Peter_Puget

Link' More reason to vote Bush even if you think he is the anti-christ. PP

FYI Here is an example of a double standard: The Hollywood elite saying how bad the black listing was of communists during the cold war and the same elites threatened blacklisitng of Mel Gibson. Read Entertainment Weekly 2/17 edition or NYT Magazine. Sad but typical liberal behavior.

precisely, and let's not discuss the bush administration squeezing the aristide government. charges have repeatedly been made by members of congress about noriega's ingerence in haiti's affairs, but we would not read about it in Faux News. also they won't let the UN handle it because it's our backyard. the french have already said they were ready to move in under UN mandate. No oil is why France is willing to move. Ignorance - exactly.

You keep saying that Dru but they include lots of new routes that were never in the Campbell guide.

You might glance at the Select Guide if you have longer climbs in mind as it has better topos. Esp of the Apron area. PP

Amazing

It depends fully on if you have done that approach before. I started up it once just to check it out and figured it was not worth the effort and went swimming instead. I am not sure if you plan to spend the night on Big Sandy or not? In any case the bottom pitches are very straight forward and easy. The first one or two might be worth fixing but I wouldn't fix more than that. If your mind was set on a bivi you might consider a bivi lower on the route. Big Sandy smelled really bad when I was there and the ledge on pitch 11 had excretions from all human orifices - male and female. I was grossed out and glad I was passing thru. Other people planned on sleeping at those locations. I heard that the night beofre we started seven people were on Big Sandy. Of course the view from Big Sandy can't be beat.

Link US senators' personal stock portfolios outperformed the market by an average of 12 per cent a year in the five years to 1998, according to a new study. "The results clearly support the notion that members of the Senate trade with a substantial informational advantage over ordinary investors," says the author of the report, Professor Alan Ziobrowski of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He admits to being "very surprised" by his findings, which were based on 6,000 financial disclosure filings and are due to be published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. "The results suggest that senators knew when to buy their common stocks and when to sell." First-time Senators did especially well, with their stocks outperforming by 20 per cent a year on average - a result that very few professional fund managers would be able to achieve. "It could be argued that the junior senators most recently came out of private industry, so may have better connections. Seniority was definitely a factor in returns," says Prof Ziobrowski. There was no difference in performance between Democrats and Republicans. A separate study in 2000, covering 66,465 US households from 1991 to 1996 showed that the average household's portfolio underperformed the market by 1.44 per cent a year, on average. Corporate insiders (defined as senior executives) usually outperform by about 5 per cent. The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year. Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale. When adjusted by the size of stocks, the total portfolio returns outperformed by 12 per cent a year on average. The study used a total market index as the benchmark for comparison. The study took eight years to complete because there was no database of information and the documents had to be gathered and examined manually. Stocks held in blind trusts are not included in the disclosure documents.

I am educated enough to believe this is not correct but I am willing to entertain the possibilty I may be incorrect. Source please. As far a education I remember my father telling me a story about a friend of his from Norway who learned the first year of calc and physic while in high school. My fatehr remembers being jealous of that fact. The twister is this guy was in high school during WW2! He moved to the US PP

Things aren't so bad---- I forgot where I saw this calculation done but it is interesting: Let's look at some of the best jobs that have been lost to robots or foreigners. In 1913, Henry Ford instituted the $5 day for a 9 hour shift. These jobs were hard assembly line positions, but were extremely desirable work. With changes in technology, these jobs were lost. For their day, these jobs earned double the average manufacturing wage. But they are nothing special to speak of in today's terms. Deflating the $5 a day wage by the CPI-U Ford's $5 a day is a wage of 5*(184/9.9)=$93 per day in 2003 dollars, or $10.35 per hour. The average Wal-Mart employee working in the grocery section--by some cc.com posters' accounts, some of the WORST JOBS EVER--makes about $10 an hour not including benefits. So some of the lowest-skilled service industry workers today are making as much or more than the best technically-skilled assembly line workers of Henry Ford's day. And that's because of outsourcing. Forgot were I read this but it is interesting too - Toyota plant employees are more productive in the US than in Japan - same with at least one of the German auto manufacturers. One more thing to think about – In 1997 about 100,000 educated people left Canada for the US. Average income $100k, discount rate 5%, PV income 2 million. Total gift to the US $200 billion! Thanks Canada!

link PP

I reread the intitial post and realized my advice sucked. The bug rules cragging but if you have a lot of stuff and doing raps it's not the device I would pick.

