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About 35 years ago I was a new skydiver, jumping at a tiny DZ on Long Island and dreaming about moving somewhere new. I spent some of my free time at work posting on rec.skydiving - a Usenet group that catered to skydivers. It was a different time back then. To be able to get to Usenet at all means you needed a modem and a computer, both pricey purchases, and you needed to be able to get them to work together, which meant you needed some tech experience. As a result, not many people were on Usenet - just me and a few other tech nerds. And there was hardly any spam! Slowly over the years more people figured it out and started joining. I remember TooyT, Barry Brumitt (wrote the first skydiving FAQ!) Lance Kirwin, Kevin O'Connell, Dave Appel and Jerry Sobieski. I also met Amy on there, which changed the course of my life in a big way. I moved to California in '94 both to escape a bad relationship and to skydive. And of course because I found a great company - Qualcomm - in San Diego. By that point Usenet was becoming a cesspool of Viagra ads and foreign bride offers, and filters had not gotten good enough yet to remove all that, so browsing it was painful. So when Willem announced he was starting DZ.com I felt a big sense of relief. He got in touch with me to see if I wanted to moderate S+T and Incidents, which I said yes to. We started with a complement of about a dozen moderators, some of which I got to know really well. I spent a day in San Diego with Andrea watching whales swim by the gliderport, and I spent a few days with Chuck and Katie at Raeford jumping. Derek once built me a tersh just because I was talking about how I needed one (thanks again Derek) and Remi, Karen and I would meet up whenever we were out at Eloy. Seven of us once got together at Eloy and did the now-infamous moderator jump, angled carefully so no one could see Willem's face on camera. I think Eric and Scott were on that one as well. I also met a bunch of other people from DZ.com in real life - Lisa, Keely, Gary, Winsor - and saw them at Perris and at boogies all the time. It grew my circle of friends from Socal jumpers to jumpers all over the US. And even the world; I met some people from the Irish Parachute Club and made a trip out there to jump with them. I recall a lot of drinking. Over time as moderators changed I took on moderation of a few more forums, but to me the S+T and Incidents forum were always the important ones. I got some sort of award - a "skydivers hall of fame" or something from Parachutist for running that, and got on a few podcasts talking about safety and incidents. One of my proudest moments during that time was reading an incident by a newer jumper flying a too-small canopy. He had read one of my many diatribes on "LEARN FLAT TURNS!" and had tried them once or twice. Then one day he found himself flying downwind by accident, and he tried to turn into the wind at 50 feet. He tried that flat turn he had heard about, but there was something off about it (he explained) because he landed hard, tore his jumpsuit and sprained his ankle. The fact that he was complaining about a sprained ankle after a turn at 50 feet under a heavily loaded canopy made me think that maybe this forum was actually doing some good. I learned a lot, too, mainly from the forums I wasn't moderating - forums like General and Gear and Rigging. Based on what I learned about wingsuiting here, for example, I bought a small wingsuit, taught myself how to fly it, started moving up in wingsuit sizes - then met Jari and became one of the first Birdman wingsuit instructors in the US. And over the years we lost people here too, of course. In some ways this place served as a memorial; you could go back and read what Shannon or Taz had posted while they were still alive, and remember them that way. Over the years traffic has started to fall off as people find more social-media options for skydiving, which is a natural evolution. I'm sorry that it will be disappearing sooner rather than later, but nothing lasts forever. It will be interesting to see what happens to the database; all these incident reports and threads on canopy flight have a lot of value (IMO) and I hope we can save some of it. Thanks to everyone who participated on this site over the decades it has been running, and thanks especially to all the moderators who I've worked with - Wendy, Lisa, Andrea, Chuck, Eric, Remi, Meso and all the others. And of course thanks to Willem for doing all the work to set up and maintain this site. See you out there.

I'm glad I was able to remember my log-in! Thank you for flirting with me, all the way back in 2006. Have we ever paid Sangiro for his pimp fee? You had me at hello. Some of the best times of my life were with you in the sky, I miss it! I love you! Hi to anyone who remembers me!!

I hope you are trolling for the sake of spirited conversation, but I fear you are not.... Yielding to the lower jumper is NOT OBSOLETE! In fact, your suggestion is dangerous and I encourage jumpers to disregard it. The reasons we yield to the lower jumpers are simple. First, jumpers in the pattern are (correctly) focused on their landings, which dictates giving primary attention to what is BELOW them. Jumpers are ALWAYS responsible to clear the area in their flight path - like clearing the area to the left or right AND below before making a turn. This includes pattern flight and final approach. Second, it is often impossible to see traffic above us because our canopies block much of the view. Yielding to the higher jumper simply doesn't make sense and much of the time would be impossible because of the blocked view. It also distracts from the mission at hand - clearing the flight path ahead and below, and landing safely. The "low person has the right of way" is a basic premise in all of aviation. CFR 92.113.g states in part "When two or more aircraft are approaching an airport for the purpose of landing, the aircraft at the lower altitude has the right-of-way...". Additionally, the USPA Skydiver's Information Manual agrees with this rule. SIM Section 6-1.C.3.c states "the low person has the right-of-way both in freefall and under canopy". Deciding on our own to buck accepted practices leads to confusion, and that leads to problems. As for high performance canopies and the jumpers who fly them, they are ALWAYS responsible to yield to lower traffic. This makes perfect sense. The higher jumper has the best field of view of the jumpers below them, they can monitor lower traffic without looking away from their flight path, they have more altitude to make an avoidance maneuver if necessary, and it's consistent with aviation and skydiving norms. I am a former high performance canopy jumper (and still have a rate of descent faster than many others) and can say in practice that yielding to the lower jumper works. When I am descending faster than the jumpers below me, I have the best opportunity to observe what they are doing and have the best field of view to decide how to avoid conflict. There are a lot of great ideas out in the field. Suggesting lower jumpers attempt to yield to traffic above them is a really, REALLY bad idea. My suggestion to other jumpers - no disrespect intended - is to COMPLETELY ignore your advice.

