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The buck stops here, if ya know what I mean. There is no deflection and no refusal to take responsibility concerning the voting numbers for the board of directors because there is nothing to deflect and no failure to take responsibility for. Turnout in USPA elections has always been low. I've noted before that there are some obvious reasons like new members that don't vote because they don't know our system or even what they are voting for, and life members who are still on the voter rolls but are disengaged, but there are also people who don't vote because they simply aren't concerned with it. These folks don't see anything wrong with the way things work. They get their magazine, processing times for licenses and ratings are fast, they have 3rd party liability coverage in case they break something or someone, and dozens of other things USPA does for them in the background. Fun jumpers (the largest segment of us) just want to show up, make some hops, drink some beer, and do it again next weekend. Our members aren't voting for representatives that make life-altering decisions on their behalf. They are voting for volunteers who work for the members doing at times some of the most mundane things imaginable. If the governance of USPA isn't important enough to a member to prompt them to vote, so be it. We will still represent them the best way we know how. That comes with the price of membership.

I think the fact that you didn't know skydiving is under part 105 is an indication of what a good job the USPA is doing. Because of them, you don't have to know. All you have to do is get USPA training, get a USPA license, go to a USPA drop zone, and jump. You don't have to know which part of Part 105 applies to you, because it's all summarized for you in the SIM, and the critical bits are taught to you in the FJC. You don't have to worry about tearing an unsafe jumper a new one because an S+TA does that for you. You don't have to worry (too much at least) about your DZO setting up a somewhat safe DZ because much of that is called out in the Group Member Pledge. You don't have to worry about the airport manager telling you you can't jump there any more, because of that Airport Access and Defense Fund you probably never heard about. Consider the pilot of the last commercial aircraft you flew on. Did you have to make sure he turned the transponder on before takeoff? That he had a fuel reserve? That he did a weight and balance before takeoff? No - because he did all that and you didn't have to worry about it. That is the sign of a good pilot, not a bad one. And did you have to know how an ILS glide slope is set up? What the clearway is and under what conditions you might need it? What a VASI or PAPI is, and what airports have them? Whether your pilot could use an nonprecision approach for the airport, and whether that's a bad thing or not? If he (or the airplane) could handle a landing in zero-zero conditions? Again no - because the FAA has figured those things out beforehand. Your being able to read a book until you get to the gate and ignore all that is the indication that the FAA is doing a good job, not a bad one.

I finally used the ignore feature for the first time in the many many years I've been here. I didn't even use it on Rush when he still posted here, *that's* how little value these posts have reduced to.