In your third paragraph you are simply confusing me. But your final sentence is somewhat close to stumbling into the truth. Liberals throughout the 20th century have been quite reluctant to see the true effects of communist ideology. I believe more Ukrainians were killed in the “terror” famines than Jews were killed by the Germans. The same is probably true with regard to the great leap forward/Cultural revolution in China. Both used crass political power to reduce political dissent. Both were the darlings of liberal chic. The NYT earned a Pulitzer prize on stories about the Soviet Union under Stalin that have now been admitted by all parties were full of outright lies. 40 years later Mao shirts were the rage. (Heck read the Nation in the 50s! For more liberal rubber stamping to the Soviet Union.) ANother fave example of the same phenomenon is that case of Reinaldo Arenas a Cuban writer. In his autobiography he writes painfully of how the liberal Intellectual elite thought him wonderful when his writings were smuggled out of Cuba but as soon as he was in America they denounced him almost as a fake when he continued to speak out against Fidel's repression. The list can go on forever. By the way I am sending out good energy vibes right now! Relax and enjoy the flow. PP

Go small. Less stuff to get in the way. Check out the bug!

Lots of Japanese, Germans, Italians, North Koreans, Vietnamese and Laoatians have. Japanese? Germans?

Egads Sloth. Jayb has often remarked how liberals have supported guys like Stalin and Mattp has said that they hadn’t. I thought my post illustrated how they can both be correct when coupled with my suggestion (See Bush Lie Peopel Died thread) such complete disregard for facts can/should be considered a lie. Trudeau was head of the Liberal party for almost 20 years. Outlined below are some of his educational achievements. His comment relative to development of the Arctic shows that he must have had an almost willful (if not criminal) disregard for honest analysis – that a man in his position could apparently not understand Gulag system is unbelievable. Jean de Brébeuf College, B.A. 1940 University of Montreal, LL.L. 1943 Harvard University, M.A. Political Economy 1945 École des sciences politiques, Paris 1946 - 1947 London School of Economics 1947 - 1948 PP

I thought you might like this photo. I did.

Years ago a visit to the city of Norilsk prompted then-prime minister Trudeau to wonder why Canadians had never managed to settle the Arctic as the Soviets had. “NORILSK, Russia — The bones appear each June, when the hard Arctic winter breaks at last and the melting snows wash them from the site of what some people here — but certainly not many — call this city's Golgotha. “The bones are the remains of thousands of prisoners sent to the camps in this frozen island of the Gulag Archipelago. To this day, no one knows exactly how many labored here in penal servitude. To this day, no one knows exactly how many died.” Link to NYT. Those darn liberals.... PP

You are so wet!