The other card-carrying woman here (though I have been absent a bit!). Anyone impregnated should be able to get her own treatment from a provider who is trained and still willing to perform the procedure. "Late term" is not a thing. "Later abortions" happen after a fetus is expected to be developed to viability and can survive outside the uterus but are necessary due to something non-viable about the fetus (it will never be viable outside a uterus). To force someone to continue growing a fetus that will never grow a brain, or statistically speaking has a 98% chance of not surviving due to ruptured amniotic sac or other complications, or for myriad other medical issues that none of us NOT trained in obstetrics fully understand, is cruel, dangerous and unethical. Anyone trained in the science who is willing to perform the procedure in-office or by medications (has taken an oath to do no harm and still feels the procedure is appropriate), should be able to provide that health care to the patient who wants it.

Odd to even have to say this but - no blood libels. Your next ban will be your last. Either start discussing things without the Russian playbook in front of you or find a new forum to work on.

On June 6, 1942, Adeline Gray made the first jump by a human with a nylon parachute at Brainard Field in Hartford. Her jump, performed before a group of Army officials, put the world’s first nylon parachute to the test. The Pioneer Parachute Company of Manchester fabricated the new nylon material, which was developed as an alternative to silk. Working in concert with the Cheney Brothers Company of Manchester and the DuPont Company, Pioneer Parachute developed a material that combined “compactness with lightness, resiliency and strength.” Gray, who was 24 years old at the time of the jump, was from Oxford and worked as a licensed parachute rigger and packer at the Pioneer Parachute Company. She began jumping at age 19 and at the time of the nylon “jump test” had completed 32 jumps and was the only licensed female parachute jumper in Connecticut. https://connecticuthistory.org/first-human-test-of-a-nylon-parachute/#:~:text=On June 6%2C 1942%2C Adeline,nylon parachute to the test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_Gray_(parachutist)

Interesting how "life" is defined by these folks as a "heartbeat" at this point, but "not alive" is measured by brain activity. If you have to terminate a pregnancy at the 20th week, it's usually because there is no (or will be no) brain activity, but women have been forced to carry a non-viable fetus for several days/weeks because it is "alive." These morons should first agree on a definition of "life" that covers the whole span. If a heartbeat (don't even get me started on what that zygote really has at 4 weeks past fertilization) is the definition of alive, then we can stop learning CPR and dispose of all defibrillators. They're already dead, so you just have to call it when the heart stops. If you pound on someone's chest, or shock them, after their heart stops, then you should be charged with mutilating a corpse.

I'd counter that there's a virtually limitless supply of tools chasing this Hunter Biden angle.

Personally? It guides my morality and worldview. I didn't know anything about how people in sub-Saharan Africa lived, and imagined they were all poor, ignorant people who lived in poverty and misery. Then I spent a month there and learned they were some of the happiest people around. When I told them I was a skydiver, one of the kids pantomined an entire RW skydive, including throwing a hand-deploy at the end and releasing the brakes. They all spoke three languages. I thought the US was a good influence there. And I discovered in the cities and larger towns that everyone hated Americans, because they'd come in and steamroller over local businesses, homesteads and farms (often literally) in the name of profit. "It never their fault" one guy told me, who explained that Americans always blamed their boss, or the shareholders, or the (Niger) government for whatever trouble they caused. But when you got to the smaller towns, the only Americans people had seen were Peace Corps volunteers. And they saw Peace Corps volunteers as sometimes misguided, sometimes clueless, but clearly there because they were trying to help. And thus I was welcomed with open arms. And that taught me that ultimately it's what you do, not what you say or what you profess to believe, that determines your morality and how you are seen by the world. I thought I was "woke" and really understood people. Then I managed a transgender woman and realized that I really didn't understand much of anything, and I never would, since I'm a straight cis middle aged white guy. But that that was OK as long as I could accept that her point of view was as valid as mine - even if it didn't make sense to me. I've known people who were great guys, would do anything for you, who turned out to be pedophiles. I've known miserable people who would curse you and never say a good word about anyone - but years after they were gone, I found out they'd been supporting several families and paying for their kid's college education for no reason other than he thought they deserved a chance. From that I learned to not judge people so quickly. True of Barack Obama, too. (Or as you preferred, Barack HUSSEIN Obama.) But I bet you don't think that the reaction to his name defines his significance.

As I have contemplated the end of this forum it seems like facing the prospect of losing a large partly dysfunctional family all in one fell swoop. Of course it has been slowly dying anyway but some of the participants that are still here are outstanding in many so ways. At this time however I would like to thank the mods for their decision to let pretty much anything go in the dying days. The resultant decline in the quality of the discourse by allowing people of such low ability to think rationally is making it a lot easier for me to prepare myself for the loss. Seriously, it was the right thing to do for other reasons as well. I certainly will miss the chance to interact with some great people in a way that I will probably never be able to replace but at least I will also never have to deal with the crazy nonsense that comes across my screen.

