Andy9o8

his confusion seem warranted - your first response made no sense. Of course it did:

Or even more, depending on definitional nitpicks. http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2012/02/14/are-scientists-underrepresented-in-congress/

Hm, lawyers, most of whom majored in government as undergrads, and who are naturally interested in government and law far more than the general population (just as doctors and engineers tend to be keenly interested in the hard sciences), working in government, making laws. You're right, it's most illogical.

Are you and I in the same thread?

Honor killing and female genital mutilation? Seriously? Sigh. Please allow me to mention Pearl Harbor and Nanking.

I made 2 human beings. OK, I helped.

The key word in that is "IMO". 99+% of the world think you and I are batshit crazy for jumping out of airplanes at all.

You can preach the talking points to the choir all you want, but anyone with even a hint of honest objectivity can see that it was the House Republicans who threw down the gauntlet over the ACH which, like it or not, has passed Congress via the democratic process and been signed into law. The blackmail tactic is the GOP's; they hold the keys to their own jail cell. It is they who painted themselves into the corner; it is they who will have to get themselves out. Or, not.

Respectfully, sir, not quite. FARs are regulations created by the FAA. The FAA has the authority to amend FARs. ........................................................................... Sorry, Perhaps I used the wrong legal term. "Sequestration" ... "Act of Congress" ... "Bigger fish to fry" ... "Mating elephants" ... "Al Quida can do more damage than all the parachute riggers on the planet" ... I see. You have to move the sun and the Earth to change a FAR. Only Superman can move the sun and the Earth. Therefore only Superman can change a FAR. But that's OK. He's an expert BASE jumper, and can out-track... well... anybody, so I presume he's on our side.

A few months ago I got a car at Enterprise at Logan Airport for about $30/day (including tax + nuisance fees) (didn't get extra insurance cuz I have collision on my own cars that covers it.)

Excuse me, but was does that "6200" in your profile stand for?

Carter never appointed any Supreme Court justices.

I think the presumed context is that it was pre-planned by the jumpers involved.

That was quite the interesting skydive would be even more so if the link worked.

Ah- you do get it.

Because on the eve of the apocalypse, they will come for the bikers first.

I dunno; maybe things are very different over there than over here. Me, I've never been to a DZ where female jumpers had trouble finding someone to jump with.

You're all missing the point; although I do concur with Ron and others on this fact: that the rules are often driven by tandem equipment manufacturers. The reason they want TIs to have medicals is only tangentially for medical reasons - mainly, it's for legal reasons. IOW, it's because the tandem mfgrs' lawyers (and insurance companies, when they have insurance) tell them that their potential liability exposure is less by requiring medicals than by not requiring them. Simple as that. Face it: there are only a very small few tandem gear manufacturers. Without them, no tandem gear, no tandem jumps. So yeah, the Manufacturers' Caucus gets to disproportionally call the shots on stuff, just as DZOs' Caucus gets to disproportionally call the shots on stuff, and for essentially the same reason. Yeah, it sucks, but it is what it is. I don't have the dough, or the know-how, or the time, to build my own gear, hire my own plane, rent land to jump into, etc., so I suck it up and deal. There's a lesson in there somewhere; just takes a bit of squinting to see it.

Oh, goody. You get to bash Mooozlims and O'Bammer in one fell swoop. Jump more, hate less.

Yes, in the contextual sense he means it, it really is... more or less. Sure, there are some examples of non-Catholic clergy - just like, say, teachers, scoutmasters or cops - who sometimes abuse their positions to sexually exploit juveniles. But, at least in modern times (say, the past 70 years or so), only in the Catholic Church has the sheer number of examples of adult clerical and vocational serial sexual abusers of juveniles reached utterly epidemic proportions. To talk about the occasional Protestant or Jewish clergyman who does so, too, or the occasional teacher who does so, too - as if somehow that is even remotely a quantitative equivalent - is intellectually dishonest, and it insults our intelligence. The first step to the Catholic Church's true remediation of the stain is to admit that it has a problem that is unique to itself, and not to try to back-handedly defend itself with "Well, others do it, too." The next step is for the Church to drop its celibacy (and non-marriage and non-having children) requirement for priests, nuns and brothers; for that, in large part, is directly causative (not just correlative) of the sexual abuse problem. So long as that requirement exists - I'd argue even more so in the present day than 2 or 3 generations ago - a grossly disporportionate number of people who go into those vocations will be those who are so socially odd that they use the vocation to escape from the social and sexual lifestyle norms of lay society. (And then the Church goes and puts these social misfits in charge of children. Just brilliant.)

Because it needs to be perfect. That's a serious answer, BTW.

Respectfully, sir, not quite. FARs are regulations created by the FAA. The FAA has the authority to amend FARs.

Only that he wasted expensive time & altitude in 'cutting away'. What is there to cutaway from in that situation? Ya beat me to it, Jerry. We train the FJC to "cutaway" every time, but an experienced jumper should later modify his emergency procedures away from "one size fits all." I always say you should be able to think faster than you act.

Yup. I was gonna mention that connection between ice cream sales and domestic violence, but you just ruined it.

Really, Rick, we get it already: you hate Muslims, and you hate blacks. You should skydive more, and burn some of that off.