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Mods: This is a play on words (Ross Perot) and then a reference to the scandal involving faked nude photos of his daughter. A strained joke at best, but not off-topic. http://www.famoustexans.com/rossperot.htm

In the Air Force, from 1941 to 1945, he piloted a B-17 Flying Fortress on 89 missions, including Guadalcanal and Bougainvillea. Among his several decorations were the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.

It was on a flight from Calcutta that his plane lost two engines and caught fire in flight, crashing at night in the Syrian desert. As the senior surviving officer, Roddenberry sent two Englishmen swimming across the Euphrates River in quest of the source of a light he had observed just prior to the crash impact. Meanwhile, he parleyed with nomads who had come to loot the dead. The Englishmen reached a Syrian military outpost, which sent a small plane to investigate. Roddenberry returned with the small plane to the outpost, where he broadcast a message that was relayed to Pan Am, which sent a stretcher plane to the rescue. Roddenberry later received a Civil Aeronautics commendation for his efforts during and after the crash.

A famous Texan Ima Hogg. No foolin'.

the leak was really Carl Rove, right?

You mean Karl Rove. There's a K instead of the usual C.

George Bush had nothing to do with oil? Are you kidding?

Have you heard of Arbusto, Harken and Spectrum 7? Bush Jnr has done exceptionally well out of the oil industry, and largely due to his political connections and borderline inside trading rather than his skill.

On June 22, 1990, George Jr. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560-a cool 200 percent profit. The move was well timed. One week after Junior sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf.

The idea of self-regenerating oil fields has a much more easy-to-comprehend parallel: the aquifers in West Texas. Nobody doubts that the Edwards Aquifer is self-regenerating. Unfortunately, its source of recharge is the parched Texas Panhandle, and the rate of recharge is far below the rate of usage.

T. Boone Pickens (yes, the famous oilman, corporate raider, and greenmailer from the '80s) is taking a cue from his fossil fuel days, and is now entering the fossil water business. His plan is to tap the water under the Panhandle for use by big, thirsty Texas cities like Dallas/Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. Nobody's buying his water yet... but that's what they probably said 150 years ago when some guys in Pennsylvania figured out how to get that black, gooey stuff out of the ground.

(obligatory on-topic note: there probably used to be some really interesting microbes in the Edwards Aquifer before we started pushing rusty pipes into it...)

T. Boone Pickens is a contradictory example, kinda, from the oil industry. He is not an Engineer, he is a Geologist that became a captain of industry.

This happens all of the time, when and only when a person with technical skill also has an instinct for business.

In the computing world, Bill Gates is a better example than Ross Perot since Perot was mostly a salesman for IBM before becoming a captain of industry, rather than being a programmer. Thus the Perots of the world support your conclusion, but they are not the only cases.

Yea, I know that mentioning some of these names gives me an automatic karma hit, but they are good examples for this point.

In China, and most of the rest of the world, you are not valued for the quality of your product or for how hard you work. You're valued for "who you are" -- the son of a famous general, the brother of a diplomat, the cousin of the President.

Sure, nepotism never happens in the U.S....

Perot sold EDS in 1984 to General Motors for $2.5 billion. He retained ownership in the company, which made him GM's largest individual stockholder and a member of the board of directors. From the start, Perot and GM head Roger Smith quarreled, and Perot criticized the quality of GM automobiles. In 1986, GM bought out Perot's stock for $700 million with the agreement that he could not compete with EDS for three years. Perot ignored the agreement. Two years later, he started a new computer service company, Perot Systems, which operates in the United States and Europe.