Heya all, Dropzone .com has been sold. This site has been part of my life for 27 years, so it was obviously not an easy decision. A huge thank you to every one of you (especially those relentless mods!) who supported Dropzone.com and myself during the years. Things change. The friendships I made here will outlast the tech forever, and for that i'm grateful. It's been real. Safe swoops Sangiro

BOROWITZ: Stormy Daniels not surprised Trump’s defense was small and didn’t last long

We are really in a crappy place today. Justice Clarence Thomas is arguably in cahoots with his Qanon and conspiracy theory believing wife who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Both Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett apparently lied to get their seats and, by any honest rational opinion, Gorsuch sits in a stolen seat. If you read this and think "sucks to be you libtard" or "it's about winning and we won" you are no patriot. You are no true American. You are a traitor to our fragile constitution.

Here’s my $0.02, for what it’s worth….if your faith makes your life better and you wanna share that then fill your fucking boots, I’m happy for you. If you want to start telling me I’m going to burn for eternity because I don’t believe in your imaginary friend, I’m happy to write you off as a person worth giving another minute of my time.

The Republicans should be forced to carry Trump to term, even if it threatens the life of the Republican Party.

Crimea river...

You are WAY off base with that comment. USPA encourages skydivers to chase their passion, and promotes best practices regardless of the discipline. Is canopy piloting safe? Nope. Not even close. CP is dangerous - damn dangerous - but that doesn't mean USPA should discourage it. Is freeflying safe? Nope. How about CRW? FS? And then there's speed skydiving. Consider a premature deployment at 300 mph. Nothing we do is safe. The CP culture is the most peer-policed discipline in skydiving. Go to a CP comp sometime and observe. You will see the best pilots on the planet coaching, mentoring, and critiquing - all with the goal of keeping one another safe. CP has come a long, long way since the days of toggle hooks and ditch digging. Today's pilots have a deep understanding of the science behind the discipline and continuously hone their skills and education to stay as safe as possible. They are also acutely aware of the risks. From an organizational perspective, the ISC (International Skydiving Commission) and national-level organizations like USPA have and do modify competitions rules and practices to make safety a top priority. One great example is the change in distance rules that now require pilots to stay below a certain height for a portion of the run before climbing their canopies. This was done specifically because folks were getting injured by climbing so high that landings were becoming sketchy. I have been following the competition CP community for over a decade. My son is one of the top pilots in the world. Do I worry about him? Every single day. Would I ever dream of discouraging him from doing what he loves? Never. USPA does not "endorse canopy piloting competitions that encourage skydivers to land in very unsafe ways". USPA encourages skydivers of all disciplines to conduct their activities as safely as possible. Some disciplines are more dangerous than others, but none of them are safe. Canopy piloting is not safe. Neither is any skydive you have ever made or ever will.

I just had my retirement request approved. Come Dec 1, I'll be joining the club!

There are 2 speeds: Indicated airspeed and true airspeed. The speed that the jumper will feel in freefall is always indicated airspeed and for a jumper that falls at an indicated airspeed of 120 mph, he will fall at that same indicated airspeed regardless of altitude (except when going so high there is no air at all). If you could take an airspeed indicator with you in freefall, it would always register the same airspeed, indicated airspeed, regardless of altitude for a give body position. Your true airspeed will change with altitude and at 41,000' your true airspeed, with an indicated airspeed of 120 mph, would be about (depending on temperature) 245 mph. However, your body would only feel the indicated airspeed of 120 mph. Mike Mullins Oh yes I will. Mike

"When a coup attempt goes unpunished, it has officially become a training exercise." - Author Unknown

He's out of the ICU now but still hospitalized.

https://skydivingmagazine.org/browse-issues/ I started skydiving around 1987 and reading theses old magazines have given me such great pleasure and sadness. There is so much that I missed before I started skydiving and since then, so many great people are no longer with us. On the plus side, I really enjoy the history and the great memories of all that has happened. I knew Mike, but not very well and now can really appreciate the writing and history. Thank you Sue for making them available.

Hi, Jerry, If he weren't a strong contender for the office of POTUS, I would be laughing. Unfortunately, the situation doesn't make it funny right now. Maybe when he loses the election and continues to "lose it," we can laugh at him.

NINE YEARS!!!!! Flirting with each other here was the start, then the flirting at boogies and drop zones. She had my heart the second our eyes met. I love you baby, let's continue our adventure filled journey through life together. now to get her back here to see this.... *Chuck Blue was right. Thanks brother!

dozens of felony counts. Trump is not walking away from this with no convictions. Pardons still mean you are guilty, so they don't mean shit to anyone with a fucking brain. He's a fucking crook. he always was. He's a fucking con man. He always was. Arguably he is guilty of sedition, given the Seditious conspiracy convictions of Jan 6 already... and that may be coming yet. 6 dozen felony counts might give the other prosecutors the balls to proceed as well. This is as close to actual treason as we could find if there is ever evidence that he shared any docs with a foreign entity. Fuck that seditious cunt. fuck anyone that supports that seditious cunt at this point. Stop making excuses for the worst president we have ever had in the white house. There is no comparison to this fucking mutt of a human being. When he dies (and he will someday) I will be hosting a neighborhood BBQ and open an 18 year old bottle of single malt. that.....fucking....seditious.....cunt.....

