riggerrob

Good point. Employers should be held responsible for all decisions made on their premises. Employees should net fear unemployment if they disagree with decisions made by their employers. The last time fear of poverty forced me to compromise my opinions on seat-belts ..... I never fully recovered from those injuries.

My experience with the Superior Court of British Columbia points to the opposite conclusion. The problem arises when arrogant lawyers start to believe that they are more important than victims or surgeons.

Just be cautious about which branch of the military you assign to investigate alleged war crimes. Canadian Captain Robert Semrau's (?) trial was a flaming fiasco and wasted millions of Canadian tax-payer dollars. The trial include flying a stack of military legal types to Afghanistan many years after the crime. What they could learn years after the crime is a mystery to me??????????? There was also the miserable treatment of Canadian snipers serving in Afghanistan. It seems that a Canadian Army padre was offended by some snipers' black humor. My brother's (retired Warrant Officer) suggestion was to hire padres with tougher senses of humor. A recurring theme in "Canadian military justice" is to hold Canadian soldiers - serving in Afghanistan - to the same standards as Toronto municipal police officers. ... a ridiculous concept in a country as poor as Somalia or Afghanistan. When I tried to make a comparison between the behaviour of Russian soldiers invading Ukraine (2014 to present) with Quebec Provincial Police Officers in Oka, circa 1990 ... my high school history teacher cousin was shocked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Part of the problem is that the Canadian public never hears about some of the nastier things done for their benefit. What was that quote from an American SF type who said "We are rough men who do rough things to other rough, nasty, brutish people (e.g. Taliban) to allow gentle people (e.g. citizens of the USA) to sleep peacefully in their beds?" The only difference is that North American soldiers attack nasty people (e.g. Boko Haram) on the far side of the planet.

Atair did do a research and development program with the University of Alberta (?) about custom, non-woven ribs. Instead of traditional load-bearing tapes sewn to a fabric matrix, they laid individual threads along load lines. This sort of construction is used on composite, competition sails, (see America's Cup competition) but is prohibitively expensive for mass-consumption. It allows them to construct sails with molded-in 3D curvature for best possible airflow. They start with huge, 3D plugs, lay threads in successive layers, then bond/glue them all together. None of those wealthy yacht owners seem to care if a set of sails lasts more than one or two seasons.

Still too big a fine. Anyone who disagrees with same-sex marriage should be allowed to quietly step aside without penalty. The same goes for abortion, trans-gender surgery, etc. Any medical professional should be allowed to quietly step aside without penalty. As for the county clerk who refused to process paperwork for a same-sex marriage/civil union/whatever ... she should have quietly stepped aside and handed the task to a less biased co-worker. Please remember that our world is rapidly changing and many things that are legal now were illegal until recently. For example, when I was young, homosexuality was illegal in Canada. Homosexuals were routinely arrested, jailed, fined, etc. Even for decades after Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau announced that "gov't has no role in the bedrooms of the nation", Canadian Military Police routinely arrested any service member suspected of homosexuality. You will never change the minds of some people. You can only wait until they retire. In the meantime, when asked to perform a duty that clashes with their moral or religious values, they should just quietly step aside.

Please tell us more about your general health and diet. People falling unconscious in the airplane is exceedingly rare. Over 30-some-odd-years of teaching skydiving, I have never had a student faint in the airplane, though I have had a handful faint after their parachutes opened. Back during the 1970s and 1980s, we used to suffer one static-line student per hundred jumps or one per thousand jumps fainting after their parachute opened. They ignored steering commands on the radio and wandered off to land in the forest. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon getting them out of the trees. For some silly reason, I am better than most at climbing trees, so I got tasked with extracting then from trees. NOT my favorite task. We had to do tandems for a decade (1983 to 1993) before we started to understood the physiology of fainting under canopy. It seems that most of the fainters were city-slickers who were not very active in their Monday-to-Friday lives. The spent the morning on a hot, dry, drop zone doing physical exercises involving climbing in and out of the airplane mock up, rolling around on the grass, etc. They forgot to eat or drink, so were hungry and thirsty by the time they got near the airplane. The fear and excitement of an airplane ride burned through their last reserve of blood sugar. Outside the airplane, they relaxed as soon as they saw an open parachute over-head. They relaxed so much that they fainted and wandered off towards the forest. That is why most skydiving schools now insist on students doing a tandem or three before attempting static-line or AFF. We now encourage all students to sip water, munch on snacks and visit the toilet before suiting up.

