[Bob Kuczewski]

For the record ...

Here's an email message that I sent to Jack on January 26th, 2011 titled: "Working Together Again?"

Hello Jack,

There was a time when we worked together and I think we made a fair amount of progress for the greater good of hang gliding. I'd like to get back to that time if possible.

I've been having a growing number of public and private postings, emails, and personal conversations with people who feel that your ban was unjustified. If you look at the history, you know that your warning was AFTER the post that you didn't like. You also know that my post was NOT out of line with treating you as any other member (there's been far worse said without any bans). It's very easy for me to demonstrate the unfairness of this treatment, and that's exactly what I've been doing.

The responses I've gotten are not complimentary of you, and I think your stance of "digging in your heels" is doing you more harm than good in the public eye. So here's what I would advise (of course, you can ignore this if you like).

"I've been reviewing the bans of Bob Kuczewski and Scott Wise, and I think it would serve the greater hang gliding community to have them back on this forum. So without casting any blame on any parties, I would like to invite Bob and Scott to rejoin us here on hanggliding.org."

That statement does not admit any guilt and it sets a tone of cooperation. That's what I hope *I* would be able to do if I were in your shoes.

Please let me know either way. You're also welcome to call.

Thanks,
Bob Kuczewski
858-204-7499

Jack hasn't responded and I doubt that he will.

I've learned in life that it's always best to take the high road and to offer the olive branch. Those who reject such offers define themselves.

[Free]

For the record ...
Jack hasn't responded and I doubt that he will.

I was just about to post something about *no-one* was posting anymore.

"What we have here is a failure to communicate..."

Bevis (Straub) and Butthead (Axaopoulos) are getting what they want..
It's the law of the lowest denominator when cowards can control the narrative.
Daily, we should throw a challenge or two at these weenie boys that lie and distort the facts.
Jack likes kitties and he claims that Bob has mistreated him so badly, using mean ol' words that hurt his feelings..

I've never seen it. Where is the proof?
If it ever happened it ought to be easy enough to produce the documentation... Where is it kitty boy?

Jack used a lot of weasle words to describe the 'crime' but produced no evidence.
Just libelous inference, and a cowardly lockdown for anyone that even mentions Bob's name..

He just recently gave someone a weeks ban for mentioning Bob's name?
That's weak and destructive...

Kitty boy, (bunny boy in the old days) is a cowardly bully behind a keyboard.
He kicked me off the org when I wrote that he was 'in bed' with Dennis Cavagnaro in the google stalking data mining scheme that they tried to sell to the corporation. "In bed with" is a term for closely doing business with someone but Jack Axaopoulos seemed to be very sensitive to the term because 'kitty boy' was afraid that someone might think he was gay? Really?

Me thinks he does protest too much!

Lowest common denominators = Bevis and Butthead (kitty boy)..

Censorship and keyboard bullies (cowards) bring out the worst in me.
It's dirty work but someone's got to do it.
Now I feel dirty and nothing productive has come out of it.

An NWO engineered collapse of society is occurring and here I am wasting time on a couple of weasles..
Straub is complicit in pushing for the new world odor and Bunny boy Jack doesn't have a clue and never will as long as he censors anyone and anything that makes him and his kitties uncomfortable...

If Jack wasn't so scared and Davis wasn't so egotistically deluded they could get a much clearer world view if they would just spend a little time perusing web sites like
http://www.prisonplanet.com/
http://www.infowars.com/

But they won't..
They can't stand the truth..

[Bob Kuczewski]

Censorship and keyboard bullies (cowards) bring out the worst in me.

That's part of their strategy. They know that if they push a person far enough, that person will eventually reach a "breaking point" where they fight back in a way that's uncharacteristically crude. Then they can use that crude behavior to demonize the person they've pushed.

The smartest revolutionaries (like Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi) recognized that tactic and refused to fall into that trap. They refused to stoop to the levels they were being pushed into. I think that led to their success.

It's also known that isolation can eventually drive most people to the brink. I don't know if you saw the movie "Trading Places" with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. It showed how a refined upper class commodities broker could be turned into a raving lunatic by making him an outcast in his community.