A few months before I got out of the tandem game (after 10 years and probably 5000+ tandems): I exit on a handcam jump that had outside video as well, and right out the door I realize I didn't buckle my full face helmet. So I'm flying the entire jump with my right hand on my head, filming with my left, and cursing the camera flyer who decided (not for the first time) to film everything while carving around us on his head. Apart from that helmet annoyance and the freeflying camera guy, we get to 6000' uneventfully, whereas I reach back with my left hand (wasn't going to sacrifice my helmet for the opening shot), pull, and nothing happens. I switch hands, hold down my helmet with my left, and pull the right handle. Nothing. Now we're getting to 5000', and everything I know about release blockages and drogues in tow on Sigmas flashes through my head. I give the left handle another go, then say a quick prayer and fire the reserve past the trailing drogue. It clears, and we have a brisk, but totally manageable deployment, and I fly us down, hoping the people on the ground aren't too freaked out by the drogue dragging behind us, trying to get some good canopy HC footage to make up for what would definitely be suboptimal freefall. We land, and I look back to locate my drogue. And it's not there. And that's when I realize it's still in the BOC, where it's been the entire time because I was too busy holding down my helmet and filming the jump, and the camera guy was just trying to keep up with us, and we went straight to reserve from drogueless terminal. And I was generally pretty proud of myself for not being one of those TIs who need the drogue to get them stable, but the dumbfuckery I managed to cram into this jump still makes me a bit sick to my stomach.

I've recreated all of the witness and crew testimonies in their unredacted format and put them all in one place. Many of the copies floating around the net look terrible and have gross watermarks, etc. norjak.org/testimony

Penn & Teller are from this time period. If you're trying to use the "Well Regulated" meant "Well Organized" argument - I'm not even sure where that originated. The colonialists (the people) were the militia and not any part of a standing army (which caused Hamilton great concern for the US to have one - but we do). In his Federalist Papers No. 29, he outlines all "three sides" of the coin. The militia, a standing army and the people. "Well Regulated" meant training to a military standard. It was proposed, that the people from each state would gather once or twice a year and train to military standards, but make no mistake they were "the people" of each state - not a paid military. In fact, they could be made to support another state in the event that other state were invaded by a standing army. There is an ongoing myth about what the forefathers "meant" about a "well regulated" militia and "the people" being separate by a single comma. "The people" were "the militia." The right to bear arms was to allow the people to support the militia UNTIL a more formalized militia could be developed at a later date to protect these US from a standing (foreign) army. If you don't believe the government can regulate weapons and ammo, then how has the NFA stood as a law for so long. Did you know that the Supreme Court didn't acknowledge individual gun ownership as a right until 2008. 219 years after the US Constitution was adopted. If you don't think the US can ban certain weapons, then why is there still a ban on gravity knives. Why is there still a law on who can or can't own machine guns and a rather lengthy "well-regulated" process to own one. Having said all that, I personally, don't like the "left's" attack on the 2nd Amendment, but I also don't like the "right's" belief that gun ownership comes without some form of responsibility or accountability, or regulation. The "left" needs to agree to leave the 2nd Amendment alone and the "right" needs to agree that children getting killed in school warrants regulation of firearms to prevent it from happening again. We claim to be morally superior to other countries - let's start with protecting children from even having to have "active shooter" programs by regulating ownership - not banning guns, but banning nut jobs from owning guns AND ensuring everyone who owns a weapon gets the proper training as Hamilton outlined as "the People" being "Well Regulated."

An excellent example. By reframing the Civil War as a "war of northen aggression" having nothing to do with slavery, whites in the south could avoid any residual feelings of shame associated with the position they took on slavery. They could instead take pride in their ancestors who stood up to an evil north, rather than trying to reconcile their heritage of slavery with a more modern view of civil rights. We are seeing the same thing happen today with the attempted cancellation of both CRT and the 1619 project. These studies of history make many white people feel bad, because it reminds them that a significant part of this country came from the labor of slaves. This make them feel - not bad, exactly, but like they cannot be as proud of their history as they otherwise could be. "Make America Great Again" doesn't work if those halcyon days included slavery (or enforced segregation, or redlining, or any of the other structural racisms that the early and mid US incorporated.) So they try to ban it. They realize that banning history is something of a bad look, so they dress up the ban in flowery language and mix in a few "won't someone please think of the children" memes. We've seen these a lot lately - "why are teachers teaching our children to hate themselves?" CRT teaches kids "to be ashamed that they are white." One theoretically real child tearfully asked her far-right mother "Why am I hated so much?" - and then supposedly needed therapy to overcome all the damage that CRT did. (How fortunate that that child did it just in time for Marsha Blackburn's political campaign.) Others spend thousands of words trying to define CRT to mean something other than CRT. It's an "unremitting attack on Western institutions." It teaches that "America is systemically racist and must be dismantled." It was created by Karl Marx to destroy democracy. It is a "monstrous evil" that gives black people "the whip handle" over white people. (That last was from Pat Robertson; what a fascinating metaphor to use when one is advocating ignoring what slavery did to the country.) Underlying all this blather is a simple belief common amongst the right - that education can and should be curtailed because it makes some people feel uncomfortable or threatened. We have seen several examples right here on this forum. George Orwell once said that "he who controls the past controls the future." Conservatives are trying to take control of the past and alter it to something that works better for them. The question is - will we let them?

