BigWaveDave

Members
  • Content

    94
  • Joined

  • Last visited

    Never
  • Feedback

    0%

Community Reputation

0 Neutral

Gear

  • Main Canopy Size
    170
  • Reserve Canopy Size
    175
  • AAD
    Cypres

Jump Profile

  • Home DZ
    Z-Hills, FL
  • License
    A
  • License Number
    44446
  • Licensing Organization
    USPA
  • Number of Jumps
    54
  • Years in Sport
    2
  1. David, Zephyrhills (skydive city) on both... “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  2. Thanks guys... @popsjumper... Yup, always has been. Where do you normally jump? “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  3. Hello all!!! Just made my first jumps after 7 years out of the sport. Unfortunately, life just got in the way, but now nothing's holding me back. Damn it's good to be back... Blue skies...
  4. BigWaveDave

    Jobs

    Does having a liquid lunch count? “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  5. OMG...that's one of the funniest things I've read in a while. And here I thought (when I first opened the thread), that this was about LOTR or something... “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  6. The problem though, is that this goes way beyond drinking and driving. A man’s “castle” is no longer safe, and neither is his tavern. It will probably surprise you to learn that “you can’t be drunk in a bar.” So says Fairfax County (VA) Police Chief J. Thomas Manger. He claims that public intoxication is an offense worthy of arrest, and a tavern is a public place. This January, officers burst into Northern Virginia bars in search of intoxicated patrons. Anyone registering over .08% BAC — the state’s legal limit for driving — was subject to arrest. Bar-goers with that unlucky fate “would be transported to an adult detention center until they sobered up.” Here’s The Washington Post with one woman’s story: “as the designated driver in her dinner party, Pat Habib was careful to consume no more than one alcoholic drink and follow it up with two sodas. So she was shocked when a police officer singled her out of the crowd at Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern in Herndon and asked her to step outside to prove her sobriety.” That’s right. The police forced her to prove she was sober — in a bar. Among the tactics they used to tell who might be drunk: “frequent trips to the bathroom.” You’d think law enforcement would have something better to do than play hall monitor. They insist that their policy of harassing social drinkers is “proactive,” and claim to be targeting “the root causes of alcohol-related deaths.” In other words, they’re subjecting people to arrest for what they might do. As former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) noted in the wake of the raids, The Department of Precrime in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report was supposed to be fictional. Unfortunately, when it comes to the zeal of anti-alcohol forces, it seems that nothing is off limits. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  7. Great job on the helmet. Its amazing what a little paint job can do. Now I feel like a dumbass for blowing $300 on a helmet. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  8. Great example. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  9. No, but I hadn't noticed any mass hysteria anyway. hell yah, even if there were only one person killed each year by a drunk driver, the rest of them should lose their license You're absolutely right, one death is too much, and people who habitually drive drunk should lose their license. BUT, these measures to lower the BAC threshold do little to deter the problem. You see, hard drinkers are the ones who cause most of the accidents. Its akin to lowering the speed limit from 65 to 50 in order to catch people who regularly drive 100 mph. The "new criminals" aren't the problem, and targeting them diverts valuable resources form catching the people who are. The reason why there are more drunk driving arrests every year is because they keep redefining what "drunk" is. Add that to the fact that there is a mountain of evidence supporting the fact that a .08 BAC does not impair you that much. The NHTSA, along with MADD, keeps pushing for a lower BAC limit, and the NHTSA had issued some studies supporting it. The GAO took them to task, saying "The evidence does not conclusively establish that .08 BAC laws by themselves result in reductions in the number and severity of crashes involving alcohol. ...NHTSA's position-that the evidence was conclusive-was overstated." In fact the GAO found that the NHTSA suppressed its own studies that did not support the lower BAC threshold. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  10. You're right. We should also focus more on rehabilitation. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous do a great job at this. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  11. Hey, Optimus Prime was a badass robot! But you gotta admit Megatron was the shit. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  12. Cool punishment, definitely unique. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  13. One more thing…, MADD president Wendy Hamilton in a Reuters article just prior to the July 4, (2003) weekend: "Last year, 18,000 people were killed in drunk driving crashes." This not true, however. MADD twists the facts to benefit their cause. This statistic is actually alcohol related fatalities, and is compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Here’s how the NHTSA comes up with this figure: 1) A measurable amount of alcohol means anything above .00 percent, up to and including a sip of beer or cough medicine. 2) Drivers impaired by drugs, be it aspirin, cough syrup, crack or heroin, are often counted as drunk drivers. 3) If a pedestrian is involved and has a measurable amount of alcohol it is considered alcohol-related. 4) If the accident is a sober driver’s fault (i.e. a sober driver runs a red light and crashes into a driver who had a beer after work) it is alcohol-related. 5) If the residual presence of alcohol is found (an empty beer can) it is considered alcohol related, even if tests prove no one has any alcohol in their systems. 