Skydiving actually establishes a compelling connection with the crowd, and surprisingly more so back then. There were many meandering parachutists-pilots who, looking for income, showed skydiving in various nations. Andre-Jacques Garnerin was one of the primary balloonists to show expand trips in 1803 in Russia. There were a ton of excited parachutists in Russia itself. The paper "Moskovskie Vedomosti" for 1806 reports that the Russian balloonist Alexandrovsky lifted off on an enormous inflatable and took a parachute leap. The adrenaline junkie securely slid to the ground and was excitedly welcomed by the crowd. In the account of Bulgarin from 1824, the broad utilization of travel bag parachutes for hopping from inflatables is depicted in the future[1]. Parachutes of that time had a significant disadvantage - the consistent shaking of the vault while plunging. The issue was at long last tackled by the British. In 1834, Cocking made a drop as an upset cone. Tragically, around the same time, when testing this framework, the arch edge couldn't withstand the heap and collapsed, and the Cocking kicked the bucket. Another researcher, Lalande, proposed making an opening in conventional parachute frameworks for air to escape from under the arch. This rule has demonstrated viable is as yet utilized in many parachute frameworks. Before the century's over, the most famous in Russia was an entire group of parachutists - Jozef and Stanislav Drevnitsky and their sister Olga. Locals of Warsaw, the siblings became keen on skydiving on purpose. In 1891, they started with trips on tourist balloons, however before long became persuaded that inflatable flights were unsafe. So balloonists who have a parachute on board have a preferred possibility of salvation over the people who treat the parachute derisively. Jozef and Stanislav developed a suspended parachute like those utilized by Garneren, and started testing it. They moved to a kilometer stature, and Jozef Drevnitsky leaped out of the bin. The parachute suspended from the bin was hung on a slight rope, what fell to pieces from the jerk. Under the heaviness of the parachutist, the arch surged down, however promptly loaded up with air, and Jozef Drevnitsky easily dropped to the ground. Sibling Stanislav additionally went down on an inflatable close by. The principal hop established such a colossal connection with Jozef Drevnitsky that he chose to rehash it. Following his sibling, Stanislav additionally became keen on hopping. The Drevnitskys took a few dozen leaps in three years thus worked out their strategy and further developed the actual parachute that there were no significant mishaps with them. Taking a gander at the flights and striking leaps of the siblings, their more youthful sister Olga additionally chose to accomplish something so strange for young ladies of that time. In 1896, she took her first parachute leap and quickly turned into an enthusiastic aficionado of this game of the daring. Yet, the senior sibling, Jozef Drevnitsky, did the most for the prominence of dropping in Russia. On July 23, 1910, he took an exhibition leap in St. Petersburg. Huge number of individuals came to see the well known "jumper". On the site in the Krestovsky Garden, the shell of a huge montgolfier was spread out. At the point when the inflatable was expanded with hot air, it was scarcely held by thirty laborers. At the base, under the container, a parachute was suspended in a half-open structure. At the order of Jozef Drevnitsky, the laborers delivered the inflatable, and it immediately took off to a tallness of 200 meters. Here Drevnitsky serenely isolated himself from the container, and before the group could pant, the parachute opened and, similar to an immense umbrella, delicately brought the valiant man down to the ground, to whom the crowd gave an applause. Interest in the parachute was extraordinary to the point that Drevnitsky needed to make in excess of twelve leaps in St. Petersburg, and in absolute he made multiple hundred of them, staying safe. This was the most ideal way of persuading that the possibility of the parachute was right and that it essentially required working out. The cumbersomeness and burden of parachutes being used were entirely self-evident, to the point that numerous balloonists liked to fly without them. On March 1, 1912, the primary parachute hop from a plane was made. It was made by the American skipper Albert Berry in the territory of Montanna. In the wake of hopping from a stature of 1,500 feet and flying 400 feet in free fall, Berry opened his parachute and landed effectively on the procession ground of his unit. On June 21, 1913, another lady took a parachute leap. Georgia Thompson took her introduction leap over Los Angeles. The designer of the drop in its advanced structure is G. E. Kotelnikov (1872-1944), a designer from St. Petersburg, who was the first on the planet to make a travel bag parachute, in 1912 getting a patent for this development in Russia, France, Germany and the USA [2]. Interestingly, he isolated all the suspension slings into two gatherings, put the gadget in a travel bag appended to the pilot; a shaft opening was utilized in the focal point of the arch for air outlet. The Kotelnikov parachute was tried on June 6, 1912 at the Gatchina camp of the Aeronautical School. In the post-progressive years, Kotelnikov kept chipping away at parachutes - as of now for Soviet aeronautics. The principal salvage drop in the USSR was utilized by aircraft tester M. M. Gromov on June 23, 1927 at the Khodynka landing strip. He purposely put the vehicle into a spiral, from which he was unable to get out, and at a height of 600 m left the plane with a salvage parachute. Later on, Kotelnikov altogether worked on the plan of the parachute, made new models (counting various freight parachutes), which were embraced by the Soviet Air Force. In December 1941, Kotelnikov was cleared to Moscow. A rear entryway on the region of the previous Commandant's runway was named after Kotelnikov in 1973. Starting around 1949, the town of Saluzi close to Gatchina, where the designer tried the parachute he made in the camp of the Officer Aeronautical School in 1912, has been named Kotelnikov (in 1972, a dedication sign was opened at the entry to it). A parachute of an American organization made of unadulterated silk was utilized (incidentally, all pilots who got away with the assistance of parachutes of this organization were granted a particular sign a little brilliant figure of a silkworm). Around the same time, these parachutes saved the existences of two more aircraft testers: V. Pisarenko and B. Buchholz. A little later, a unique help showed up in Soviet avionics to guarantee the salvage of pilots in flight, coordinated by L. G. Minov. On July 26, 1930, a gathering of military pilots drove by Minov performed hops from a multi-seat airplane interestingly. From that point forward, this day has been viewed as the start of the mass advancement of parachutism in the USSR. Drop tower in the Central Park in Leningrad In the years going before the Great Patriotic War, a ton of work was done in the USSR on military preparing of the tactical age populace for the arranged mass airborne tasks. In such manner, skydiving turned into a fundamental fascination in the alleged pre-war "Parks of Culture and Recreation", where parachute towers were introduced. In 1934, the planner Lobanov proposed another state of the arch - square and level, in 1935 another games and preparing parachute with a variable pace of plunge was placed into activity. Architects Doronin siblings without precedent for the world planned a machine for opening a parachute at a given tallness.

