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Well yes, but beyond that is a widely entrenched American ideology of "freedom" that emphasizes "personal liberty" above all else. People in other civilized societies recognize some balance exists between personal liberty and restrictions needed to make for a workable/liveable society. Indeed, they recognize that these two things are not always zero-sum affairs. For example, fewer firearms corresponds to less violent crime which results in more freedom to go out and do things without fear of being killed. Universal health insurance results in greater freedom to change jobs (or start your own business) without exposing yourself or your dependents to the risk of being uninsured, which is especially problematic if you or any of your dependents have a pre-existing medical condition. A large proportion of Americans, though, only recognize things that directly benefit themselves, and mostly in the short term. Almost anything that requires a measure of personal sacrifice, even if the result is a benefit to the whole of society, is pretty much a non-starter.

Daily Beast: Far-Right Channel One America News Officially Dropped by Last Major TV Carrier That's a shame. :-(

From the article: “He’s got himself two or three months. He’s a smart guy. But he needs focus. He needs to get that part of the campaign down. A Heisman Trophy isn’t going to bring him a victory.” ROTFLMAO!!!

I say it can't come soon enough. These pests should have been eliminated long ago. I cannot tell you how much of a pain it is to clean out those big orange and black wings from the grill of my car after driving through a swarm* of them crossing the road. Why don't they just learn to fly 10 feet above the roads instead of right in my pathway. Finally something good coming out of "climate change". * a "swarm" is defined as any number greater than one

Sorry to hear about your accident. Based on your account of the events I think there is a good chance that the RSL didn't activate your reserve, and played no role in the reserve malfunction. You could look at the reserve cable, they often get a kink in them when there is a RSL initiated reserve deployment. But like you say in the quote before, you pulled the reserve handle, or at least that is what I interpret your comment "reserve deployment" to mean in that sequence. This sounds like a pilot chute in tow, or potentially a pilot chute that is stuck in the low pressure burble above you or even sucked right on to your container. Pchapman's has a good potential account above for the PCIT scenario. You did the right thing to initiate emergency procedures. What happens next is a bit of luck. Once the reserve is deploying the main container may stay closed if there is a misrouted or pierced bridle, or it may open up and the main may start deploying because having the reserve tray open and the reserve out relieves some pressure and tension on the main container which allows the closing pin to finally clear the closing loop. There may be things that you could have done differently, or it could have just been a spot of bad luck. You may never be able to determine exactly what happened here but you can talk with your instructors and experienced skydivers to help avoid it in the future. Know your gear, ensure that is is properly maintained, properly configured, and operate it correctly. Practice your emergency procedures. Review how you will respond to different circumstances. Plan your jumps from take off all the way till you are back safely in the packing area. Build awareness about what other skydivers are doing. You may also want to talk about your accident with a therapist who specializes in traumatic accidents and events. Having an accident, especially one that has many questions, can leave you with a lot of mental stuff to process.

Aw nuts. Wendy P.

The humorlessness of the Woke is matched only by their inability to do their homework. Their good intentions are those with which the road to hell is paved. I'm not sure whether to attribute the Weltanschauung to willful ignorance, active stupidity, or a combination of both. My news feed pops up such gems as this: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/social-justice-summer-camp-started-by-anarchists-to-be-held-in-oregon It concerns me that such idiocy is supported to the extent that it is. I wish people would not us comedy routines as instructional materials. While I find censorship to be abhorrent, it also concerns me that people can read or hear tripe and take it seriously. To use religion as a paradigm, it amazed me that when studying the Greek Myths it was taken as a given the mentions of the Greek Gods was treated as a literary device, while other texts of similar antiquity that referenced their deity of choice were accepted verbatim. Simply mind blowing. My son put it nicely when he noted that "God is Ignorance." His contention was that unsophisticated societies had a limited knowledge base, and that anything that was unknown was treated as unknowable and thus the work of "God." It is a curious characteristic of humanity that when ignorance is addressed, any clarification is generally met with hostility by both the unwashed masses and, to a large extent, the 'intelligentsia.' This leads to my observation that our only inexhaustible natural resource is stupidity. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king - he is a pariah. T'was ever thus. BSBD, Winsor

Spot on, Jerry. The Gunhugging transammosexuals will never see a path forward that does not include more guns, and more dangerous guns, for all. Earlier in the thread Bill wrote: "Banning high cap mags may have no impact." So much to unpack there, none of which will ever resonate with BillE, I'm now convinced. There's the "high cap mags" for starters. All just local gun guy talk he'd say, I'm sure, not realizing that it's a neutralizing (I'd argue neuralizing) bit of brainwashing he's been subjected to. In fact, they are High Capacity Magazines for guns used to mass murder people in the current discussion. Then there is the "may have no impact" toss out for the purpose of misdirection. Of course the banning of high capacity magazines won't eliminate their use tomorrow but it's a real and fair start. Too bad the indoctrinated never give an inch gun crowd believes they can never give an inch. Gun Loving is a religion and you cannot argue people out of a religion.

HI ken, But they were not. Jerry Baumchen

Hi Bill, I've had it with the old, 'Hey, look over here,' gambit of the GOP; including you. You know damn well we are talking about gun killings from Columbine to Uvalde; and nothing else. So, quit with the handgun deaths. My neighbor, shooting his wife for having an affair with his best friend, is not the issue here. My 8-yr old granddaughter possibly getting killed while sitting in class is. Jerry Baumchen

I spent just over thirty years in the fire service. I have treated about 150 shooting victims, from domestic violence, armed robberies, police shootings, drive by, gang party shootouts, planned murders and self inflicted. Only a handful were shotgun or rifles. The most common weapon was a small caliber handgun. .22, .25. .38. Drive bys were larger caliber hand guns. One gang battle was with AK 47s. Most of it never made the news. We even had the fire trucks shot at. One resident was gunned down right in front of our firehouse. A few times we were met with weapon wielding people. And more than once the shooting started and we scrambled under the fire engine for cover. A few times the SWAT team gave us cover so we could drag a gunshot victim to the ambulance. We all were issued bullet proof vests. Running into burning buildings always seemed way safer to me!

