winsor

perhaps it's your eyesight then

bankers have just got the biggest financial bailout in human history - how can they not be bankrupt 'state dependants' (is your slide rule a bit bent) Banks got the bailout. BankERS are not necessarily broke. The role that bankers played was largely established by the powers that be, such as Congress. Barney Frank was responsible for rules that mandated underwriting ownership of McMansions for his constituency, whether they could afford them or not, and assured all involved that "the Government" would cover the banks' exposure. I don't think you have to worry about a Barney Frank, Jr. either way. My slide rules work great, but be advised - there is a difference between mathematics and arithmetic. Your average CPA would not have any idea of how to solve a second order partial differential equation, and a theoretical mathematician is not the first choice of someone to do your taxes. Blue skies, Winsor

If a banker is unemployed long enough to need welfare then yes, procreation should be over until they could personally afford to reverse the operation. However, I suspect the ones you would like to neuter have enough reserve assets (from bonuses and golden parachutes) to last their entire lives, not just their reproductive years. If you need a sophisticated processor to support your case, odds are your conclusion is wrong. Case in point: AlGore using CGI to bring Comic Book Physics to life to support his crusade for junk science. GIGO does not stand for "Garbage In, Gospel Out." The SR-71 was designed with slide rules. If you run the same algorithms on the most sophisticated computer, you get more significant digits, but you still have one hell of a fast airplane. Blue skies, Winsor

Argumentum ad Populum- anything for legalization has a conflict of interest. Your argument is dependent on the Legalization debates, It is wildly unlikely that you will publish anything that suggests that Legalization is a bad idea. You know. . .most debate fallacies work well at the podium and abstract, but concrete life doesn't seem to like to follow those rules. "Argumentum ad Populum?" Appeal to the People? A Logician you ain't. You garble together unrelated issues to make your point, and assume that it makes sense. It does not. To rely on facts as a drunk relies on a lamppost - for support, rather than illumination - does not get us anywhere. I do not drink or use tobacco or intoxicants of any kind, so I have no dog in this fight. Frankly, I see it all as being pretty much the same - but alcohol and tobacco are about the worst of the lot. Between 1933 and 1934 the murder rate in the US dropped significantly. Why? Because the Volstead Act was repealed. Competition was no longer between Bugs Moran and Al Capone, but Anheuser Busch and Miller, and people weren't machine gunning each other over the profits. I have lived in Switzerland and spent enough time in Amsterdam to prefer the problems of legalization and decriminalization to those of prohibition. Don't get me wrong; the problems are significant either way, but it's an awful lot more expensive to continue our quixotic War on Drugs (it's over, btw - drugs won). I have spent enough years working for the Pharmaceutical Industry that I am under few, if any, illusions regarding the legal drug market. I avoid taking anything beyond aspirin unless there is compelling medical basis for doing so. In any event, my conflict of interest - the fact that I am expected to pay for the cost of prohibition in my taxes - is hardly fallacious; it is the point of my argument. While I consider recreational drugs (to include alcohol and tobacco) to be less than beneficial on the whole, my observation is that funding the Apprehension Industry, the Prosecution and Defense Industries, the Incarceration Industry and the Illegal Drug Industry is orders of magnitude more expensive than is drug use itself. Put another way, while the disease is bad, the cure is worse. Before bandying about terms with which you are not familiar, look them up. Throw in Ignoratio Elenchi for good measure. Blue skies, Winsor