Thing is, they believe themselves to be good at math and analysis, despite having no evidence of it whatsoever.

USPA also looks at instruction on a regular basis, and updates it as lessons come in from experiences in the field, as people have ideas (good and bad), and equipment changes. And they do the same with the BSR’s. USPA works with airports that want to limit or eliminate skydiving (sometimes successfully, sometimes not), but none of those airports would probably keep skydiving without them. USPA is a joint voice to the FAA, so that we don’t each individually have to lobby them when an idea will impact skydiving negatively, and we don’t have (x) million skydivers each coming up with their own (sometimes) self-serving interpretation of the FARs. That joint voice, by (somewhat) proactively taking accident reports and thereby reducing the public authorities’ perceived need to do tons. There’s more, but i have some stuff to do. The thing is, you personally might not need these things. But other skydivers have, and do. That’s what insurance and organization is about. Wendy P.

Jerry, I am getting to zero patience with those who comment as if we had multiple candidates opposed to Trump. We did not. We had Biden. Now, we don't have Trump. So for those people: for fucks sake, unless you miss Trump, give it a goddamn rest.

Two of the more important solutions to the problem of CO2 emissions are solar and storage; they will both go a long way towards reducing/eliminating CO2 emissions from power plants. And there's some more good news on that front. NREL has new cost per watt numbers for systems installed in 2021 to date. $2.65/watt for residential PV (down 3% from last year) $4.50/watt for residential PV + one day energy storage $1.14/watt for grid scale PV (down 12% from last year) $1.60/watt for grid scale PV + 4 hours energy storage Overall residential storage is down 10%, grid scale storage is down 3%. Solar is already the cheapest form of power we have. The problem is that it's intermittent. Solar plus 4 hours of storage is now cheaper than nuclear, coal and turbine natural gas (i.e. peaker plants.) Still not cheaper than natural gas combined cycle plants, due to their greater efficiency. But since they can be ramped almost instantly and built within about a year (instead of a decade) they are going to be the answer to a lot of utility's short term problems. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/80694.pdf https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/13/solar-pv-pvstorage-costs-keep-dropping-new-nrel-reports-show/?fbclid=IwAR3aq5Y6GuA10X_5Xeooa3WewXWPfYpCbTld8D_9jmlsy1sDgDOvJfZOBL8

I challenged Ulis theories,, he attacked me, called me a troll and refused to acknowledge the facts I presented right from the FBI, just like you Blevins. Shutter challenged him as well. Reca was debunked by many very quickly. The case evidence is well known, you are the only one who is ignoring it. You brag about not reading the FBI files.. there is a reason. If you just reject the case evidence then anyone and everyone is Cooper.

I have a National 28' Phantom packed in a Warp 3 container that was subject to the recall. Since I retired it after 2 recalls and 1 modification it was a favorite to give to give to rigger candidates.

Mid-terms in one year. They will simply run out the clock and hope for a return to the majority in Congress. And it will almost certainly work. Sad.

