redlegphi

Problem is, Sweden's too goddamn cold. On the other hand, the Dutch Belgians have kick-ass chocolate, and the Germans have the best pretty good beer ever. And sometimes, we have hot summers swiss chocolate blows the shit out of belgium one, our beer is stronger than the german pisswater, plus, we have the alps.. cant beat the most beautiful country in the world! Slowly there, Mr. BigMouth: You and I just share parts of the Alps, our chocolate is much better than yours and nothing beats German beer. OTOH: I'd invade Switzerland within a second, if I only could and they only would let me in - it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I've never had Swiss beer, but Belgian beer definitely crushes German beer (though I do find German beer to be quite good). And the Swiss and Belgians both have the Germans beat on chocolate, though I'll say it's a toss up as to who's on top.

I'll echo this. I don't know how many hours I've spent driving between Lawton and SDD, but it was all worth it.

I can speak English and I'm willing to be a bullet magnet for Uncle Sam. Therefore, I can totally immigrate.

I believe you mean decreasing twelve ounce curls. Otherwise, you just end up with warm beer, which is a sin against God, who loves us.

I know James Doohan (Scottie from Star Trek) was already mentioned as having served in the Canadian Army, but I thought I'd add on that he stormed the beach at Normandy (Juno Beach) and had part of his finger shot off. Also, Ted Williams was a Marine aviator, not Air Force. Now, to get back off topic, I just thought I'd throw out that one of my PLs got hit in the back of the head by a Sadrist brick (at a campus protest, no less). He and his platoon somehow managed to avoid firing into the crowd. Just sayin'.

And this is why immigration reform never goes anywhere. The status quo (illegal immigrants able to get into the country and unable to get legalized) drives labor costs down, which is exactly what the corporations want. They don't even have to get a bill passed. They just have to ensure any bill that does come up dies slowly in committee.

US Army 2001-Present

So, if you say 'Fuck Off' to say, a cop and he and his buddies beat you senseless with their batons - it's THEIR fault entirely? Yes, as I believe is being discussed in another thread.

You can add "hate crimes legislation" to the list of things that you don't understand. Not really surprising, though it is kinda sad, considering how important that legislation is.

Yelling fire in a crowded theater is completely different from dropping the N-bomb in a crowd of black people. Yelling fire in a theater compels a person to act (by heading to the exit) because most of us are flammable and do not want to burn. Meanwhile, dropping the N-word does not compel a person to do anything. Some people might choose to beat your ass. Some might choose to yell at you. Some might choose to tell you you're being an ass hole. And some might do nothing. Whatever they choose to do, it's because they made that choice, NOT because of what you said. Just look at those "God hates fags" ass holes at the military funerals. If there is anybody deserving of an ass whooping, it's them. But they are allowed to say what they want, even if it has a decent chance of leading to a violent confrontation, because the First Amendment guarantees them that right.

That's Americans at their best. "I support your right to Free Speech as long as you don't say anything that pisses ME off." There's your assholes. No, the assholes are: go ahead and say what you want, if it incites riots, so what? If people die, so what? Absolute free speech is more important than civil order. I would venture that the person responsible for the riot is the person who actually starts acting violently. Somebody saying something you abhor doesn't give you the right to do whatever the fuck you want. If you only have the freedom to say things that everybody already agrees with, you don't really have "free" speech. Also, I highly agree with what lawrocket said about keeping the bigots out in the open. It makes it easier to counter their arguments and takes away their ability to argue from the position of "they're trying to shut me up because they know I'm right and they can't defeat my clearly superior arguments."

I'm just saying, I think there are probably more young skydivers who could accurately identify who Scott Lutz is and what he did than who could accurately identify Jacques Istel (or any other historical figure in our sport) and what he did. And that's kinda sad.

The answer to that question is even less meaningful that the answer to the questions "Do you enjoy paying taxes/bills?" and "Do you like eating cauliflower?" The Tea Party is still able to maintain their "popularity" because they aren't for anything. They just whine about generic shit that everybody hates. I'll be a bit more impressed by them if they actually start outlining what they'd do differently. And not just "cut taxes". What programs are they going to cut in order to provide balance for the lower taxes?

I'd like to propose a 10 year limit on making fun of failed skydivers who haven't actually sued a DZ/Instructor/Rigger/etc. I mean, yeah, what the guy did was moronic and he besmirched our fine sport on television repeatedly with his nonsense, but I'm pretty sure the only people who even remember who he is and what he did are skydivers. I would venture that there are thousands of skydivers who currently have their D license who hadn't begun skydiving yet when Lutz made his fateful jump. Maybe it's time we let it go and find somebody new to kick around. Just a suggestion.