Yes, I used to have a copy when I was a Rigger-Examiner. Most of that pamphlet is still valid. It just needs to be updated with the more recent variations on 3-Rings and the stainless steel hardware coming from France. Please delete the chapter about stainless steel hardware coming from South Korea.

American and Canadian police interrogations are boring compared with the rest of the planet. Annoy a cop in most other countries and you WILL get beaten.

My mother tongue is English. I learned to speak French at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier ... hint: it's near Quebec City. I learned to speak the basics of German while serving at CFB Baden-Solingen, West Germany ... enough to take German-only tandem students. I learned the basics of Spanish while working in Perris Valley, California.

How about the New Zealand approach of banning publishing the names of school shooters. The drop in notoriety might reduce the numbers of "inspired" angry, young men. A society can be measured by the way it utilizes its angry young men. Mr. Poutine is currently using his angry young men to shoot up the Ukrainian landscape while American angry young men are shooting up schools, parades, churches, shopping malls. Canada just experienced a - rare - armed bank robbery by a pair of angry young men. Police in Saanich, British Columbia (near Victoria) killed both on scene.

Dear Baksteen, Bullies eat their weakest man. When they can no longer advance by their own merits, bullies shift to belittling people around them. "Eat Your Weakest Man" is the title of a book by Rui Amera (sp?) about the last days of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. ... shows you how well that strategy worked in the long run ...

Which flag is he wearing?

Proud Boys, Antifa, etc. don't really care about the issues, politics, religion, ethics, morals, etc. they just enjoy a good riot, vandalism, arson, looting, breaking other people's stuff, etc.

On a related note, why do a few D-bags have those triangular "aprons" but not all? It looks like an apron would help open container flaps and stabilize the D-bag as it lifts off your back.

That summary is easier to read than the next dozen legal documents written by Canadian lawyers.

I suspect that management salaries is still only 1 or 2 percent of the total corporate budget. My theory holds that management salaries are just part of the screening process because corporations hope that CEOs who are able to negotiate large salaries for themselves will devote equal energy to negotiating contracts that are equally profitable for the corporation.

Hey! I resemble that remark! I worked at 2 DZs that "saved" money on maintenance but eventually crashed airplanes. I narrowly missed being killed when a Beech 18 crashed at Hinckley, Illinois during 1992. Fast forward to 2008 and was injured when a Beechcraft King Air force-landed near Pitt Meadows, Canada. I suffered multiple injuries during the second crash and some of my injuries never fully healed.

Sad how interstate travel to secure an abortion will soon become a federal crime. Even worse how the FBI will get dragged in. The FBI will soon be so busy chasing rape victims - across state lines - that the FBI will no longer have any time or energy to chase rapists. A twisted logic!!!!!!!!

Dear McCordia, What are the external dimensions of your Apple AirTag? "1.26 inches in diameter, similar to a half-dollar coin." Which rigger sewed on the tracker tag pockets? Did he/she sew them to the main D-bag? What about sewing a pocket to a reserve D-bag? Yes, I know that might infringe on a TSO, but a harness/container manufacturer can easily advise you on where a pocket will least influence reserve deployment. My first guess is at the point where the bridle meets the free-D-bag.