That's about it. Mike Smith from the old Spaceland Parachute Center discovered it while packing his girlfriend's reserve. The fabric tested fine during a repack, then 120 days later during another repack he pull tested it again and the fabric fell apart like wet paper. It was determined that the contaminated mesh having contact with the F111 fabric degraded it severely. No one ever figured out how the fabric could test perfectly fine for a long time, then suddenly fall apart in the course of one repack cycle. The fix was an acid test followed by a specific washing method if it was positive.

Hi Kleggo, Pretty good, if I do say so myself. Re: Some round canopy's drive slot mesh was not properly cleaned / treated during manufacturing which led to a low ph condition on the surface of the mesh = acid mesh. It wasn't that it was not properly cleaned. It was that the mesh mfrs added a non-flammable 'coating' to the mesh. The mesh still met the Mil Spec req'ments. But, this 'coating' is what caused the interaction with the nylon fabric in the canopies; resulting in strength failure. They added the 'coating' so the non-flammable mesh could be used in things like tents, etc. The parachute mfr's did not know about the coating, so they used the mesh without concern. Anyway, that's my story & I'm sticking with it. Jerry Baumchen

A bus driver was on trial for killing 24 children and 6 adults. The judge asks the bus driver "why did you kill all those innocent people?" The bus driver, looking a little sad, says "I didn't mean too, It was by mistake!" "How did it happen?" Asks the judge. "Well-" said the bus driver, "I was driving to a bus station but suddenly, on the road, I saw a rabbit. I swerved into the woods and hit a tree. I managed to escape but all the other people just didn't make it in time and the bus exploded. Everyone but me perished." "Why did you not just run over the rabbit?" Asks the judge. "I tried!" Says the bus driver, "But it ran into the woods!"

