a national high energy physics lab before)

 

(By the way, my graduate research was funded by Lawrence Livermore National Labs.)

 

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These guys had all the skills they needed (unlike many engineers that I've witnessed today).

 

It's probably no different today than it was then. The good engineers won patents, published papers, wrote books, etc. The average engineers just went to work every day.

 

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27 minutes ago, Edgar said:

As long as there are twenty-somethings repeating [horn stereotypes] without even having heard them, the problem will persist.

I believe it really is dying out--like audiophile magazines are dying out...slowly. 

 

I find that the younger folks that I've dealt with want authentically better sounding gear--and at a reasonable price.  Those things really do exist (and I think you in particular know where to find those things).  Perhaps there's a split between the "haves" (in terms of true domain knowledge of the subject), and the "have nots" (those that didn't bother to take the time to learn).  Apparently it doesn't take much effort to buy into a standard set of audiophile memeplexes--like any subject.

 

It takes a little more to learn that "what you think you know, just isn't so".  The young people that I've helped don't seem to care a lot about audiophile memeplexes, especially when they actually hear the difference...

 

Chris

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5 minutes ago, Chris A said:

I find that the younger folks that I've dealt with want authentically better sounding gear--and at a reasonable price. 

 

My only direct experience with this comes from my nephew, who turns out to have an excellent set of audiophile ears and natural ability to listen critically. But even he succumbs to pressure from his peers to own something that the group finds "acceptable". I'm working on him.

 

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It takes a little more to learn that "what you think you know, just isn't so".

 

So true, for so much more than just audiophile considerations. Just read some of the quasi-political threads here to see that in action.

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Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.

 

Leonardo was a genius.  Had he not been the illegitimate son of a notary, the societal pressures of the day would have him follow his father’s profession.  Instead, his illegitimate status left him free to pursue his interests in painting, sculpture, anatomy, engineering, and more.  The world benefitted as a result.

 

 

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18F14996-D0D6-4AA3-B26E-377EF00C299E.jpeg

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1 hour ago, DizRotus said:

Leonardo was a genius.  Had he not been the illegitimate son of a notary, the societal pressures of the day would have him follow his father’s profession.  Instead, his illegitimate status left him free to pursue his interests in painting, sculpture, anatomy, engineering, and more.  The world benefitted as a result.

 

Isn't it amazing how many geniuses came from modest backgrounds? One would expect that genius offspring would only come from genius parents, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

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"The Third Reich at War" by Richard J. Evans.  Over 1100 pages but I find it interesting.

Quote from page 144 by Adolph Hitler  " I am convinced of the powers of my intellect and of decision...The fate of the Reich depends on me alone...I shall shrink from nothing and shall destroy everyone who is opposed to me."

Wow.

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On 6/12/2020 at 7:13 AM, DizRotus said:

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.

 

Leonardo was a genius.  Had he not been the illegitimate son of a notary, the societal pressures of the day would have him follow his father’s profession.  Instead, his illegitimate status left him free to pursue his interests in painting, sculpture, anatomy, engineering, and more.  The world benefitted as a result.

 

 

0F873D43-FBAD-4D9C-9BA6-5F29A5BCABF9.jpeg

 

2C542E90-B796-4B3B-92DF-331853DF5886.jpeg

 

18F14996-D0D6-4AA3-B26E-377EF00C299E.jpeg

very impressive ----------he even foresaw the design of aeronautics looking at birds

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