The key to relaxation, for me anyway, has been visualization. On the ride up, once you clear 1000 feet, close you're eyes and visualize everything you're supposed to do on the jump from the time your instructor tells you to get up to the time you land. Visualize it over and over until you feel 100% comfortable or until it's time to get ready, whichever comes first. If you sit there thinking about nothing, your brain will automatically default to thinking about "holy fuck, i'm about to jump out of an airplane." So give it something else to think about instead. This can be especially useful once you start AFF, and you have a lot more to do during your freefall. As far as tandem v. AFF for your next jump, I think it basically comes down to how you feel. I think doing a tandem can be a great way to get people past the initial fear of jumping out of the airplane so that when they do AFF on their next jump, they can focus on what they have to do and not be overwhelmed still by the fear. If you think you might still be in danger of being overwhelmed, I'd say try another tandem. If you think that you've gotten past the initial shock phase of jumping out of a plane, I'd say try AFF. Your instructors could probably give you a much better read on how you did on your tandem and if you're really ready for AFF. Good luck and welcome to the sport!

Shall we buy guns, or shall we buy pizza? Or strippers? Guns will make us powerful, pizza will make us fat. And strippers? Um, blue balls I guess?

I don't really view the enemy as "seemingly endless". Realistically, al Qaeda is a fairly small, globally distributed network of loosely linked terrorist cells. The Taliban are a much more localized fundamentalist group and the main issue they caused for us is they allowed AQ to operate in Afghanistan when they controlled it. Either way, there are some things that we need to successfully do to achieve our goals in the war on terror: 1) Encourage the non-fundamentalists. We can't "win" this war by killing all the bad guys. While they aren't endless, we're never going to kill all of them either. That'd be an unrealistic goal. A more realistic goal is to find the non-fundies and provide them with assistance. This would gradually shift each countries version of the Overton window away from fundamentalism. It would also encourage people to move away from fundamentalism by showing them that it can be pretty nice being friends with the US, UK, Oz, etc. 2) Strengthen the governments and security forces where we are. It's no secret that most people aren't going to like an occupying army. Even a fairly benevolent occupying army will rub a lot of people the wrong way. Therefore, it's important that we transition the indigenous government to control over the country as quickly and responsibly as possible. Removing our forces from the countries would remove a lot of the current hostility and fighting. The problem, of course, is in the interim our forces need to be there to assist. The other problem is that we've encouraged democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, which means the people get to pick their own leadership, and we aren't going to be lucky enough to get the Afghan or Iraqi George Washington when they vote. So we have to recognize that the government we're working with isn't going to be perfect and may even be fairly corrupt. The big disadvantage in this, and any, COIN fight is that it hinges a lot on the will of the people. We can do everything right and they could still choose some America-hating ass hole as their leader and there's not a lot we can do about that. So, at the end of the day, there will always be a chance for failure in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But there's also still a pretty good chance for us to achieve our goals there, so that's while we're still there.

I am not going to call you a warmonger or disrespect you at all, respect is a two way street and your reply was respectful. I especially like the fact that you are honest and acknowledged that bad activity happens and that bad eggs exist in the military. I do not believe all those that are deployed act like this that would be unrealistic, and I am not delusional if I believe that this sort of activity does exist. There are plenty of people in here that will simply deny that any of this sort of activity happens, these people are the ones that discredit the military because they assist in allowing such activity to continue. It is impossible to eliminate bad people entirely, especially in a institution as massive as the united states military, that is common sence. it is important however to acknowledge these bad incidents and expose them so they may never be repeated un-noticed. Can you possibly share any experiences you have had, heard or observed where people have not followed the rules of engagement, or where there rules of engagement were what you felt inapropriate? If you honestly havn't had 'any' of these experiences, I would be suprised, but I don't think it is impossible. I am not here to flame you or anyone, in fact I am the one that is usually under attack and I have been known to bite back from time to time, but I have a respect for your honesty and wish to have at least some sort of intellegent conversation. I am genuinely interested in what happens over there and I don't believe enough people are. We don't really discuss what our ROE is. It would be a pretty good advantage if the insurgents knew when we could and couldn't shoot them. That said, I've only seen the guys I've worked with operate well within the ROE. Have I heard of people operating outside of the (current) ROE and doing things similar to what is described in your article? Yes, but those stories are all second-hand at best and are all either from the initial invasion or from the Surge, when the rules were different due to the more dangerous operating environment. As I think everybody on both sides can acknowledge, and as has already been said in this thread, there are going to be ass holes and good guys in any organization, and it's going to be difficult to tell them apart most of the time. When you give both of those groups guns and plop them down into a war zone, sometimes bad stuff is going to happen. It's why we should avoid war unless it's necessary. And I can state as a fact that we're trying to reduce the number of civilian casualties we inflict during operations here and in Afghanistan, because it's both the right thing to do and because it hurts our chances of mission success if we're killing the wrong people. Unfortunately, nobody is perfect 100% of the time and the insurgents in both countries have excellent propaganda wings.