She goes into a bit more detail here: https://www.commentary.org/articles/bari-weiss/resist-woke-revolution/#new_tab NOVEMBER 2021 POLITICS & IDEAS We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage Say no to the Woke Revolution by Bari Weiss A lot of people want to convince you that you need a Ph.D. or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts about critical theory to understand the woke movement and its worldview. You do not. You simply need to believe your own eyes and ears. Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon. It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings. Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion. In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. Just ask Tiffany Riley, a Vermont school principal who was fired—fired—because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter. In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. It is why statues of Grant and Washington are being torn down. And it is why William Peris, a UCLA lecturer and an Air Force veteran, was investigated for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” out loud in class. In this ideology, intentions don’t matter. That is why Emmanuel Cafferty, a Hispanic utility worker at San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired for making what someone said he thought was a white-supremacist hand gesture—when in fact he was cracking his knuckles out of his car window. In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. Thus, the argument to get rid of the SAT. Or the admissions tests for public schools like Stuyvesant in New York or Lowell in San Francisco. In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class. That is why third-graders in Cupertino, California, were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege. In third grade. In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted. This is why, one high-schooler in New York tells me, students in his school are told, “If you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.” This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power. Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups. If disparity is present, as the high priest of this ideology, Ibram X. Kendi, has explained, racism is present. According to this totalizing new view, we are all either racist or anti-racist. To be a Good Person and not a Bad Person, you must be an “anti-racist.” There is no neutrality. There is no such thing as “not racist.” Most important: In this revolution, skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests. The Enlightenment, as the critic Edward Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism. What we call “cancel culture” is really the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of the cancellations is not merely to punish the person being cancelled. The goal is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next. It has worked. A recent CATO study found that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. And nearly 70 percent of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something that students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. Why are so many, especially so many young people, drawn to this ideology? It’s not because they are dumb. Or because they are snowflakes, or whatever Fox talking points would have you believe. All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others. And so on. “I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thrusting for faith.” That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his love affair with Communism. The same might be said of this new revolutionary faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit on fire the souls of true believers, eager to burn down anything or anyone that stands in its way. If you have ever tried to build something, even something small, you know how hard it is. It takes time. It takes tremendous effort. But tearing things down? That’s quick work. The Woke Revolution has been exceptionally effective. It has successfully captured the most important sense-making institutions of American life: our newspapers. Our magazines. Our Hollywood studios. Our publishing houses. Many of our tech companies. And, increasingly, corporate America. Just as in China under Chairman Mao, the seeds of our own cultural revolution can be traced to the academy, the first of our institutions to be overtaken by it. And our schools—public, private, parochial—are increasingly the recruiting grounds for this ideological army. A few stories are worth recounting: David Peterson is an art professor at Skidmore College in upstate New York. He stood accused in the fevered summer of 2020 of “engaging in hateful conduct that threatens Black Skidmore students.” What was that hateful conduct? David and his wife, Andrea, went to watch a rally for police officers. “Given the painful events that continue to unfold across this nation, I guess we just felt compelled to see first-hand how all of this was playing out in our own community,” he told the Skidmore student newspaper. David and his wife stayed for 20 minutes on the edge of the event. They held no signs, participated in no chants. They just watched. Then they left for dinner. For the crime of listening, David Peterson’s class was boycotted. A sign appeared on his classroom door: “STOP. By entering this class you are crossing a campus-wide picket line and breaking the boycott against Professor David Peterson. This is not a safe environment for marginalized students.” Then the university opened an investigation into accusations of bias in the classroom. Across the country from Skidmore, at the University of Southern California, a man named Greg Patton is a professor of business communication. In 2020, Patton was teaching a class on “filler words”—such as “um” and “like” and so forth for his master’s-level course on communication for management. It turns out that the Chinese word for “like” sounds like the n-word. Students wrote the school’s staff and administration accusing their professor of “negligence and disregard.” They added: “We are burdened to fight with our existence in society, in the workplace, and in America. We should not be made to fight for our sense of peace and mental well-being” at school. In a normal, reality-based world, there is only one response to such a claim: You misheard. But that was not the response. This was: “It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students,” the dean, Geoffrey Garrett wrote. “Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry.” This rot hasn’t been contained to higher education. At a mandatory training earlier this year in the San Diego Unified School District, Bettina Love, an education professor who believes that children learn better from teachers of the same race, accused white teachers of “spirit murdering black and brown children” and urged them to undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators.” San Francisco’s public schools didn’t manage to open their schools during the pandemic, but the board decided to rename 44 schools—including those named for George Washington and John Muir—before suspending the plan. Meantime, one of the board members declared merit “racist” and “Trumpian.” A recent educational program for sixth to eighth grade teachers called “a pathway to equitable math instruction”—funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—was recently sent to Oregon teachers by the state’s Department of Education. The program’s literature informs teachers that white supremacy shows up in math instruction when “rigor is expressed only in difficulty,” and “contrived word problems are valued over the math in students’ lived experiences.” Serious education is the antidote to such ignorance. Frederick Douglass said, “Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.” Soaring words that feel as if they are a report from a distant galaxy. Education is increasingly where debate, dissent, and