riggerrob

Negativity sells 100 times faster than love. It is always easier to blame your problems on some outsider, instead of inventing ways to improve yourself and become your best possible you. That attitude leads to bullying, because bullies have abandoned efforts to achieve their best possible self and instead seek to improve their status by debasing others. Warfare is the same attitude on a national level. How well did that work for Adolf Hitler back in 1945? How well did that work for the Argentine ruling military junta back in 1982? How well is it working for Hamas today?

There is a fine line between freedom of speech and slander. Sadly, this distinction has disappearred from modern social discourse.

Yes Gerry, Any information that time-sensitive would have been sent via three couriers ... on three different routes.

30 years ago, I retired USAF Combat Controller told me that he and his buddies had been surveying airstrips in North Africa. They sent one CC home with the survey results. He was travelling in that 747 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. A couple of Libyan military intelligence officers were eventually arrested and jailed, but released early. Lockbie was a military hit .... with 300 collateral casualties.

My impression - during the 1970s - was that Western pressure to eliminate apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa was more about domestic politics in the USA. Kennedy and Johnson were trying to encourage American blacks to lift themselves out of poverty and become tax-paying middle-class workers. They failed on all three counts. Rhodesia was a net agricultural exporter in 1970, but now they have to import food. South Africa has a prosperous, advanced economy - the most technologically advanced in Africa - but now it is a poor Third-World country with a high crime rate. Granted, some American blacks have moved up into the middle class, but there are still millions stuck in poverty ... on the dole .... in prison .....

Many of the airplanes that Dause operated were managed by Flanagan Enterprises of Nevada. I suffered multiple injuries when one of those King Airs crashed in 2008. Lawyers dragged out the misery for another 9 years. Even though WCB's lawyers "won" the first part of the lawsuit, it was a net loss for the wounded. I only collected one year's salary. Too bad that I was unemployed for 15 months during the trial. WCB imposed a 2 year delay for surgery, infection, deep vein thrombosis, withheld settlement funds for a year, 2 counts of contempt outside the court, PTSD, etc. But that decision forced Flanagan to divest some assets. Then another one of their airplanes (Caravan) crashed near Lodi in August of 2016.

The sad thing is that those North Korean soldiers will be purely cannon-fodder. They can never go home again because they might tell family and friends about the high standard of living in Ukraine. Any stories that under-mine faith in the Supreme Leader of North Korea will be quickly crushed. Compare this with Soviet soldiers who conquered Berlin at the end of World War 2. Because they had seen the luxurious living standards of Berliners - compared with the average Russian peasant. From Stalin's perspective it was better for those soldiers to die in battle. Surviving soldiers got diverted to Siberia for a few years.

Peter Zeihan and some generals.

Blame that on management and manifest.

Many strategists believe that Mr. Poutine's latest military adventures are ploys to re-capture the Polish Gap (near Warsaw) and the Bessarabian Gap (Carpathian Mountains Southwest of Odesa). The rest of Ukraine is needed for defense-in-depth. I seriously doubt if Mr. Poutine really cares about de-nazifying Ukraine.

russia was small a thousand years ago ... just a few forest villages surrounding Moscow. Too bad Moscow is located on the North European Plain which extends from Northern France all the way to the Ural Mountains, with few defensible rivers of mountains. Over the last thousand years Moscow has been over-run by Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles, Germans, French, Mongols, Huns, Sythians, etc. more times than anyone can count. That is why Moscow is paranoid. All of their later conquests were to provide strategic depth to their defenses. The current invasion of Ukraine is all about the Russian Army regaining control of the Bessarabian Gap in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. The Russian Army need to control the Bessarabian Gap to prevent another invasion by Muslim Turks. Ukraine just happens to the be on the road towards the Carpathian Mountains.

Hot enough to melt the surface of nylon risers. If you jump partially-melted risers long enough, they will eventually fail. Statistically they are most likely to fail during opening shock. In the worst case scenario, they fail during your last turn onto final approach. No need to take a well-understood risk. Budget the money to replace tandem risers every 300 to 600 jumps.

Granted, we do need to listen to minority opinions. BUT! I draw the line at political violence.

The scariest thing is when fascists and communists go full circle and meet at the bottom. Then they both look like violent thugs who oppress anyone not playing their tune. I fear the current generation of "antifa" as much as I fear Hitler's Brown Shirts or Mussolini's Black Shirts or any version of Russian secret police.