Valid point. CBC Radio just interviewed a Detroit-based doctor who arranges something like 6,000 abortions per year, but she worries about how the latest SCOTUS decision will affect her poorest patients. OTOH she a single bridge away from Windsor, Ontario, a large city blessed with first-rate, Canadian hospitals, but she fears that sending an extra 6,000 patients per year will overwhelm Canadian hospitals. She also worries that her poorer patients will struggle to gas their cars, find some one to mind their small children, missing a day's work (at an unstable, minimum-wage job), etc. A conservative military base commander can crush that sort of inter-state medical travel, forcing a single, female private soldier to give birth to the results of a drunken fling. Base commanders need to seriously consider the 20-year costs of a single mother raising and infant. Perhaps military medical officers need to be held to a different standard. Patient confidentiality should be paramount, with referrals to other clinics for non-disclosed treatment. Perhaps send the female private on a one-week course at a base in another state?????? This reminds me of a tale from my military service. I was a young, single, Protestant, liberal, private (E5) with lofty sexual ambitions. My ambitions often exceeded the interests of young women that I met. But I still carried a condom on the off chance that I might meet a young woman as horny as me. Sick bay provided me with free condoms because free condoms were cheaper than the medicines needed to cure syphilis, etc. This was before herpes, AIDS, etc. OTOH, one of my French-Canadian co-workers was married with 2 or 3 children, conservative and Catholic. He and his wife agreed that they were struggling to feed their current family and could not afford any more children on a Master Corporal's salary. BUT he also knew that if he asked the medical officer for condoms, birth-control pills, etc. that the medical officer would share his request with the base Catholic padre and his request would soon result in an embarrassing "confession" with the Catholic padre. So he asked me to provide him with condoms. .......

Few people like to talk about it, but during previous centuries, mid-wives ocassionally suffocated infants at birth, especially if the infant was pre-mature, under-weight, deformed, etc.. That practice was not discussed in polite company.

I agree with the concept of "sunset clauses" on laws. Any law should be reviewed every 20-ish years. The alternative is having hundreds of non-enforced laws cluttering up the law books, courts, etc. One of my pet peeves is all the dozens of traffic laws that are still on the Canadian books, but not enforced. For example, in Vancouver, you will only get ticketed for an illegal left-hand turn AFTER you collide with another car. That left-hand turn was illegal the other 364 days of the year, but cops did not bother to enforce it.

We sort-of have standardized police training in Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Depot in Regina trains all the federal police officers, plus some of the provincial police and a few municipal police. The RCMP contracts to provide provincial police (e.g. highway patrol) in many provinces. The RCMP also contracts to provide municipal police for many cities. One advantage is that RCMP provide uniform training, plus access to federal crime labs, etc. A disadvantage is taking an RCMP constable from a remote, rural detachment in Alberta or the Yukon, then transferring him to downtown Maple Ridge. Hint: downtown Maple Ridge is over-run with poor folks and drug addicts ousted from Vancouver's downtown east side. The City of Vancouver (major port city) has had their own distinct police force for a century. Vancouver trains their own police constables. More controversial is the nearby City of Surrey converting from RCMP contract policing to their own dedicated Surrey Municipal Police Force. That controversial conversion is taking many years and costing many millions of dollars. The simplest way to hire a new police force is for the City of Surrey to offer contracts to individual RCMP officers who are currently serving in Surrey. A couple of provinces (e.g. Quebec) have a provincial police academy while a few others (e.g. Ontario) mostly hire graduates of LEO or criminology diploma programs at technical colleges (e.g. Algonquin College near Ottawa, Ontario).

Lily Allan has been an outspoken feminist for many years. She also delvers most of her songs with a sense of humor.

If all those hard-core, right-winged, white-privilege, replacement-conspiracy, voters put their ass where their sass is, they would ban all forms of birth control for white women, but provide all forms of birth-control to blacks, latinos, asians, gays, etc. FOR FREE. How many decades before those arch-conservatives figure out that the average white family can only afford to educate two - maybe three - children all the way through college.