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Ken doesn't think your nation is awful despite the current rough patch you are going through. I do think the 2nd amendment is awful.

After being stationed overseas for the last three years I'm back! So I'm kicking this off with a cross country road trip. Primarily I'll be touring MLB stadiums as I traverse the wide open plains, but of course I'll be jumping along the way. The highlights are; San Diego, Phoenix, LA, Oakland, Denver, Kansas City, St Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Boston, New York and finally DC. Any recommendations for places to jump between Denver and Chicago would be greatly appreciated. Looking around online has not been very promising as a lot of the DZ's on my route are closed during the week and tandem operations.

No hellhole, but a place that's doubling down on doing the same thing, and expecting a different result. Eventually enough people may figure out that there aren't, in fact, a bunch of super human prescient good guys with guns running around. Wendy P.

My point was clear. Whether or not you think Jerry is making a convincing argument for abortion to be legal is irrelevant. The pro choice movement has already won the debate.

I have sold early and short my entire career. My objective has always been to hit singles and be thrilled with the odd double. I'm happy with the outcome.

The context here is about investments. As for core beliefs, they don't really matter in the real world. People talk a big game online, but we're all out there doing our own thing side by side, face to face and for the most part we all get along, keep calm, STFU and remain civil.

Today was my first time logging onto Facebook in a few years. Saw that I had an unread note from Tom from about 2 years ago, after the last time I saw him. It was at the standardization meeting in Germany. And we talked about flying his plane up the coast when I got home. Man - it gets you when you least expect it. Miss you my friend.

It should be noted that electric aircraft are progressing (in terms of distance they can fly over time) far faster than early aircraft did. For example, the first aircraft flew in 1903. By 1905, the world record was 24 miles, It was not until 1914 that someone managed to fly over 1000 miles in a day.

It's worth remembering that the only really consistent Trump policy was to cancel every program, treaty, policy, or law from the Obama administration, and replace it with nothing. He cancelled the CDC's collaboration with the Chinese to monitor for emerging viruses, with the result that we were unaware of the Covid outbreak for months. He ignored the national pandemic response plan that was developed after the H1N1 outbreak, and failed to develop any national plan of his own. He went so far as to tell states they had to order their own PPE, setting up a scenario where states had to bid against each other and drive up the price, then he seized shipments destined for blue states and sent them to states whose governors sucked up to him. It's true he did allow the government to fund fast-tracked vaccine development (though that was a "no-brainer") but then he failed to develop any sort of a plan to distribute the vaccines, and blocked the incoming Biden administration from getting the information they needed to develop their own plan. Apart from Covid, he cancelled the program for dealing with black lung disease, and replaced it with nothing. He withdrew the US from the WHO, leaving us with no mechanism for collaborating with other countries to deal with a world-wide pandemic. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal and replaced it with nothing, with the result that Iran stopped abiding by the deal and is now closer to a nuclear weapon than the have ever been. I could go on and on and on. Hatred of Obama is not a substitute for a national policy on anything. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a result, and people will be worse off for a long time because of Trump's obsession with erasing Obama from history.

It's important for kids to be alive, not for them to have a good life. Things like adequate nutrition are mere luxuries that the government has no business being involved with.

What is stupid is making health insurance a "perk" offered through the workplace, and sometimes only to management. In the civilized world health insurance is universal. One consequence of that is that businesses are not burdened with having to pay for insurance for any of their work force.

I haven't posted or even lurked on these forums for a number of years, but I was inspired to share a quick note today. My name is Scott Miller. A couple of decades ago I started something called The Canopy School at Skydive DeLand, which became the Freedom of Flight Canopy School. Later, in collaboration with some awesome gentlemen from the PD Factory Team, that canopy school was transformed into Flight-1. I've been away from the skydiving world for a while, but I still stay in touch with some old skydiving friends and visit DeLand from time to time. I'm always impressed to see what Flight-1 has become thanks to all of the work that Ian, Shannon, and the rest of the crew have done. Back when I was teaching my canopy courses, students would always fill out a registration form at the start of the day. For all of these years, I've had all of those forms sitting in a couple of boxes in a closet. It always seemed worthwhile to keep them around, but yesterday I decided to run them through a scanner so I can finally get rid of the paper copies. Looking through all of those forms—almost 3,000 of them, from 8 years worth of canopy courses—brought back a lot of memories and emotions. It's hard to describe what it was like to look back at all of the DZs that I visited and to see some of the peoples' names on the forms. There was one feeling that percolated to the top, though. Above all else, I felt very, very grateful. I was, and still am, grateful for everyone who supported me and believed in what I was doing back then. I'm grateful for all of the jumpers who signed up and attended my courses. I'm grateful to the DZOs who invited me to come teach at their drop zones. I'm grateful for the local jumpers who did all of the planning, organizing, and coordinating to make the camps happen at their DZs. I'm grateful for the manifestors, managers, and everyone else who made all the moving parts fit together during the courses. I'm grateful for the pilots who flew extra passes at 5000' even though it's extra work, and who were willing to drop people way the hell upwind when we did the "long spot practice" jump at the end of the day. I'm grateful to Bob Hallett for supporting this whole project from the very beginning, and throughout. I'm grateful to all of the Relative Work School, Freedom of Flight School, and Flight-1 coaches with whom I had the honor of working and collaborating. I'm grateful to John LeBlanc for teaching me most of what I know about how canopies really, actually work. Gratitude is powerful. Taking a few moments to be grateful for someone or something—to think and feel a deep, genuine sense of gratitude—can bring so much joy into our lives and put things in a very different perspective. If I could go back in time, back to when I was a kid or even when I first started jumping, and pass myself a note, it would say, "be grateful for the people you have in your life and for the time that you have with them." That's why I'm here today. To share something that I'm very grateful for, and to pass you that note. Be grateful for what you have in your life. Be grateful for the people in your life and for the time that you have with them. Take some time every day to think about what you are grateful for: in skydiving, but also in other parts of your life. Practice a little gratitude every day, and watch it transform your life. Thank you for letting me share this with you today. BSBD Scott

Ummmm... Seriously? Jackson evaded answering a 'gotcha' question. I never saw anyone but Trump fans get upset about it. And which side attacked the actual government because they were 'butthurt' about losing an election? Either that or so fucking stupid they bought Trump's lies about it being 'stolen'. And what I'm really and truly pissed at the Rs about is the systematic dismantling of our democracy. The usurpation of power so that the rich & powerful can do whatever the fuck they want, and the rest of us just have to take it.

I've got a much better angle. Judaism allows abortion, and that is certainly a private and quiet event. A Jewish woman could certainly sue (say) Texas and say that denying her right to an abortion violates her First Amendment right to worship as she sees fit.

Pony up the cash for a plane ride to Skydive Arizona. If you're standing at manifest when they open, you can get as many jumps in a day as you have the energy for.