Back when I moved to California - in 1992 - I read a thick book called "Cadillac Desert"' 'which spelled out the folly of Colorado River water rationing. The start of the problem was issuing more "water rights" than there were gallons in the river .... it got worse from there. After 6 years, I concluded that it was foolish for white men - like me - to live in a desert. Now I live in a rain forest ... er ... rain forest 6 months out of the year. It is raining cats and dogs today.

There is a fine line dividing freedom of speech from slander or hate speech. Sadly, few people these days understand the difference or have the maturity to keep their public comments short of slander or hate speech.

Find a wing-suit coach and work your way through all the possible skills on your current suit before you buy a second suit. The same syllabus applies to down-sizing canopies.

Amusing that you mention "common clay" as the term also came up while reading Nancy Isenberg's book "White Trash." "Clay eaters" was a derogatory term referring to poor whites who lived in swampy areas of the USA's Southern States. Some of those poor people were in the habit of eating clay to compensate for poor diets. A disadvantage is that some types of intestinal worm eggs can lay dormant in clay for years. Eating clay to compensate for a vitamin B12 deficiency created another problem: intestinal worms.

Poorly-informed hill-billies. See Nancy Isenberg's book: " White Trash, the 400 year old untold history of Class in America."

Most of us atheists, agnostics and skeptics have seen too many false prophets. Even mainstream Muslims will tell you that Hams, Hezbollah, al Queda, Muslim Brotherhood, Taliban, Boko Haram, etc. are not true Muslims because they follow false prophets. Other Muslims will tell you that the oil-rich Gulf States follow false profits (pun intended). We don't even need to go into the Shia/Suuni schism to see false prophets. See the book "The Unit" by Adam Gamal.

That arrest could not have happened to a nicer person! Hah! Hah!

Call up Performance Designs to order a ZERO precision landing canopy or call North Amreican Aerodynamics to order a PARA-FOIL. Read thePD ZERO manual as it reads like a textbook for precision landing competitors. Expect to load your competition canopy at 0.7 pounds per square foot. For example, at my exit weight of 215 pounds, I should buy a 300 square foot canopy.

To give you some historical perspective ... during World War 2, most combat jumps were done from less than 1,000 feet to limit the time of exposure to anti-aircraft fire. During the invasions of Holland and Crete the Germans lost so many cargo airplanes that they never recovered. They suffered shortages of cargo airplanes for the rest of the war. Since neither the Italians nor the Germans nor the British paratroopers used reserves, so altitude was less important. The latest generation of military static-line mains are designed to open reliably within 300 feet of exit, which allows planes to fly lower and exposes them to AAA fire for fewer seconds.

Mains need those thick stainless steel grommets because they make a thousand or so jumps on the same slider and grommets. I expect a tandem main to last 1,000 jumps. OTOH Tandem reserves rarely suffer 20 deployments during their service life, so can get by with thinner brass grommets. Thin brass grommets do not last 1,000 jumps in the gritty California desert. Sand and salt get imbedded in suspension lines and they act like sand-paper on the inner edges of grommets. When they wear completely through a single layer of brass, the sharp edge start to chew suspension lines. I have had to replace dozens of brass grommets after they developed sharp edges.

The main reason that British Columbia de-criminalized small amounts of recreational drugs for personal use was that prisons were getting clogged with people convicted of possessing small amounts of recreational drugs. IOW the province of B.C. was not willing to pay to incarcerate petty criminals. I have to laugh at some of the ways that gov't has tried to control recreational drugs. Look at failed attempts to prohibit alcohol. Marijuana was the third most popular recreational drug in BC. Conservative Prime Minister Harper waited until he - and his buddies - figured out how to regulate and tax marijuana. Now there is a cannabis dispensary on every major street in B.C. The problem now is that new drugs now dominate the criminal class and gov't regulations are too slow to respond. The illicit drug market was dominated by methamphetamines a decade ago. Now the market is dominated by cheap fentanol imported from China. Granted, many addicts came from broken homes and suffered troublesome childhoods, which led them to self-medicate with recreational drugs. The old drugs - like alcohol or marijuana - only killed people slowly. But now modern synthetic drugs ruin brain cells after a few months use, making it impossible for addicts to ever be contributing members of society. I reached these conclusions after driving a city bus through Vancouver's notorious "Downtown East Side" for 3 years.