JayB

If I'm not mistaken, you took the same swipes at me when, three years ago, I said that Bush had lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. Then, as now, you all too often prefer to take stabs at some cartoon character of "the left" or some ridiculous distortion of someone's argument than to simply discuss the issue. Have a nice day, fighting the X-men. There are no accidents, mistakes, bad-judgments, or any other mechanisms operative in your world other than cabals, conspiracies, etc. Consequently your arguments provide their own parody. Yes. The US military knowingly and intentionally let Bin Laden escape because we really just needed a pretext to seize control over the vast oil supplies that the Taliban was sitting on top of. It honestly wouldn't surprise me to learn that you also believe that the attacks on the WTC were orchestrated by the Bush Administration and unfairly pinned on Bin Laden as part of the larger conspiracies that you are constantly alluding to whenever you put forth one of your "arguments."

You've neglected to include the manner in which the Zionist Cabal secretly secured the release of Bin Laden, cloned him, and are propogating copies of him in a subterranian embryo-farm as part of their plan to manipulate the US into unwittingly furthering their master-plan to seize control of the world, Matt. Tisk, tisk.

Nope. Our role in Iraq, and the Middle East in general - for 75 years or more - has been to play one state against another, or one faction against another, in the interest of maintaining access to oil. American oil got involved in Saudi Arabia in the 1930's and the President formally announced that defense of Saudi oil was important to U.S. interests in World War II. Our desire for access to the oil was a larger part of the reason for our support of the Shah, in 1941 and again ten years later. It was also behind our support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980's. And on and on. Some say our invasion of Afghanistan had more to do with oil than with Bin Laden, and it sure looks as if we weren’t really trying to capture the bad guy so much as to replace an unfriendly government with one more pliable. Go back to history class. The collapse of the Muslim empire happened in several stages starting nearly a thousand years ago and sure there are many Islamists who would like to see a return to the glory days. It is true that we helped set up Israel as a Jewish state. But the major drivers behind our foreign policy in the region have been related to the oil found there. George Bush and buddies did not decide to invade Iraq because they wear turbans - they played up the significance of their attire in order to derive the support of a racist and nationalistic American public. When 22 hijackers from Saudia Arabia killed 3,000 of "our own," they responded by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, where governments were not so willing to go along with American oil money interest. They did not attack or even really sanction Saudi Arabia. The fundamental thesis behind your "broader view of history" is that all of history that predates direct American involvement in the Middle East actually had no effect on the Islamic world, and that all developments that have transpired since that time owe their genesis to American foreign policy initiatives. They have no sense of history that eclipses America's rise as a world power, and have no active agenda of their own that they would pursue in the absence of American intervention in their affairs. Broader view of history indeed. Can you discuss the significance of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Sayyid Qutb, or Muhammad Ali (hint, not the boxer) without recourse to Google?

I realize that may have been joking, but Bush did not 'have Muslims attacking.' Some creeps flew planes into our buildings. So what if they happened to be Muslims. If Bush 'has Muslims attacking' now, it's because he declared a war on Muslims, which for lack of a better explanation (like propagandizing us into bewildered fear and support) sounds like the very dumbest response to 9/11. Yes, and the guys who were stuffing the Jews into gas chambers just "happened" to be Nazis....

Blind supporter of the Democrats? Probably not. I am arguing that your hatred for the current administration has blinded you in certain fundamental respects, and left you unable to contemplate serious strategic or political issues in any fashion that is not congruent with your hostility to the Bush administration. I don't think it's moral to ignore who's actually doing the killing in Iraq in order to advance my domestic political agenda, much less grant those doing the killing the title, much less the high moral stature that comes with the term "freedom fighters," much less ignore the fact that objective of both our policies and sacrifices in Iraq has been to limit the civilian death toll, rather than to increase it, etc, etc, etc - all for the same reason.

I'm saying that your stance is nakedly partisan, and that this - rather than any serious moral considerations - has determined your position from the get go, and your attempts to argue to that moral considerations, rather than political ones, are so transparently shallow and insincere that they establish this fact at least as clearly as stark admission of the same. It's hardly worth the effort to point out the fact that per your argument, the "millitary coercion" used to bring the killing in Bosnia/Kosovo to a close would also qualify as terrorism, as would the threat to use millitary force to halt the slaughter in Darfur, etc.

