jclalor

There is no point in trying to argue logic with most christians just as there is no point trying to argue with a moonie or jehovas wittness, Christians choose 2000 year old superstitions over science and reason, and while I suspect many christian have a lot of doubt in what they beleive, but they dare not question it. Christianty does not lend it self well to self examination. I choose reality. What about that GM stock? that shit sucks

Is there something that confuses you ? democrats are more liike Jesus. ( Do unto others, forgiveness, help the poor) They tend to base thier beliefs on the teachings of the new testament. Republicans seem to base thier beliefs on the old testament ( homophobia, capital punishment, creationism) I choose to believe in reality, religion just fucks everything up. It is fun at times debating people that believe the earth is 5000 years old and thier is an invisable man in the sky who watches our every move.

Sorry to be confusing, I was stating the republicans seem to base thier beliefs more on the old testament (OT) and the dems more on the new testament (NT). The dems do seem to show a little more Jesus like compassion but in the end it's all based on superstition...

Yet, consider these people: Jeffrey Mark Deskovic, 33, spent nearly half his life in a New York prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. DNA testing cleared Deskovic and he was released Sep. 20 from prison. "I was supposed to finish out my education…begin a career," Deskovic, choking up, told reporters when leaving the court room. "Marry, have a family, spend some time with my family…share the last years of my grandmother's life with her." Deskovic was 17 years old when he was ordered to spend his life in prison. In 2004, Ryan Matthew, convicted for the murder of a local convenience store owner in Louisiana, escaped the death penalty after prosecutors dropped all charges on the basis of DNA testing results. There are other stories of executions conducted too fast, trials completed too quickly and mistakes too easily made. And yet, the state-sanctioned killings continue. Now, DNA testing is helping to prove that innocent people continue to be killed or placed on death row. It proves that the U.S. judicial system is flawed; it sends innocent people to jail and, worse, puts them to death. Northwestern University School of Law's Centre on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) documented at least 38 executions carried out in the United States in spite of compelling evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt since capital punishment was restored in the mid-1970s. According to this study, while innocence has not been proven in any specific case, there is no reasonable doubt that some of the executed prisoners were innocent. Moreover, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has documented 123 death-row inmates who, since 1973, have been exonerated and freed before their executions. Officially, courts do not consider claims of innocence after a person has been executed. In the past, people attempting to prove innocence had to do so by re-examining the evidence and re-interviewing witnesses and investigators, with no finality granted them. In the last 20 years, however, they have had a new tool: DNA testing. While DNA testing was still viewed with suspicion by prosecutors in the 1980s, nowadays its implementation and accessibility has shown it essential in many trials. As it has become more accepted, it has provided an absolute that previously was not available. "DNA has introduced dramatic changes in the whole criminal justice system. Now capital executions are viewed in a more sceptical light thanks to this testing," Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre (DPIC), told IPS. Except in the case of identical twins, the structure of a person's DNA is unique. About 10 per cent of DNA contains chromosomes. The rest of it is "non-coding" DNA, partly made up of identical sequences. Experts analyse "repeat units" to compile a person's genetic profile, which takes the form of a series of figures and becomes essential for investigations. "Recently, with DNA death-row exonerations, those who may support the death penalty in principle have questioned its legitimacy given the risk that we may have executed -- we may execute -- an innocent person.," Sarah Tofte, researcher for the U.S. Program at Human right Watch, told IPS. This has led some prosecutors, law enforcement officials, conservative politicians and others to support moratoriums on the death penalty, if not outright abolition. The staff of the CWC pioneered the investigation and litigation of wrongful convictions, relying a great deal on DNA testing. Their work proving the innocence of 11 men sitting on death row in the U.S. state of Illinois was a driving force behind former Governor George H. Ryan's decision to suspend executions in Illinois in January, 2001. The Innocence Project, which worked to free Deskovic, only handles cases where post-conviction DNA tests can yield conclusive proof of innocence. To date, it has helped exonerate 184 people, proving that wrongful convictions are not rare. DNA tests point up the underlying need to reform of the criminal justice system, including a halt to the death penalty, human rights experts said. "In my opinion, the recent exonerations of both death-row inmates and other prisoners represent just the tip of the iceberg of the failures of our criminal justice system. There is an intolerably high risk that many, many prisoners currently incarcerated are in fact innocent, including many death-row inmates," John Holdridge, director of the Capital Punishment Project for the ACLU, told IPS. Until the late 1990s, DNA testing was seldom used due to the high cost, which ran into thousands of dollars. Recently, with the improvement of new technologies, the price has dropped to about 1,000 dollars, a small amount compared to the average cost of a trial. Texas, for instance, with over 300 people on death row, spends an estimated 2.3 million dollars per case, according to the DPIC. "Now almost everybody can afford the cost of a DNA test. It should be freely and automatically available to every death-row inmate and every person charged with a crime. Furthermore, it should be freely available to every prisoner with a substantial claim of innocence," Holdridge said. DNA tests played a substantial role in establishing prisoners' innocence in at least 14 cases of the 123 exonerations since 1973, according to the DPIC. Nonetheless, the scope of DNA is limited to the few individual cases in which biological evidence is available. For every DNA exoneration, there are countless cases where testing cannot help because no DNA was left on the scene or the evidence had been lost or destroyed. "DNA testing is a very good tool to prove the innocence of inmates, but unfortunately it does not mean the end of erroneous capital executions," Holdridge said. But it does point up the weaknesses in the U.S. justice system: Innocent people still are being put to death by the government. "Hopefully people worldwide will continue to be concerned and indignant about the capital punishment issue. What is essential for succeeding is that people recognise it as a major diminishing of human values," Dieter said.

