Bob_Church

There will NEVER be peace in the middle east, as long as there are Palestinians and other Muslims and Arabians that want the Jews out of Israel. Hell, Saudi Arabia has been an intermediary in the Israel/Palestine negotiations and they are getting tired of the Palestinians' crap. A few other countries in the region are also siding with Israel (gasp!) That's because everyone's been going about it the wrong way for decades. What they have to do is build some really expensive condos on the shore of the Med and the West Bank that they sell to wealthy Asians and Europeans and charge a really hefty tax every year for 'ownership rights' or some crap like that. The proceeds from the condos and the yearly tax go into a general fund that builds all the Palestinians cookie-cutter little tract houses with satellite TV and air conditioning. Once a week or so a bunch of supply truck go through the neighborhood and toss off bags of rice, beans, falafel, maybe some goat meat and butter, etc. So, we're sheltered, we're entertained, we've got nice cold AC, and plenty of food for the kitchen. Oh, it's time to go throw rocks and burn tires? Yeah, but, but, you know, it's Shark Week! Do we have to do it now? How about next Tuesday between Teen Mom and The Kardashians? So there you go, satellite TV and good cold AC is the solution to peace in the Middle East. A friend of mine lived on Frebus Street in Columbus which was called Freebase street for good reason. He had this great deal renting a huge house and the owner kept trying to sell it to him for next to nothing but being the only educated working white guy living between two warring gangs just didn't sound like a good way to stay alive. Rick's a psychologist in the Ohio Corrections System and kept running into his neighbors at work and work at home. He was in a bar one night and saw the crew who was building the new welfare condos a couple of blocks over. They got to talking and Rick said something about "wait, you're telling me that these will be rent free but you're adding a/c and cable?" The guy said "hey, if it keeps them home" and Rick saw his point.

And I'd bet money that it's the change in how she's dressing that pissed him off. He knows she's getting sick of him and now he notices that she's started dressing the way she did when she caught his eye.

" wait until I reach SS retirement age? " By the way, I'd always planned on starting my SS at 65 or 67, whatever the age of it going up was, but found that it was really ok to do it at 62. The money was almost as good, in fact I'd have to live so long to make up the difference that I think I'm coming out ahead. It doesn't hurt that it's sort of "extra money" for us but either way the numbers worked out for signing up as soon as possible.

I almost ruined my newspaper this morning by spraying coffee all over it when I read the editorial headline. "Embassy move has damaged the Peace Process"

I'm sorry to hear it. I hope you get through it ok.

The sixties really are ending, aren’t they? Tom Wolfe at 88. As much as I hate how he libeled and deeply screwed over Grissom I still love "The Right Stuff" and pretty much anything else he wrote. edit: I first wrote slander but since it was written I think libel is more appropriate, even for the movie. Either way I know that "deeply screwed over" is accurate.

It'd think mining gold would be hard enough on your back without waiting until you're in your sixties. Start as early as you can then get rich enough to hire workers when the pain sets in. Are there other mines nearby? I only ask because I have friends who spend real money to travel out west and pan gold at an established spot. Sometimes they come back with a few nuggets, and always with a smile. Is anything like that possible?`

I know I said I was done but can I just say "I agree. Absolutely."

I first saw her back when Quackser Fortune came out and have always liked her. I know she had a lot of emotional problems but I think that's always close to the surface with artists, whatever their discipline. Some are just luckier with it than others. I really hope she found some happiness in the last years.

"(Google Bataan Death March.)" You have a strange habit, and this is hardly the first time, of calling me wrong then making my case for me. But back to my post. The article I posted was about yet another attempt by the Japanese to avoid owning up to what the did. The Germans did, yet the Japanese keep (and I know that article is old but this is still going on) trying to even have any reference removed from textbooks. They keep trying to have Tojo returned to a place of honor. That's was my point in posting it. People talk and talk about honor and yet continue to refuse to show the least bit of it. When Germany talks about putting statues of Hitler back up and removing any negative history of Nazism from their texts and people in the US don't even notice then we'll be seeing each country's war atrocities being treated equally. When we fail to even notice the crap Poland is trying to pull then I'll stop wondering. Ok, that's it. That's all I've got. If it doesn't mean anything now then it won't mean anything if I repeat it so I won't.

Yes you are. And quite deliberately so. So I will once more spell out the point I was making. The difference between the effort the Nazis made to exterminate the Jewish people and the atrocities committed by the Japanese is the motivation. Get it yet? One was an effort to win at all costs. The other was an effort to wipe out a group of people for no reason other than hate. Are you going to still claim to be unable to see the difference? I can see the difference, but I can't understand what that has to do with what I was asking. Are we supposed to only say one group was bad? Do you think the men who were treated inhumanely and died horrible deaths building railroads for the Japanes gave a rat's ass over this word game you're playing?

