[Free]

Congratulations Michael, for launching the publicity of Joe Faust's unjust banning into another level. I hate to tell you this but you have already lost your argument. Where this was clear to me was when you wrote this:

Joe is fantastic. I love his thought streams. He gets me thinking in new directions on subjects I had never considered before.

With that being said, does nit ot give Joe super rights over everyone else. Joe and Jack have the same rights. When I am standing up for Jack’s rights, I am also standing up for Joe’s rights, because they have equal rights.

Your "standing up for Jack's rights" is not the same as standing up for Joe's rights.
I'll say that you can't do both. Its either one or the other.
Magenta ain't a color. There is no center line of a magenta blue sky.
http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html

The optics is almost poetic given your chosen nick name.
You can't straddle a magenta line.

But all is not lost and you can stop losing sleep over this. I lost some last night but not any more if I can help it.
I know several people here are having sleep disturbances over this. Late night/early morning postings.
It can all go away as soon as you recognize the error of your thinking.
Bob trolled you so bad you don't yet realize how hard you have been hit.
He owns you on this one. 3-D for shizzle..

I'll still defend your right not to do as he says, if that was ever the case.
You failed,in my eyes, the moment you wrote this:

When I am standing up for Jack’s rights, I am also standing up for Joe’s rights, because they have equal rights.

What happened to Joe is not a legal question unless Joe chooses to make it one.
You were only asked about the ethics of the banning and unless you are claiming some superior knowledge of absolutely unsettled law, your opinion on that is worth about the same as mine.
But ethics vs blackrobe fiction, it's ethics that is being argued here.
Get on board and see the conflict go away. Then you start sleeping better.

[Free]

So I woke up last night with a mental streaming. I think most of you call it dreaming.
For years I went a long time between dreams when I used to dream in color and flying by spreading my arms like wings.
I used to stretch my glide by pure will, in my dreams. Mostly over fields and creeks of my childhood farm.
Those were the best.
Then there were dreams of trains I was driving running off the rails at high speeds. I think they call those nightmares.
And there was too much time where dreams didn't seem to come anymore.
That was some of the worst times of my life. I think I was lucky to survive those times, those years.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I woke to a dream last night and couldn't go back to sleep.
It was railroad connected and it probably didn't help that I use DVDs to put myself to sleep.
Some subjects turn the brain off so fast that I can use the same video for days before getting through the whole movie.
Lately I've been binge watching "Breaking Bad" . Season 4. At season 3 it got pretty dark at times. Bryan Cranston. Wow.

So I wake up to losing my job at the railroad, basically. It's happened in real time twice before but I haven't dreamed railroad in a long time.
The second time I was fired permanently, it took. This occurred just before a big time lawyer and the son of a lawyer stole my flying career along with
a one fifth ownership of a Dragonfly.

How much stress can a person handle at one time. I was fighting a major corporation for my livelihood after it had already stolen my family.
I kinda had nothing at that point.
Back to my country roots, at the same time, unbeknownst to me at that time, 2 of my three siblings conspired to cut me out of the family farm.
Simple legal voodoo. They took my poor widowed mother, in failing health, out to eat one day and then stopped by a cheezy layers office on the town square and had her sign papers for ... don't know what they told her but what she signed was a Beneficiary Deed that cut me out. My sister worked for lawyers for years.
She knew the ropes. I was the dope.

Anyway, to be continued.
Warren

[Bob Kuczewski]

Today I found myself rewatching the iconic 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial



I looked it up on Wikipedia and found the "Big Brother" speech in writing:

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

That was 37 years ago. Today we live in a world where our "Big Brothers" are Jack Dorsey (Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). They have implemented "the Information Purification Directives" forewarned in that 1984 advertisement. But they are not alone. There are "Little Brothers" everywhere like Jack Axaopolous and Davis Straub who practice exactly the same "Information Purification" censorship and revisionist history predicted by George Orwell in his prophetic "1984".

There are certainly many "Jack Axaopolous and Davis Straub" topics where I might have posted this, but I think Warren's topic title was the best fit. Thanks Warren. I hope your dreams have more of this ...

"I used to dream in color and flying by spreading my arms like wings. I used to stretch my glide by pure will, in my dreams. Mostly over fields and creeks of my childhood farm."

... and less of this ...

"Then there were dreams of trains I was driving running off the rails at high speeds. I think they call those nightmares."

[KaiMartin]

Just a quick note on the nature of magenta. Every colour of the spectrum of white light is of course a colour. But the same spectrum does not contain all colours a human can perceive. How is this even possible?