People who manipulate people know how to push those buttons to get the reaction that serves their purpose. I'm sure it's been done to me, and sometimes I've played into it. It may be that the "gag order" on my Directorship (Rich Hass letter of 2009) was written to elicit just such a response. I responded by suggesting that their gag order was possibly illegal, and then they turned that against me (claiming I was suing USHPA) which helped Bill Helliwell win the election.

As for Jack, I think his ego is bigger than his brain. He's done a good thing with hanggliding.org, and he gets a lot of well-justified praise. But that praise has gone to his head, and he thinks he's smarter than he is. The Range Voting fiasco is a perfect example. If Jack had done the analysis, then he'd know that Range Voting degenerates to simple plurality (or worse) on hot issues. When push comes to shove, people will vote with the extreme values (0 and 100 in the HGAA example) because that gives them the best chance of winning over the more moderate voters who try to follow the "guidelines" which suggest more moderate scores. I tried to tell that to Jack, but he refused to listen claiming that people voting with extreme values (0 and 100) would be clearly recognized as "corrupt". He was proved wrong by his own voting record (0 and 100) yet he refused to admit his mistake.

But where Jack really went astray was with the extreme measures he took to protect his fragile ego. Rather than admit that he was wrong, he lashed out and banned people who pointed to his mistakes. He shut down the entire TorreyHawksForum, and he also modified the record to cover his mistakes (remember how he changed the post where he banned me?). Those are clear examples where he crossed the line, and they don't look very good on his resume. I would never trust (or hire) someone who couldn't admit their mistakes. So the best thing Jack could do for himself (and his future) would be to eat a little humble pie and admit his mistakes. But I think his ego is too fragile for that, and I suspect he'll continue going to extremes to hide his mistakes rather than admitting them.

And that brings up my last point on this philosophical detour. I've found that if you make a mistake and try to cover it up, it only gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Remember what happened to Richard Nixon? On the other hand, if you come right out and admit a mistake, it disappears almost immediately. Humility is the easiest way to diffuse a stupid mistake, and that's a lesson that Jack has yet to learn.

Anyway, thanks for hanging out here, Warren. Maybe we can try to keep each other sane.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Fast Forward to December of 2015 ...

Various people have been collecting quotes from Jack's site before he changes them. It's somewhat difficult to keep track because Jack keeps changing people's posts and his own. Here's what I've put together so far:

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 6:29 pm

USHPA has two policies.

The CGL (Commercial General Liability) policy covers USHPA itself, its chapters and its individual members for 3rd party liability. It also covers landowners as additional insured parties, and we call this "site insurance". Each of those landowners has to be specifically named as an insured. All of that coverage is wrapped up in one single policy, and you can download it and read it at your leisure from the USHPA website, members only, insurance tab. Prepare to be both bored AND confused.

The PL (Professional Liability) policy covers USHPA instructors only. It protects them in their individual capacity as instructors for liability related to teaching HG/PG. It does not cover landowners, and it does not cover instructors teaching as employees of a school. In that case, the school should carry a CGL policy which covers itself and its instructors.

Certain of the larger schools (Windsports, Torrey, Kitty Hawk, Discover PG, etc) have individual CGL policies through the same broker and syndicate that covers USHPA. This is the insurance which we were notified would be non-renewed back in mid-August. We evaluated the loss ratio on the USHPA policies and asked whether they'd be renewed too. The insurers said they did not plan to renew our instructor policy, and they did not offer an opinion on our commercial policy (that I'm aware of, anyway). That's not very comforting.

Talk of "just let the schools figure it out on their own" is the same as saying, "let 'em go out of business". This is not the sort of insurance you can just go out and buy anywhere. We are already dealing with the one source of this kind of specialized coverage that exists. The specialty insurance market is already very small, and we're a tiny little fish that's barely worth considering at all. The amount of premium we generate collectively, between both USHPA policies and all of the school policies is just barely enough to interest an insurance syndicate in investing. Once the commercial policies are off the table, is there enough left for the insurers to even bother with? I don't know...and I don't really want to find out too late that the answer is no.

