BIGUN

RIP Jim. I did not know him other than by rep. Thank you for all the stories you've been posting lately. I started jumping in '81. IN '83; I went to the nationals in Muskogee since it was close to home and I was on leave. I had the pleasure of working with Jerry Bird on SCRs and in 2001, was at the WFFC working with Hutch on SCRs when we needed some more applications, so I picked up the phone and called Bill Newell. He sent them to manifest and we carried on. When I got home; I called Bill again and asked why he didn't have a website that we could just download the application and show young skydivers the criteria. He didn't know anyone that could do it, so I built the first scr-awards.com website. As I built it, we would talk and I wound up writing the prologue for "The Arvin Good Guys." which is still on the site today. At that time, I also planted the seed of considering a gorup of Vertical Skydiving Awards and he got busy. In 2003, we got him to come to SkyFest at Skydive Dallas to participate on the SCR jumps, awards, and ceremonies. He had a blast. Still have a pic of him in my office doing an SCR jump. Again, thank you for posting these wonderful stories. Keith SCR #14304, SCS #8080

Evening, Jerry. It was temporary. Two schools; one saying an outage, the other a shutdown. In either case, “We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent,” Leavitt said. “We expect the portal will be back online shortly.” It's back up and running.

That generation not being well-versed in the Bible, probably thought he was attributing his father to the - greatest. of. all. time. DJT jr without his father would probably be selling hot dogs on a corner in NYC

From the article: Burchett implied in the wake of a classified briefing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), [don't mean shit] “When they tell me something’s moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater, and our capabilities … and these things, this one was, it was large as a football field underwater. And this was a documented case, and … and I have an admiral telling me this stuff,” Burchett said Wednesday. The movie, "The Abyss" has been rerunning on streaming TV lately.

Morning, Jerry. Lotsa things running thru my head with this one: They walk among us. Perhaps Elon is their leader. Imagine spending billions to get to Mars only to find out they spent billions getting here.

Wow. Freedom of speech and expression is the freedom not to.

See was a good prosecutor. After that, Peter Principle.

Brother, I'm not sure this would bode well. One oopsie and you're in deep shit. I would be more inclined to have a no vote party. Everyone just stay home on election day. Unfortuately, people have agendas and too often it's not for the greater good.

So it would appear that, "President Trump’s sweeping agenda took its first hit Thursday, when a federal judge put a temporary hold on his birthright citizenship executive order." Perhaps if there were an AG, they would have explianed it to him.

Is that a non economist or a nonconforming economist? [runs]

My signature line used to read, "Everyone is trying so hard to be heard that no one is listening." It fell on deaf ears.

Interesting. I'm gonna have to look into watchng that.. Yeah, the whole nature of communications now is not about sitting down and talking with someone that you have an issue with; I see it in my kid, explosion, noise, sharing of texts, block, ghost, etc. Honey, did you talk WITH them about it. No. OK Let's do that.

Morning, Nigel. I am opposed to the Immigrant policy as presented. IMO, Trump could have taken a more phased approach. 1) A moratorium on new immigrants for 3 years. Have every undocumented go to INS and get an I-10 Card (Making that up, just an example), Spend the next three years vetting all thos new I-10 cards (Paying taxes, not criminals, etc. etc.) If there were children of undocumented born in the US, the 14th amendment says they are citizens, If one does not have an I-10 card, then a due process. During that 3 years, Bill & I had spoke of using BRAC bases as the "new" ellis island for new immigrants. I voted for Chris Garrity - Independent and voted for the person in each case, some moderate Democrat, some moderate Republican (Balance) . IMO, the chasm of division is too wide. We need a leadership that can bring both parties together, not push each other further apart.

Well, mostly just the 14th Amendment and as of this morning, it sounds like 22 states are taking him to court.

He did not.

Morning, Nigel. When Elon bought Twitter and after a few weeks, I DM'd him and suggested he find a CEO for Twitter and go back to saving the world. As mentioned on here before, I "think" he's on the Howard Hughes path. IMO - he needs to butt out of politics, stick to what he does best and get out of the limelight.

Good to hear from you, Wendy. Hope your New Years was enjoyable. You'll always be a greenie in my world. :)

Evening, Jerry. This _can_ be a lengthy discussion and I will share my opinion with you. The ERA was first submitted to congress in 1923 under a Republican President (Coolidge). You know the history of it not being ratified by the states (mostly deep south). Since then, women have won many rights thru both the Civil Rights act and the legal process. I see Biden's commment more as a Roe v. Wade push than the need for ERA. IMO, RvW needs to be the issue for the Democrats.

I believe the announcement to sell came in October. WIth the more than usual nastiness that occurred in this last election cycle; I had pretty much resigned myself to leaving anyway. People that we know/knew and spent time with hurling insults at each other like some political camel-spitting contest became too much. There was a time where we educated each other on our positions instead of hurling prejoratives. It became more toxic than usual. Before it closed, a couple of posters implied they could meet at BlueSky. I will peek in at times, but will not participate in the vile. Be well.