Well, our colour vision relies on three kinds of light sensitive "cone" cells. The sensitivity of the cone cells is fairly broad. They all "see" light from the whole visible spectrum. Its just that they are most sensitive at a certain wavelength. A little simplified, they preferably react to light with wavelength 564 nm, 563 nm and 420 nm. Light that contains only one of these wavelengths is known as "red", "green" and "blue".

When we see light that contains just one wavelength, it not only "tickles" the cone that fits its wavelength. The other two get excited too, just to a lesser degree. Our hardwired neuronal network uses the relative strength of the excitement to assign a colour. That way, we can perceive vastly more colour tones than just the three given by the sensitivity maxima of the cone cells.

A spectrum as produced by a glass prism works by presenting exclusively one wavelength to the eye. Each of these wavelengths will excite all three types of cones by a characteristic relative strength. However not all relative strengths correspond to a wavelength. Consider the case where the blue and the red cones get lots of excitement but the green cones kind of miss out. It is impossible to achieve this situation with a single wavelength. However, it is easy if we allow for a combination of pure blue (420 nm) and pure red (564 nm) light. The perception of this situation is called "magenta".

---<)kaimartin(>---

[Bob Kuczewski]

Interesting side discussion.

From Wikipedia:

500px-Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.svg.png (41.46 KiB) Viewed 1271 times

I've been dealing with the RGB space in various forms (cube, HSV cones etc) for decades. It never really dawned on me that these 3 colors might be directly mapped to RGB "hardware" in the eye.

Thanks for that insight.

Also, the clearest example of how our visual system synthesizes colors comes from the color "white". Where is "white" in the electromagnetic spectrum shown above? It's not there! The color we call "white" is synthesized in the brain when we get proportionally equal amounts of input from red, green, and blue. So we can synthesize (perceive) many colors not in the electromagnetic spectrum by assigning values to combinations of red, green, and blue that are detected by our cones.

As for the original topic, it's interesting to note that censorship in Hang Gliding predated the current wave of "Cancel Culture" by at least a decade. Of course the desire of humans to silence other humans has been evident on every playground since the dawn of civilization ("shut up or I'll punch you in the face"). But most people have tended to grow out of it by their teens and learned to use logic over fists. Unfortunately, that level of maturity is increasingly absent these days. The banning of Joe Faust and others from major hang gliding conversations is a shameful disgrace. Warren's play on Michael Grisham's screen name ("MagentaBlueSky") highlights the artificial nature of Grisham's defense of Jack banning Joe. Grisham can synthesize some "justification" just as "magenta" is synthesized by the human eye. But the reality tells a different story. The sport of hang gliding is damaged by the banning of voices and the fracturing of the community. That's a fact regardless of any spin or justification by Grisham and others.

Also, Warren's topic title ("Jack Axaopolous' Black Hole of Tyranny: HG.org") is extremely accurate. Jack Axaopolous has destroyed vast aspects of hang gliding history by completely erasing all posts from anyone he doesn't like. You will read certain topics and find references to posts and discussions that are no longer present on the forum. Jack uses threats of similarly "erasing" other people's contributions to maintain his tyranny over them. For example, Tom "Red" Howard is a long time contributor on hanggliding.org. Tom has made decades of posts to that forum. It is a significant part of Tom's legacy on this planet. Jack holds Tom's entire legacy of posts under threat of obliteration with a few keystrokes. Every post Tom makes gives Jack more power over him. Tom is now "owned" by Jack, and the same is true for everyone else who uses these "free" public sites (hanggliding.org, ozreport.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many more).

This "owning" of pilots by forum operators is similar to USHPA's "owning" of pilots by their ratings. Those ratings were earned by those pilots and should forever be their property. But USHPA has asserted and exercised their ability to destroy a pilot's hard earned ratings for their own purposes. This is a shameful legacy for USHPA.

[Bill Cummings]

We can now add Google to the cancel culture in this thread.
Talk of new legislation to ban assault weapons had me researching
information on ammunition for ar15 rifles.
After awhile I was blocked by a Google notification that I am
now kicking myself for not taking a screenshot. The notification
admonished me for not following Google Guidelines. I hadn’t posted
a single letter of the alphabet. I was searching for information that
was in the rule making process before the legislature. All of a sudden
I’m blocked by some automated algorithm set up by a
nameless committee probably sitting in a safe room with flowers and
butterflies painted on the wallpaper. I’m not sure if I have a strike
against me or not. All I am sure of is that I was blocked by Google for
looking for information about current gun legislation.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that a screenshot of my
blocking would have been a copyright infringement on my part.