I don't actually find the prospect of Hillary in the Oval Office horrifying. She may advocate and try to implement policies that I oppose, but the prospect of someone sitting in the Oval Office who doesn't always support legislation that I am in favor of would hardly be sufficient cause for me to lose the capacity to differentiate between my personal political interests, the interests of her administration, and the national interest - much less lose the perspective necessary to assign the proper weighting to these three considerations - which seems to have happened to a large sector of the Democratic base over the course of the past few years. If having a Democrat in the White House would reverse this trend, that would be a welcome development indeed. As things stand, you seem to have lost the capacity to make elementary moral judgments that are untainted by your passionate loathing for this administration. Let's suppose, for the sake of this argument - that one were to accept your characterizations of the President. You seem to be arguing that the existence of "the world's number one terrorist" negates the possibility of the definition having any objective meaning. "I believe that the president of the United States is a terrorist," ergo there are no terrorists, only "those who we call terrorists." If "those who we call terrorists are not, in fact, terrorists, they must be something else. What are they, exactly? I'd love to see you develop this argument further if this is what you actually believe.* Even if we grant that all killing of human beings is ultimately physically equivalent, you seem to be arguing that all killing is morally equivalent as well. There are various degrees of responsibility for civilian deaths in warfare - ranging from direct responsibility in those cases where a nation uses its military to intentionally target and kill civilians as a matter of policy, and extremely indirect responsibility in the case where the disruption to the normal conduct of life and/or commerce that results from the decision goes to war leads to more civilian deaths that would have resulted from taking no action whatsoever. It's one thing to accept that the US is responsible in the latter of the two senses, quite anther to argue for the former and completely ignore who is actually doing the killing in Iraq, the fact that they are doing so intentionally, and to completely ignore the fact that this country has made staggering sacrifices in an effort to prevent Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the actions of "those who we call terrorists." I'm quite confident you would not be making these arguments if there was a Democrat in the White house that had decided to invade Iraq or anywhere else - and that's both sad and profoundly disturbing because I think that this is broadly characteristic of the political Left these days. This does not bode well for the West. *Further, if you are sincere in your conviction that the President, the elected leader of your country, is *actually* a terrorist - not in the adjectival sense, but in the literal sense - let alone the "world's number one terrorist," then your current repose is quite puzzling. If I felt the same way that you claim to feel, with the passion and sincerity that you claim to feel - I would have left the country and renounced my citizenship, at a minimum.

I completely agree. But that goes equally for GWB and company as it does for those we call the terrorists. Our man George described our campaign as a Crusade, and has used the "clash of civilizations" metaphor repeatedly. He's amped up the religious zealots on both sides (to the extent there are really just two sides). I think our pal Selkirk might argue that a good old fashioned fascist could have / would have done the same thing. And he is right. But the religious component is certainly dangerous. Some of these guys at the very top are looking for Armageddon, for gawd's sake! Is there such a thing as a terrorist, or do they all fall into the category of "those we call terrorists."? If Hillary Clinton were to occupy the Oval Office, and were to articulate a set of arguments against the same set of behaviors that GWB, Tony Blair, and others have classified as terrorism - and her secular bona fides were sufficiently well established in your eyes, would Osama et al magically transmute from "those we call terrorists" into plain old terrorists despite the absence of any change in their tactics or motivations?

I'm sure that if you were to head to their camp and set them straight vis-a-vis their misappropriation of their own faith - they'd be happy to accept your authority on the manner and accept that your interpretation of their motivations is more accurate than their own understanding of the same. It would also be useful in this context if you'd take a bit more time to define what - exactly - you mean by "freedom" here when you refer to "Freedom Fighter." Is suspect that this is an outgrowth of the nostrum that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." One man's rapist my be another man's romantic, but the mere fact that there are people who are incapable of making moral distinctions between rape and consensual sex doesn't erase the vast objective differences between the two acts, much less establish their equivalence as an axiom that anyone who rejects this categorization is bound to grant any legitimacy to. Surely you are not talking about political freedom, nor freedom of conscience, nor freedom of the press or any other aspect of what could reasonable be included rational definition of the term "freedom," all of which are categorically outside of the set of objectives that Islamists include in their list of the policy goals they'd like to pursue should they ever secure power in any given arena that they happen to be active in at the moment.