Given the financial realities of how insurance works, the size of the market and the way claims are handled at present, we think the RRG is our last, best hope of getting a handle on insurance and managing it in a way that minimizes the long term cost to our members. We're not interested in milking it for short term profits. Our overriding interest is the long term health of our sport, and we'll run things in a way that maximizes the benefits to our sport and our members. We own it, we run it, we live or die by the decisions we make. It's all on us, not on somebody outside our sport who's interested in collecting the maximum return in a given policy period, regardless of the long term consequences.

Mark G. Forbes
USHPA insurance chairman

So it is true that the commercial insurance is and will be intact. Making ominous allusions to the withdrawal of the commercial policy seems to contribute to the hysteria on this forum when their is nothing definitive. Thanks for the info....at least I can rest assured that the ushpa will make the commonsense decision to insure Sport pilots and sites in the short run if the RRG fails and then figure out how to continue subsidising the bucket list joyrider industry.
_________________
“We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 6:51 pm Post subject: Re: Mark - query for you #102

Mark,
Couldn't the Pilot and Site insurance continue to be covered by Lloyds and the RRG cover the commercial schools and instructors?

Possibly we could keep the pilot/site policy (CGL), but we'd still have to fund the RRG somehow. The RRG needs a minimum level of aggregate premium to be sustainable; it's not a linear function of the number of insured parties. There are fixed operating costs that don't scale, and even with all of the policies (USHPA, PASA, Foundation, individual schools) we're still at the lower edge of what's feasible. Breaking it into smaller pieces as you suggest would probably push it below the minimum size needed to be self-sustaining.

As I've said before, this is complex and multifaceted. I see a lot of interesting questions that derive from a very superficial understanding of how insurance works, how risk pools are managed and what the financial realities are. I've spent the last ten years as USHPA's insurance chairman becoming more educated on how it all works, and I'm still learning a lot. I'm an electronic design engineer in real life; I took the insurance chair job because I was asked and I figured, "How hard can it be? Sign something once in a while, chair a couple of meetings, maybe make a phone call or two...easy!" If only I'd known......

So my point is that this is REALLY complicated stuff, with a lot of interlocking pieces, and some of them are fairly sensitive to discuss in a public forum. Some of the questions that are posed here really can only be answered under the terms of a non-disclosure agreement that bars any public discussion of the details. I'm trying to be as open as I can be, within that limitation. (Yes, I'm legally bound by such an agreement, as are other board members.)

We see no viable option for commercial instruction or schools without forming the RRG. The RRG isn't going to be viable without both those entities and USHPA being in the risk pool and funding it through premiums. So abandoning the schools to "figure it out on their own" just means closing them all down. We don't think that's wise. We really are all in this together, pilots, instructors, schools and manufacturers. We're all participating to whatever level we can afford, and we MUST all help out as much as we can to make this work.

As pilots, we need instructors and schools to train the next generation and provide a continuing source of equipment and training. We need the manufacturers to have a market to sell to, so we can have new and better gliders and instruments. And they need us, to bring in new people and provide a market for their products. We don't thrive unless we all work together and support each other.

MGF

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 6:55 pm

Very good point. I'm surprised it wasn't censored like my post about indemnity laws.

So you define censorship as breaking the rules and and posting anywhere you want? If you cant post absolutely anywhere, its censorship?

Nope... you are free to post in a ton of places here and anywhere on the internet. Oh look! You just did!!! Where is the censorship????? Your claim of censorship is absurd. This was was the absurd attitude BobK took on the HGAA forum.

We would vote on a set of rules. Special threads were started with rules associated with those threads that stated off topic posts would be deleted. Then BobK would flagrantly break every rule and s*** on every thread against the agreed upon rules, the group, then cry like a little baby about censorship.

You dont believe in moderation? Youre going to whine like a little cry baby???
Door is right there buddy ---->>>> (EXIT)

Seriously... anyone who cries about censorship because they cant post to 0.01% of threads with extra rules, while free to post anywhere else, *STFU* already. Ive had it with the cry babies.
_________________

H4, AT, FL, TFL, AWCL, CL, FSL, RLF, TUR, X-C
Aeros Stealth III 142

Thomas Jefferson wrote:
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 7:19 pm

A note on insurance pools....