NORML have been criticized for thier mixing of research as you accuse the DEA for. Of course. They are original sources, programs, interviews and sessions. If you have to do hard research online, you usually find that looking for the actual studies are near impossible. You would have to have access to some of the professional journals or you have to pay for them. The ones you find for free were there because they were put online by website owners that used them for research. They are arguments against Legalization, but they have sources. But if you insist: These help with the evidence for the dangers of Drugs. http://www.drugabuse.gov/NIDA_Notes/NNVol11N3/MarijMemory.html http://www.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/34.pdf These are abstracts against Legalization. http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=127678 http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/abstract/123/6/461 http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/330/5/361 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;249/4976/1513 http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=JPmZMbPvl9Vvhz7ydBYL9q6bMxyFkpqL3nLwZ1cBpVl5l8rMx12k!111030713!1507451015?docId=5010967148 http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=172367 http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/124/8/777-a To be fair, I looked for scholarly articles for legalization. I didn't get much there, except for maybe here: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=13438457 Others are usually economists who look at only the supply/demand concept of drug legalization and usually don't consider the multifacet aspect of drug problems that trump their theories. Argumentum ad Populum - a classical fallacy of relevance. Anything with .gov in it has a conflict of interest. If your job is dependent on the Prohibition Industry, it is wildly unlikely that you will publish anything that suggests that Prohibition is a bad idea. Likewise the organizations that function on Government grants. Regardless of the facts, publishing articles diametrically opposed to the stance taken by those responsible for your funding is not a good career move. Whether drugs are a good thing in and of themselves is not the point. Regardless of how much drugs/alcohol/tobacco may suck, their prohibition is orders of magnitude worse. I say legalize anything that is not clearly and significantly worse than alcohol and tobacco (basically nothing is worse than alcohol and tobacco). Throw in an automatic DNR for an OD, and it simplifies treatment. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to give someone a good Christian burial than it is to lock them up for even a short period of time. That frees up a great deal of resources for people who do not have a death wish. BSBD, Winsor

how about if we 'sterilize' the population of the eu and the us (the ones chiefly gorging on the planet's resources) - suddenly the population is sustainable

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/22/g20-global-economy Poverty can be solved by the application of one simple principle: if you can't feed yourself, you don't have kids. How anyone thinks that they are doing anyone any favors by providing the means to blossom for populations that were not self-sustaining in the first place is beyond me. Unless sterilization is a condition of receiving aid, I strongly oppose providing any. We are past peak oil, and the days where our population could be supported by nearly free energy are coming to a close. It was fun while it lasted. The sustainable population of this planet is around 1.5 billion people, and we have already overshot by 4.5 billion. People who think that some technological "solution" will allow our population to expand without limit (or remain at current levels, for that matter) are those who cannot distinguish between science and magic. Things are sure to be interesting in the forseeable future. Blue skies, Winsor

Perhaps not I have never had a cop tell me they would rather deal with someone who had been smoking pot than someone that's liquored up (I have asked rather a few). Marijuana has its drawbacks, but they do not include making users sloppy and violent. Blue skies, Winsor

I'm pro-choice on everything. Check out the World's Smallest Political Quiz. The only thing I missed was that I support Universal Conscription. You WILL undergo 6 months of training and 1 year of active service upon reaching the age of majority in order to achieve citizenship. This can be Army/Navy/Marines/Air Force, or the Park Service or the Coast Guard or whatever. Beyond that, I consider Governmental entities to be poor servants and terrible masters. If this is a Democracy, they work for me but keep forgetting that fact. A simple criterion is that nothing should be proscribed unless it's worse than alcohol or tobacco. Then again, compared to alcohol and tobacco, heroin is like a gift from God (my mother, an RN, used to administer heroin to patients in a hospice). I'm a hell of a lot more concerned with someone in the oncoming lane with a significant amount of scotch in them than if they had smoked a joint. With drugs (licit and illicit) and weapons of any type, the key is accountability. There should be no consideration whatsoever given to arguments such as "I didn't know it was loaded," or "I didn't know what I was doing - I was drunk." The law of unintended results applies to the prohibition process in general - in addition to failing to solve the perceived problem, it spawns a host of more virulent problems as well. I do not recommend the use of intoxicants, and advise against misbehaving with items useful as weapons, but consider legal bans to be an exercise in futility at the very best. Blue skies, Winsor

Not to worry - your kids couldn't pay off the debt if they wanted to. FWIW, the condition in which we find ourselves makes the Weimar Republic look like a model of economic stability, and we will soon look back to Germany ca. 1923 as "the good old days." All that has to happen is for someone to note that the Emperor's new suit needs ironing, and the whole thing will unravel. The dollar has less backing it than cheap wallpaper, and when other countries cease to accept it, things will get interesting. We will become self-sufficient (after a fashion) pretty much over night. We will have to make do with 25% of the oil consumption that we now enjoy. We will have to find American made products, from shoes and clothing to electronic components, or do without. Upon the collapse of their currency, in Germany very many people starved. Hungary was no picnic, either. Yugoslavia took a thumping, but did a lot better than we will. Zimbabwe simply imploded. A good bit of background may be found here. In any event, enjoy yourself - it's later than you think. Blue skies, Winsor

Okay, okay, my bad. I'll try not to do it again.