Now I'm seeing the answer to my question of why we look down on the Nazis as monsters, which they were, but not the Japanese Imperial Army who committed incredibly horrible atrocities during WW2. The Japanese only slaughtered people that they considered others, or worthless. But the Nazis rounded up and gassed people who, uh, wait. Shoot, I think I'm missing something here.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/06/japan.schoolsworldwide Choho Zukeran was a schoolboy, mobilised to dig beachfront trenches, when US soldiers landed on his native Okinawa, sparking one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 Japanese and Americans would die, including more than a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population. Most died in the invasion, others killed themselves - on the orders of the army that was supposed to be protecting them. "The army had given us two grenades each. They told us to hurl the first one at the enemy and to use the second one to kill ourselves," Mr Zukeran told the Guardian from his home in Okinawa, a subtropical island 1,000 miles south-west of Tokyo. Whole families and communities committed suicide together. Yet if the government in Tokyo gets its way, Japanese children may never learn how hundreds of Okinawa residents, under direct or indirect pressure from the military, took their own lives. This year the education ministry ordered publishers of seven high-school textbooks to be introduced next April to remove references to the forced suicides. The ministry said "it was not clear there were military orders [to commit suicide]" and that "recent studies suggest there were no such orders". The demand is part of a growing movement to sanitise - or simply ignore - the darkest episodes in modern Japanese history, which have gathered pace under one of the most conservative governments of recent decades, led by the hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe. A long simmering row over the 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking by Japanese forces has been reignited by renewed efforts to play down the carnage. Last month about 130 Japanese MPs denounced the massacre as a Chinese fabrication and claimed the death toll was nearer 20,000. Several films marking the 70th anniversary are due for release this year, including one by the rightwing director Satoru Mizushima which describes the episode as a myth. Other attempts by the Japanese right to rectify Japan's "masochistic" view of its own history have set it on a diplomatic collision course with its closest ally, the United States. Last month a congressional committee passed a resolution calling on Japan to acknowledge and apologise for forcing an estimated 200,000 mainly Chinese and Korean women to work in frontline brothels - the so-called "comfort women". Mr Abe caused uproar when he denied the women had been coerced, and was forced to reiterate his support for an informal 1993 apology issued by the then parliament speaker. Hiromichi Moteki, secretary-general of the rightwing Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, denies Japan's current obsession with reinterpreting the past is politically motivated. "We are now able to look again at our history now that the facts have come to light," he said. "We have been listening to the left's fabrications for years, but now we have the truth in front of us." The drive extends to the rehabilitation of wartime politicians closely associated with militarism. Yuko Tojo, whose grandfather, Hideki, was prime minister during the war and was hanged as a war criminal in 1948, says clearing her grandfather's name is part of a mission to restore "pride and confidence". "There is no need to apologise to anyone - our ancestors are not guilty of the crimes of which they have been accused," said Ms Tojo, 68, who is running as an independent in elections. "If my grandfather is to be blamed for anything, it is not that he started the war but that we lost it." Japan's defeat probably saved Mr Zukeran's life. After a week in a beach cave in June 1945, hunger triumphed over fear and his family surrendered. "We soon realised we had been lied to. The Americans were not going to kill us. "Lots of my school friends were told to commit suicide by Japanese soldiers. At school we had been brainwashed ... [that] to surrender to [US troops] would be to disgrace the emperor," said the 75-year-old retired teacher and local councillor. The attempt to airbrush the suicides caused outrage in Okinawa and prompted half its towns and villages to demand the references stay. "It is an undeniable fact that mass suicides could not have occurred without the involvement of the Japanese army," the Okinawa city assembly said. More than six decades on, Mr Zukeran is appalled at what Japan's modern-day leaders are trying to do. "Many of my friends died because they were told to. The army never once tried to protect us. They told people to die and stole food intended for women and children. That is how war robs people of their humanity." In the weeks after the invasion, Mr Zukeran's family walked from village to village to escape the Americans who, they had been told, would rape and kill them amid a "typhoon of steel". Eyewitnesses claim entire families committed suicide together on the orders of fanatical Japanese soldiers rather than allow them to surrender and betray sensitive information about troop movements. Some 700 committed mass suicide in the Kerama islets off Okinawa.

You just became a bit more vulnerable...... Ouch! I blame autocorrect, and my lawyers will back me up on that. The photo teachers put a cabinet right across the hall from my office for students to get chemicals out of. Most of the chemistry seems to have been on the very bottom shelf, or maybe it's just the popularity of low riser jeans and thongs at the time that made it seem that way. I wasn't trying to look, but you'd have to be blind not to see since the cabinet was literally right in front of me.

I'm kind of holding my breath about Australia. In every gun control debate the fact of Australia never having mass shooting incidents comes up. It seems a lot like painting a target on the country. Every country has bitter twisted people and you can see the thought balloon over their heads thinking "hey, if I shoot up a school in Perth that would really make world wide news."

I had one about three weeks ago. My right hip would get so painful by evening that I could hardly walk. One cortisone shot and it hasn't hurt since. My wife got one a couple of years ago for her knee. They told her they'd probably have to repeat it every six months or so but the results were good enough to make it worthwhile, but she still hasn't needed it. Cortisone seems to be a genuine miracle drug. edit: now for my right shoulder. Sigh. I have a pre-existing condition called surviving while playing too hard for too many years.