Ive had so many friends lose their insurance due to Obamacare, not because their insurance company decided to dump them, not because they weren't grandfathered in, they were, but because of the effect on the pool they were in.

So many people left the sub-pool they were in to move to new Obamacare plans, that the pool became too small, which made it too risky, and thus, that whole pool got dumped, even though that wasnt originally the plan. Had an insurance agent explain that to me when my pool got way small, which caused the premiums to triple over time. (which causes MORE people to leave, which makes it smaller.... its a death spiral).

Shrinking insurance pools eventually get dumped or get so expensive everyone leaves them. Just a matter of time.
So we lose half the insurance... now we're looking even smaller. Writings on the wall.

The new student life blood is getting extremely cut starting march. Doing nothing is suicide.

People with better ideas better start posting them. Crapping on the only reasonable option put forth so far does not help.
_________________

H4, AT, FL, TFL, AWCL, CL, FSL, RLF, TUR, X-C
Aeros Stealth III 142

Thomas Jefferson wrote:
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 8:47 pm

So you define censorship as breaking the rules and and posting anywhere you want? If you cant post absolutely anywhere, its censorship?

Nope... you are free to post in a ton of places here and anywhere on the internet. Oh look! You just did!!! Where is the censorship????? Your claim of censorship is absurd. This was was the absurd attitude BobK took on the HGAA forum.

We would vote on a set of rules. Special threads were started with rules associated with those threads that stated off topic posts would be deleted. Then BobK would flagrantly break every rule and s*** on every thread against the agreed upon rules, the group, then cry like a little baby about censorship.

You dont believe in moderation? Youre going to whine like a little cry baby???
Door is right there buddy ---->>>> (EXIT)

Seriously... anyone who cries about censorship because they cant post to 0.01% of threads with extra rules, while free to post anywhere else, *STFU* already. Ive had it with the cry babies.

I am shocked. This level of rage and cursing by the forum moderator is completely inappropriate and unprofessional. If this is hang gliding, I want nothing to do with it.

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 8:52 pm Post subject: #106
Marcos70 wrote:

(parting shots removed)

_________________
“We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 8:57 pm
Just as I thought..... Have fun hanging out with the rest of the BobK lunatics, keyboard warrior.BANNED.

These BobK proxies are a little too obvious.

If anyone else wants to join the org and egg me on into banning them so they can cry censorship like a big baby, go right ahead.
_________________

H4, AT, FL, TFL, AWCL, CL, FSL, RLF, TUR, X-C
Aeros Stealth III 142

Thomas Jefferson wrote:
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Last edited by sg on Fri Dec 11, 2015 9:55 pm; edited 1 time in total

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 9:16 pm

Comet wrote:

sg wrote:

So you define censorship as breaking the rules and and posting anywhere you want? If you cant post absolutely anywhere, its censorship?

Nope... you are free to post in a ton of places here and anywhere on the internet. Oh look! You just did!!! Where is the censorship????? Your claim of censorship is absurd. This was was the absurd attitude BobK took on the HGAA forum.

We would vote on a set of rules. Special threads were started with rules associated with those threads that stated off topic posts would be deleted. Then BobK would flagrantly break every rule and s*** on every thread against the agreed upon rules, the group, then cry like a little baby about censorship.

You dont believe in moderation? Youre going to whine like a little cry baby???
Door is right there buddy ---->>>> (EXIT)

Seriously... anyone who cries about censorship because they cant post to 0.01% of threads with extra rules, while free to post anywhere else, *STFU* already. Ive had it with the cry babies.

I am shocked. This level of rage and cursing by the forum moderator is completely inappropriate and unprofessional. If this is hang gliding, I want nothing to do with it.

You can blame me, not hang gliding.
Ive had it up to here with Bob style cry babies. Cant take anymore. Yeah, im pissed.