He could get a rig on as fast as me, and he guessed that he had a chance - given that the part of the aircraft for which he was ticketed remained intact until impact. The best example of survivability that comes to mind is military aircraft that were disassembled in flight due to enemy activity. The bulk of the thousands of bombers manufactured by the US during the early 1940s were used as targets by our adversaries, and very few survived the war. IIRC, if your aircraft came apart as severely as did Pan Am 103, you were likely screwed, parachute or no. Just getting out of the wildly spinning wreckage with sufficient consciousness to yank silver was typically not possible. I did have a Flight Attendant tell me that if the aircraft was compromised severely enough that the cabin was depressurized, and the door could thus be opened by 10,000 ft. or thereabouts, I was welcome to go for help. Blue skies, Winsor

In powered aviation we have a few standard ways to die that require just a couple of boxes to complete in a boilerplate incident report form to capture the event in its entirety. Visual flight into instrument conditions is as fatal as it is routine, so is controlled flight into terrain. In skydiving we have ways of coming to grief that are easily as standard, and I won't bother to name them for the purposes of this discussion. Since it's six of one, half a dozen of the other, the airplane paradigm will do nicely without anyone getting defensive (okay, maybe some of the pilot types who skydive will be thin-skinned, but this is as good as I can do). When I had my pilot's license for about a week, I was flying home at night in marginal conditions. All the weather reports indicated that I should have VFR for another couple of hours at least, and it was only a 20 some-odd minute flight from Northeast Philadelphia to Doylestown. I was just over 3,000 feet past Willow Grove Naval Air Station, trying to pick up the beacon at Doylestown, when I lost ground contact. All I could see was the glow of the nav lights on my wingtips. Since I knew things were good behind me, I got on the panel and played Atari until I had executed a U-turn and broke back into the clear. I shot a visual approach into Northeast Philly and got a ride home. When I later got a heated dressing down about what was described as a near-death experience, I blew it off as overreaction. I had done all the preflight activities by the book, and went to Plan B when conditions were much worse than reported. What's the big deal? Fast forward to now, many thousands of flying hours later. I have buried too many friends for whom things did not work out as well - some of whom were more experienced than I am now. I have become the person giving hell to the low-timer who can't see anything wrong with pushing their luck as long as they get away with it. Incidents in skydiving share a remarkable commonality with those in aviation, in that the bulk of them are carbon copies of previous incidents. The fact that too many of those lost were people I liked very much does not change the nature of the process whereby they came to grief. Thus, when I read a skydiving incident report it is with the same eye that I would one titled "VFR into IMC" or "CFIT." Beyond the name and location, there is not a lot to be learned that we did not already know a long time ago. Skydiving can only be made so safe. With a few choice decisions, however, it can be made downright fatal in a hurry. Let's be careful out there. BSBD, Winsor

Strange coincidence... Those very shots were taken at the Belgrade DZ.

If everyone is on the page when boarding the aircraft, it does not tend to be a problem under canopy. "I expect to set up over the treeline, and shoot accuracy into the peas." "No sweat; I will do an outside 270 and swoop the pond." "We're going to open high and land on the far field." And so forth. I have been at DZs where people did radical setups and landings all day and stayed clear of the slowpokes. The key was that everyone knew what to expect and flew accordingly. It's when you have people making it up as they go along that the most problems seem to arise. Blue skies, Winsor

I have scratched because of winds at all stages of the operation. I have yet to regret doing so. On the way to the plane once, I looked at the way the wind sock was dancing and decided I would rather eat the ticket than jump. Operations were thereafter halted by the ambulance crew who had to tend with someone less timid than me. I have pulled off some landings in squirrely conditions that could have gone to hell without warning, and I have been hurt when things went to hell. Getting hurt sucks. If people who depend on the jump for their livelihood won't go, neither will I. Blue skies, Winsor

Yup. Getting bent is a bad thing, and only a fool will push it.