Eppur si muove--Or, It's Back to the Dark Ages on Trade Financial Times UK, Europe, US by Amity Shlaes It is February 23, 2005. President John Kerry and his economic team - Roger Altman and Alan Blinder from the US Treasury and US trade representative Clyde Prestowitz - are busy converting the US into a protectionist fortress. The North American Free Trade Agreement? Rewrite it to force Mexican wages upward. The World Trade Organisation? Reconsider. Japan? Ralph Nader, special envoy, is just landing in Tokyo. And oh, that meeting with Pascal Lamy, the European Union's trade commissioner? Schedule it later. This vision of a return to the Dark Ages of protectionism seems improbable, especially considering the sunny American scenario of just a few weeks ago. No protectionist candidate cast his shadow across the election stage - Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan were nowhere to be seen. The only two serious candidates who talked about protectionism were Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Howard Dean of Vermont. Iowa voters chucked them out early, a humiliation that seemed to underscore the anachronistic nature of the protectionist message. In short, Americans generally seemed to have internalised the principal economic lesson of the 1990s: that the sort of global commerce symbolised by Nafta is a good thing. Certainly, the US transition to an international service economy has been difficult. Many citizens have lost jobs or know people who have. It is infuriating to see Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan thinking about hiring in Mumbai when people are worrying about the death of manufacturing in Montgomery, Alabama. Nonetheless, most voters also know that US unemployment dipped to historic lows in the decade following the signing of Nafta; they know that even now, post-recession, unemployment is lower than the average of the past quarter-century. Finally, Americans know that more jobs will materialise eventually. For while outsourcing may "kill" some jobs, it also helps companies to generate more profits, and those profits are reinvested - eventually - in jobs. But something is changing to obscure this logic. This month Mr Kerry and John Edwards have discovered that the loss of manufacturing jobs is unnerving voters and that calling for "job protection" - precise meaning to be worked out later - has enormous appeal. Suddenly, the basic laws of economics no longer seem to apply. Without considering much the implications of their actions, the candidates are edging towards old anti-trade positions. Thus earlier this month, Mr Edwards told an audience in Wisconsin that trade deals such as Nafta were bad as they "drive down our wages and ship our jobs around the world". He also spoke repeatedly about "fair trade not free trade". Mr Kerry has been more circumspect; he, after all, supported Nafta in the Senate, as well as China's entry to the WTO. His economic guru, Mr Blinder, spent his career repeating the formula, "increasing productivity and trade equals growth and jobs". Nonetheless, Mr Kerry has also - as James Hoffa of the Teamsters union recently put it - "evolved" on trade. Nafta, Mr Kerry says, has to be reopened and rewritten. The Kerry campaign has also reminded voters that its agenda calls for a moratorium on new trade agreements until all old agreements are reviewed, and Mr Kerry has said he wants to "bring back" jobs. What can that mean? The Republicans have also done their part to put back the clock. This month saw a new low for the party, when Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, made the inquisitorial demand that Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House council of economic advisers, deny his suggestion that outsourcing can increase American well-being. Mr Hastert, a wonderful man but, after all, a former wrestling coach, was forcing Mr Mankiw, author of one of the best economic textbooks, to deny a basic law of economics. ("Recant, Galileo, admit that outsourcing always kills jobs!") It is easy to argue that this retrograde shift doesn't matter. Bill Clinton also asked for Nafta riders during his first campaign. But by crusading so hard for American jobs, today's candidates are suggesting the problem is free markets. They thus make it virtually inevitable that they will have to deliver protectionism after the election - even in areas where they do not intend such an outcome. This spells trouble. Democrats these days generally like to portray themselves as multilateralist. But protectionism is inherently unilateralist. If you are interested in international co-operation at all, you can see that this is exactly the wrong moment to bash international trade. The second problem is that by "protecting" jobs, the new administration is likely to kill them. Mr Kerry's international tax plan will force companies to stay in the US at the expense of profitability. This in turn will force them to lay off workers. His scapegoating of "Benedict Arnold chief executives" certainly won't inspire new companies to list on US exchanges. As for Mr Kerry's domestic tax increases, they represent the one kind of step that ensures lost jobs will not return: they reduce US relative competitiveness. The third problem is subtler: intellectual dishonesty. Congressmen of the 1990s saw first-hand what trade can do for growth. By ignoring that experience, Messrs Edwards and Kerry - and Mr Hastert even - force Americans to ignore it along with them. In effect, these men are erasing history. You can't get more medieval than that.

Hi Trask!

I guess time of year would be a big factor too. Will your littlest one be able to avoid the omnipresent cactus? Ouch! Greta place to run around in the spring.

J Tree!

Good point Dru! TRs in the RC Forum!