OK, Slick what's your fucking plan other than throwing "follies" around? Wait you just want to throw rocks at everyone else's shit. Go play with the other kids - the adults want to have a conversation.

Response to the nipply one: Your first jump will be a recurrency. To make sure that you obey your jumpmasters, you'll be required to wear eye shades along with the face mask. The instructors will pull off the eye shades when they deploy you. With a frap hat, the options are endless. I'd go with the standard little blue face shield, and just let freefall blow it off. Then you can wait for it to land and re-use it again. Make sure you weight it appropriately -- you do want it to come back down on the airport, after all. There's a whole new sport of mask accuracy, with people building special accuracy masks, studying the wind currents in detail, and adjusting the mask weight based on the exit altitude and direction. Wendy P.

Wow, you found the "Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency" document. When anti-vaxxers give themselves a fancy name and buy a URL with a '.org' domain they can post all types of bullshit and people looking to confirm their biases will eat it the fuck up! Here's a link to the original document: https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf These guys got a bit crafty trying to make it look like a legit Pfizer doc: the header has the research name of the vaccine, they're lawsuit-seekingly close to claiming that the whole thing was prepared by Pfizer on page 1, and they even put a file-path stamp on the side of the document...from that stamp, you can clearly see that it was in the 'approved' folder, so you know it is extra verified and totally good. Come on, Doctor! Put that big, multisyllabic brain of yours to use before you regurgitate this type of shit

I disagree with just about all of Rep. Cheney's policy positions, but to punish her for not promoting a huge lie is about as low as you can go.

In my church there is controversy about taking the vaccine. Many have taken it, including my wife and I, but some refuse. Those refusing are not vocal with their reasoning. It comes across as, mostly, the government is not going to tell me what to do. To me that is very weak and not very enlightening. Some of us have had the virus and some of those have died or still suffering long term effects. My wife is in this situation. To date we have had 8,254 infected and 214 deaths. I would guess around 50% of the seniors are vaccinated. Getting an appointment is a stumbling block. Personally, I think it is better to be as safe as possible than to be as sick as possible.

So do actions. There was a time (it seems long ago) when elections were bitterly contested, but when the survivors made it to Congress they would roll up their sleeves and try to get some work done, and this meant working across the aisle. Hard though it may be to believe, Republicans and Democrats often socialized together and even had some pretty solid friendships. For some time now though, Republicans have adopted a scorched-earth strategy of total obstructionism when they are the minority, and ram-it-up-your-ass policy making when they are in the majority. This policy has been carried to the ultimate extreme by McConnell, who has pretty much destroyed the Senate as a deliberative body. Once upon a time the Senate required 60 votes to confirm Cabinet appointments and senior judgeship's including the Supreme Court. In Obama's first term McConnell was minority leader but still pushed the Republicans in the Senate to block several of Obama's nominees for his Cabinet, and also many nominees the judiciary. He was not coy about using the filibuster to try to castrate the Obama administration, so that Obama could not seat a full cabinet or fill judicial appointments in a timely manner. This forced the majority leader, Harry Reid, into a Hobson's choice. A Hobson's choice is where you have to make a choice but you only have one option. He eliminated the filibuster (the 60% rule) for most positions that required Congressional approval, but he did not eliminate it for Supreme Court appointments, arguing that such an important appointment should require more than a bare 51 votes to confirm. Leaving the Supreme Court at 60 votes meant any nominee would need to attract at least a few votes from the minority party, so they could not be too extreme. The problem with the Democrat's approach is that they still assumed some measure of good faith on the part of the Republicans. Instead, when the Republicans gained control of the Senate, McConnell blocked almost all of Obama's judicial nominees, creating a huge backlog of empty positions and also a huge backlog of cases waiting to be heard, and ultimately of course he blocked Obama's nominee for a Supreme Court seat. Then when Trump nominated Gorsuch, McConnell eliminated the 60 vote rule for the Supreme Court so he could ram through Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and now Barrett with not one Democratic vote. What I meant by "actions have consequences" is that McConnell's legacy will be a Congress in which Democrats will have learned the lesson to never allow the Republicans one inch, because if you do they will fuck you. The Senate is dead as "the world's greatest deliberative body". It will for a long time be focused far more on screwing over the other side than on doing any actual bipartisan legislation. Good job, Mitch. I have voted for Republicans in the past, when I thought they were the best candidate. Not for president it is true, but I would not have been too alarmed if McCain or Romney had won as I was confident they actually had the best intentions for the country. No longer. The Republican "party" has shown itself to be interested only in cementing their own power in place, establishing one party rule, and prostrating themselves before Trump and their corporate masters. Even if I think a particular individual is OK the party is so corrupt I can never again consider a Republican for any level of government.

Hooray. Good news. I got a job offer today! It’s not quite what I was after, but with so many people unemployed right now and companies having a freeze on hiring just finding a job is a godsend.

Yesterday, this post had over a hundred views and no responses after 6 hours, and this was a good thing. Then all it took was added bait from the second most ignorable poster on the entire forum, and you all had to take a bite. This was a great opportunity to leave him shouting into the void, and you failed. Every one of you should be ashamed.