Crying censorship at every possible moment when the tiniest of moderation occurs is not reasonable at all. Thats not what censorship is, and I wont accept this ridiculous definition at all.OVER IT. That crap ends today.
_________________

H4, AT, FL, TFL, AWCL, CL, FSL, RLF, TUR, X-C
Aeros Stealth III 142

Thomas Jefferson wrote:
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 10:07 pm Post subject: #109

Marcos70 wrote:

(parting shots removed)

So hacking into someones account & posting things under their name that they did not say & using that as justification to ban them off of the forum under false acusations that they are Bob K, whoever the f*** that is, is the definition of crazy...

SG, you need to talk to someone or maybe get one of those free hugs I see poeple in Ashland holding signs for. Seriously dude seek help.

Posted: Sat Dec 12, 2015 6:35 am Post subject: #110
Hacking? LOL. Can you get anymore dramatic? Its obvious he didn't write that... but ill edit it for you. Sorry, but when you take parting shots in an attempt to get banned, your graffiti doesnt get to stay in your hosts living room as your'e thrown out the door.'

" & using that as justification to ban them off of the forum" <--- THAT never happened, you are seriously confused here. I did not ban him for what I wrote. I banned him for the predictable attack designed to get banned.

I don't think he is Bobk. BobK proxies are people are refer to that work on behalf or act like BobK.

BobK refused to the follow the simplest of rules on the HGAA forum and turned it to complete crap. This was his MO. The group agreed that THIS thread was a voting thread. You can post your vote, thats it. Anything else would be deleted. Then of course he would post a long rant on the thread and immediately cry censorship when it was immediately deleted as stated by the rules.

The Donation thread in for donation posts only. All posts non-donation related will be deleted.

People who post there and then call me a censor, can cry me a river.

He called me a sensor, I called him out for being a cry baby. He attempted to get banned, he got banned. No surprises. The censor babies are not going to be coddled anymore.


I havent written a post (outside of dealing with immediate technical issues) in many many months. The DAY I come back, and moderate in the slightest, someone cries about censorship again, just like BobK.

OVEEEEER IT. If people want 100% moderation free anarchy, the cesspool known as 4CHAN is for you. If you cant handle the slightest bit of moderation without calling the mod a censor, you are not compatible with any forum period.

Could I have handled it better... yup, 100% correct. I agree. Im just way past my limit with coddling the vocal minority that bitches about every little thing.


Going to put my level headed hat back on now. My apologies for the ugliness, but this whiney crap ends today.
_________________

H4, AT, FL, TFL, AWCL, CL, FSL, RLF, TUR, X-C
Aeros Stealth III 142

Thomas Jefferson wrote:
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

A lot of that may have been changed by the time you read it, so this is here for historical reference.

I suspect that Jack Axaopoulos has made some sort of "arrangement" with USHPA to promote their RRG or he wouldn't be doing it. Many years ago Jack put together a "Lead Generation" program and pitched it to USHPA. I don't know the details, but it appears that USHPA turned him down (after Jack had put in a fair amount of work), and that sent Jack on the warpath against USHPA. At the time, I felt Jack might have been justified in how he was treated by USHPA, but then I saw how he defaced the Torrey Hawks forum which had been entrusted to his care (you can see it to this day at http://torreyhawksforum.org). After seeing that, there's no way that I would trust Jack Axaopoulos with control of anything.

Furthermore, he continues to tell lies about what happened to the HGAA. Jack claims that I asked him to change people's ballots. What Jack forgets to mention is that I withdrew from the race before the voting started and I endorsed Scott Wise for chairman. But Jack wanted to split the vote so he put me on the ballot anyway - against my clearly stated wishes. When I saw that I was on the ballot I suggested that Jack should either restart the vote (without me) or give my votes to Scott. That's what he's calling "voter fraud".

The fact that Jack Axaopoulos is pushing the USHPA RRG scheme lends further doubt to the credibility of USHPA's effort.

[Rick Masters]

I don't have a personal issue with Hanggliding.org or SG. Creators have a right to moderate their forums as they see fit, and by doing so make them more or less relevant. After my experience with Paragliding Forum's juvenile mentality and Oz Report's Christians vs. the lions mindset, I would just like to thank BobK for allowing me to post my admittedly unpopular opinions on US Hawks without interference.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies illustrated the importance of teaching ethics to children and what happens when this fails. I won't waste any more space here drawing parallels. But I would like to say "Thanks, Bob!" for providing a working forum where a few mature folks could present and discuss solutions to serious problems that affect the future of hang gliding.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Thanks to you, Rick. It's great to have a group of people working together for something they share.   