I'll begin this statement by saying that I wasn't in favor of the Iraq invasion to begin with and largely disagreed with how the Bush Administration fought the Iraq War up until the "Surge" (and I think a lot of the success of the Surge had to do with luck and timing). I say this to preempt any accusations of my being a neo-con warmonger. You should still feel free to make such accusations, but I think you'll probably look silly doing so. That said, I'm currently on my second deployment to Iraq (the first being in 03-04) with a deployment to Afghanistan in between and I've never seen anything like what is being described by these Soldiers and Marines. This isn't to say it doesn't happen. I'm sure it does. But I think it's incorrect to ascribe those things happening to the President, DoD, or the services. Every unit I've been in has clearly briefed the ROE to me and none of them encouraged me to go out and randomly shoot people, take pot shots at passing cars, or show wanton disregard for human life. Quite the opposite in fact. So I think the problems that these Soldiers/Marines saw were due more to poor leadership in their units combined with sociopathic behavior on the part of the Soldiers/Marines carrying out those actions.

The problem with that statement is that the administration will define what's considered a "combat mission" after their "deadline" has lapsed. Actually, "combat missions" have pretty much already stopped. The only people still out there kicking doors in the dead of the night are the SF folks. And they're doing it alongside Iraqi Security Forces. The rest of us are advising, assisting, and training the Iraqis or escorting State Department folks to meetings. And I can assure you that they are very much trying to get down under 50,000 troops (and no "combat" brigades) in country by the deadline.

I see a lot of blather and nothing of substance. What exactly do they plan on doing to make Iceland this journalistic paradise?

They use the long form, ACS version of the census to determine statistical data used to determine funding levels for federal programs in your area. So the main "penalty" is your area will get less funding for certain federal programs. Not everybody gets the long form. I think it's like 1 in 6 households or something like that.

It seems to me that the point of the Stanford Experiment (if I"m not mistaken, which I often am) was that pretty much anybody would abuse power given to them if left unchecked. It pretty much goes back to the old quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely. So testing people for character flaws wouldn't really help matters, since most people would demonstrate those flaws if left to their own devices. Which really highlights why Abu Gharaib happened. It wasn't that you had a bunch of morally deficient people guarding the Iraqis. It was that you had a bunch of normal people guarding them with very little oversight and very little guidance on where the line between right and wrong were. Which is why it was surprising to me (though not really that surprising) that none of the officers who should have been checking in on the enlisted personnel ever stood trial for neglecting their duties. Just my two cents.

Actually, the GOP tend to be the most Constitutionally literalist on the statistics method, since the groups that tend to be underrepresented now due to not filling out the census tend to be minorities, who tend to vote Dem. Nice try though.

I just don't get what you're asking for. When people complained about SkyRide, they complained that Skyride hid competing dropzones that aren't in the program. When ProSkydiving set up this page, the hoped to avoid this criticism by showing every DZ in the area. When I first saw it, I thought it was a pretty reasonable approach. I still think it's a reasonable approach- and I don't have a horse in this race. You're asking that they show non-Proskydiving in the top section, in the section labeled "3 PRO Skydiving dropzones were found for Montana". Clearly, that would be false advertising as you're asking for non-member DZ's to be listed as a member DZ. I imagine that would piss off even more DZO's. The site is CLEARLY identified as a "National Dropzone Connection", and clearly distinguishes between member DZ's and non-member DZ's. I would think you would be happy with this as I can not think of a single booking agency that lists non member businesses. Does Priceline, Orbitz, or Travelocity show airlines, hotels, or car rental companies they don't do business with? Do they highlight non-partners in their search results? What the hell are you asking for, anyways? My suggestion would be to not list out of state dropzones. Simply state that there are no proskydiving dzs in the state. If they then had the list of non-proskydiving dz in the state listed, even in the small font as they do now. I think its wrong to direct people to go to other states. I hope this answers your question "What the hell are you asking for, anyways?"