Hello To ALL..... Just checked in here, to find this thread.....Thanks to Each of your for your posts and good wishes......The worst Is now Over. I was discharged on Oct 20th.. " They turnt me Loose " " said I was Well " …. And I AM.... I had gone to Skydive The Falls on Saturday September 14th and after a bit of a wind hold it calmed down and they started sending up loads. I enjoyed a Nice 2 way from 12 grand with a long time buddy....The view of Niagara Falls during the climb to altitude was Fantastic . While Packing my rig afterwards, I found it to Be, a bit of an effort.. and I had to stop 3 times and sit to rest...… Hmmmm. Got home that night and was just feeling wrung out... No real pain, no numbness, but I felt lousy..It was around 10 or 11 pm and Nancy had already gone to sleep. I saw NO value in waking her and having her SIT in an E R waiting room, wondering and Waiting,,,, so I wrote her a note , left it where she could Easily Find it. and said " I am going to the hospital " Got there in a few minutes because it is only a couple of miles away. It was NOT busy and they took me in quickly. They did an EKG on me. and the next thing I knew they were calling for an anesthesiologist AND a surgeon !! Yikes !!!! Well they did a big time bypass on me , had me on a heart pump and a respirator throughout... I was out of it for a few days... and feel terrible about putting my FAmily through those first few days, post Op... I got great care from the doctors and nurses and a few in particular were top shelf, in their encouragement and insistance that I "get UP and get Moving"... I was walking around and improving each day, by about 2 weeks post op and little by little they removed the trach... and the drainage apparatus and the nasal feeding tube and got me back onto swallowing and a bit of a sense of normalcy... I have been Home now for 10 days or so, and I am pain free and no longer need the walker I had been using. Kind of glad we are coming into the end of the year as I am on a hiatus from work and will be doing Physical therapy and building up my appetite the next few weeks. I lost 22 pounds and was Under 170, for the first time since high school..... Anyway things are improving. I am proud that I Did NOT ignore my sense of malaise and instead sought medical care...... I was told I was getting close to a cardiac arrest..... Follow your instincts my Friends No One is bulletproof and certain issues CAN sneak Up on us... I feel blessed that in addition to Great Friends and Family, I also have a Guardian Angel or Two... sitting on my shoulders... Thanks skymama,,, for initiating this thread. I am glad that I checked in here,,, to Find it.... skydive often, skydive safely, skydive with friends . jimmytavino uspa # 9452 A3914 D12122