Tarriffs and subsidies that prevent them from selling their goods in the US market is also helping them out quite a bit. To assist in liberalizing trade is a sin, and to sin would be wrong...

I think that one could throw a dart at Deuteronomy or pretty much any other section of the Bible and come up with a fairly effective argument to the contrary. Modern secular liberal (classical) values have rendered most Christians relatively peaceful and tolerant, but the credit here goes to modernity and liberalism, rather than Christianity.

"What lessons for today? IN CENTRAL ASIA, Lenin and Trotsky were attempting to win a predominantly Muslim peasant population, who were fighting for their national rights, to the banner of world revolution, against a background of the desperate struggle for survival of the first workers’ state. In Britain today, we are attempting to win an oppressed minority of the working class to the banner of socialism. In most senses, ours is a far easier task. The vast majority of Muslims in Britain are part of the working class, and many work in ethnically-mixed workplaces, especially in the public sector. The mass anti-war movement gave a glimpse of the potential for a united movement of the working class, with Muslims playing an integral role. The formation of a new mass workers’ party, campaigning in a class way on both the general issues and against racism and Islamaphobia, would act as an enormous pole of attraction to working-class Muslims at the same time as beginning to cut across racism and prejudice. However, the lack of such a party at the present time encapsulates the difficulties that we face. In the 1990s, the collapse of the regimes that existed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union provided world capitalism with the opportunity to dismiss socialism as a failure (they falsely equated socialism with these Stalinist regimes). This allowed the ruling classes to conduct an ideological onslaught against the ideas of socialism. The rightwing of the Labour Party, and of social democracy worldwide, used this opportunity to abandon any vestiges of socialism in their programme, and to become clearly capitalist parties. Over a decade after the collapse of Stalinism, a new generation is drawing the conclusion that capitalism is incapable of meeting the needs of humanity – a minority is beginning to draw socialist conclusions. Nonetheless, consciousness still lags behind objective reality – and socialism has not yet become a mass force. Given the vacuum that therefore exists, radical young people are searching for a political alternative. A small minority of young Muslims in Britain are looking towards right-wing political Islamic organisations like Al-Muhajiroun. The lack of alternative offered by such organisations is summed up by their opposition to the anti-war movement because it involved demonstrating alongside non-Muslims. The majority of young radical Muslims were repelled by Al-Muhajiroun and company, and understood the need for a united anti-war movement. The potential to build a strong base for socialists amongst Muslims undoubtedly exists – but only if we both engage and argue the case for socialism." http://www.socialismtoday.org/87/islam.html Plenty more where these came from, kemosabe.

Here's an answer from self-described progressive Muslim. "What historically distinguishes leftwing ideas is their commitment to the poor and dispossessed, and to the fight for equality, anti-racism, anti-colonialism and national self-determination. Herein, perhaps, lies the clue to the emerging unity between sections of the left and sections of the Muslim community that are bearing the brunt of imperialism abroad in terms of brutal military intervention and at home, where justifications for such actions are sought using anti-Muslim rhetoric. In resisting imperialism, Muslims and the left are fighting a common enemy and developing their own ties of friendship forged through struggle and mutual solidarity." http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/salma_yaqoob/2006/08/not_so_bright_martin.html.printer.friendly

Although I agree with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other speakers who have made the same arguments, As a non-believer I care less about the particulars of a given religious creed and quite a bit more about the manner in which the adherents conduct themselves. Your true religion - the fundamental beliefs that actually govern your behavior here in the real world where the rubber meets the road - represent your true faith. Quakers - nutty theology but peaceful lives. Fine by me. What puzzles me is that the folks on the Left who spare no effort in excoriating Christian fundamentalists seem to have adopted a much different stance towards Islamists. Despising conservative Christians because they - say - tend to oppose full legal equality for gays makes sense if that's a cause that you are passionately engaged in, but how one can hold these beliefs and at the same time hardly summon a shrug when confronted with the facts concerning the legal status and treatment of gays in countries where Islamic law prevails? Ditto for women's rights, separation of church and state, freedom of the press, and pretty much any other cause that anyone who claims to be a liberal - either in the modern or classical sense - should be concerned with championing around the globe. In one sense, I can understand this in the context of "near enemy" versus "far enemy" thinking, in which they perceive the Christian right to be more threatening because of their capacity to effect political changes here in the US that are at odds with their vision for the country, but I still don't quite understand the relative insouciance that has generally characterized the Left's* response to Islamists and the rise of Islamism. Maybe a self-annointed representative of the Left can explain the incongruity to me. *Honorable exceptions being Christopher Hitches, Salman Rushdie, and a few others.