Republicans = OT Democrats = NT While the left might show a bit more compassion than the right, it does not take away from the fact they both beleive a giant invisable man in the sky is watching over our every move. Choose to live a REALITY based life.

Once again, religion poisons everything.

The Salvation army does great charity work and always gets my spare change and singles at X-mas.

While some Catholics do very commendable work, Mother Teresa was a complete fraud. From Christopher Hitchens: I think it was Macaulay who said that the Roman Catholic Church deserved great credit for, and owed its longevity to, its ability to handle and contain fanaticism. This rather oblique compliment belongs to a more serious age. What is so striking about the "beatification" of the woman who styled herself "Mother" Teresa is the abject surrender, on the part of the church, to the forces of showbiz, superstition, and populism. It's the sheer tawdriness that strikes the eye first of all. It used to be that a person could not even be nominated for "beatification," the first step to "sainthood," until five years after his or her death. This was to guard against local or popular enthusiasm in the promotion of dubious characters. The pope nominated MT a year after her death in 1997. It also used to be that an apparatus of inquiry was set in train, including the scrutiny of an advocatus diaboli or "devil's advocate," to test any extraordinary claims. The pope has abolished this office and has created more instant saints than all his predecessors combined as far back as the 16th century. As for the "miracle" that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.) According to an uncontradicted report in the Italian paper L'Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican's secretary of state sent a letter to senior cardinals in June, asking on behalf of the pope whether they favored making MT a saint right away. The pope's clear intention has been to speed the process up in order to perform the ceremony in his own lifetime. The response was in the negative, according to Father Brian Kolodiejchuk, the Canadian priest who has acted as postulator or advocate for the "canonization." But the damage, to such integrity as the process possesses, has already been done. During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is "the greatest destroyer of peace," as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize*. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996. Later in that same year, she told Ladies Home Journal that she was pleased by the divorce of her friend Princess Diana, because the marriage had so obviously been an unhappy one … This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility? The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda. One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions. Correction, Oct. 21, 2003: This piece originally claimed that in her Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Mother Teresa called abortion and contraception the greatest threats to world peace. In that speech Mother Teresa did call abortion "the greatest destroyer of peace." But she did not much discuss contraception, except to praise "natural" family planning.

Why do we need any God or the bible to show us the proper way to treat one another? Thier has been more people slaughtered and more repression handed out in the name of god (Gods) than any other cause. The day we all fully evolve from believing that someone in the sky is watching our every move, the better off we will be. While Jesus indeed had some good things to say he also endorsed a god that was racist, cruel, homophobic, sexist, unjust, etc. etc. etc.

I dont understand why these Somali assholes can't just be blown out of the water by an F-18. I think if enough got fucked up they would cool it. It seems since Somalia is going extreme Islam ( they just stoned a 13 year old girl to death) That the profits from Piracy mite come back to hurt us, so we have every right to fuck them up,

I'M buying a reserve canopy from the classifieds, what is the normal protocol? I heard I should pay and have it shipped to my rigger and then once he gives the thumbs up then the money is sent to the seller. Does this sound right?

With the 30 year anniversary of Jonestown approaching I wonder if Jim Jones was born evil, or a man who started out doing good works and went bad. Jones did a lot of good works in the beginning (integrated churches in the fifties, free medical, housing and food for the poor and elderly and adopted a lot of foster children) I was friends with Steve Jones for a while, who was Jone's only biological child. Talking with him gave me a kind of different perspective, he spent almost a year in prison in Guyanna when the murders take place. While he would never defend his father he would violently defend the members of the church. On the day of the murders he was playing basketball with the church team ( He was 17 at the time) in the capital about 200 miles away. There was also a group of church members relatives waiting at the airport who were not allowed to travel to Jonestown with Rep Leo Ryan and other family members due to lack of seats on the planes. Steve was very fearful of what could happen with his father and was very anxious for Ryan to return. When it got late in the afternoon, Steve went to a house owned by the temple in George town that had a radio so he could call his dad to see what was happening. Ten minutes before he got there the temple member that lived there was told over the radio to commence the suicides, she slit her 2 young children's throats and then her own. Steve saw this and then also had to go back and identify the bodies of his family. An excellent book to read if interested is the Raven.

Thanks for all the input, I think i will go with a recent Cypress or Vigel.

Thanks for the info, and idea how much a rigger would charge?

Putting together my first rig and was wondering about the FXC 12000 AAD, It is used but has been recently serviced and has very little use. The price is 350, is it worth it? Thanks

Is the god you are referring to this god? The one that has bears rip apart 42 children for calling Elisha baldy? From Kings 2 2:23 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. 2:24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two I wonder if they teach this one in sunday school?

No point in trying to argue using logic against fanatics, They just dont want to hear it if it contradicts their 2000+ year old work of fiction. I mean how do you argue with people that believe in Noah's ark? Once again, religion poisons everything.

The video was posted on Youtube under "Hollister AFF cat 1" I dont think many whuffo's would be looking under that for skydiving disasters. It was posted for the skydiving community or I would have put it under something more interesting. I also thought it could possably educate.

WTF, 3 maybe 4 seconds away from going in. I know it happens but I just cant see how you could loose AW like that. The guy also looks shakey as hell, I wonder if that was AFF or just a coach jump?

No worries, just though it was an interesting situation and a great save.

Was I wrong morally for posting this video? I never would have posted it if someone was hurt or if I did not have the permission of the AFFI.

I think she decided no more jumping. Hollister's aff program and instructors are tip top.

Yes, I have the permission of the creator of the video.

WTF am I lying about? and why would I? I got the disc from one of the video guys and I could not figure out how to convert the format so I had a friend do it. I desribed to him what happened but mabe I did not explain it to him clealy.

Sorry about the desription, I had a non-jumping friend put it on you tube for me.