That's great info, thanks. In the very early 80s there were times when I thought the idea of having a rigger sew up a bunch of disposable throw outs and sort of bags and freebagging the main was a good idea. Unfortunately those times were usually when I was under canopy and desperately trying to stay that way. If you do a google map search on Jackson County Airport in Wv that's where we were doing CReW, including a lot of night stacks. What looks like a big opening next to the airport was Kaiser Aluminum at the time and actually the worst place you could land. The night we built our "official" night 4 stack the winds were out of the NNE and so stiff that we opened in Ohio and almost in West Virginia again. It was cloudy, very little moon and strong winds and the only place you knew you could land was that tiny strip of blue lights way off in the distance. But we got it, with me coming in fifth on a four plane and one stack. I'd never come in later than third before and now allow had to do to get our numbers was fly it for the necessary time so when Gary, who was fourth, shouted about planing it Mig yelled NOOOOOOO loud enough to be heard in Kentucky. But he was right. And we got our numbers. But the idea of our pilot chute brides wrapping or anything else was just to bad to even consider.

I think a big part of that is that Sports have become Business in schools. But the big lesson to take away is to not think you can predict how thongs will play out. Expect anything.

Ok, it was a rough night and the aircraft was a huge loss, but can anyone think of a better way to earn your Caterpillar wings?

That's great. Tie-in with another thread, I wonder how hard it would be to get ISIS to believe that the photo on the cover is actually a depiction of Mohammed?

What's the name of the reefing system where bridle was attached to the bottom of the pilot chute then fed through a hole in the canopy to an X shaped sort of slider. The sliding part didn't present enough drag to do the reefing itself, it depended on the pilot chute slowing it down as it tried to descend. I had one on the first square I ever owned, an ancient evil piece of crap designated a Parafoil but called Black Death and for good reason. And not just because it was black. You never knew what you'd get. Maybe a decent opening. Well, anything's possible I guess. Now and then the pilot chute would fall into the burble and not only would the opening knock your breath out but the sliders would be squeezing your face. It felt like the bus driver had closed the doors too soon. The closest thing to making an opening better was the 1500 feet of blue green blue green as it spun you around every which way but open. That's when I learned my big lesson. Never buy a canopy before you can jump it. I wasn't allowed to jump a square yet when I got this great deal from an experienced jumper. I made about 12 jumps on it, had to cut it away on the last one and never bothered to hook it back up.

Almost every aspect of advertising is driven by psychological studies and science. Advertising is a 220 billion dollar industry in the US alone. A person thinks an ad is ineffective, when in fact its targeted at your whole psychology, your mindset. This may help: https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more-likely-to-buy-they-can-change-how-you-think-about-yourself And a longer version: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1904/01/the-psychology-of-advertising/303465/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272314/advertising-spending-in-the-us/ There is a certain hubris to suggest that an individual is not subject to the same psychological process that anyone else is. But this is a skydiving forum! Do you think that enough people sit through the 12 or more commercials packed into each commercial break in a tv show to make it worth the money spent? TV advertising, I believe, is in a death spiral. And I'm not talking about paying attention or not, I know they can get the message through without making you think about it, but I'm talking about the number of people who used VCRs and now DVRs or whatever it takes to just skip them completely.

edit: I was quoting phil but screwed it up and show it as airdvr. Sorry about that. "You're right. Advertising is completely ineffective. The trillions of dollars spent selling beer on sports programs. A waste. All the hundreds of millions that those stupid Koch brothers donate. All wasted. Google ads, more waste. The legislation limiting donations, prohibiting foreigners from donating. Should all be tossed out. in fact the doors should be thrown open for any foreigner to donate to political campaigns. It will spur jobs! " Bad advertising that few people even see is a waste. I think the point of the article is that so few people saw this stuff that they made no difference, and they have the numbers from Facebook to back that up. Not that Facebook is some icon of honesty but if they were going to lie I think they'd have inflated the numbers, not reduced them. As for advertising in general, I think a lot of it is a scam, but one that too many people make too much money from to look at honestly. Some of it works of course, but a lot, and I'm thinking primarily of television advertising, has become a joke and a scam. But that's another thread.

No one will ever be able to answer that question conclusively. But it is beside the point. The real question is two fold. One, did Russia try to influence the election. And two, did any Americans try to help them. Most likely the answers are yes and no. It is a known fact that the Clinton campaign did work with the Russians as she paid for it. The pee pee doc. And the Russians did try and spread chaos to make the people question the election. With the media, deep state and Democrat help, for some, they succeeded. I think a lot of it is a combination of the wording and people desperate to believe that they won when they didn't. What we keep hearing is "The Russians used the computer networks to interfere with our elections." It tends to be background noise and people picture hackers changing the number of votes by breaking into the voting machines. Not this trivial crap.

I love Xenia. I don't get over there much, my back doesn't like the drive, but when I can get out to a DZ that's the one. It always feels like pulling into home.