That's what the attorney representing the skier claimed. IMO the whole notion of "engineering" jumps in terms of known, definable inputs in the same manner that one would engineer a suspension bridge or an electrical circuit is a ludicrous. Anyhow - more inputs from the rumor mill concerning the other major injuries on this feature: "You really need to dig deeper before you come to a conclusion like that. The guy that broke his back was an idiot hucker that was trying a backflip with no backflip experience (even on a trampoline) And the kid that died dropped into a jump from approximately 300 vertical feet higher than was needed to land in the sweet spot, he also had no shirt on, and was on drugs." "Ironically, Booth Creek owns and operates Snow Park Technologies, an internationally renowned terrain-park design firm run by Chris Gunnarson, who is considered one of the world's leaders in development, design and construction of terrain parks. Gunnarson and SPT designed several Winter X Games courses and are in charge of designing parks at all six Booth Creek resorts, including Snoqualmie. While Gunnarson and his team designed the park and the park guidelines at Snoqualmie, local crews are in charge of maintaining the park."

If someone finds a way to make a kickers with 25 foot-plus tables "safe" by any means other than having a snow-cat mow them down, that'd be quite a feat. The reality is that hitting kickers - even hypothetical kickers custom tuned by a panel of NASA engineers between each hit - is inherently dangerous. There was a kid in Colorado who had pro-caliber skills that died attempting a 360 on a moderately sized jump. This is about as probable as Dean Potter falling to his death while soloing a fourth class ridge - but it happened. As with Diving Boards, so it will be with Terrain Parks. "I'm now an official victim of the trial lawyers. So are my kids and the 800 members of our community pool that opened this summer without a high diving board. The three-meter board had been a fixture of our pool at Chesterbrook Swim Club in Fairfax County, Va., for as long as anyone can remember. But the county has declared that it can no longer afford to pay the liability insurance for it--and so we've been grounded. Most of the parents and kids share my disappointment at being cheated out of one of the great joys of summertimes past. No high board means no more "atomic" cannonballs, can openers, jack knives and watermelons, the kind of attention-grabbing dives that boys love to perform, sending a quarter of the pool's water spraying onto unsuspecting sunbathers nearby. And no more graceful teenage girls either, performing double flips with a twist, entering the water with hardly a ripple. So why can't we just have a sign that reads: "Jump off this board at your own risk"? Some of our club members, many of whom are lawyers, say the elimination of the high board is for the safety of "the children." And not just the children in Fairfax County, mind you. Diving boards are disappearing across America. The insurance industry says that most pool-construction companies won't even install the boards anymore out of fear of lawsuits. Texas lawmakers earlier this year enacted a de facto prohibition on diving boards by making the safety standards so stringent that few existing pools can meet them without spending millions of dollars. (The law would require, for instance, that the deep end be made several feet deeper.) As Dallas Magazine informed its readers a couple of weeks ago: "You can kiss your cannonball goodbye." But why? Has there been an epidemic of diving accidents? I asked that question of our own pool manager. He assures me that the number of serious high board injuries at Chesterbrook pool since it was first erected more than 20 years ago is exactly zero. Under a rational insurance model, our premiums should be going down, not up--after all, we've proved that we're not a gang of drunk divers. The Consumer Product Safety Commission calculates that there are about 50,000 serious injuries or drownings at pools each year. That's a big number. But diving board accidents are actually rare. Hard data are difficult to come by, but Pool and Spa News estimates that, out of the millions of jumps and dives off high boards each year, there are, on average, fewer than 20 spinal injuries. Most head injuries actually occur from people diving off the pool's ledge into the shallow end. Diving boards actually reduce these types of injuries because they visually tip off swimmers about which end of the pool is deep. Moreover, the number of annual injuries from diving boards is a fraction of the number from bicycles, playgrounds, tackle football, bungee jumping, skiing and even walking across the street. Which brings us back to the trial lawyers. Diving accidents may be rare, but when they occur, lawyers become relentless in their quest for a jackpot jury verdict. In one famous 1993 case, a 14-year-old boy in Washington state took a "suicide dive"--headfirst with no arms out for protection--off the board of a neighbor's pool. He was tragically paralyzed from the neck down when he hit his head on the bottom of the pool. Despite the boy's own unsafe behavior, the parents' legal team sued every imaginable party--the neighbors, the pool-construction company, the diving-board manufacturer, the pool industry--and the family won a $10 million jury award. Ever since, it's been off to the races. Even cases in which there is no negligence on anyone's part can lead to jury awards of $5 million or more. The plaintiff attorneys often walk off with up to half the loot. "This day and age, you can pretty much sue anyone for anything if there's an injury involved," a spokesman from the Pool and Spa Institute tells me. But the diving-board dilemma is not just a legal matter; it's a cultural one. We Americans have become so risk averse when it comes to our children that we now see unacceptable dangers from even the most routine activities. We have created peanut-butter-free school zones, "soft" baseballs, army figures without guns, parks without seesaws, and full body armor for bike riding. It's not even clear that all these risk-reducing measures keep us safer. The research shows that boys will be boys (the vast majority of sporting accidents involve young males). If they can't get their thrills from diving boards, they will find other risky activities. When I was in college, I lived in a two-story apartment complex with a pool in the middle. There was no diving board, so we climbed on the roof--sometimes drunk--took a running start, leaped across 10 or 15 feet of cement walkway and plunged into the pool. It was incredibly dangerous and incredibly exhilarating. And we did it not even knowing that, if we undershot and broke our necks, we would have had grounds for a million-dollar lawsuit."