Hi, Jerry. Hope you are doing well.... Sometimes crazy things happen at the end of a presidency. People who maybe shouldn’t be pardoned get pardoned. Presidents flood the zone with executive actions related to things they couldn’t get done legislatively or on dicey subjects they wanted to avoid before an election. And sometimes presidents get senioritis and throw caution to the wind. But rarely do we see something like this: An outgoing president suddenly declaring there is another amendment to the Constitution. That’s what President Joe Biden seemingly attempted to do Friday, in his third-to-final full day in office. Biden announced that the 28th Amendment — an amendment guaranteeing men and women equal rights under the law — is the “law of the land.” “It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people,” Biden said. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: The 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.” But a 28th Amendment has not suddenly been appended to the Constitution per Biden’s decree — there are still only 27 — nor does there appear to be much hope that it will soon. It is at best a Hail Mary and at worst a strange political ploy that runs afoul of the rule of law Biden has spent four years pitching as one of his foremost concerns. Let’s explain. To start, the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress in 1972. At that point, like all constitutional amendments, it needed to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, or 38 of them. Since then, 38 state legislatures have ratified it, with Virginia’s becoming the 38th to do so in 2020. There are two problems, though. One is the deadline issue. Congress initially passed the amendment with a seven-year deadline for states to ratify it. Congress later extended that deadline by three years, to 1982, but the ERA still came up three states shy. The three additional states came much later. The second is that, in the 1970s, five states voted to rescind their previous votes to ratify the amendment. In other words, only 35 states ratified it by the deadline, and only 33 states currently want it ratified — at least if you look at their most recent word on the matter. Some, like Biden, have argued that neither of those things matters. They say the deadline doesn’t really apply and that states can’t legally rescind their ratifications. Ipso facto, they say, it has satisfied the requirements. And that’s not a totally fringe or completely crazy idea. Even the American Bar Association has taken the position that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all the necessary hurdles and should be implemented. It passed a resolution last year stating that the deadline isn’t legally binding and that states can’t rescind their ratifications, because neither power appears in Article V of the Constitution. In addition, the deadline appears in what’s known as the “resolving clause” of what Congress passed rather than the text of the amendment. The idea is that since states aren’t voting on the deadline, they shouldn’t be bound by it. I won’t walk through all the legal ins and outs — my colleague Glenn Kessler did a nice job of that here — but suffice it to say that these issues are far from being settled enough for a president to claim an amendment is law. Federal judges have repeatedly ruled in ways that suggest the deadline is valid and, in one case, that a state can rescind its vote to ratify. While there might not be much that’s totally definitive from the Supreme Court, the rulings we do have tilt strongly against the Biden position. And most notably, even those who might seem predisposed to this argument haven’t adopted it. Then-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, herself a pioneering advocate for the rights of women and the ERA, suggested in 2020 that the argument didn’t make sense. “There is too much controversy about latecomers [like] Virginia long after the deadline passed,” she said. "Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said, ‘We have changed our minds'? " And even Biden’s own Justice Department has declined to take his position. A 2022 advisory opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel largely stood by another such opinion from the Trump administration saying that the amendment hadn’t been ratified. Biden’s move might seem to be a last-ditch effort to apply pressure on the archivist of the United States to certify and publish the amendment. The Biden administration has argued that the archivist’s role is “purely ministerial” — in other words, that it doesn’t have discretion. But that appears extremely unlikely; the archivist just last month said the amendment “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions." And even that wouldn’t be the final word. The courts would surely review it even if the archivist did what Biden wanted. In the end, this appears to mostly be a messaging exercise intended to push an idea that had lurked beneath the surface more out into the open. After all, if this has been ratified since Virginia voted back in 2020, why not say this earlier? But it’s also remarkable that a president would try to declare something that isn’t clearly the law to be not just the law, but part of the most significant legal document our country has. That at the very least skips over a whole lot of very valid legal issues that have never been settled. As Columbia University law professors David E. Pozen and Thomas P. Schmidt wrote in the Columbia Law Review in 2021: And yet, with three days to go in Biden’s presidency, here we are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/17/biden-declares-there-is-now-28th-amendment-there-is-not/

Apparently, Meso is runnning it, based on his post in reddit, "I used to run the site for a decade" [paraphrase]. and announcing the new domain name. Sometimes, it's an IT/IP timing issue. He couldn't do anything until everything was finalized. My suspicion is, he put it back mostly as a legacy informational site and for that - my thanks.

Back up under a different name?

Farewell

Apparently, I'm from Ecuador.

Can't get away from plastic. About 30 years ago we went from dumps to waste-to-energy. About ten years ago, we went to sorting our trash and putting all the plastics/paper in a separate bin which we now have a W2E and Recycle facility. It's been a model that other cities/countries come to visit to emulate.