(Warning - long) Winsor recently refloated the always popular nuclear-is-expensive-because-of-those-goddamn-hippies argument. Since he's not reading my posts any more, and since that's not relevant to the woke-bashing that's going on in that thread, I thought I'd break it out into a separate thread. First off, of course there is an element of cost associated with protests. When people don't like nuclear power (or aviation, or skydiving, or drag queens, or whatever) they protest, and those protests invariably make it more difficult/expensive to do whatever those people wanted to do initially - through demanding more regulation, or lobbying to deny permits, or promoting the bad over the good. In the case of nuclear power, however, that has very little to do with the rising costs. As a pilot and a skydiver, one thing I learned early on is that most aviation regulations were written in blood. The FAR that requires pilots to check the weather before they take off if they are flying to a different airport? That's not there because "bushy tailed Liberal Arts types in Boston/Cambridge" hated airplanes and wanted to screw up aviation. They are there because of the deaths of pilots who were surprised by weather after they took off. There are similar reasons for many of the regulations involved with nuclear power. The limits for worker exposure? That's not there because scaredycat liberals want to shut down nuclear power. That's because early on several people were injured and killed by radiation from poorly designed experiments and reactors. The Demon Core, for example, killed two people working with it. At that point, the risks of gamma radiation were known, but no one had been exposed to a fatal dose of neutron radiation before - something you can only get from a nuclear chain reaction, or via a very complex sort of particle accelerator. After those two deaths, more work was done on neutron radiation risks, and new limits were put in place. More regulations! Side note here - the reason most nuclear reactors are possible at all is due to a quirk of physics called "neutron cross section." It's basically the probability of a neutron hitting the nucleus of a fissile atom. Einstein's work made it clear that the slower the neutron, the more likely it was to hit that nucleus. This is important because "prompt criticality" - the sort of chain reaction we all learned about in school, and how nuclear bombs detonate - is VERY hard to regulate, since the reaction waxes and wanes over the course of hundreds of microseconds, too fast for humans to reliably control (as the physicists working with the Demon Core learned to their dismay.) However, it is possible to design nuclear reactors that cannot go prompt-critical, and can only reach criticality with delayed, or thermal, neutrons. These are neutrons that pass through a moderator (like water) and are slowed, as well as neutrons that are natually emitted from fission, just more slowly. This allows design of reactors with power time constants of seconds or tens of seconds, which makes regulation via control rods possible. Even better, if they lose their moderator (i.e. they lose coolant) the reaction slows automatically. In fact, if the reactor even just gets too hot and boils the water, the voids in the water moderator automatically reduce power generation (i.e. it has a "negative void coefficient.") This gave early reactor designers perhaps a bit too much confidence in the inherent safety of nuclear power. As people started working on reactors for power in peacetime, we saw some of those irrational emotion driven types Winsor was referring to in his post - but initally they were on the side of nuclear power. Nuclear power was so safe, easy and efficient, according to Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss, that "it is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." He saw so much of the promise of nuclear energy (both fission and fusion) and so little of the drawbacks that the future looked rosy indeed. Turns out, though, nuclear power is hard to do well. For example, if there is a LOCA (loss of coolant accident) in water-moderated reactor, the chain reaction does indeed stop. But the fuel is now full of short lived isotopes due to the neutron bombardment during operation, and those isotopes also decay and release neutrons. Not enough to sustain a chain reaction, but enough to cause additional fission and a LOT of heat. So although the reactor has technically shut down, it will still happily melt into a puddle of spent nuclear fuel, nuclear waste, moderator and steel. And it's hard to keep a reactor full of that stuff safe. And reactor designers started discovering this almost immediately. In most parts of the world, those designers have been very lucky that their mishaps have, for the most part, not resulted in large public health threats or loss of life. The first meltdown occurred at reactor EBR-1 in Idaho in 1955. This was a breeder reactor, so different design and different coolant, but same basic idea. A power excursion caused a partial meltdown, but cooling was restored and the core solidified before anything worse happened. The next occurred at the same facility, but in a different reactor - this time an experimental boiling water reactor. It was designed to not go prompt-critical for all the reasons listed above. However, when a technician removed a single control rod from the reactor, it did indeed go prompt-critical. Fortunately the core disassembled itself before nuclear weapon yields were reached, but the power excursion (20 gigawatts in a reactor designed to handle 3 megawatts) caused an explosion that killed three men in a fairly gruesome fashion. How could this have happened? This reactor was designed to be SAFE! It could not go prompt critical! Turns out two factors allowed this. One, some of the neutron poisons inside the reactor (that reduce reactivity) had corroded and flaked off. Two, it turns out that it takes water some milliseconds to boil, and this event happened in microseconds, so the voids could not form fast enough to shut down the reaction. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power plant operation. In 1977, the nuclear reactor at the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant had its coolant level drop while the reactor was powered down, exposing the fuel elements to air (actually steam.) A hydrogen explosion occurred, which damaged the reactor and seriously injured one worker. How could this have happened? There's no hydrogen in a reactor! Where did it come from? The hot fuel elements, clad in zirconium, reacted with the steam to generate the hydrogen. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power plant operation. Then Chernobyl happened. Fortunately for us the RBMK reactor is so different from US designs that a similar accident almost certainly can't happen here. But again the accident was due to something that no one had considered - that there is an operating regime for a reactor where poisons build up so quickly that it shuts down the reactor, and when they burn off (as they do eventually) then the reactor can restart so violently that it, again, goes prompt critical. So probably no effect on US reactors; ours can't go prompt critical. Although we initially thought the same thing about the SL-1 reactor in Idaho. Lesson learned. This time, no new regulations for the US. There are about a dozen of these. Three Mile Island, the most visible US incident, was the result of two mechanical failures and three coincident operator errors. And despite all the reassurances from the utility, the incident came very close to a containment breach - most of the core did in fact melt down, and a lot of it ended up on the bottom of the vessel. During the investigation, it was discovered that valves to the emergency feedwater supply were closed and never opened, there was no clear indication on the reactor status panel that the PORV was stuck open, and an operator actually shut off the emergency high pressure injection system. So failures of training, equipment and instrumentation. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power plant operation. Then outside the US came Fukushima. A textbook case of how to shut down a nuclear reactor in an emergency, and everything looked good. But then a tidal wave damaged - not the reactor, not the control room, but the power lines and the generators that provided cooling water for the reactors when shut down. And THEY melted down. So failure to take into account protection of the entire plant - not just the reactor. Lesson learned. More regulation of nuclear power. These new lessons are why it's so hard to build new nuclear power plants. Recently the first nuclear reactor in decades opened at the Vogtle facility in Georgia. This was a simplified Gen IV design that's referred to as "walk-away safe" - no power needed to cool the reactor after an emergency shutdown. It was so simple that an early ad from GE for the reactor's original design touted "first concrete to fuel load in 36 months." From the beginning of the planning to the first operation took 20 years and came in $20 billion over budget. No protesters, just contractors screwing up, companies folding, and the usual very high level of quality required at a facility designed to safely contain a nuclear chain reaction. I keep hoping that, someday, we will get a Gen IV reactor design (or, heck, even a fusion reactor) that does indeed meet the promise made by Strauss all those years ago. What keeps us from getting there is not those goddamn hippies, and it's not evil liberals in suits toting briefcases. It's the fact that nuclear power is hard to do well, and we as a society have (wisely) demanded that it's done right.

Sexual immorality is just a construct. The only immorality would be if someone is taking advantage of a child or a person otherwise not able to give informed consent. Homosexual sex is not immoral. Men entering the priesthood then using the posistion of trust to take advantage of children is immoral. Likewise it is not immoral for a boy or a girl to feel they don't fit your expectations of their sexuality. It is a struggle, and it may be very difficult for them, but it is not immoral.

Believing in a Creator is not following the science.

It's a barbaric, mistake prone process that serves no real purpose other than to "punish" someone to make the victims relatives and bloodthirsty onlookers feel better. It's more expensive than life in prison I believe, It's irreversible and I suspect the wrong people get caught more often than they should. All civilised societies no longer do this..