With regard to Jack Axaopoulos ("sg"), I wouldn't have had so much of a problem either if he just said that he didn't want some of us on his forum. But that's not what happened ...

When I started the Torrey Hawks, Jack volunteered to set up a forum for our club. Great. But when we came to a disagreement about the HGAA look what he did to our site at torreyhawksforum.org. Really, please click on that link and take a look.

He locked out all of our members and replaced the text in my own posts with his lies. Our club officers have asked for him to turn over the forum data (database of posts, registrations, personal messages, etc). He refused. He just lets it sit there year after years slandering good people and defaming the name of our club.

Look also at what happened to the HGAA before that. I had started a topic on hanggliding.org about building an alternate to USHPA in the spring of 2010. Jack Axaopoulos again stepped up and said he would build a forum for the new organization. I resisted moving to the new forum because I didn't want it to end up getting shot in the back in a dark alley. But that's exactly what happened there as well. We had all selected Scott Wise ("Wingspan") as our interim chairman. But when Scott was away on vacation, Jack Axaopoulos took that opportunity to lock down the entire forum and force an election of a replacement. Then he rigged the ballot by including my name when I clearly posted that I withdrew my candidacy if Scott decided to run - which he did. But Jack put my name on the ballot anyway to hopefully split the vote between Scott and myself. So I publicly requested to the entire team (including Jack) that since I was NOT supposed to be on the ballot, and that I had endorsed Scott, he should either count my votes toward Scott or restart the voting. He didn't want either and continued the crooked election to get the conclusion that he wanted. And if that weren't bad enough, he then accused ME of "voter fraud". How can that be voter fraud when I was making a public request? That's like saying that Al Gore was committing voter fraud by asking that "hanging chad" ballots be thrown out or counted. That's simply a request for how to conduct the election and not any kind of fraud.

Then Jack Axaopoulos went on to ban myself and Scott (and others) from the HGAA that we had founded. He spread lies at the sites he controlled, and they're there to this day.

I firmly believe that Jack was initially interested in starting the HGAA to compete with USHPA, but he hadn't thought it through. He hadn't considered that if the new HGAA really grew that it would compete with his own dominance and control at hanggliding.org. It would be a democratic organization with elected leaders who might not be "Jack Axaopoulos". As that began to sink in, I believe he decided that he had to kill it, and that's exactly what he did. Jack claimed that he was kicking us out to "grow" the new association. Well, he succeeded in kicking us out, but how much "growing" did he do? When was the last time you saw Jack advertising for people to join the HGAA? That should have been the banner on hanggliding.org recently - not this garbage about throwing more money at USHPA. Eventually the HGAA.org domain name was sold, but hangglidingassociationofamerica.org still remains. Go ahead and click on that link and see what's there. Take a look at the "ghost town" that became of our effort to start the precursor to the US Hawks. Why didn't Jack continue to advertise and grow that association? He had complete control and did nothing.

We learned our lessons from the HGAA disaster, and we've built the US Hawks much more slowly and carefully. You may also notice that we chose to use the same forum style (X-Silver) that Jack had used. That wasn't by accident. People on the HGAA were saying that they couldn't take sides against Jack because he was the "technological brains" behind the whole thing. "Oh dear, what would we do without him?"   I chose the same style as a statement that there was nothing special about Jack's site that we couldn't do better. I think we were up and running within just a few days of Jack's takeover of the HGAA. Unfortunately, Jack's main site (hanggliding.org) is hightly rated in Google's search engine for the phrase "hang gliding". One of the factors in ranking a site, is how many other highly rated sites link to the site being ranked. Jack set up his software to automatically change any link to the US Hawks site to something like "loserville.org". If you're not currently banned from there, go ahead and try to post a link to anything on the US Hawks. By the time you view it, it will have already been changed. That's completely against the original philosophy behind the World Wide Web, and it's another example of how Jack strongly controls what people can know in the sport of hang gliding.