Like you can smoke and drink but you can't drink and smoke, you can sky then scuba but should not scuba then sky. Blue skies, Winsor

That's SOL (L being the Roman numeral for 50). Blue skies, Winsor

I live 14 miles from Spaceland. If I can put the Alfa into afterburner mode, I can be there in 10 minutes or so. Blue skies, Winsor

When you get past all the nonsense, there are more unknowns than equations. My suspicion is that Cooper did not survive the experience, and that all the theorists and claimants to the contrary are endlessly running in circles. As far as the money and Cooper becoming separate, it is simply a matter of when and how that occurred. According to Bernie whatsisname, author of the "Real McCoy" book, Cooper stuffed a couple of bundles of bills in his pockets before somehow securing the rest of the money otherwise. Thus, the money found in the river could have been from a pocket that was blown open on exit, from the otherwise secured money that was blown loose on exit, or washed loose from wherever his body came to rest. If he hit the river (or a tributary) and the money broke loose some time later, this could account for its arrival after the dredging operaton. If he died and his body was not discovered in a timely manner, the likelihood that his remains will be located and identified at this point round off to zero. Blue skies, Winsor

Does this admission mean that we no longer need to question who Cooper was, but ask you how you pulled it off? All right, so I screwed up and didn't manage to keep the money. Had I managed to hang on to $200k and invest it wisely, I could have funded a Major Motion Picture about the adventure by now. Luckily, I was able to fabricate an alibi about being in Germany (with a "Parachutist" job description) at the time. I thought it was pretty clever. Blue skies, Winsor

Pretty sure that was Wolfgang Pauli. Bingo. At least I had the right category of Physicists in mind.... Blue skies, Winsor

Isn't the fact you are on this forum posting mean you survived those jumps. This info tells me what? Simply that I've been there, done that, and don't buy most of the scenarios put forth in this forum. It forms the basis for my doubting to the extreme that Cooper exited the aircraft anywhere near a preplanned location, for one thing. It also gives me reason to conclude that Cooper had no idea of what he was up against. Thousands of aviators made their first jumps from stricken aircraft and survived, some more banged up than others. The number of residents in the Luftstalag system, the folks that survived the experience. was in the six digits, so getting to the ground in one piece was a viable option. When you get to the part of putting people jumping intentionally with gear into a predetermined location, the record becomes much spottier. With all the training, planning, Pathfinders and what have you, the tendency - often as not - is to drop people all over hell and creation. For someone to successfully execute the jump and coordinate with either a support person on the ground or waiting transportation is beyond unlikely. There is the infinitesimal chance that he lost some or all of the money, slinked away, and never let on that he had been behind this adventure. In any event, I don't buy the claims of the spouse of the OP. Blue skies, Winsor

The idea that Cooper exited anywhere near a planned location does not wash. For one thing, the routing of an aircraft by ATC is a game of Simon Says. Regardless of what kind of reverse-psychology you think you have dialed in, the likelihood of getting a particular route +/- 5 miles is so low as to be unworthy of consideration. In the same sense that it is almost impossible for a skilled artist to mimic a child's drawing without it being obvious to the trained eye that it was actually done by a pro, there is a big difference between a seasoned parachutist throwing in enough red herrings to confuse investigators and a clueless neophyte who really has no conception of what is involved. Cooper shows too many signs of being in the latter category. I have made jumps out of a variety of jets, at altitudes ranging from pattern to Class A, in rain, snow and sleet, and into unlighted dropzones in total darkness carrying heavy loads. I am much better than average at aviation navigation and spotting, with decades of experience in both. On the basis of the foregoing, when someone proposes a scenario wherein every part of the hijacking was part of a carefully crafted plan, I call bullshit. If you have things under control, you don't lose money. The money was the whole reason for the exercise, so this is a big red flag that says that it did not go as planned. All the speculation in this thread that comes from armchair quarterbacks is fine, but has little to do with reality. I keep thinking of Werner Heisenberg's assessment of a student's work: "This isn't right. It isn't even wrong." Blue skies, Winsor