Masterpice of a commercial against Dr Quack in Pennsylvania. Jump to 0:34 to skip the intro:

GOOD! 5% is better than 0%! Thats 22,000 people that would have lived last year. Lets start with something and improve, eh?

Hey, I am sure they have trained their feral hogs to stay home and not wander onto other people's property.

Aim for a wing-loading of 0.7 pounds per square foot. That is the wing-loading that most students start at along with BASE jumpers and precision landing competitors. BASE jumpers often have to land in tiny clear areas between rocks and hard places and cannot always do a full flare before landing. In practice, this means that most students start with 280 square foot canopies, though I have been known to hang small female students under 230 square foot parachutes. Also remember that USPA, CSPA, BPA advise students to quit jumping when winds exceed 15 knots because that is when lightly-loaded canopies start landing backwards, people get dragged and landing injuries increase. Even after thousands of tandem jumps in turbulent Southern California weather, I quit jumping when winds reach 22 knots because it gets too turbulent and I collect too many bruises. More than a 5 knot spread between gusts also increases the number of bruises during landings. By 22 knots, winds start developing weird and wonderful vertical drafts that can slam you hard during landings. The ideal winds - when you don't want to run out a landing - are around 10 knots. That way a less-than-perfect flare will set you down with minimal horizontal speed.

Possible, with precautions. Try visiting an aviation medical examiner (doctor who examines pilots) to discuss vision limitations ... or an optometrist when routinely examines pilots. Also consider doing a simplified jump like IAD or static-line when your parachute will start to open almost immediately after you let go of the airplane 3,000 feet or 1 kilometer above the planet). S/L will reduce the number of variables you need to deal with. If BPA proves problematic, consider going to a DZ with fewer obstacles (rivers, lakes, wires, roads, alligator farms, etc. Even people with perfect vision have difficulty seeing wires from above. Perhaps visiting a desert skydiving school will further reduce the number of landing hazards you need to avoid. The better schools already equip students with radios and station an instructor - with a radio - at the target to talk students down. However, radios are not perfect and sometimes fail, so you need to understand the entire parachute steering process before you board the airplane for a solo jump. For back up, many schools also have a huge white arrow on the groudn beside the target. Few students can understand the arrow from 3,000 feet away, but it becomes clearer the closer you get.

Cooper wearing "loafers" just will not die.. That was a fictional description in the media... Tina actually described the Cooper's shoes as.. "brown ankle length pebble grain shoes, not tie type shoes" ankle length is not a loafer,, sounds more like some type of slip-on boot. The only "loafer" references in the FBI files is in newspaper clippings..

Given that the BPA /BS don't even allow 100% fit adults over the age of 55 to do AFF in the UK, I would have thought that your chances of completing an AFF1 jump in the UK are pretty slim. You can but ask. I know that disabled ex servicemen (BLESMA) do have some dispensation but whether or not that extends to sight issues, I can't say. As the previous poster said, you might have better luck in Spain (or one of the other EU countries) where the rules may not be less rigorous but are, on occasion, possibly less rigorously enforced. Good luck with your quest.

I don’t know about BPA rules; they’re different on things like this. In the US it would be very much up to the individual drop zone. I had a friend in the 70’s with much more restricted vision who made it to freefall using the static line progression. I’d start by contacting an individual DZ and talking to their chief instructor. If it’s absolutely not possible in the UK, then make it a “what if” discussion — you’ll still learn something, and can use that to start a discussion in Spain or somewhere else. Good luck Wendy P.

Follow-up: Thank you both for your responses. They’re informative, and helped me put the sequence of events into perspective. After last Saturday, the leg weakness and tingling seemed to improve for a day or two, but it never went away. From Wednesday onwards it gradually got worse; I became more fatigued, dizzy, and a little cloudy headed. I attributed it all to working longer hours (16 hour shifts, instead of my normal 12 hour shifts). By Friday night I felt like trash. Turns out I have COVID. I work full-time in the ICU and ER of an urban area hospital. 2.5 years into the pandemic, COVID finally got me. Despite working with high volumes of COVID patient’s, I clearly didn’t recognize the early symptoms as I began to develop them myself. Had to feel like crap [and get outside advice :) ] to finally put the pieces together.

Yeah it is a little hard to piece together what was happening based on imperfect memories after what sounds like a crash landing. A possible scenario: Pilot chute in tow. (Rather than pilot chute around leg, which wouldn't have left you still falling stably while 'nothing happened' for some seconds.) Cutaway & reserve procedures performed. Loss of pressure on main container allows main to come out of container as reserve deploys. Bad luck and bad timing results in a riser from the main tangling in the deploying reserve. Probably nothing to do with tension knots. Just an effectively fucked-up reserve because there's a main parachute somehow connected to it by a main riser caught up in it, pulling at it probably off center or maybe partially choking it off. Leading to a high speed impact under a spiralling, perhaps partially inflated reserve. There are certainly some youtube videos out there of such scenarios. Various related possibilities don't change the basic scenario, just how bad it might be: You might have been thrown into line twists under the reserve; the main could have been partially inflated, mostly streamered, or still caught up in its bag by its lines; the reserve canopy could be fully inflated or have part of it pulled together if the main riser wrapped itself around or through multiple lines or caught under rather than over the slider.