'..why do you keep on bringing up "mass marketing campaigns and media saturation?" Manufactured Dissent.

"The hallmark of a respresentative government is that we collectively decide what is okay and what isn't. Excuse me if I misjudge you, but you seem outraged at my suggestion that simply by chosing to live in a society and accept the benefits of its government, you are voluntarily forfeiting your personal freedoms to the will of collective opinion." "No, it does not pertain to those things, until the damage done to society outweighs the philosophical (and administrative) appeal of freedom. You are free to do whatever you want, until it fucks too much with the rest of us. And yes, becoming a drug addict fucks with the rest of us enough that we have laws to discourage that behavior." And.. "No, "harm to the rest of society," consists of injury to or infringement of the rights of specific individuals. Otherwise, how is there any harm?" Are conflicting statements that cannot be reconciled with one another when it comes to the manner in which people treat their own bodies. With regards to the first statement, are you channeling Robespierre here? The primary benefit of our government is the specific boundaries that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights draws around a set of personal freedoms which are not and should never be subject to "the will of collective opinion." Even in those realms where the law stipulates that "the will of collective opinion matters," it's filtered through and limited by the various branches of government, and ultimately it's constitutional legitimacy - not any popular will - that matters. And finally, are all people who use illegal drugs addicts? I think the evidence suggests otherwise. There are laws to protect others from the specific harm that any other individual - addict, madman, sociopath, etc - may commit, so there are already mechanisms for addressing any specific harm that they may cause others. Overeating leads to obesity which has massive costs for society, unprotected sex leads to the transmission of a litany of diseases which the public will have to pay the treatment of - etc. There are a million private behaviors which, while not directly harming anyone else, have public consequences. Your contention that drug use is unique in this respect, and that laws that criminalize drug use rely on arguments that couldn't also be applied to other private behaviors is just plain wrong.

Just keeping checking the board and you should have no problems hooking up with folks. If you are into cracks, put "The Bend" at Tieton on your hit-list. Mostly single pitch, but the quality, quantity, and density makes it worth the trip for sure. Not sure if you hit the Platte much while you were in Colorado, but the Bend is pretty comparable to Turkey Rocks in terms of all of these qualities. And it's pretty much always dry and sunny over there, so you should feel right at home.

