riggerrob

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.

Turkey was a valuable trip-wire during the Cold War. Since Turkey and Norway were the only NATO countries bordering the USSR, they were handy for listening in on Soviet radio traffic. Remember that the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was sparked by the recent forward-positioning of NATO (American-made and controlled) nuclear missiles in Turkey and Spain. Since the USSR did not enjoy having NATO nukes that close to their border, Soviets responded by forward-positioning nukes in recently-communized Cuba. NATO and the USA pushed second-hand weapons on Turkey to use them as cannon-fodder in case the Soviets wanted to finish invading Western Europe. On the con side, Turkey is the only Muslim-majority nation in NATO or the EU and Turkey has always had its own distinct foreign policies. I suspect that Turkish foreign policy is based upon their glory days during the height of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, when (1683) they conquered all the way to the gates of Vienna (old, German-speaking Holy Roman Empire). The United Nations and NATO have had to expend considerable effort to prevent Turkey and Greece from going to war over ancient border disputes in Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, etc. We suspect that plenty of back-room negotiations (NATO, EU, UN, etc.) will never be made public.

I lost count between quadroon and octroon.

I helped package up the last few CF-104 that the CAF sent to Turkey near the end of the Cold War. One of my (technician) colleagues had previously served in the Canadian Army's United Nations Mission to Cyprus. He had a low opinion of Turks, so used to spray-paint a Greek flag inside very panel before he screwed it shut. Years later, Turkish technicians were still finding little Greek flags inside their second-hand CF-104s. Hah! Hah!

It is standard practice for Canadian soldiers to pay for lost equipment ... in peacetime. When I left the Canadian Army Reserve I had to pay out my own pocket for some missing uniforms.

sorry brenthutch, I am not quite understanding your last post. Are you implying that more than a million refugees have fled Ukraine? How many Ukrainian refugees applied to come to the USA?

I find it amusing when North Americans try to impose North American policing standards or Geneva Convention notions of polite behavior on Third World countries. Russian Army attitudes towards warfare have always been different than Western European norms. The Russian Army willing accepts hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dying to achieve an objective ... casualties that horrify Western Europeans. Genocide is still common in slavic - and cultures farther east. For example, Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan were harshly criticized - back home - because their dark sense of humor offended a delicate Canadian Army chaplain. You need that dark sense of humor to survive the horrors of terrorist battlefields. You also need to hire chaplains with tougher senses of humor ... senses of humor that more closely match their congregations. Some of those Canadian political/legal wranglings became farcical. For example, paying to ship an entire court halfway around the world to visit the scene of the crime - in Afghanistan - years after the alleged crime was committed (Captain Robert Semrau (sp?).

Not so much Pakistani berry-pickers as it was Punjabi-born grand-fathers and grand-mothers picking berries in the fields surrounding Pitt Meadows Airport. Those Sikhs were raised on farms in the Third World, making them much physically and psychologically tougher than Canadian-born teenagers. It also helps that many British Columbia farms are owned by Sikhs who immigrated from the Punjab. But silly me, there I go religiously stigmatizing people based upon their religion instead of their country of birth. Much of the Punjab region was incorporated into Pakistan after it separated from India in 1949. Pakistani Muslims promptly encouraged millions of Hindus, Sikhs, etc. to move out of Pakistan. Given the Pakistani gov'ts' subsequent reputation for honesty, rule-of-law, fair elections, transparency tolerance of Taliban, etc., it is a wonder why anyone would want to remain in Pakistan. (sarcasm alert)

I know many licensed jumpers and instructors who earned rigger ratings back in the day, but no longer repack their own tight Javelins. Many also only instructed for a year or three before retiring their instructor ratings. They brought their tight, fashionable tiny Javelins to me because they knew that I would do a better pack job, considering that I was the busiest rigger in town. None of them regret the time and money they spent on learning how to rig.