In short, Jack Axaopoulos has been a petty, vindictive, back-stabbing, website-stealing disaster for the sport of hang gliding. He provides a place for "happy talk" about hang gliding while keeping the "sheeple" in line for USHPA. Now he's guiding his flock to UHSPA's doorstep ... to be fleeced.


So, how did you like that short review of modern hang gliding history?   

[Rick Masters]

When this page comes up

https://web.archive.org/web/20081112013318/http://www.torreyhawksforum.org/forums.php?sid=77d4b2ddc11b659e071d2d6c2061cd7b

click the bottom link.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Hi Rick!!!

Thanks for that link to the archive.org site. It's great that people are out there making records of what happens on the Internet. I remember reading George Orwell's "1984" when I was in high school. I remember the one thing that seemed a bit far fetched was the "Ministry of Truth" going around and rewriting all the books in the world. It always seemed to me that would be way too expensive, virtually impossible to do, and people would notice anyway. Of course, that was before the digital era. Now things can change in a heartbeat, at virtually no cost, and without leaving any trace.

With regard to the Torrey Hawks forum, I do have some copies of it from when it was first defaced (late 2010). I think the damage was pretty minimal then, and I can probably fix it by hand. But the problem with those copies (and the ones on archive.org) is that they are the HTML versions of the site and not the database that generates the HTML. Most forums (including the TorreyHawksForum) store all of their data in a "MySQL" database. When you view the site, the web server goes to the database, fetches the pages you want, formats them all nicely with the information that's public, and sends it to you as an HTML document. I have copies of those HTML documents, but unfortunately it's not an easy job to take that nice frilly HTML and extract out just what belongs in the database and put it into a new database (and some of the information doesn't even show up in the HTML version). It's not impossible, and I could do a reasonable job by hand, but it would be tedious and possibly error prone. On the other hand, it would be a very easy thing for Jack to just send me a copy of the database, and be done with it. That's the professional thing to do ... even if you hate the other guy's guts. It's what I will do if any of our local clubs decide to leave the US Hawks. That's my commitment to them.

Finally, even if I were to restore all the data, Jack is still hosting a bunch of lies on torreyhawksforum.org. That's the web site that we advertised in our newsletters, and there are still people who might go there and think that's our site. In fact, I got a call from my own 80+ year old mother a while back when she stumbled across that site. She wanted to know if was true that I committed voter fraud.  

There's really no way to excuse what Jack Axaopoulos has done in this case. It was highly unprofessional, vindictive, dishonest, and childish. Anyone thinking of hiring him to build a web site or trust him in any manner should consider how he handled his trusted role in managing the TorreyHawksForum.org website for our club. Just go there and take a look.

The saddest thing is that he controls the lion's share of communication between hang glider pilots in this country - as if having USHPA wasn't bad enough. Now it appears that they're working together ... they must really fear the US Hawks.

[Bill Cummings]

"

The saddest thing is that he controls the lion's share of communication between hang glider pilots in this country - as if having USHPA wasn't bad enough. Now it appears that they're working together ... they must really fear the US Hawks.

Of course they fear the US Hawks. Believing in the Hawks mission statement will reduce $upport for USHPA while keeping money in the pockets of the Hawks members.
I saw when sg changed a post by Al Hernandez to make it appear as if Al was admitting that he was a pedophile.
I haven't posted there since then. (Years.)
I FOR ONE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH sg. I DON'T TRUST HIM.

[Frank Colver]

I once left a forum, never to return, when I posted that I liked a certain brand of "micro-brew" ale. At that time this forum had no protection against someone posting as someone else. Someone posting as me posted that I drank so much of this ale that I had become a bed-wetter! There were multiple posts to that effect. I wondered if this person was just malicious or perhaps owned a competing brewery. That forum has become much more secure since that time but I still won't return to it. My point is that any forum that is being used to change a person's posting (without permission), or impersonate a person, should not be visited by anyone. It has become worthless trash to be discarded.

Frank