6) The NHTSA arbitrarily adds 9% to all the alcohol-related statistics it receives from the states. Why? Because they feel like it. 7) If a passenger has alcohol in his system, it is considered alcohol related. 8) To further inflate the numbers, The NHTSA just started using what they call the Multiple Imputation Method to inflate alcohol-related statistics even more. The method automatically assumes that anyone involved in an accident who was not tested for BAC (probably because they were obviously sober) could actually have been drunk, and the numbers are jacked up by a set percentage. So lets say you are the designated driver for the night (ie: stone cold sober) and you drive your buddy home after he’s had a few beers. If a SOBER driver runs a red light and smashes into your car, and somebody dies, then its reported as an ALCOHOL RELATED FATALITY, courtesy of the alcohol in the PASSENGER’S system. Now we have another death caused by a drunk driver? According to MADD, yes. Of course one death is too many. But instead of 18,000 drunk driving deaths per year, more accurate studies put the figure between 500-1000. Is that number suitable justification for the mass hysteria sweeping the nation? Does it justify the one and half million arrests for drinking and driving each year? Another lie MADD likes to shill is they have no interest whatsoever in de facto prohibition of alcohol. Sift through the Official Position Statements page of their website, however, and you’ll think you’ve accidentally clicked into the Anti-Saloon League’s homepage. They have broadened the scope of their anti-alcohol crusade to include: higher taxes on alcohol, reducing access to alcohol for the community in general, prohibition of drinking while playing golf, banning alcoholic drinks from having fancy or fun labels, the ability to sue bars, liquor stores, breweries and distilleries for damages sustained from one of their customers, a ban of alco-pops, forcing bars to close earlier and uniformly, a ban on happy hours, the curtailing of beer ads on the air and banning them entirely from billboards, and etcetera. None of which has anything to do with driving, unless you’re talking about golf carts. Making the roads safer is no longer their goal or function. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  14. The Rise Of The Neo-Prohibitionist Sorry for the long post… Anyone who has known me for any length of time will know that I am an ardent libertarian. I dislike government intrusion on many of the liberties we Americans have enjoyed since the inception of our great nation. Over the last decade or two, there has been a movement to curb and/or wipe out the consumption of alcohol in our country. This is something that has been obvious to me for several years now as alcohol laws become more and more restrictive, and enforcement becomes more and more draconian. This is indicative of the long shadow cast across the American social landscape by those who think they know what's best, spiritually, morally, and corporally (sp?) for us. If you critically read the MADD site, you'll soon see that this organization is at the head of the neo-prohibitionist movement. While I am not going to sit here and argue that drunk driving laws are a bad idea, it's fairly obvious that the sentiment against drunk driving is being perverted to drive a campaign against drinking altogether. Here is a paper put out by the CATO institute regarding this very subject. It is a great, albeit long, read, but it details many of the ways our freedoms are being curtailed. Back Door To Prohibition If you don’t have the time to read the entirety of the CATO institute report, here are some important quotes and facts to back up this assertion. ”Once you’ve consumed your first drink, you’ve lost that ability to make a sound judgment.” --MADD Chapter President, Penny Wagner. A Backgrounder on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest and most influential of the many contemporary temperance organizations. “It’s time to get the country looking at the alcohol industry in exactly the same way we’re looking at tobacco…We’re 10 to 15 years behind the tobacco people, and we want to close that gap in the next year or two” –Anti-alcohol activist Sandy Golden “If .08% is good, .05% is better. That’s where we’re headed, it doesn’t mean that we should get there all at once. But ultimately it should be .02%." --Steve Simon, Chairman, Minnesota State DUI Task Force This is a good, well-referenced page. "We may wind up in this country going to zero tolerance, period." --U.S. Senator and MADD supporter Barbara Boxer "...if you are a 170 lb. male, you can drink four drinks on an empty stomach in the space of one hour and not exceed the limit. If you are a 137 lb. female, you can consume three drinks on an empty stomach in a one hour period before you reach the .08 BAC limit. MADD believes that .08 BAC is a generous definition of impairment and that level of alcohol consumption can hardly be characterized as social drinking." --Katherine P. Prescott, Former MADD President, testifying before the US Senate on 7 May 1997 The Center For Science In The Public Interest in 1998 reminded the U.S. House Speaker's Task Force for a Drug-Free America that "alcohol is a drug too." "We're not a Prohibitionist organization," (past Pennsylvania state chair Nancy) Oppedal said. "For those who drink, we encourage moderate consumption, which is one drink a day for women, and two for men. We're not after everybody." (Bigwavedave: What's the point of two drinks?) Are we facing a return to Prohibition? --Philidelphia Daily News, 7 April 2003. "It has become far more neo-prohibitionist than I ever wanted or envisioned," said (Candy Lightner) MADD's founder. "I didn't start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving." --"MADD Struggles to Remain Relevant." Washington Times, 6 August 2002. A few Google searches will tell you everything you need to know. These people are out there, and their movement is real. It is well-funded and supported by powerful people. Be afraid, people. Be very afraid. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh
  15. My first canopy is a Sabre (original) 170, slightly used with less than 100 jumps on it. “If you hear a voice within you saying, ''You are not a painter,'' then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.” - Vincent van Gogh