Wow. Where to begin? It should suffice to say that every argument that you put forth concerning the potential harm to the rest of society could just as well pertain to food, gambling, unprotected sex, or pretty much any other facet of human behavior that one could imagine. The notion that something as inherently vague and subjective as "harm to the rest of society," as opposed to direct injury to or infringement of the rights of specific individuals should serve as the principle which defines the boundaries of individual liberty - beyond which the state may not cross - is much more frightening in its implications and rife with much greater potential for abuse than any "corporate interest" operating in a market economy could ever hope to exert. What can be done? How about accepting that a society in which people exercise their liberties in a manner which you don't happen to personally approve of - and in the process of which some people harm themselves - is infinitely more resistant to becoming enslaved, subject to wholesale indoctrination, and any other gross abuse of power than a society in which the state is endowed with the power to forcibly "protect" citizens from engaging in activities which - however distasteful, wasteful, or unjustifiably risky others may find them - bring no direct harm to others.

Moderately off-topic here, but.. How did you know you had costochondritis, and how long did it take to go away? I've had pain in my rib-cage after running, lifting, paddling - basically anything involving torso-twisting ever since the last 1/3rd of the season - when I took my most severe beatings in the park. I'm wondering if I may have just repeatedly bruised the hell out of the tissue surrounding my ribcage and its taking a long time to heal.

Uncritically accepting virtually ever proposition put forth by Chomsky and adopting them en-masse as the core of your own world-view hardly puts one in a position to lament a generalized susceptibility to "mind control" in others.

From Larry Flynt: "The Reverend Jerry Falwell and I were arch enemies for fifteen years. We became involved in a lawsuit concerning First Amendment rights and Hustler magazine. Without question, this was my most important battle--the 1988 Hustler Magazine, Inc., v. Jerry Falwell case, where after millions of dollars and much deliberation, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in my favor. My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling. The most important result of our relationship was the landmark decision from the Supreme Court that made parody protected speech, and the fact that much of what we see on television and hear on the radio today is a direct result of my having won that now famous case which Falwell played such an important role in."

Never been to Blackcomb huh? Lineups on the big park all day. Whistler/Blackcomb takes an interesting approach, with separate use fees for the big park, and mandatory helmets. They have also been building top notch parks for more than a decade. The Pass frankly used to buld piss poor parks and severely lagged behind the times. I havent ridden snowboard parks much in the last few years, but I hear they have finally gotten better. Big jumps are not necessarily a lot more dangerous, but they do need to be built properly. Usually that means a long steep landing. The pass had a tendency to build decently sized, but by no means large jumps, with a very short steep landing. Unless you had the speed just right you either didnt make the landing, or you clear the landing, which hurts a lot. People complained constantly, but they didnt ever respond. I think the management figured that the less mass a jump had, the safer it inherently was. I have mixed feelings about the verdict, on one hand it points out the poor practices of the ski area. On the other hand riding a snowboard park has inherent risks and you pretty much assume you will get hurt pretty bad from time to time. I've hit the Blackcomb parks from time to time for ~10 years, and was just there for a week about a month ago, and spent about 1/2 of my time in the park. Even on the weekend, there was never a line for the biggest jumps outside of the XL park. Mid-sized jumps yes, big ones, no. Maybe this is atypical for Whistler, but even back East where there's absolutely nothing worthwhile to ski outside the park, the biggest jumps tend to have a crew of ~20 dudes in their late teens that run laps on them, and when they aren't riding together, there's just no lines for the biggest stuff. Anyhow - this is peripheral. There are good jumps and bad jumps, and some are safer than others - but it's hard to imagine building a jump that's safe for all skill levels under all conditions. Conditions change all day - the inrun may get soft and a starting point that put you right in the landing's sweet spot may leave you decking out in a massive way in the afternoon, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc - and the inverse could happen and put you way into the flats in backbreaking land if you don't judge the speed correctly. I've certainly done both, but it was my fault for misjudging the conditions. Even if the resort had provided physicist and an engineer at the start of the inrun to tell me the exact speed I'd need to hit the landing just right, and provided me with a spedometer - that doesn't guarantee that I wouldn't biff the jump in some fashion or another and wreck myself in a spectacular fashion.

Just for reference purposes, this is a pro skier getting 36 feet of air off of a 20+ foot quarter pipe after being towed downhill by a snowmobile.