discovery go to die. It’s also very bad for kids. For those deemed “privileged,” it creates a hostile environment where kids are too intimidated to participate. For those deemed “oppressed,” it inculcates an extraordinarily pessimistic view of the world, where students are trained to perceive malice and bigotry in everything they see. They are denied the dignity of equal standards and expectations. They are denied the belief in their own agency and ability to succeed. As Zaid Jilani had put it: “You cannot have power without responsibility. Denying minorities responsibility for their own actions, both good and bad, will only deny us the power we rightly deserve.” How did we get here? There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates. But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice. The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility—that is how we got here. Allan Bloom had the radicals of the 1960s in mind when he wrote that “a few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.” Now, a half-century later, those dancing bears hold named chairs at every important elite, sense-making institution in the country. As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.” Each surely thought: These protestors have some merit! This institution, this university, this school, hasn’t lived up to all of its principles at all times! We have been racist! We have been sexist! We haven’t always been enlightened! I’ll give a bit and we’ll find a way to compromise. This turned out to be as naive as Robespierre thinking that he could avoid the guillotine. Think about each of the anecdotes I’ve shared here and all the rest you already know. All that had to change for the entire story to turn out differently was for the person in charge, the person tasked with being a steward for the newspaper or the magazine or the college or the school district or the private high school or the kindergarten, to say: No. If cowardice is the thing that has allowed for all of this, the force that stops this cultural revolution can also be summed up by one word: courage. And courage often comes from people you would not expect. Consider Maud Maron. Maron is a lifelong liberal who has always walked the walk. She was an escort for Planned Parenthood; a law-school research assistant to Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther; and a poll watcher for John Kerry in Pennsylvania during the 2004 presidential election. In 2016, she was a regular contributor to Bernie Sanders’s campaign. Maron dedicated her career to Legal Aid: “For me, being a public defender is more than a job,” she told me. “It’s who I am.” But things took a turn when, this past year, Maron spoke out passionately and publicly about the illiberalism that has gripped the New York City public schools attended by her four children. “I am very open about what I stand for,” she told me. “I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school.” What followed this apparent thought crime was a 21st-century witch hunt. Maron was smeared publicly by her colleagues. They called her “racist, and openly so.” They said, “We’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.” Most people would have walked away and quietly found a new job. Not Maud Maron. This summer, she filed suit against the organization, claiming that she was forced out of Legal Aid because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. “The reason they went after me is that I have a different point of view,” she said. “These ideologues have tried to ruin my name and my career, and they are going after other good people. Not enough people stand up and say: It is totally wrong to do this to a person. And this is not going to stop unless people stand up to it.” That’s courage. Courage also looks like Paul Rossi, the math teacher at Grace Church High School in New York who raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. A few days later, all the school’s advisers were required to read a public reprimand of his conduct out loud to every student in the school. Unwilling to disavow his beliefs, Rossi blew the whistle: “I know that by attaching my name to this I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.” That’s courage. Courage is Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom who endured Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a child and spoke up to the Loudoun County School Board at a public meeting in June. “You are training our children to loathe our country and our history,” she said in front of the school board. “Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this feels very familiar…. The only difference is that they used class instead of race.” Gordon Klein, a professor at UCLA, recently filed suit against his own university. Why? A student asked him to grade black students with “greater leniency.” He refused, given that such a racial preference would violate UCLA’s anti-discrimination policies (and maybe even the law). But the people in charge of UCLA’s Anderson School launched a racial-discrimination complaint into him. They denounced him, banned him from campus, appointed a monitor to look at his emails, and suspended him. He eventually was reinstated—because he had done absolutely nothing wrong—but not before his reputation and career were severely damaged. “I don’t want to see anyone else’s life destroyed as they attempted to do to me,” Klein told me. “Few have the intestinal fortitude to fight cancel culture. I do. This is about sending a message to every petty tyrant out there.” Courage is Peter Boghossian. He recently resigned his post at Portland State University, writing in a letter to his provost: “The university transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a social justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender and victimhood and whose only output was grievance and division…. I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?” Who would I be if I didn’t? George Orwell said that “the further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” In an age of lies, telling the truth is high risk. It comes with a cost. But it is our moral obligation. It is our duty to resist the crowd in this age of mob thinking. It is our duty to think freely in an age of conformity. It is our duty to speak truth in an age of lies. This bravery isn’t the last or only step in opposing this revolution—it’s just the first. After that must come honest assessments of why America was vulnerable to start with, and an aggressive commitment to rebuilding the economy and society in ways that once again offer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the greatest number of Americans. But let’s start with a little courage. Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission. When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history. America is imperfect. I always knew it, as we all do—and the past few years have rocked my faith like no others in my lifetime. But America and we Americans are far from irredeemable. The motto of Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery paper, the North Star—“The Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are brethren”—must remain all of ours. We can still feel the pull of that electric cord Lincoln talked about 163 years ago—the one “in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.” Every day I hear from people who are living in fear in the freest society humankind has ever known. Dissidents in a democracy, practicing doublespeak. That is what is happening right now. What happens five, 10, 20 years from now if we don’t speak up and defend the ideas that have made all of our lives possible? Liberty. Equality. Freedom. Dignity. These are ideas worth fighting for. --------------------------------------------------------------- If you can address the content's particulars, one way or another, it might be interesting. I'm sure there are flaws in her arguments, so by all means point them out. BSBD, Winsor