You have a common misconception that seems to be rooted in the right. The Constitution does not tell people what their rights are. The Constitution tells the government what rights they may take from people. For example, Article 1 Section 8 tells us that the Constitution can tax the people to provide for an armed forces and for the general welfare; that takes away the right to not pay taxes. If the Constitution does not describe what rights may be taken away, then those rights revert to the states or the people. In this case, women had the inherent right to an abortion, just as they have an inherent right to marry someone who is not their race, or get cosmetic surgery, or sue someone, or become pilots. None of those rights are called out in the Constitution, nor do they need to be States may on occasion try to take those rights away, The Supreme Court's primary job is to protect those rights. We are now entering a phase where the Supreme Court will begin removing those rights for people in pursuit of the politiical ideology of their benefactors. They have already removed the protection on a women's right for bodily autonomy. They have signaled that they will try to do something similar with other currently-protected rights, like the right of women to get birth control, and the right of black students to go to the same schools as white students. Other republicans have signaled that the right to marry someone outside your race will be reconsidered as well - and given the political connection between the SC and the republicans, it's fair to say that that right is at risk as well. The US has had a long tradition of increasing rights for all. We ended slavery. We affirmed that women have the right to vote. We said that blacks to attend the same schools as whites. We guaranteed the right for blacks to marry whites, for gay people to marry each other, and indeed for gay people to exist at all. We have now reversed this trend. And if you think that they are going to stop at abortion - or that they will never get to a right that you value - you haven't been paying attention.

Let's be honest, for you it really won't matter what he says. Like most republicans you don't stand for anything anymore, all you know is you are against anything the Democrats do.

Hehe, this is so disingenuous that it's embarrassing for the reader. Trump throws our Kurd allies into a meat grinder and that's no problem. Biden abides by a shit show deal engineered by Trump, which included the release of thousands on enemy combatants, to end Bush's Afghanistan disaster and it's evidence of his incompetence on every level. Sinema and Manchin back stab him, along with every R Senator that used to be for voting rights equality and he couldn't get the deal done because he sucks. Trump and his team do worse than zero to assist the transition to a new administration, foment insurrection and further divide the nation by continuing the year long lie of a stolen election and, to the chagrin of any thinking person, that hobbling has nothing to do with any supposed hot messes. The list goes on and on. This isn't a meaningless schoolyard game of dodgeball; this is the fate of our nation. Some people need to wake up.

I do indeed. Your sources for what CRT is are about as authoritative as that whuffo's ideas of what skydiving was from years gone by. Yep. No wonder you believe the right wing strawman version of what CRT is. I am only surprised you did not include George Carlin, Andrew Dice Clay and Bobcat GoldThwait as sources for your understanding. Nope. But race played a role. Attempts to understand what role it played are worthwhile, and are not Monty Python-esque, or Marxist, or racist. I do indeed support it, and I am just fine with you thinking I am a humorless twit. Due to my work in it, I have realized a few things. I used to think I understood transgender people. Then one of the women who works for me came out to me as trans. She did this because of my support for DEI, and it was a good thing - I could be a better manager if I understood her perspective a bit better. From her I learned that I was not "woke." I did not understand what trans people go through, nor do I understand now, since I am a straight cis guy. But at least I understand the issue a little better now. I used to think that rape was a rare crime, and that it was something that happened when women got careless. Then an old friend told me about her rape. It shook me a bit. When I talked to another friend about it, she told me about HER rape. Now half the women I have talked to have their own stories about it - including women who are tough as nails, and are about as far from a careless pushover as you can get. I used to think that blacks (and other minorities) had had it bad centuries ago, but nowadays all those laws had been changed, so now it was 100% up to them. Then in high school I got to know the Indian kid next to me in band. He was one of four non-Christians allowed entry. I also got to know one of the four black kids in the school, and we're still friends on Facebook. I did a little digging, and found out that if my high school admitted a certain percentage of non-Christian and non-white students, they qualified for a federal financial assistance program. (One of those 'structural' things that you think is a joke.) I don't really understand what it's like to be a minority, but after talking to them I at least understand it a little bit more. From your posts it sounds like you believe you know it all, and are smugly confident that you have nothing left to learn on the topic. Black scholars who research the structural basis of racism are Marxists, and their work is comedy. Trans people are mentally ill. Muslims are violent, insane criminals. Black people who talk about racism are the real racists. If that lets you sleep better at night, then I guess that . . . works for you. Rest assured that I do not have the vast, superior and unquestionable understanding that you do. The more work I do on understanding the issues under DEI (and for me it does take work) the more I understand how much I have to learn. If that means I am a humorless twit in your eyes, so be it. Feel free to, in the future, disregard my posts, and converse only with people at your (much higher) level.

Looks like a lot of people don't understand the difference between "making good choices" and "having good choices".

YOU don't get off the hook that easily. YOU are one of the enablers. Be ashamed.

It's a simple solution really. Name all the bases and put up statues in honor of those 3,520 Medal of Honor recipients. Of those, 90 of the MoH's went to 89 African-Americans (Sweeney was awarded twice). Who's gonna take exception to an MoH recipient.

1. JoeWebs asked you if the highest earners should pay a higher percentage of their income than the kid with a lemonade stand? 2. The child within me only saw the words "lemonade stand," so I went on a tangent about how horny old assholes were trying to shut us down at garage sales way back in the 2015s. 3. Kallend said that horny old assholes aren't part of the government and that my comment was irrelevant to the question. 4. Gowlerk then said that my comment was a good way to avoid answering the question that Weber was asking you. 5. I told him that since you hadn't logged in yet to see the question, it was doubtful that you were avoiding it. 5. Then I told Webs about how they were talking about lemonade stands on Wheel of Fortune. 6. Damn you for making me repeat all that. 7. Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having listened to it. 8. I award myself no points, and my God have mercy on my soul.